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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume VII (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8)
+       The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: April 30, 2008  [eBook #25261]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME VII (OF 8)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes links to images of the original pages.
+      See 25261-h.htm or 25261-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/5/2/6/25261/25261-h/25261-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/5/2/6/25261/25261-h.zip)
+
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+
+VOLUME VII
+
+THE REVOLUTION, 1683-1760. MODERN ENGLAND, 1760-1767
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
+New York: MacMillan & Co.
+1896
+
+First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
+Eversley Edition, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   BOOK VIII
+
+   THE REVOLUTION. 1683-1760
+
+
+        CHAPTER III
+                                                    PAGE
+        THE FALL OF THE STUARTS. 1683-1714.            1
+
+        CHAPTER IV
+
+        THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 1714-1760.             147
+
+
+   BOOK IX
+
+   MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815
+
+
+        CHAPTER I
+
+        ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE. 1760-1767.           273
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FALL OF THE STUARTS
+
+1683-1714
+
+
+[Sidenote: The King's Triumph.]
+
+In 1683 the Constitutional opposition which had held Charles so long in
+check lay crushed at his feet. A weaker man might easily have been led
+to play the mere tyrant by the mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his
+triumph. On the very day when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were
+dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood as in the blood of a martyr the
+University of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive
+obedience even to the worst of rulers was a part of religion. But
+Charles saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a mere
+tyranny. Ormond and the great Tory party which had rallied to his
+succour against the Exclusionists were still steady for parliamentary
+and legal government. The Church was as powerful as ever, and the
+mention of a renewal of the Indulgence to Nonconformists had to be
+withdrawn before the opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore
+during the few years which remained to him to avoid the appearance of
+any open violation of public law. He suspended no statute. He imposed no
+tax by Royal authority. Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press
+and the Habeas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt
+to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to avoid
+rousing popular resistance, he moved coolly and resolutely forward on
+the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax pressed for energetic
+resistance to the aggressions of France, for the recall of Monmouth, or
+for the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other English
+statesman he found he had been duped. Now that his work was done he was
+suffered to remain in office but left without any influence in the
+government. Hyde, who was created Earl of Rochester, still remained at
+the head of the Treasury; but Charles soon gave more of his confidence
+to the supple and acute Sunderland, who atoned for his desertion of the
+king's cause in the heat of the Exclusion Bill by an acknowledgement of
+his error and a pledge of entire accordance with the king's will.
+
+[Sidenote: New Town Charters.]
+
+The protests both of Halifax and of Danby, who was now released from the
+Tower, in favour of a return to Parliaments were treated with
+indifference, the provisions of the Triennial Act were disregarded, and
+the Houses remained unassembled during the remainder of the king's
+reign. His secret alliance with France furnished Charles with the funds
+he immediately required, and the rapid growth of the customs through the
+increase of English commerce promised to give him a revenue which, if
+peace were preserved, would save him from any further need of fresh
+appeals to the Commons. Charles was too wise however to look upon
+Parliaments as utterly at an end: and he used this respite to secure a
+House of Commons which should really be at his disposal. The strength of
+the Country party had been broken by its own dissensions over the
+Exclusion Bill and by the flight or death of its more prominent leaders.
+Whatever strength it retained lay chiefly in the towns, whose
+representation was for the most part virtually or directly in the hands
+of their corporations, and whose corporations, like the merchant class
+generally, were in sympathy Whig. The towns were now attacked by writs
+of "quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why their charters
+should not be declared forfeited on the ground of abuse of their
+privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about a
+general surrender of municipal liberties; and the grant of fresh
+charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were carefully excluded from
+their corporations, placed the representation of the boroughs in the
+hands of the Crown. Against active discontent Charles had long been
+quietly providing by the gradual increase of his Guards. The withdrawal
+of its garrison from Tangier enabled him to raise their force to nine
+thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this force, the
+nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve of six regiments
+which were maintained till they should be needed at home in the service
+of the United Provinces.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Charles.]
+
+But great as the danger really was it lay not so much in isolated acts
+of tyranny as in the character and purpose of Charles himself, and his
+death at the very moment of his triumph saved English freedom. He had
+regained his old popularity; and at the news of his sickness in the
+spring of 1685 crowds thronged the churches, praying that God would
+raise him up again to be a father to his people. But while his subjects
+were praying the one anxiety of the king was to die reconciled to the
+Catholic Church. His chamber was cleared, and a priest named Huddleston,
+who had saved his life after the battle of Worcester, received his
+confession and administered the last sacraments. Not a word of this
+ceremony was whispered when the nobles and bishops were recalled into
+the royal presence, and Charles though steadily refusing the communion
+which Bishop Ken offered him accepted the bishop's absolution. All the
+children of his mistresses save Monmouth were gathered round the bed,
+and Charles commended them to his brother's protection by name. The
+scene which followed is described by a chaplain to one of the prelates
+who stood round the dying king. Charles "blessed all his children one by
+one, pulling them on to his bed; and then the bishops moved him, as he
+was the Lord's anointed and the father of his country, to bless them
+also and all that were there present, and in them the general body of
+his subjects. Whereupon, the room being full, all fell down upon their
+knees, and he raised himself in his bed and very solemnly blessed them
+all." The strange comedy was at last over. Charles died as he had lived:
+brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tortured as he was
+with pain, he begged the bystanders to forgive him for being so
+unconscionable a time in dying. One mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth,
+hung weeping over his bed. His last thought was of another mistress,
+Nell Gwynn. "Do not," he whispered to his successor ere he sank into a
+fatal stupor, "do not let poor Nelly starve!"
+
+[Sidenote: James the Second.]
+
+The death of Charles in February 1685 placed his brother James, the Duke
+of York, upon the throne. His character and policy were already well
+known. Of all the Stuart rulers James is the only one whose intellect
+was below mediocrity. His mind was dull and narrow though orderly and
+methodical; his temper dogged and arbitrary but sincere. His religious
+and political tendencies had always been the same. He had always
+cherished an entire belief in the royal authority and a hatred of
+Parliaments. His main desire was for the establishment of Catholicism as
+the only means of ensuring the obedience of his people; and his old love
+of France was quickened by the firm reliance which he placed on the aid
+of Lewis in bringing about that establishment. But the secrecy in which
+his political action had as yet been shrouded and his long absence from
+England had hindered any general knowledge of his designs. His first
+words on his accession, his promise to "preserve this Government both in
+Church and State as it is now by law established," were welcomed by the
+whole country with enthusiasm. All the suspicions of a Catholic
+sovereign seemed to have disappeared. "We have the word of a King!" ran
+the general cry, "and of a King who was never worse than his word." The
+conviction of his brother's faithlessness in fact stood James in good
+stead. He was looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubborn, and despotic
+in heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of being false. Above
+all, incredible as such a belief may seem now, he was believed to be
+keenly alive to the honour of his country and resolute to free it from
+foreign dependence.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Parliament.]
+
+From the first indeed there were indications that James understood his
+declaration in a different sense from the nation. He was resolved to
+make no disguise of his own religion; the chapel in which he had
+hitherto worshipped with closed doors was now thrown open and the king
+seen at Mass. He regarded attacks on his faith as attacks on himself,
+and at once called on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
+London to hinder all preaching against Catholicism as a part of their
+"duty" to their king. He made no secret of his resolve to procure
+freedom of worship for his co-religionists while still refusing it to
+the rest of the Nonconformists, whom he hated as republicans and
+Exclusionists. All was passed over however in the general confidence. It
+was necessary to summon a Parliament, for the royal revenue ceased with
+the death of Charles; but the elections, swayed at once by the tide of
+loyalty and by the command of the boroughs which the surrender of their
+charters had given to the Crown, sent up in May a House of Commons in
+which James found few members who were not to his mind. His appointment
+indeed of Catholic officers in the army was already exciting murmurs;
+but these were hushed as James repeated his pledge of maintaining the
+established order both in Church and State. The question of religious
+security was waived at a hint of the royal displeasure, and a revenue of
+nearly two millions was granted to the king for life.
+
+[Sidenote: Argyle's Rising.]
+
+All that was wanted to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism
+was supplied by a rebellion in the North, and by another under Monmouth
+in the West. The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the
+Restoration to the house of Argyle. The great Marquis indeed had been
+brought to the block at the king's return. His son, the Earl of Argyle,
+had been unable to save himself even by a life of singular caution and
+obedience from the ill-will of the vile politicians who governed
+Scotland. He was at last convicted of treason in 1682 on grounds at
+which every English statesman stood aghast. "We should not hang a dog
+here," Halifax protested, "on the grounds on which my Lord Argyle has
+been sentenced to death." The Earl escaped however to Holland, and lived
+peaceably there during the last six years of the reign of Charles.
+Monmouth had found the same refuge at the Hague, where a belief in the
+king's love and purpose to recall him secured him a kindly reception
+from William of Orange. But the accession of James was a death-blow to
+the hopes of the Duke, while it stirred the fanaticism of Argyle to a
+resolve of wresting Scotland from the rule of a Catholic king. The two
+leaders determined to appear in arms in England and the North, and the
+two expeditions sailed within a few days of each other. Argyle's attempt
+was soon over. His clan of the Campbells rose on the Earl's landing in
+Cantyre, but the country had been occupied for the king, and quarrels
+among the exiles who accompanied him robbed his effort of every chance
+of success. His force scattered without a fight; and Argyle, arrested
+in an attempt to escape, was hurried on the 30th of June to a traitor's
+death.
+
+[Sidenote: Monmouth's Rising.]
+
+Monmouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the West
+was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme and
+demanded an effective parliamentary government as well as freedom of
+worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the farmers and traders of
+Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns of
+Somerset were true to the Whig cause, as they had been true to the cause
+of the Long Parliament; and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the
+popular enthusiasm showed itself in the flowers which wreathed every
+door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth with a
+Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand men, but
+whatever chance of success he might have had was lost by his assumption
+of the title of king, his right to which he had pledged himself hitherto
+to leave for decision to a free Parliament. The two Houses offered to
+support James with their lives and fortunes, and passed a bill of
+attainder against the Duke. The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary
+and of William, held stubbornly aloof; while the Guards and the
+regiments from Tangier hurried to the scene of the revolt and the
+militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol
+and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the
+night of the 6th of July on the king's forces as they lay encamped hard
+by on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners
+who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which
+crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by
+the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain
+effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the
+block.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bloody Circuit.]
+
+Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed
+into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the
+victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the
+Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
+were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was
+disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James
+was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the
+Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent
+temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which
+have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
+were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit,"
+while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight
+hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were
+whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers,
+even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons.
+What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some
+were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
+one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring
+a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned
+at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such
+as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of
+General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly
+been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away
+from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the
+chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."
+
+[Sidenote: James and France.]
+
+But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to
+strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
+a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have
+seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thousand men;
+James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The employment of this
+force was to be at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy
+in foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs which James
+had at heart he could look for no consent from Parliament; and however
+his pride revolted against a dependence on France, it was only by
+French gold and French soldiers that he could hope to hold the
+Parliament permanently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he
+assured Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of
+Charles himself. "Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador,
+"that without his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be
+consulted, and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The
+pledge of subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and
+the promise was received with the strongest expressions of delight and
+servility. The hopes which the Prince of Orange had conceived from his
+father-in-law's more warlike temper were nipped by a refusal to allow
+him to visit England. All the caution and reserve of Charles the Second
+in his dealings with France was set aside. Sunderland, the favourite
+Minister of the new king as he had been of the old, not only promised
+during the session to avoid the connection with Spain and Holland which
+the Parliament was known to desire, but "to throw aside the mask and
+openly break with them as soon as the royal revenue is secured." The
+support indeed which James needed was a far closer and firmer support
+than his brother had sought for. Lewis on the other hand trusted him as
+he could never trust Charles. His own bigotry understood the bigotry of
+the new sovereign. "The confirmation of the King's authority and the
+establishment of religion," he wrote, "are our common interest"; and he
+promised that James should "find in his friendship all the resources
+which he can expect."
+
+[Sidenote: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.]
+
+Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger to
+English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of
+Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed warfare
+against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland; he declared war at
+this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the
+measure by which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism
+secured toleration and the free exercise of their worship for his
+Protestant subjects. It had been respected by Richelieu even in his
+victory over the Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin.
+But from the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its
+provisions, and his revocation of it at the end of 1685 was only the
+natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was
+followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva.
+Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung from
+their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from their mothers'
+arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the
+galleys. In spite of the royal edicts which forbade even flight to the
+victims of these horrible atrocities a hundred thousand Protestants
+fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were
+filled with French exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their
+industry established in the fields east of London the silk trade of
+Spitalfields.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Parliament.]
+
+But while Englishmen were looking with horror on these events in France
+James was taking advantage of the position in which as he believed they
+placed him. The news of the revocation drew from James expressions of
+delight. The rapid increase of the conversions to Catholicism which
+followed on the "dragonnades" raised in him hopes of as general an
+apostasy in his own dominions. His tone took a new haughtiness and
+decision. He admitted more Catholic officers into his fresh regiments.
+He dismissed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to consent to
+a plan for repealing the Test Act. He met the Parliament on its
+reassembling in November with a haughty declaration that whether legal
+or no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and
+with a demand of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of
+the Houses, their alarm for the Church, their dread of a standing army,
+was yet stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a
+single vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were
+redressed, and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal
+commissions on the ground that the continuance of the Catholic officers
+in their posts "may be taken to be a dispensing with that law without
+Act of Parliament." The Lords took a bolder tone; and the protest of the
+bishops against any infringement of the Test Act expressed by Bishop
+Compton of London was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Their desire
+for conciliation indeed was shown in an offer to confirm the existing
+officers in their posts by Act of Parliament, and even to allow fresh
+nominations of Catholics by the king under the same security. But James
+had no wish for such a compromise, and the Houses were at once
+prorogued.
+
+[Sidenote: The Test set aside.]
+
+The king resolved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain
+from Parliament. He remodelled the bench by dismissing four judges who
+refused to lend themselves to his plans; and in the June of 1686 their
+successors decided in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer
+in the army, that a royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the
+Test Act. The principle laid down by the judges "that it is a privilege
+inseparably connected with the sovereignty of the King to dispense with
+penal laws, and that according to his own judgment," was applied by
+James with a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint.
+Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices without stint,
+and four Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council. The
+laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the realm or the
+open exercise of Catholic worship were set at nought. A gorgeous chapel
+was opened in the palace of St. James for the use of the king.
+Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb
+in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the
+Savoy. The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have startled
+a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on an obstinacy
+which never gave way; and a riot which took place on the opening of a
+Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the establishment of a camp
+of thirteen thousand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]
+
+The course which James intended to follow in England was shown indeed by
+the course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland he acted
+as a pure despot. At the close of Charles's reign the extreme
+Covenanters or "wild Whigs" of the Western shires had formally renounced
+their allegiance to a "prelatical" king. A smouldering revolt spread
+over the country that was only held in check by the merciless cruelties
+with which the royal troops avenged the "rabbling of priests" and the
+outrages committed by the Whigs on the more prominent persecutors. Such
+a revolt threw strength into the hands of the government by rallying to
+its side all who were bent on public order, and this strength was
+doubled by the landing and failure of Argyle. The Scotch Parliament
+granted excise and customs not to the king only but to his successors,
+while it confirmed the Acts which established religious conformity. But
+James was far from being satisfied with a loyalty which made no
+concession to the "king's religion." He placed the government of
+Scotland in the hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had embraced
+his own faith, and put a Catholic in command of the Castle of Edinburgh.
+The drift of these measures was soon seen. The Scotch Parliament had as
+yet been the mere creature of the Crown, but servile as were its members
+there was a point at which their servility stopped. When James boldly
+required them to legalize the toleration of Catholics they refused to
+pass such an Act. It was in vain that the king tempted them to consent
+by the offer of a free trade with England. "Shall we sell our God?" was
+the indignant reply. James at once ordered the Scotch judges to treat
+all laws against Catholics as null and void, and his orders were obeyed.
+In Ireland his policy threw off even the disguise of law. Catholics were
+admitted by the king's command to the council and to civil offices. A
+Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was put at the head of the army, and set
+instantly about its re-organization by cashiering Protestant officers
+and by admitting two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks.
+
+[Sidenote: The High Commission.]
+
+Meanwhile in England James was passing from the mere attempt to secure
+freedom for his fellow-religionists to a bold and systematic attack
+upon the Church. He had at the outset of his reign forbidden the clergy
+to preach against "the king's religion"; and ordered the bishops to act
+upon this prohibition. But no steps were taken by them to carry out this
+order; and the pulpits of the capital soon rang with controversial
+sermons. For such a sermon James now called on Compton, the Bishop of
+London, to suspend Dr. Sharp, the rector of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields.
+Compton answered that as judge he was ready to examine into the case if
+brought before him according to law. To James the matter was not one of
+law but of prerogative. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
+weapon providentially left to him for undoing the work which it had
+enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been
+used to turn the Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under
+James it might be used to turn the Church back again from Protestant to
+Catholic. The High Commission indeed which had enforced this supremacy
+had been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this Act
+had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration. But it was
+thought possible to evade this Act by omitting from the instructions on
+which the Commission acted the extraordinary powers and jurisdictions by
+which its predecessor had given offence. With this reserve, seven
+commissioners were appointed in the summer of 1686 for the government
+of the Church with the Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, at their head. The
+first blow of the Commission was at the Bishop of London whose refusal
+to suspend Sharp was punished by his own suspension. But the pressure of
+the Commission only drove the clergy to a bolder defiance of the royal
+will. The legality of the Commission and of its proceedings was denied.
+Not even the Pope, it was said, had claimed such rights over the conduct
+and jurisdiction of English bishops as were claimed by the king. The
+prohibition of attacks on the "king's religion" was set at nought.
+Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the
+two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put
+themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered
+pamphlets and tracts from every printing press.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Tories.]
+
+It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof and
+predicted the inevitable reaction which the king's course must bring
+about, or that Rome itself counselled greater moderation. James was
+infatuated with what seemed to be the success of his enterprises. He
+looked on the opposition he experienced as due to the influence of the
+High Church Tories who had remained in power since the reaction of 1681,
+and these he determined "to chastise." The Duke of Queensberry, the
+leader of this party in Scotland, was driven from office. Tyrconnell, as
+we have seen, was placed as a check on Ormond in Ireland. In England
+James resolved to show the world that even the closest ties of blood
+were as nothing to him if they conflicted with the demands of his faith.
+His earlier marriage with Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, bound
+both the Chancellor's sons to his fortunes; and on his accession he had
+sent his elder brother-in-law, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as
+Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of
+Rochester, who had long been a minister under Charles the Second, to the
+post of Lord Treasurer. But the sons of Hyde were as staunch to the old
+Cavalier doctrines of Church and State as Hyde himself. Rochester
+therefore was told in the opening of 1687 that the king could not safely
+entrust so great a charge to any one who did not share his sentiments on
+religion, and on his refusal to abandon his faith he was deprived of the
+White Staff. His brother Clarendon shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord
+Bellasys, became First Lord of the Treasury, which was again put into
+commission after Rochester's removal; and another Catholic, Lord
+Arundell, became Lord Privy Seal; while Father Petre, a Jesuit, was
+called to the Privy Council.
+
+[Sidenote: The Tory Nobles.]
+
+The dismissal of Rochester sprang mainly from a belief that with such a
+minister James would fail to procure from the Parliament that freedom
+for Catholics which he was bent on establishing. It was in fact a
+declaration that on this matter none in the king's service must oppose
+the king's will, and it was followed up by the dismissal of one official
+after another who refused to aid in the repeal of the Test Act. But acts
+like these were of no avail against the steady growth of resistance. If
+the great Tory nobles were staunch for the Crown, they were as resolute
+Englishmen in their hatred of mere tyranny as the Whigs themselves.
+James gave the Duke of Norfolk the sword of State to carry before him as
+he went to Mass. The Duke stopped at the Chapel door. "Your father would
+have gone further," said the king. "Your Majesty's father was the better
+man," replied the Duke, "and he would not have gone so far." The young
+Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce into the Presence Chamber the
+Papal Nuncio, who was now received in State at Windsor in the teeth of a
+statute which forbade diplomatic relations with Rome. "I am advised,"
+Somerset answered, "that I cannot obey your Majesty without breaking the
+law." "Do you not know that I am above the law?" James asked angrily.
+"Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He was dismissed
+from his post, but the spirit of resistance spread fast. In spite of the
+king's letters the governors of the Charterhouse, who numbered among
+them some of the greatest English nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to
+the benefits of the foundation. The most devoted loyalists began to
+murmur when James demanded apostasy as a proof of their loyalty.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Nonconformists.]
+
+He had in fact to abandon at last all hope of bringing the Church or the
+Tories over to his will, and in the spring of 1687 he turned, as Charles
+had turned, to the Nonconformists. He published in April a Declaration
+of Indulgence which suspended the operation of the penal laws against
+Nonconformists and Catholics alike, and of every Act which imposed a
+test as a qualification for office in Church or State. A hope was
+expressed that this measure would be sanctioned by Parliament when it
+was suffered to reassemble. The temptation to accept the Indulgence was
+great, for since the fall of Shaftesbury persecution had fallen heavily
+on the Protestant dissidents, and we can hardly wonder that the
+Nonconformists wavered for a time or that numerous addresses of thanks
+were presented to James. But the great body of them, and all the more
+venerable names among them, remained true to the cause of freedom.
+Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan all refused an Indulgence which could only be
+purchased by the violent overthrow of the law. It was plain that the
+only mode of actually securing the end which James had in view was to
+procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself. It was to this
+that the king's dismissal of Rochester and other ministerial changes had
+been directed; but James found that the temper of the existing Houses,
+so far as he could test it, remained absolutely opposed to his project.
+In July therefore he dissolved the Parliament, and summoned a new one.
+In spite of the support he might expect from the Nonconformists in the
+elections, he knew that no free Parliament could be brought to consent
+to the repeal. The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish creations of
+new peers. "Your troop of horse," Lord Sunderland told Churchill, "shall
+be called up into the House of Lords." But it was a harder matter to
+secure a compliant House of Commons. No effort however was spared. The
+Lord-Lieutenants were directed to bring about such a "regulation" of the
+governing body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates
+pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in
+their county as to his vote. Half of them at once refused to comply, and
+a string of great nobles--the Lords of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset,
+Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Abergavenny, Thanet, Northampton, and
+Abingdon--were dismissed from their Lord-Lieutenancies. The justices
+when questioned simply replied that they would vote according to their
+consciences, and send members to Parliament who would protect the
+Protestant religion. After repeated "regulations" it was found
+impossible to form a corporate body which would return representatives
+willing to comply with the royal will. All thought of a Parliament had
+to be abandoned; and even the most bigoted courtiers counselled
+moderation at this proof of the stubborn opposition which James must
+prepare to encounter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading
+classes.
+
+[Sidenote: The Attack on the Universities.]
+
+Estranged as he was from the whole body of the nobles and gentry it
+remained for James to force the clergy also into an attitude of
+resistance. Even the tyranny of the Commission had failed to drive into
+open opposition men who had been preaching Sunday after Sunday the
+doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings. But James who had
+now finally abandoned all hope of winning the aid of the Church in his
+project cared little for passive obedience. He looked on the refusal of
+the clergy to support his plans as freeing him from the pledge he had
+given to maintain the Church as established by law; and he resolved to
+attack it in the great institutions which had till now been its
+strongholds. To secure the Universities for Catholicism was to seize the
+only training schools which the English clergy possessed as well as the
+only centres of higher education which existed for the English gentry.
+It was on such a seizure however that James's mind was set. Little
+indeed was done with Cambridge. A Benedictine monk, who presented
+himself with royal letters recommending him for the degree of a Master
+of Arts, was rejected on his refusal to sign the Articles; and the
+Vice-Chancellor was summoned before the Privy Council and punished for
+his rejection by deprivation from office. But a violent and obstinate
+attack was directed against Oxford. The Master of University College,
+Obadiah Walker, who declared himself a Catholic convert, was authorized
+to retain his post in defiance of the law. A Roman Catholic named Massey
+was presented by the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen was
+the wealthiest College in the University; and James in 1687 recommended
+one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even qualified by
+statute for the office, to its vacant headship. The Fellows
+remonstrated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough,
+one of their own number, as their President. The Ecclesiastical
+Commission declared the election void; and James, shamed out of his
+first candidate, recommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a
+Catholic in heart and the meanest of his courtiers. The Fellows however
+pleaded that Hough was already chosen, and they held stubbornly to their
+legal head. It was in vain that the king visited Oxford, summoned them
+to his presence, and rated them as they knelt before him like
+schoolboys. "I am King," he said; "I will be obeyed! Go to your chapel
+this instant, and elect the Bishop! Let those who refuse look to it, for
+they shall feel the whole weight of my hand!" It was seen that to give
+Magdalen as well as Christ Church into Catholic hands was to turn
+Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the king's threats were
+disregarded. But they were soon carried out. A special Commission
+visited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set aside his
+appeal to the law, burst open the door of his president's house to
+install Parker in his place, and on their refusal to submit deprived the
+Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows was followed
+on a like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who died immediately
+after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman Catholic bishop _in
+partibus_, named Bonaventure Gifford, and twelve Roman Catholics were
+admitted to fellowships in a single day.
+
+[Sidenote: James and William.]
+
+With peers, gentry, and clergy in dogged opposition the scheme of
+wresting a repeal of the Test Act from a new Parliament became
+impracticable, and without this--as James well knew--his system of
+Indulgence, even if he was able to maintain it so long, must end with
+his death and the accession of a Protestant sovereign. It was to provide
+against such a defeat of his designs that he stooped to ask the aid of
+William of Orange. Ever since his accession William had followed his
+father-in-law's course with a growing anxiety. For while England was
+seething with the madness of the Popish Plot and of the royalist
+reaction the great European struggle which occupied the whole mind of
+the Prince had been drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of Germany
+indeed was worn out by the ceaseless aggressions of Lewis, and in 1686
+its princes had bound themselves at Augsburg to resist all further
+encroachments on the part of France. From that moment war became
+inevitable, and in such a war William had always held that the aid of
+England was essential to success. But his efforts to ensure English aid
+had utterly failed. James, as William soon came to know, had renewed his
+brother's secret treaty with France; and even had this been otherwise
+his quarrel with his people would of itself have prevented him from
+giving any aid in a struggle abroad. The Prince could only silently look
+on with a desperate hope that James might yet be brought to a nobler
+policy. He refused all encouragement to the leading malcontents who were
+already calling on him to interfere in arms. On the other hand he
+declined to support the king in his schemes for the abolition of the
+Test. If he still cherished hopes of bringing about a peace between the
+king and people which might enable him to enlist England in the Grand
+Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before the Declaration of Indulgence. It
+was at this moment, at the end of May, that James called on him and Mary
+to declare themselves in favour of the abolition of the penal laws and
+of the Test. "Conscience, honour, and good policy," wrote James, "bind
+me to procure safety for the Catholics. I cannot leave those who have
+remained faithful to the old and true religion subject to the oppression
+under which the laws place them."
+
+[Sidenote: The King's hopes.]
+
+But simultaneously with the king's appeal letters of great import
+reached the Prince from the leading nobles. Some, like the Hydes, simply
+assured him of their friendship. The Bishop of London added assurances
+of support. Others, like Devonshire, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury,
+cautiously or openly warned the Prince against compliance with the
+king's demand. Lord Churchill announced the resolve of Mary's sister
+Anne to stand in any case by the cause of Protestantism. Danby, the
+leading representative of the great Tory party, told the Dutch
+ambassador plainly to warn William that if James was suffered to pursue
+his present course, and above all to gain control over the Parliament,
+he would leave the Catholic party strong enough at his death to threaten
+Mary's succession. The letters dictated William's answer. No one, he
+truly protested, loathed religious persecution more than he himself did,
+but in relaxing political disabilities James called on him to
+countenance an attack on his own religion. "I cannot," he ended, "concur
+in what your Majesty desires of me." William's refusal was justified, as
+we have seen, by the result of the efforts to assemble a Parliament
+favourable to the repeal of the Test. The wholesale dismissal of
+justices and Lord-Lieutenants through the summer of 1687 failed to
+shake the resolve of the counties. The "regulation" of their
+corporations by the displacing of their older members and the
+substitution of Nonconformists did little to gain the towns. The year
+1688 indeed had hardly opened when it was found necessary to adjourn the
+elections which had been fixed for February, and to make a fresh attempt
+to win a warmer support from the dissidents and from the country. For
+James clung with a desperate tenacity to the hope of finding a compliant
+Parliament. He knew, what was as yet unknown to the world, the fact that
+his Queen was with child. The birth of an heir would meet the danger
+which he looked for from the succession of William and Mary. But James
+was past middle life, and his death would leave his boy at the mercy of
+a Regency which could hardly fail to be composed of men who would undo
+the king's work and even bring up the young sovereign as a Protestant.
+His own security, as he thought, against such a course lay in the
+building up a strong Catholic party, in placing Catholics in the high
+offices of State, and in providing against their expulsion from these at
+his death by a repeal of the Test. But such a repeal could only be won
+from Parliament, and hopeless as the effort seemed James pressed
+doggedly on in his attempt to secure Houses who would carry out his
+will.
+
+[Sidenote: The Trial of the Bishops.]
+
+The renewed Declaration of Indulgence which he issued in 1688 was not
+only intended to win the Nonconformists by fresh assurances of the
+king's sincerity, it was an appeal to the nation at large. At its close
+he promised to summon a Parliament in November, and he called on the
+electors to choose such members as would bring to a successful end the
+policy he had begun. His resolve, he said, was to make merit the one
+qualification for office and to establish universal liberty of
+conscience for all future time. It was in this character of a royal
+appeal that he ordered every clergyman to read the Declaration during
+divine service on two successive Sundays. Little time was given for
+deliberation; but little time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a
+man to be the instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was
+read in only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation
+flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all the country
+parsons refused to obey the royal orders, and the Bishops went with the
+rest of the clergy. A few days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop
+Sancroft called his suffragans together, and the six who were able to
+appear at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the king in which they
+declined to publish an illegal Declaration. "It is a standard of
+rebellion," James exclaimed, as the Primate presented the paper; and the
+resistance of the clergy was no sooner announced to him than he
+determined to wreak his vengeance on the prelates who had signed the
+protest. He ordered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of
+their sees; but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from
+obeying him. The Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for
+libel as an easier mode of punishment; and the Bishops, who refused to
+give bail, were committed on this charge to the Tower. They passed to
+their prison amidst the shouts of a great multitude; the sentinels knelt
+for their blessing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the
+garrison drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of the
+nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his obstinacy
+grew with the danger. "Indulgence," he said, "ruined my father"; and on
+the 29th of June the Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the
+King's Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of
+the Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of
+the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered the
+words "Not guilty" than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, and
+horsemen spurred along every road to carry over the country the news of
+the acquittal.
+
+[Sidenote: The National discontent.]
+
+James was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him, and as
+he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind him. "What is that?"
+he asked. "It is nothing," was the reply; "only the soldiers are glad
+that the Bishops are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled
+the king. The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm.
+The peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities,
+every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. And now
+his very soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to
+give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since his
+accession and to change the whole nature of his government. All show of
+legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, appointed by
+the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were no real officers
+in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were summoned members returned
+by officers such as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a
+Minister of the Crown or a Privy Councillor exercised any lawful
+authority. James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration
+of legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had
+done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only
+spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. "I will
+lose all," he said to the Spanish ambassador who counselled moderation;
+"I will lose all or win all." He broke up the camp at Hounslow and
+dispersed its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges
+who had favoured the acquittal of the Bishops. He ordered the
+chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who had not
+read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke fruitlessly
+against a sullen resistance which met him on every side. Not a
+chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners
+were cowed into inaction by the temper of the nation. When the judges
+who had displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the
+gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the
+king's resolve to supply the place of the English troops whose temper
+proved unserviceable for his purposes by drafts from the Catholic army
+which Tyrconnell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at
+the Council-table protested against this measure; and six officers in a
+single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enrol the Irish
+recruits among their men. The ballad of "Lillibullero," a scurrilous
+attack on the Irish recruits, was sung from one end of England to the
+other.
+
+[Sidenote: The Invitation.]
+
+Wide however as the disaffection undoubtedly was the position of James
+seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of France. His army,
+whatever signs of discontent it might show, was still a formidable force
+of twenty thousand men. Scotland, disheartened by the failure of
+Argyle's rising, could give no such help as it gave to the Long
+Parliament. Ireland on the other hand was ready to throw a Catholic
+army in the king's support on the western coast. It was doubtful too if
+in England itself disaffection would turn into actual revolt. The Bloody
+Assize had left its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and Churchmen,
+angered as they were, were still hampered by their horror of rebellion
+and their doctrine of non-resistance. Above all the eyes of the nation
+rested on William and Mary. James was past middle age, and a few years
+must bring a Protestant successor and restore the reign of law. But in
+the midst of the struggle with the Church it was announced that the
+Queen was again with child. The news was received with general unbelief,
+for five years had passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena,
+and the unbelief passed into a general expectation of some imposture as
+men watched the joy of the Catholics and their confident prophecies that
+the child would be a boy. But, truth or imposture, it was plain that the
+appearance of a Prince of Wales must bring on a crisis. If the child
+turned out a boy, and as was certain was brought up a Catholic, the
+highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which
+England lay should go on for ever. The hesitation of the country was at
+an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred of
+subservience to France, answered for the Tories. Compton answered for
+the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion by the Declaration of
+Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion
+struggle, answered for the Nonconformists, who were satisfied with
+William's promise to procure them toleration, as well as for the general
+body of the Whigs. The announcement of the boy's birth on the 10th of
+June was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to William to
+intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the
+protection of the Protestant religion. The invitation was signed by
+Danby, Devonshire, and Compton, the representatives of the great parties
+whose long fight was hushed at last by a common danger, by two recent
+converts from the Catholic faith, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord
+Lumley, by Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and by Henry the brother
+of Algernon Sidney. It was carried to the Hague by Herbert, the most
+popular of English seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a
+refusal to vote against the Test.
+
+[Sidenote: James and France.]
+
+The Invitation called on the Prince of Orange to land with an army
+strong enough to justify those who signed it in rising in arms. An
+outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable, and either its success or
+defeat must be equally fatal to William should he refuse to put himself
+at its head. If the rebels were victorious, their resentment at his
+desertion of their cause in the hour of need would make Mary's
+succession impossible and probably bring about the establishment of a
+Commonwealth. On the other hand the victory of the king would not only
+ruin English freedom and English Protestantism, but fling the whole
+weight of England in the contest for the liberties of Europe which was
+now about to open into the scale of France. From the opening of 1688 the
+signs of a mutual understanding between the English Court and the French
+had been unmistakeable. James had declared himself on the side of Lewis
+in the negotiations with the Empire which followed on the Treaty of
+Augsburg. He had backed Sweden in its threats of war against the Dutch.
+At the instigation of France he had recalled the English and Scotch
+troops in the service of the States. He had received supplies from Lewis
+to send an English fleet to the coast of Holland; and was at this moment
+supporting at Rome the French side in the quarrel over the Electorate of
+Cologne, a quarrel which rendered war inevitable. It was certain
+therefore that success at home would secure James's aid to France in the
+struggle abroad.
+
+[Sidenote: William's Acceptance.]
+
+It was this above all which decided the action of the Prince, for the
+ruling passion in William's heart was the longing to free Europe from
+the supremacy of France. It was this too which made his enterprise
+possible, for nothing but a sense of their own danger would have forced
+his opponents in Holland itself to assent to his expedition. Their
+assent however once gained, William strained all his resources as
+Admiral and Captain-General to gather a fleet and a sufficient force
+under pretext of defence against the English fleet which now appeared in
+the Channel, while Brandenburg promised to supply the place of the Dutch
+forces during their absence in England by lending the States nine
+thousand men. As soon as the news of these preparations reached England
+noble after noble made his way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury
+brought £2000 towards the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell,
+the representative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the
+representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of
+Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by Lord
+Macclesfield, a well-known High Churchman. At home the Earls of Danby
+and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the
+North. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all was conducted,
+the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance
+in office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism, detected the
+preparations of William; and the sense that his master's ruin was at
+hand encouraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a
+pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself. James alone remained
+stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by
+the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a French
+attack on Holland itself would render William's departure impossible. At
+the opening of September indeed Lewis declared himself aware of the
+meaning of the Dutch armaments and warned the States that he should look
+on an attack upon James as a war upon himself.
+
+[Sidenote: James gives way.]
+
+Fortunately for William so open an announcement of the union between
+England and France suited ill with the plans of James. He still looked
+forward to the coming Parliament, and the knowledge of a league with
+France was certain to make any Parliament reluctant to admit Catholics
+to a share in political life. James therefore roughly disavowed the act
+of Lewis, and William was able to continue his preparations. But even
+had no such disavowal come the threat of Lewis would have remained an
+empty one. In spite of the counsel of Louvois he looked on an invasion
+of Holland as likely to serve English interests rather than French and
+resolved to open the war by a campaign on the Rhine. In September his
+troops marched eastward, and the Dutch at once felt themselves secure.
+The States-General gave their public sanction to William's project, and
+the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news
+of war and of the diversion of the French forces to Germany no sooner
+reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to panic. By drafts
+from Scotland and Ireland he had mustered forty thousand men, but the
+temper of the troops robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France
+was now out of the question. There was nothing for it but to fall back,
+as Sunderland had for some time been advising him to fall back, on the
+older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party of the Church;
+and to win assent for his plans from the coming Parliament by an
+abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with
+which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his
+sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He
+dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he
+had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The
+Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City.
+The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of
+Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.
+
+[Sidenote: William's Landing.]
+
+Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was
+still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with
+France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange
+at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's
+counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to
+place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the
+succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been brought by
+advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again
+therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope
+of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end
+of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had
+hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange
+reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling
+of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion
+on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists
+and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the
+legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession
+to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the
+birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers
+who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds,
+beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of
+six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the
+5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong,
+entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been
+taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force,
+which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it
+consisted of the English and Scottish regiments which had remained in
+the service of the States in spite of their recall by the king. Its
+foreign divisions were representatives of the whole Protestant world.
+With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant
+corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees.
+
+[Sidenote: The National Rising.]
+
+The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet.
+William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner
+joined his forces. Though the king's fleet had failed to intercept the
+expedition it closed in from the Channel to prevent William's escape as
+soon as he had landed, while the king's army moved rapidly to encounter
+him in the field. But the pause was one of momentary surprise. Before a
+week had passed the nobles and squires of the west flocked to William's
+camp and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. The call of the
+king's forces to face the Prince in the south no sooner freed the
+northern parts of England from their presence than the insurrection
+broke out. Scotland threw off the royal rule. Danby, dashing at the head
+of a hundred horsemen into York, gave the signal for a rising. The York
+militia met his appeal with shouts of "A free Parliament and the
+Protestant religion"; peers and gentry flocked to his standard; and a
+march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devonshire who had
+mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties.
+Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared for
+a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of three
+hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. At Oxford townsmen and
+gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace and the forces he led with uproarious
+welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who
+advanced steadily on Salisbury where James had assembled his forces.
+
+[Sidenote: Flight of James.]
+
+But the king's army, broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among
+its leaders, shrank from an engagement and fell back in disorder at his
+approach. Its retreat was the signal for a general abandonment of the
+royal cause. The desertion of Lord Churchill, who had from the first
+made his support conditional on the calling of a Parliament, a step
+which the king still hesitated to take, was followed by that of so many
+other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to
+London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join Danby
+at Nottingham. "God help me," cried the wretched father, "for my own
+children have forsaken me!" His spirit was utterly broken by the sudden
+crash; and though he had promised to call the Houses together and
+despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with William on the
+terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had resolved on flight.
+Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him, would force on
+him concessions he could not endure; while flight would enable him to
+return and regain his throne with the assistance of French forces. He
+only waited therefore for news of the escape of his wife and child on
+the 10th of December to make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy
+lay ready to carry him to France. Some rough fishermen however who took
+him for a Jesuit prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards
+brought him back in safety to London. His return revived the hopes of
+the Tories, who with Clarendon and Rochester at their head looked on the
+work of the Prince of Orange as done in the overthrow of the king's
+design of establishing a Catholic despotism, and who trusted that their
+system would be restored by a reconciliation of James with the Tory
+Parliament they expected to be returned. Halifax however, though he had
+long acted with the Tories, was too clear-sighted for hopes such as
+these. He had taken no part in the invitation or revolt, but now that
+the revolution was successful he pressed upon William the impossibility
+of carrying out a new system of government with such a sovereign as
+James. The Whigs, who had gone beyond hope of forgiveness, backed
+powerfully these arguments; and in spite of the pledges with which he
+had landed the Prince was soon as convinced of their wisdom as the
+Whigs. From this moment it was the policy of William and his advisers to
+further a flight which removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It
+would have been hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to
+keep him prisoner; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the
+silence of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James's filled the king
+with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which
+were almost openly placed at his disposal James a second time quitted
+London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France.
+
+[Sidenote: The Convention.]
+
+Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking a new
+Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could all
+means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of panic and
+outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon
+reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in the capital
+provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more
+pressing needs of administration, and quietly resigned their authority
+into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which arose from the
+absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was
+got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body of
+all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the
+Second together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London. Both
+bodies requested William to take on himself the provisional government
+of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters inviting the electors of
+every town and county to send up representatives to a Convention which
+met on the 22nd of January 1689. In the new Convention both Houses were
+found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the
+fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provisional authority to
+the Prince of Orange. But with this step their unanimity ended. The
+Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which,
+illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in
+its favour every element of the opposition to James, the Churchman who
+was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right of a
+nation to depose its king, the Whig who held the theory of a contract
+between King and People. They voted that King James, "having endeavoured
+to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original
+contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits and other
+wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having
+withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and
+that the throne is thereby vacant." But in the Lords where the Tories
+were still in the ascendant the resolution was fiercely debated.
+Archbishop Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring
+about a forfeiture of the crown and that James still remained king, but
+that his tyranny had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the
+actual exercise of government and to entrust his functions to a Regency.
+The moderate Tories under Danby's guidance admitted that James had
+ceased to be king but denied that the throne could be vacant, and
+contended that from the moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested
+in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax
+backed the Whig peers in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as
+it stood. The plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's
+scheme was adopted by a large majority.
+
+[Sidenote: Declaration of Rights.]
+
+But both the Tory courses found a sudden obstacle in William. He
+declined to be Regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to be his
+wife's gentleman-usher. Mary on the other hand refused to accept the
+crown save in conjunction with her husband. The two declarations put an
+end to the question, and it was settled that William and Mary should be
+acknowledged as joint sovereigns but that the actual administration
+should rest with William alone. It had been agreed throughout however
+that before the throne was filled up the constitutional liberties of the
+subject must be secured. A Parliamentary Committee in which the most
+active member was John Somers, a young lawyer who had distinguished
+himself in the trial of the Bishops and who was destined to play a great
+part in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which after some
+alterations was adopted by the two Houses. The Declaration recited the
+misgovernment of James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords
+and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English
+subjects. It condemned as illegal his establishment of an ecclesiastical
+commission, and his raising of an army without Parliamentary sanction.
+It denied the right of any king to suspend or dispense with laws, as
+they had been suspended or dispensed with of late, or to exact money
+save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to
+petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and to a
+pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared the right of
+both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded securities for the free
+exercise of their religion by all Protestants, and bound the new
+sovereign to maintain the Protestant religion as well as the laws and
+liberties of the nation. "We do claim and insist on the premises," ran
+the Declaration, "as our undoubted rights and liberties; encouraged by
+the Declaration of his Highness the Prince, we have confidence that he
+will perfect the deliverance he has begun and will preserve our rights
+against all further injury." It ended by declaring the Prince and
+Princess of Orange King and Queen of England. The Declaration was
+presented to William and Mary on the 13th of February by the two Houses
+in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall, and at the close of its recital
+Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to receive
+the crown. William accepted the offer in his own name and in that of
+his wife and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain the
+laws and to govern by advice of Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Lewis and the Revolution.]
+
+But William's eyes were fixed less on England than on Europe. His
+expedition had had in his own eyes a European rather than an English
+aim, and in his acceptance of the crown he had been moved not so much by
+personal ambition as by the prospect which offered itself of firmly
+knitting together England and Holland, the two great Protestant powers
+whose fleets held the mastery of the sea. But the advance from such a
+union to the formation of the European alliance against France on which
+he was bent was a step that still had to be made. Already indeed his
+action in England had told decisively on the contest. The blunder of
+Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for his point of attack had
+been all but atoned for by the brilliant successes with which he opened
+the war. The whole country west of the Rhine fell at once into his
+hands; his armies made themselves masters of the Palatinate, and
+penetrated even to Würtemberg. The hopes of the French king indeed had
+never been higher than at the moment when the arrival of James at St.
+Germain dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at once thrown back on
+a war of defence, and the brutal ravages which marked the retreat of his
+armies from the Rhine revealed the bitterness with which his pride
+stooped to the necessity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]
+
+But his reception of James at St. Germain as still king of England gave
+fresh force to William's efforts. It was yet doubtful whether William
+would be able to bring England to a hearty co-operation in the struggle
+against French ambition. But whatever reluctance there might have been
+to follow him in an attack on France with the view of saving the
+liberties of Europe, the stoutest Tory had none in following him in such
+an attack when it meant simply self-defence against a French restoration
+of the Stuart king at the cost of English freedom. It was with universal
+approval that the English Government declared war against Lewis. It was
+soon followed in this step by Holland, and the two countries at once
+agreed to stand by one another in their struggle against France. But it
+was more difficult to secure the co-operation of the two branches of the
+House of Austria in Germany and Spain, reluctant as they were to join
+the Protestant powers in league against a Catholic king. Spain however
+was forced by Lewis into war, for he aimed at the Netherlands as his
+especial prey; and the court of Vienna at last yielded to the bait held
+out by Holland of a recognition of its claims to the Spanish succession.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and the Revolution.]
+
+The adhesion of these powers in the spring of 1689 completed the Grand
+Alliance of the European powers which William had designed; and the
+union of Savoy with the allies girt France in on every side save that of
+Switzerland with a ring of foes. Lewis was left without a single ally
+save the Turk; for though the Scandinavian kingdoms stood aloof from the
+confederacy of Europe their neutrality was unfriendly to him. But the
+energy and quickness of movement which sprang from the concentration of
+the power of France in a single hand still left the contest an equal
+one. The empire was slow to move; the court of Vienna was distracted
+with a war against the Turks; Spain was all but powerless; Holland and
+England were alone earnest in the struggle, and England could as yet
+give little aid in it. One English brigade indeed, formed from the
+regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on the Sambre, and
+distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been rewarded for his
+treason with the title of Earl of Marlborough, in a brisk skirmish with
+the enemy at Walcourt. But for the bulk of his forces William had as yet
+grave work to do at home. In England not a sword had been drawn for
+James. In Scotland his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and
+so far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and
+complete. No sooner had he called his troops southward to meet William's
+invasion than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western peasants were at
+once up in arms; and the Episcopalian clergy, who had been the
+instruments of the Stuart misgovernment ever since the Restoration, were
+rabbled and driven from their parsonages in every parish. The news of
+these disorders forced William to act, though he was without a show of
+legal authority over Scotland. On the advice of the Scotch Lords present
+in London he ventured to summon a Convention similar to that which had
+been summoned in England, and on his own responsibility to set aside the
+laws passed by the "Drunken Parliament" of the Restoration which
+excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Parliament. This Convention
+resolved that James had forfeited the crown by misgovernment, and
+offered it to William and Mary. The offer was accompanied by a Claim of
+Right framed on the model of the Declaration of Rights to which the two
+sovereigns had consented in England, but closing with a demand for the
+abolition of Prelacy. Both crown and claim were accepted, and the
+arrival of the Scotch regiments which William had brought from Holland
+gave strength to the new Government.
+
+[Sidenote: Killiecrankie.]
+
+Its strength was to be roughly tested. On the revolt of the capital John
+Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of the Western
+Covenanters had been rewarded with high command in the Scotch army and
+with the title of Viscount Dundee, withdrew with a few troopers from
+Edinburgh to the Highlands and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands
+nothing was known of English government or misgovernment: all that the
+Revolution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of the House of
+Argyle. To many of the clans it meant the restoration of lands which had
+been granted them on the Earl's attainder; and the zeal of the
+Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Camerons, who were as ready to join Dundee
+in fighting the Campbells and the Government which upheld them as they
+had been ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before,
+was quickened by a reluctance to disgorge their spoil. They were soon in
+arms. William's Scotch regiments under General Mackay were sent to
+suppress the rising; but as they climbed the pass of Killiecrankie on
+the 27th of July 1689 Dundee charged them at the head of three thousand
+clansmen and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. His death in the
+moment of victory broke however the only bond which held the Highlanders
+together, and in a few weeks the host which had spread terror through
+the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the next summer Mackay was able
+to build the strong post of Fort William in the very heart of the
+disaffected country, and his offers of money and pardon brought about
+the submission of the clans.
+
+[Sidenote: Massacre of Glencoe.]
+
+The work of peace was sullied by an act of cruel treachery the memory of
+which still lingers in the minds of men. Sir John Dalrymple, the Master
+of Stair, in whose hands the government of Scotland at this time mainly
+rested, had hoped that a refusal of the oath of allegiance would give
+grounds for a war of extermination and free Scotland for ever from its
+dread of the Highlanders. He had provided for the expected refusal by
+orders of a ruthless severity. "Your troops," he wrote to the officer in
+command, "will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Locheil's
+lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your powers shall be large
+enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with
+prisoners." But his hopes were disappointed by the readiness with which
+the clans accepted the offers of the Government. All submitted in good
+time save Macdonald of Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking of the
+oath till six days after the latest date fixed by the proclamation.
+Foiled in his larger hopes of destruction Dalrymple seized eagerly on
+the pretext given by Macdonald, and an order "for the extirpation of
+that sect of robbers" was laid before William and received the royal
+signature. "The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton who
+undertook it, "must be secret and sudden." The troops were chosen from
+among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, and
+quartered peacefully among the Macdonalds for twelve days till all
+suspicion of their errand disappeared. At daybreak on the 13th of
+February 1692 they fell on their hosts, and in a few moments thirty of
+the clansfolk lay dead on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm,
+escaped to the mountains to perish for the most part of cold and hunger.
+"The only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair, when the news
+reached him, "is that any got away."
+
+But whatever horror the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in later days few
+save Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace of the Highlands
+enabled the work of reorganization to go on quietly at Edinburgh. In
+accepting the Claim of Right with its repudiation of Prelacy William had
+in effect restored the Presbyterian Church to which nine-tenths of the
+Lowland Scotchmen clung, and its restoration was accompanied by the
+revival of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith and by the
+passing of an Act which abolished lay patronage. Against the Toleration
+Act which the king proposed the Scotch Parliament stood firm. But though
+the measure failed the king was as firm in his purpose as the
+Parliament. So long as he reigned, William declared in memorable words,
+there should be no persecution for conscience' sake. "We never could be
+of that mind that violence was suited to the advancing of true religion,
+nor do we intend that our authority shall ever be a tool to the
+irregular passions of any party."
+
+[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]
+
+It was not in Scotland however but in Ireland that James and Lewis hoped
+to arrest William's progress. Ireland had long been the object of
+special attention on the part of James. In the middle of his reign, when
+his chief aim was to provide against the renewed depression of his
+fellow-religionists at his death by any Protestant successor, he had
+resolved (if we may trust the statement of the French ambassador) to
+place Ireland in such a position of independence that she might serve as
+a refuge for his Catholic subjects. It was with a view to the success of
+this design that Lord Clarendon was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy
+and succeeded in the charge of the island by the Catholic Earl of
+Tyrconnell. The new governor, who was raised to a dukedom, went roughly
+to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. Every Judge, every
+Privy Councillor, every Mayor and Alderman of a borough, was required to
+be a Catholic and an Irishman. The Irish army, raised to the number of
+fifty thousand men and purged of its Protestant soldiers, was entrusted
+to Catholic officers. In a few months the English ascendency was
+overthrown, and the life and fortune of the English settlers were at the
+mercy of the natives on whom they had trampled since Cromwell's day. The
+king's flight and the agitation among the native Irish at the news
+spread panic therefore through the island. Another massacre was believed
+to be at hand; and fifteen hundred Protestant families, chiefly from the
+south, fled in terror over sea. The Protestants of the north on the
+other hand drew together at Enniskillen and Londonderry, and prepared
+for self-defence. The outbreak however was still delayed, and for two
+months Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government. But his aim was
+simply to gain time. He was at this very moment indeed inviting James to
+return to Ireland, and assuring him of his fidelity. To James this call
+promised the aid of an army which would enable him to help the Scotch
+rising and to effect a landing in England, while Lewis saw in it the
+means of diverting William from giving effectual aid to the Grand
+Alliance. A staff of French officers with arms, ammunition, and a supply
+of money was placed therefore at the service of the exiled king, and the
+news of his coming no sooner reached Dublin at the opening of 1689 than
+Tyrconnell threw off the mask. A flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle
+with the words embroidered on its folds "Now or Never." The signal
+called every Catholic to arms. The maddened Irishmen flung themselves on
+the plunder which their masters had left and in a few weeks havoc was
+done, the French envoy told Lewis, which it would take years to repair.
+
+[Sidenote: Siege of Londonderry.]
+
+It was in this condition that James found Ireland when he landed at
+Kinsale. The rising of the natives had already baffled his plans. To him
+as to Lewis Ireland was simply a basis of operations against William,
+and whatever were their hopes of a future restoration of the soil to its
+older possessors both kings were equally anxious that no strife of races
+should at this moment interrupt their plans of an invasion of England
+with the fifty thousand soldiers that Tyrconnell was said to have at his
+disposal. But long ere James landed the war of races had already begun.
+To Tyrconnell indeed and the Irish leaders the king's plans were utterly
+distasteful. They had no wish for an invasion and conquest of England
+which would replace Ireland again in its position of dependence. Their
+policy was simply that of Ireland for the Irish, and the first step in
+such a policy was to drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in
+Ulster. Half of Tyrconnell's army therefore had already been sent
+against Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter
+behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns and destitute even of a
+ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen behind the wall made
+up for its weakness. They rejected with firmness the offers of James,
+who was still anxious to free his hands from a strife which broke his
+plans. They kept up their fire even when the neighbouring Protestants
+with their women and children were brutally driven under their walls and
+placed in the way of their guns. So fierce were their sallies, so
+crushing the repulse of his attack, that the king's general, Hamilton,
+at last turned the siege into a blockade. The Protestants died of hunger
+in the streets and of the fever which comes of hunger, but the cry of
+the town was still "No Surrender." The siege had lasted a hundred and
+five days, and only two days' food remained in Londonderry when on the
+28th of July an English ship broke the boom across the river, and the
+besiegers sullenly withdrew.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Ireland.]
+
+Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen who
+struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of double their number
+at Newtown Butler, and drove horse and foot before them in a panic which
+soon spread through Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell back
+on Dublin where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied
+Parliament which he had summoned. Every member returned was an Irishman
+and a Catholic, and their one aim was to undo the successive
+confiscations which had given the soil to English settlers and to get
+back Ireland for the Irish. The Act of Settlement, on which all title to
+property rested, was at once repealed in spite of the king's reluctance.
+He was told indeed bluntly that if he did not do Ireland justice not an
+Irishman would fight for him. It was to strengthen this work by ensuring
+the legal forfeiture of their lands that three thousand Protestants of
+name and fortune were massed together in the hugest Bill of Attainder
+which the world has seen. To the bitter memory of past wrongs was added
+the fury of religious bigotry. In spite of the king's promise of
+religious freedom the Protestant clergy were everywhere driven from
+their parsonages, Fellows and scholars were turned out of Trinity
+College, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to propose
+that if any Protestant rising took place on the English descent, as was
+expected, it should be met by a general massacre of the Protestants who
+still lingered in the districts which had submitted to James. To his
+credit the king shrank horror-struck from the proposal. "I cannot be so
+cruel," he said, "as to cut their throats while they live peaceably
+under my government." "Mercy to Protestants," was the cold reply, "is
+cruelty to Catholics."
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Monarchy.]
+
+The long agony of Londonderry was invaluable to England: it foiled the
+king's hopes of an invasion which would have roused a fresh civil war,
+and gave the new Government time to breathe. Time was indeed sorely
+needed. Through the proscription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule
+William was forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army
+which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with Marlborough to
+the Sambre, and the political embarrassments which grew up around the
+new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained
+at home. The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even
+amidst the confusion and intrigue which we shall have to describe, by
+the common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty Whig
+and Tory were now at one. The Declaration of Rights was turned into the
+Bill of Rights by the Convention which had now become a Parliament, and
+the passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the
+character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right
+of the people through its representatives to depose the king, to change
+the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was
+now established. All claim of Divine Right or hereditary right
+independent of the law was formally put an end to by the election of
+William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to
+advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular
+clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, and Anne, were
+sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. George the First and
+his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of
+Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
+Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Taxation and the Army.]
+
+Nor was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The older
+constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had taught England the
+need of restoring to the Parliament its absolute power over taxation.
+The grant of revenue for life to the last two kings had been the secret
+of their anti-national policy, and the first act of the new legislature
+was to restrict the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years.
+William was bitterly galled by the provision. "The gentlemen of England
+trusted King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion and
+their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and their
+laws have been preserved." But the only change brought about in the
+Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make
+the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which, in spite of the
+slight changes introduced by the next Tory Parliament, soon became an
+invariable rule. A change of almost as great importance established the
+control of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
+had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James; but with the
+Continental war the existence of an army was a necessity. As yet however
+it was a force which had no legal existence. The soldier was simply an
+ordinary subject; there were no legal means of punishing strictly
+military offences or of providing for military discipline: and the
+assumed power of billeting soldiers in private houses had been taken
+away by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army was met
+by a Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for discipline in the army were
+conferred by Parliament on its officers, and provision was made for the
+pay of the force, but both pay and disciplinary powers were granted only
+for a single year.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Revolution.]
+
+The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has remained annual ever
+since the Revolution; and as it is impossible for the State to exist
+without supplies or for the army to exist without discipline and pay the
+annual assembly of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity.
+The greatest constitutional change which our history has witnessed was
+thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way. The
+dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament itself
+were met with far less skill. Under Charles the Second England had seen
+a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction,
+maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial Bill
+which limited the duration of a Parliament to three was passed with
+little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To
+counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the
+Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, which
+excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat in
+Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. The modern
+course of providing against a pressure from the Court or the
+administration by excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the
+hold of Parliament over the great officers of State by admitting them
+into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It is equally
+strange that while vindicating its right of Parliamentary control over
+the public revenue and the army the Bill of Rights should have left by
+its silence the control of trade to the Crown. It was only a few years
+later, in the discussions on the charter granted to the East India
+Company, that the Houses silently claimed and obtained the right of
+regulating English commerce.
+
+[Sidenote: The Toleration Act.]
+
+The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty than
+the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism Churchman and
+Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have seen, strangely at one;
+and schemes of Comprehension became suddenly popular. But with the fall
+of James the union of the two bodies abruptly ceased; and the
+establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, together with the
+"rabbling" of the Episcopalian clergy in its western shires, revived the
+old bitterness of the clergy towards the dissidents. The Convocation
+rejected the scheme of the Latitudinarians for such modifications of the
+Prayer-Book as would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and
+a Comprehension Bill, which was introduced into Parliament, failed to
+pass in spite of the king's strenuous support. William's attempt to
+partially admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of the
+Corporation Act proved equally fruitless. Active persecution however
+had now become distasteful to all; the pledge of religious liberty given
+to the Nonconformists to ensure their aid in the Revolution had to be
+redeemed; and the passing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically
+established freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of this
+failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may have been its political effect
+has been of the highest value. At no time had the Church been so strong
+or so popular as at the Revolution, and the reconciliation of the
+Nonconformists would have doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether
+the disinclination to all political change which has characterised it
+during the last two hundred years would have been affected by such a
+change; but it is certain that the power of opposition which it has
+wielded would have been enormously increased. As it was, the Toleration
+Act established a group of religious bodies whose religious opposition
+to the Church forced them to support the measures of progress which the
+Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side and on the other
+England has escaped the great stumbling-block in the way of nations
+where the cause of religion has become identified with that of political
+reaction.
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Church.]
+
+A secession from within its own ranks weakened the Church still more.
+The doctrine of Divine Right had a strong hold on the body of the clergy
+though they had been driven from their other favourite doctrine of
+passive obedience, and the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the
+new sovereigns from all persons exercising public functions was resented
+as an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. The whole bench of
+bishops resolved, though to no purpose, that Parliament had no right to
+impose such an oath on the clergy. Sancroft, the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number of the higher clergy
+absolutely refused the oath when it was imposed, treated all who took it
+as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament regarded
+themselves and their adherents, who were known as Nonjurors, as the only
+members of the true Church of England. The bulk of the clergy bowed to
+necessity, but their bitterness against the new Government was fanned
+into a flame by the religious policy announced in this assertion of the
+supremacy of Parliament over the Church, and the deposition of bishops
+by an act of the legislature. It was fanned into yet fiercer flame by
+the choice of successors to the nonjuring prelates. The new bishops were
+men of learning and piety, but they were for the most part
+Latitudinarians and some of them Whigs. Tillotson, the new Archbishop of
+Canterbury, was the foremost theologian of the school of Chillingworth
+and Hales. Burnet, the new bishop of Salisbury, was as liberal as
+Tillotson in religion and more liberal in politics. It was indeed only
+among Whigs and Latitudinarians that William and William's successors
+could find friends in the ranks of the clergy; and it was to these that
+they were driven with a few breaks here and there to entrust all the
+higher offices of the Church. The result was a severance between the
+higher dignitaries and the mass of the clergy which broke the strength
+of the Church. From the time of William to the time of George the Third
+its fiercest strife was waged within its own ranks. But the resentment
+at the measure which brought this strife about already added to the
+difficulties which William had to encounter.
+
+[Sidenote: William and the Parliament.]
+
+Yet greater difficulties arose from the temper of his Parliament. In the
+Commons, chosen as they had been in the first moment of revolutionary
+enthusiasm, the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their first aim was
+to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had suffered during the last
+two reigns. The attainder of Lord Russell was reversed. The judgments
+against Sidney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the
+opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Oates had been against
+law the Lords refused to reverse it, but even Oates received a pardon
+and a pension. The Whigs however wanted not merely the redress of wrongs
+but the punishment of the wrong-doers. Whig and Tory had been united
+indeed by the tyranny of James; both parties had shared in the
+Revolution, and William had striven to prolong their union by joining
+the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named the Tory Earl of
+Danby Lord President, made the Whig Earl of Shrewsbury Secretary of
+State, and gave the Privy Seal to Lord Halifax, a trimmer between the
+one party and the other. But save in a moment of common oppression or
+common danger union was impossible. The Whigs clamoured for the
+punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal acts of Charles and
+of James, and refused to pass the Bill of General Indemnity which
+William laid before them. William on the other hand was resolved that no
+bloodshed or proscription should follow the revolution which had placed
+him on the throne. His temper was averse from persecution; he had no
+great love for either of the battling parties; and above all he saw that
+internal strife would be fatal to the effective prosecution of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]
+
+While the cares of his new throne were chaining him to England the
+confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit was proving too slow and
+too loosely compacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of
+France. The armies of Lewis had fallen back within their own borders,
+but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the junction of the English and
+Dutch fleets failed to assure them the mastery of the seas. The English
+navy was paralysed by the corruption which prevailed in the public
+service, as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The
+services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded with the
+earldom of Torrington and the command of the fleet; but his indolence
+suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, and his want of
+seamanship was shown in an indecisive engagement with a French squadron
+in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the
+command of the Channel; the French dockyards were turning out ship after
+ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to
+reinforce the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast
+would have brought serious political danger; for the reaction of popular
+feeling which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the
+pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Nonjurors
+and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the
+spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and
+above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of the
+Jacobites or adherents of King James, was forming around the Nonjurors;
+and it was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of
+a French fleet on the coast.
+
+[Sidenote: Schomberg in Ireland.]
+
+In such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the
+Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. He
+dissolved the Parliament, which had refused to pass a Bill of Indemnity
+for all political offences, and called a new one to meet in March. The
+result of the elections proved that William had only expressed the
+general temper of the nation. In the new Parliament the bulk of the
+members proved Tories. The boroughs had been alienated from the Whigs by
+their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their desire to secure the
+Corporations for their own party by driving from them all who had taken
+part in the Tory misgovernment under Charles or James. In the counties
+the discontent of the clergy told as heavily against the Whigs; and
+parson after parson led his flock in a body to the poll. The change of
+temper in the Parliament necessarily brought about a change among the
+king's advisers. William accepted the resignation of the more violent
+Whigs among his counsellors and placed Danby at the head of affairs; and
+in May the Houses gave their assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim
+in his sudden change of front was not only to meet the change in the
+national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English faction which
+would suffer him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was
+king in Dublin the attempt to crush treason at home was a hopeless one;
+and so urgent was the danger, so precious every moment in the present
+juncture of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work
+as sharply to an end as was needful save himself. In the autumn of the
+year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg, an exiled Huguenot who had followed
+William in his expedition to England and was held to be one of the most
+skilful captains of the time, had been sent with a small force to Ulster
+to take advantage of the panic which had followed the relief of
+Londonderry. James indeed was already talking of flight, and looked upon
+the game as hopeless. But the spirit of the Irish people rose quickly
+from their despair, and the duke's landing roused the whole nation to a
+fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were filled up at once,
+and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda with a force double that
+of his opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits whom it was
+hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field, did all that was
+possible when he entrenched himself at Dundalk and held his ground in a
+camp where pestilence swept off half his numbers.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of the Boyne.]
+
+Winter at last parted the two armies, and during the next six months
+James, whose treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a
+coinage of brass money while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder.
+William meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to
+bring the Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the
+winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached
+thirty thousand men. Lewis too felt the importance of the coming
+struggle. Seven thousand picked Frenchmen under the Count of Lauzun were
+despatched to reinforce the army of James, but they had hardly arrived
+when William himself landed at Carrickfergus and pushed rapidly with his
+whole army to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish
+forces, hardly exceeding twenty thousand men in number but posted
+strongly behind the Boyne. Lauzun had hoped by falling back on Dublin to
+prolong a defensive war, but retreat was now impossible. "I am glad to
+see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst of delight; "and if you
+escape me now the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of
+July 1690, the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish
+foot, who at first fought well, broke in a sudden panic as soon as the
+passage of the river was effected, but the horse made so gallant a stand
+that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge and for a time the English
+centre was held in check. With the arrival of William however at the
+head of his left wing all was over. James, who had throughout been
+striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops to the nearest defile
+rather than frankly to meet William's onset, abandoned his troops as
+they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale for
+France.
+
+[Sidenote: Irish War.]
+
+But though James had fled in despair, and though the beaten army was
+forced by William's pursuit to abandon the capital, it was still
+resolute to fight. The incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the
+scorn even of his followers. "Change kings with us," an Irish officer
+replied to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne,
+"change kings with us and we will fight you again." They did better in
+fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the
+routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you
+call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon;
+they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand
+Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who
+had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the
+English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm
+the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege.
+The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, but he was hardly
+gone when a new turn was given to the struggle by one who was quietly
+proving himself a master in the art of war. Churchill, rewarded for his
+opportune desertion of James with the earldom of Marlborough, had been
+recalled from Flanders to command a division which landed in the south
+of Ireland. Only a few days remained before the operations were
+interrupted by the coming of winter, but the few days were turned to
+good account. The two ports by which alone Ireland could receive
+supplies from France fell into English hands. Cork, with five thousand
+men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days
+later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the
+greater part of Munster in Irish hands, the French force remained
+untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with arms
+and supplies encouraged the insurgents. But the summer of 1691 had
+hardly begun when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of
+Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at
+Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was utterly
+broken.
+
+[Sidenote: Ireland conquered.]
+
+The defeat at Aughrim left Limerick alone in its revolt, and in October
+Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of surrender. Two treaties were drawn
+up between the Irish and English generals. By the first it was
+stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in
+the exercise of their religion as were consistent with law, or as they
+had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged itself
+also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to endeavour to
+procure to the good Roman Catholics such further security in that
+particular as "may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account
+of the said religion." By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's
+soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France; and ten
+thousand men, the whole of his force, chose exile rather than life in a
+land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the wild cry of
+the women who stood watching their departure was hushed the silence of
+death settled down upon Ireland. For a hundred years the country
+remained at peace. But the peace was a peace of despair. No Englishman
+who loves what is noble in the English temper can tell without sorrow
+and shame the story of that time of guilt. The work of oppression, it is
+true, was done not directly by England but by the English settlers in
+Ireland; and the cruelty of their rule sprang in great measure from the
+sense of danger and the atmosphere of panic in which the Protestants
+lived. But if thoughts such as these relieve the guilt of those who
+oppressed they leave the fact of oppression as dark as before. The most
+terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the
+rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's bitter words
+of contempt, became "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to their
+conquerors. Such as the work was, however, it was thoroughly done.
+Though local risings of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the
+English settlers in Ireland, all dream of a national revolt passed away.
+Till the very eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source
+of political danger and anxiety to England.
+
+[Sidenote: French Descent on England.]
+
+Short as the struggle of Ireland had been it had served Lewis well, for
+while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes was
+restoring the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won
+the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of
+Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory which France
+was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very throne of
+William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage than in quitting
+England to fight James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were
+only looking for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise
+in revolt. The French minister in fact hurried the fleet to sea in the
+hope of detaining William in England by a danger at home; and he had
+hardly set out for Ireland when Tourville, the French admiral, appeared
+in the Channel with strict orders to fight. Orders as strict had been
+sent to the allied fleets to engage even at the risk of defeat; and when
+Tourville was met on the 30th of June 1690 by the English and Dutch
+fleet at Beachy Head the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly
+outnumbered it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid; but Herbert,
+whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were
+crushed, and withdrew with the English ships at nightfall to seek
+shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the shame, for
+Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel and his presence off
+the coast of Devon invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the
+discontent of Tories and Nonjurors against William might be all signs of
+it vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by
+Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and the news of the
+Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James.
+
+[Sidenote: Intrigues in England.]
+
+The natural reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a
+new strength for the moment to William in England; but ill luck still
+hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his presence
+abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and
+crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since
+the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the
+Continent at the head of an English army. But the slowness of the allies
+again baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small
+army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the
+strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made themselves masters of it
+in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment
+all trust in William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt
+more heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been crushed
+by the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life.
+Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened
+communications with James; and some of the leading Whigs with the Earl
+of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's
+ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's mind
+the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. His design was to
+bring about a revolt which would drive William from the throne without
+replacing James on it, a revolt which would in fact give the crown to
+his daughter Anne whose affection for Marlborough's wife would place the
+real government of England in Churchill's hands. A yet greater danger
+lay in the treason of Admiral Russell who had succeeded Torrington in
+command of the fleet.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of La Hogue.]
+
+Russell's defection would have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt
+which James was resolved to make for the recovery of his throne and
+which Lewis had been brought to support. James had never wavered from
+his design of returning to England at the head of a foreign force. He
+abandoned Ireland as soon as his hopes of finding such a force there
+vanished at the Boyne; and from that moment he had sought a base of
+invasion in France. Lewis was the more willing to make the trial that
+the pressure of the war had left few troops in England. So certain was
+he of success that the future ambassador to the court of James was
+already nominated, and a treaty of commerce sketched between France and
+England. In the beginning of 1692 an army of thirty thousand troops was
+quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent on the English coast.
+Nearly a half of this force was composed of the Irish regiments who had
+followed Sarsfield into exile after the surrender of Limerick.
+Transports were provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to
+cover it with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as
+many ships as his opponent the belief in his purpose of betraying
+William's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the
+allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's intrigues may
+have meant he was no Herbert. All he would promise was to keep his fleet
+out of the way of hindering a landing. But should Tourville engage, he
+would promise nothing. "Do not think I will let the French triumph over
+us in our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. "If I meet
+them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." When the
+allied fleet, which had been ordered to the Norman coast, met the French
+off the heights of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his
+word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety ships of
+the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the French were
+forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their
+vessels reached St. Malo; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays
+of Cherbourg and La Hogue; but their pursuers were soon upon them, and
+in a bold attack the English boats burned ship after ship under the eyes
+of the French army.
+
+[Sidenote: The turn of the War.]
+
+All dread of the invasion was at once at an end; and the throne of
+William was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite
+conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to support. The
+battle of La Hogue was a death-blow to the project of a Stuart
+restoration by help of foreign arms. Henceforth English Jacobitism would
+have to battle unaided against the throne of the Revolution. But the
+overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory.
+France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval power; for
+though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength the
+confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured
+again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope too dawned
+on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. On land
+indeed the French still held their old mastery. Namur, one of the
+strongest fortresses in Europe, surrendered to Lewis a few days after
+the battle of La Hogue. An inroad into Dauphiné failed to rouse the
+Huguenots to revolt, and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of
+the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle
+was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the
+conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheartened and
+exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme.
+"The country," Fénélon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The
+tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the
+Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg was hardly able to
+beat off the fierce attack of William at Neerwinden. For the first time
+in his long career of prosperity therefore Lewis bent his pride to seek
+peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort was a
+vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end
+and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.
+
+[Sidenote: The Sovereignty of the Commons.]
+
+Its final triumph however was in great measure brought about by a change
+which now passed over the face of English politics. In outer seeming the
+Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England
+from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful
+and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was
+transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of Commons. From
+the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the
+Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of
+granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons
+became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to
+suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either
+course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the
+army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the
+constitutional change was complete the machinery of government was far
+from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which
+such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of
+Commons might be it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear
+upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them
+were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the
+king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they held
+themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the
+Commons could force a king to remove a Minister who contradicted their
+will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen
+statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.
+
+[Sidenote: Lord Sunderland.]
+
+The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove
+William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous
+of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies
+always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is
+untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical
+difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they
+possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of
+the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the
+Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to
+find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood
+changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold
+over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he
+succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would
+have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the
+Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill
+which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of
+purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact
+without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate
+information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a
+definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political
+capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a
+simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit
+of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the
+lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the
+later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through
+almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by
+compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned
+conversion to the Roman Catholic faith; but the ruin of James was no
+sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by
+the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and
+his honour. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape
+public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came
+secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the
+king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the
+Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among
+the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.
+
+[Sidenote: The New Ministerial System.]
+
+As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each
+great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had
+in theory been independent of his fellow-officers; each was the "King's
+servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the
+king alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower
+above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of
+government, but the predominance was merely personal and never
+permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready
+to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was
+common for a king to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any
+communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at
+ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself
+the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan
+aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous
+Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments,
+and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and
+loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan
+likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till
+then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had
+never had before. The Ministers who were representatives of the majority
+of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions
+were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or
+opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the
+simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long
+vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name
+to be the king's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee
+representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and
+capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar
+Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the
+House to the other.
+
+[Sidenote: The Junto.]
+
+Such was the origin of that system of representative government which
+has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But though William showed
+his own political genius in understanding and adopting Sunderland's
+plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it
+out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland believed
+that the balance of political power was really on the side of the Whigs.
+Not only were they the natural representatives of the principles of the
+Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above
+their opponents in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their
+head stood a group of statesmen whose close union in thought and action
+gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet the most prominent of
+these, was the victor of La Hogue; John Somers was an advocate who had
+sprung into fame by his defence of the Seven Bishops; Lord Wharton was
+known as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers; and
+Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English
+financiers. In spite of such considerations however it is doubtful
+whether William would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely
+Whig Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the
+war. Exhausted as France was the war still languished and the allies
+still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all
+but ruined by the French privateers and the nation stood aghast at the
+growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold in their support of the
+Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs on the other hand
+remained resolute in their support of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: Bank of England.]
+
+William, in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was
+thus driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. Already in 1694 indeed
+Montague established his political position and weakened that of the
+Tory Ministers by his success in a great financial measure which at once
+relieved the pressure of taxation and added strength to the new
+monarchy. The war could be kept up only by loans: and loans were still
+raised in England by personal appeal to a few London goldsmiths in whose
+hands men placed money for investment. But the bankruptcies which
+followed the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal had shaken public
+confidence in the goldsmiths, while the dread of a restoration of James
+made these capitalists appear shy of the Ministers' appeals for aid.
+Money therefore could only be raised in scanty quantities and at a heavy
+loss. In this emergency Montague came forward with a plan which had been
+previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson, for the creation
+of a National Bank such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa.
+While serving as an ordinary bank for the supply of capital to
+commercial enterprises the Bank of England, as the new institution was
+called, was in reality an instrument for procuring loans from the
+people at large by the formal pledge of the State to repay the money
+advanced on the demand of the lender. For this purpose a loan of
+£1,200,000 was thrown open to public subscription; and the subscribers
+to it were formed into a chartered company in whose hands the
+negotiation of all after loans was placed. The plan turned out a perfect
+success. In ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of
+power revealed itself in this discovery of the resources afforded by the
+national credit and the national wealth; and the rapid growth of the
+National Debt, as the mass of these loans to the State came to be
+called, gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts whose
+first work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the lenders
+or as they were termed the "fundholders."
+
+[Sidenote: The Whig Ministry.]
+
+The evidence of the public credit gave strength to William abroad as at
+home. In 1694 indeed the army of 90,000 men which he commanded in the
+Netherlands did no more than hold the French successfully at bay; but
+the English fleet rode triumphant in the Channel, ravaged and alarmed
+the coast of France, and foiled by its pressure the attack of a French
+army on Barcelona. The brighter aspect of affairs abroad coincided with
+a new unity of action at home. The change which Sunderland counselled
+was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory Ministers had been replaced
+by members of the Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty; Somers was
+named Lord Keeper; Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Montague, Chancellor
+of the Exchequer. Even before this change was completed its effect was
+felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig majority of its
+members, united and disciplined, moved quietly under the direction of
+their natural leaders, the Whig Ministers of the Crown. It was this
+which enabled William to face the shock which was given to his position
+by the death of Queen Mary at the end of 1694. It had been provided
+indeed that on the death of either sovereign the survivor should retain
+the throne; but the renewed attacks of the Tories under Nottingham and
+Halifax on the war and the Bank showed what fresh hopes had been raised
+by William's lonely position. The Parliament however, whom the king had
+just conciliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went
+steadily with the Ministry; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph
+abroad. In September 1695 the Alliance succeeded for the first time in
+winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur. The king
+skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new Parliament, and
+its members at once showed their temper by a vigorous support of the
+measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. The Houses indeed
+were no mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume the
+prodigal grants of lands which he had made to his Dutch favourites, and
+to remove his Ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild project for
+a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They claimed a right to name
+members of the new Board of Trade which was established in 1696 for the
+regulation of commercial matters. They rejected a proposal, never
+henceforth to be revived, for a censorship of the Press. But there was
+no factious opposition. So strong was the Ministry that Montague was
+enabled to face the general distress which was caused for the moment by
+a reform of the currency, which had been reduced by clipping to far less
+than its nominal value, and although the financial embarrassments
+created by the currency reform hindered any vigorous measures abroad
+William was able to hold the French at bay.
+
+[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession.]
+
+But the war was fast drawing to a close. The Catholic powers in the
+Grand Alliance were already in revolt against William's supremacy as
+they had been in revolt against that of Lewis. In 1696 the Pope
+succeeded in detaching Savoy from the league and Lewis was enabled to
+transfer his Italian army to the Low Countries. But France was now
+simply fighting to secure more favourable terms, and William, though he
+held that "the only way of treating with France is with our swords in
+our hands," was almost as eager as Lewis for a peace. The defection of
+Savoy made it impossible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance,
+that of forcing France back to its position at the Treaty of Westphalia,
+and a new question was drawing every day nearer, the question of the
+succession to the Spanish throne. The death of the King of Spain,
+Charles the Second, was now known to be at hand. With him ended the male
+line of the Austrian princes who for two hundred years had occupied the
+Spanish throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in
+Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the
+extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to
+it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once
+return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces
+of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of
+Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble
+islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the
+dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow
+the work of European independence which William had wrought; and it was
+with a view to prevent either of these results that William resolved to
+free his hands by a conclusion of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: Peace of Ryswick.]
+
+In May negotiations were opened at Ryswick; the obstacles thrown in the
+way of an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside in a
+private negotiation between William and Lewis; and peace was finally
+signed in October 1697. In spite of failure and defeat in the field
+William's policy had won. The victories of France remained barren in the
+face of a united Europe; and her exhaustion forced her for the first
+time since Richelieu's day to consent to a disadvantageous peace. On the
+side of the Empire France withdrew from every annexation save that of
+Strassburg which she had made since the Treaty of Nimeguen, and
+Strassburg would have been restored but for the unhappy delays of the
+German negotiators. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the
+conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of
+Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. A far more important provision
+of the peace pledged Lewis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause and a
+recognition of William as King of England. For Europe in general the
+peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce. But for England it was
+the close of a long and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new æra
+of political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the
+conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since
+the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a Roman
+Catholic country and into a dependency of France. But it was even more
+than this. It was the definite establishment of England as the centre of
+European resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of
+power.
+
+[Sidenote: William's aims.]
+
+In leaving England face to face with France the Treaty of Ryswick gave a
+new turn to the policy of William. Hitherto he had aimed at saving the
+balance of European power by the joint action of England and the rest of
+the European states against France. He now saw a means of securing what
+that action had saved by the co-operation of France and the two great
+naval powers. In his new course we see the first indication of that
+triple alliance of France, England, and Holland, which formed the base
+of Walpole's foreign policy, as well as of that common action of England
+and France which since the fall of Holland has so constantly recurred to
+the dreams of English statesmen. Peace therefore was no sooner signed
+than William by stately embassies and a series of secret negotiations
+drew nearer to France. It was in direct negotiation and co-operation
+with Lewis that he aimed at bringing about a peaceful settlement of the
+question which threatened Europe with war. At this moment the claimants
+of the Spanish succession were three: the French Dauphin, a son of the
+Spanish king's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a grandson
+of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son of Charles's aunt.
+In strict law--if there had been any law really applicable to the
+matter--the claim of the last was the strongest of the three; for the
+claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renunciation of all right
+to the succession at his mother's marriage with Lewis XIV., a
+renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and
+a similar renunciation barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The
+claim of the Emperor was more remote in blood, but it was barred by no
+renunciation at all. William however was as resolute in the interests of
+Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis;
+and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession was inevitable
+if the war continued and Spain remained a member of the Grand Alliance,
+in arms against France and leagued with the Emperor, which made him
+suddenly conclude the Peace of Ryswick.
+
+[Sidenote: The first Partition Treaty.]
+
+Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted
+on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish
+dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress
+which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at
+once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of
+Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the
+disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two
+rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some
+hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to
+waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the
+three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became
+necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince
+of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its
+Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the
+Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to
+France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the
+Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria
+and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the
+success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe,
+seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both
+England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy
+by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class
+and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every
+day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the
+struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four
+millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at
+sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the
+realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general
+wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to
+fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the
+country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after
+the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the
+merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office
+rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a
+greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state
+of war.
+
+[Sidenote: The second Partition Treaty.]
+
+The general discontent at the course of the war, the general anxiety to
+preserve the new gains of the peace, told alike on William and on the
+party which had backed his policy. In England almost every one was set
+on two objects, the reduction of taxes and the disbanding of the
+standing army. The war had raised the taxes from two millions a year to
+four. It had bequeathed twenty millions of debt and a fresh six millions
+of deficit. The standing army was still held to be the enemy of liberty,
+as it had been held under the Stuarts; and hardly any one realized the
+new conditions of political life which had robbed its existence of
+danger to the State. The king however resisted desperately the proposals
+for its disbanding; for the maintenance of the army was all-important
+for the success of the negotiations he was carrying on. But his stubborn
+opposition only told against himself. Personally indeed the king still
+remained an object of national gratitude; but his natural partiality to
+his Dutch favourites, the confidence he gave to Sunderland, his cold and
+sullen demeanour, above all his endeavours to maintain the standing
+army, robbed him of popularity and of the strength which comes from
+popularity. The negotiations too which he was carrying on were a secret
+he could not reveal; and his prayers failed to turn the Parliament from
+its purpose. The army and navy were ruthlessly cut down. How much
+William's hands were weakened by this reduction of forces and by the
+peace-temper of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which
+was concluded in 1700 between the two maritime powers and France. The
+demand of Lewis that the Netherlands should be given to the Elector of
+Bavaria, whose political position would always leave him a puppet in the
+French king's hands, was indeed successfully resisted. Spain, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son of the
+Emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the whole of the Spanish
+territories in Italy were now granted to France; and it was provided
+that Milan should be exchanged for Lorraine, whose Duke was to be
+summarily transferred to the new Duchy. If the Emperor persisted in his
+refusal to come into the Treaty the share of his son was to pass to
+another unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of the Junto.]
+
+The Emperor, indifferent to the Archduke's personal interest, and
+anxious only to gain a new dominion in Italy for the House of Austria,
+stubbornly protested against this arrangement; but his protest was of
+little moment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly
+together. The new Western Alliance indeed showed how wide its power was
+from the first. The mediation of England and Holland, no longer
+counteracted by France, secured peace between the Emperor and the Turks
+in the Treaty of Carlowitz. The common action of the three powers
+stifled a strife between Holstein and Denmark which would have set North
+Germany on fire. William's European position indeed was more commanding
+than ever. But his difficulties at home were increasing every day. In
+spite of the defection of their supporters on the question of a standing
+army the Whig Ministry for some time retained fairly its hold on the
+Houses. But the elections for a new Parliament at the close of 1698
+showed the growth of a new temper in the nation. A Tory majority,
+pledged to peace as to a reduction of taxation and indifferent to
+foreign affairs, was returned to the House of Commons. The fourteen
+thousand men still retained in the army were at once cut down to seven.
+It was voted that William's Dutch guards should return to Holland. It
+was in vain that William begged for their retention as a personal
+favour, that he threatened to leave England with them, and that the ill
+effect of this strife on his negotiations threw him into a fever. Even
+before the elections he had warned the Dutch Pensionary that in any
+fresh struggle England could be relied on only for naval aid. He was
+forced to give way; and, as he expected, this open display of the
+peace-temper of England told fatally on the resistance he had attempted
+to the pretensions of France. He strove indeed to appease the Parliament
+by calling for the resignation of Russell and Montague, the two
+ministers most hated by the Tories. But all seemed in vain. The Houses
+no sooner met in 1699 than the Tory majority attacked the Crown, passed
+a Bill for resuming estates granted to the Dutch favourites, and
+condemned the Ministers as responsible for these grants. Again
+Sunderland had to intervene, and to press William to carry out the
+policy which had produced the Whig Ministry by its entire dismissal.
+Somers and his friends withdrew, and a new administration composed of
+moderate Tories, with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading
+members, took their place.
+
+[Sidenote: Accession of the Duke of Anjou.]
+
+The moment indeed was one in which the king needed at any price the
+co-operation of the Parliament. Spain had been stirred to bitter
+resentment as news of the Partition Treaty crept abroad. The Spaniards
+cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of
+Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment
+of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. The nobles too
+dreaded the loss of their vast estates in Italy and of the lucrative
+posts they held as governors of these dependencies. Even the dying king
+shared the anger of his subjects. He hesitated only whether to leave his
+dominions to the House of Austria or the House of Bourbon; but in
+either case he was resolved to leave the whole. A will wrested from him
+by the factions which wrangled over his deathbed bequeathed at last the
+whole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the
+second son of the Dauphin. It was doubtful indeed whether Lewis would
+suffer his grandson to receive the crown. He was still a member of that
+Triple Alliance on which for the last three years the peace of Europe
+had depended. The Treaty of Partition was so recent and the risk of
+accepting this bequest so great that Lewis would have hardly resolved on
+it but for his belief that the temper of England must necessarily render
+William's opposition a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so
+averse from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's policy that
+men openly approved the French king's course. Hardly any one in England
+dreaded the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they
+believed soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events.
+The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far
+better than the increase of power which France would have derived from
+the cessions of the last treaty of Partition. The cession of the
+Sicilies would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French
+lake, and have ruined the English trade with the Levant, while the
+cession of Guipuzcoa and the annexation of the west coast of Spain,
+which was looked on as certain to follow, would have imperilled the
+American trade and again raised France into a formidable power at sea.
+Backing all these considerations was the dread of losing by a contest
+with Spain and its new king the lucrative trade with the Spanish
+colonies. "It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, "that
+almost every one rejoices that France has preferred the Will to the
+Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at his rival's breach of
+faith, he had no means of punishing it. In the opening of 1701 the Duke
+of Anjou entered Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there
+were no Pyrenees.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Dutch Barrier.]
+
+The life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dying. His
+cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, his frame so weak that he
+could hardly get into his coach. But never had he shown himself so
+great. His courage rose with every difficulty. His temper, which had
+been heated by the personal affronts lavished on him through English
+faction, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large and
+clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments of
+French diplomacy and English party strife to the great interests which
+he knew must in the end determine the course of European politics.
+Abroad and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had
+no ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, while the
+attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the House of Austria in
+check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish
+Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French
+side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in
+Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of
+testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute
+against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king
+of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
+could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count
+in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung
+from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards
+under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory
+might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were
+agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands.
+Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which
+the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis
+blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The
+wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the
+former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at
+its close, by which seven fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and
+Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops.
+The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of
+Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new
+state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his
+negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too
+eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride
+of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at
+the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the
+Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into
+his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took
+possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: The Act of Settlement.]
+
+The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the
+leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to
+the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which
+followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it
+was and bitterly as it condemned the Partition Treaties, it at once
+supported William in his demand for a withdrawal of the French troops,
+and authorized him to conclude a defensive alliance with Holland, which
+would give that State courage to join in the demand. The disclosure of a
+new Jacobite plot strengthened William's position. The hopes of the
+Jacobites had been raised in the preceding year by the death of the
+young Duke of Gloucester, the only living child of the Princess Anne,
+and who as William was childless ranked, after his mother, as
+heir-presumptive of the throne. William was dying, the health of Anne
+herself was known to be precarious; and to the partisans of James it
+seemed as if the succession of his son, the boy who was known in later
+life as the Old Pretender, was all but secure. But Tory as the
+Parliament was, it had no mind to undo the work of the Revolution. When
+a new Act of Succession was laid before the Houses in 1701 not a voice
+was raised for James or his son. By the ordinary rules of heritage the
+descendants of the daughter of Charles the First, Henrietta of Orleans,
+whose only child had married the Duke of Savoy, would come next as
+claimants; but the house of Savoy was Catholic and its pretensions were
+passed over in the same silence. No other descendants of Charles the
+First remained, and the Parliament fell back on his father's line.
+Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, had married the Elector
+Palatine; but of her twelve children all had died save one. This was
+Sophia, the wife of the late and the mother of the present Elector of
+Hanover. It was in Sophia and the heirs of her body, being Protestants,
+that the Act of Settlement vested the Crown. But the jealousy of a
+foreign ruler accompanied this settlement with remarkable provisions.
+It was enacted that every English sovereign must be in communion with
+the Church of England as by law established. All future kings were
+forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament, and foreigners
+were excluded from all public posts, military or civil. The independence
+of justice, which had been inadequately secured by the Bill of Rights,
+was now established by a clause which provided that no judge should be
+removed from office save on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The
+two principles that the king acts only through his ministers and that
+these ministers are responsible to Parliament were asserted by a
+requirement that all public business should be formally done in the
+Privy Council and all its decisions signed by its members. These two
+last provisions went far to complete the parliamentary Constitution
+which had been drawn by the Bill of Rights.
+
+[Sidenote: The Country and the War.]
+
+But, firm as it was in its loyalty to the Revolution, and in its resolve
+to maintain the independence of the Netherlands, the Parliament had
+still no purpose of war. It assented indeed to the alliance with Holland
+in the belief that the pressure of the two powers would bring Lewis to a
+peaceful settlement of the question. Its aim was still to avoid a
+standing army and to reduce taxation; and its bitterness against the
+Partition Treaties sprang from a belief that William had entailed on
+England by their means a contest which must bring back again the army
+and the debt. The king was bitterly blamed, while the late ministers,
+Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were impeached for
+their share in the treaties; and the Commons prayed the king to exclude
+the three from his counsels for ever. But a counter-prayer from the
+Lords gave the first sign of a reaction of opinion. Outside the House of
+Commons indeed the tide of national feeling rose as the designs of Lewis
+grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch barrier to be
+re-established; and a great French fleet gathered in the Channel to
+support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite descent which was proposed by
+the ministers of James in a letter intercepted and laid before
+Parliament. Even the House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet
+was raised to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. But the
+country moved faster than the Parliament. Kent sent up a remonstrance
+against the factious measures by which the Tories still struggled
+against the king's policy, with a prayer "that addresses might be turned
+into Bills of Supply"; and William was encouraged by these signs of a
+change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland, and to
+conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for the recovery of
+the Netherlands from Lewis and for their transfer with the Milanese to
+the house of Austria as a means of counterbalancing the new power added
+to France.
+
+[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]
+
+England however still clung desperately to a hope of peace; and even in
+the Treaty with the Emperor, which followed on the French refusal to
+negotiate on a basis of compensation, William was far from disputing the
+right of Philip of Anjou to the Spanish throne. Hostilities had indeed
+already broken out in Italy between the French and Austrian armies; but
+the king had not abandoned the dream of a peaceful settlement when
+France by a sudden act forced him into war. Lewis had acknowledged
+William as king in the Peace of Ryswick and pledged himself to oppose
+all attacks on his throne; but in September 1701 he entered the
+bedchamber at St. Germain where James the Second was breathing his last,
+and promised to acknowledge his son at his death as king of England,
+Scotland, and Ireland. The promise which was thus made was in fact a
+declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at one in accepting
+the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of
+European politics, but a question whether the work of the Revolution
+should be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be
+replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a
+question as this there was no difference between Tory and Whig. Every
+Englishman backed William in his open resentment of the insult and in
+the recall of his ambassador. The national union showed itself in the
+warm welcome given to the king on his return from the Hague, where the
+conclusion of a new Grand Alliance in September between the Empire,
+Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and
+skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate,
+and the bulk of the German States. William seized the moment of
+enthusiasm to dissolve the Houses whose action had hitherto embarrassed
+him; and though the new Parliament which met in 1702 was still Tory in
+the main, its Tory members were now as much for war as the Whigs, and
+the House of Commons replied to the king's stirring appeal by voting
+forty thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle. As
+a telling reply to the recognition of the young James by Lewis, a Bill
+of Attainder was passed against the new Pretender, and correspondence
+with him or maintenance of his title was made treason. At the same time
+all members of either House and all public officials were sworn to
+uphold the succession of the House of Hanover as established by law.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough.]
+
+The king's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking the
+field; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to the
+one Englishman who had shown himself capable of a great command. John
+Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a
+Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restoration mistress
+of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more perhaps than her
+father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission in the royal
+Guards; and after five years' service abroad under Turenne the young
+captain became colonel of an English regiment which was retained in the
+service of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great
+soldier, an unruffled courage, a temper naturally bold and venturesome
+but held in check by a cool and serene judgement, a vigilance and
+capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he
+was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blenheim he
+remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms
+did less for Churchill on his return to the English court than his
+personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known as "the handsome
+Englishman"; and his manners were as winning as his person. Even in age
+his address was almost irresistible; "he engrossed the graces," says
+Chesterfield; and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won
+the favour of Lady Castlemaine. A present of £5000 from the king's
+mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to
+greatness, as the prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier
+hardened into the avarice of age.
+
+[Sidenote: Churchill and James.]
+
+But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for
+advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member of
+his household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days of
+the Popish Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and on
+his master's return he was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of
+the Life Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession by
+saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been yet
+more splendidly acknowledged but for the king's bigotry. In spite of his
+master's personal solicitations Churchill remained true to
+Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on further favour
+after a formal refusal to abandon his faith. Luckily for him he had now
+found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing influence of his
+wife over the king's second daughter, Anne; and at the crisis of the
+Revolution the adhesion of Anne to the cause of Protestantism was of the
+highest value. No sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered
+Churchill from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from promising
+Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from deserting the ranks of the
+king's army when it faced William in the field. His desertion proved
+fatal to the royal cause; but great as this service was it was eclipsed
+by a second. It was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to
+forsake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupulous as his
+conduct had been, the services which Churchill thus rendered to William
+were too great to miss their reward. On the new king's accession he
+became Earl of Marlborough; he was put at the head of a force during the
+Irish war where his rapid successes at once won William's regard; and he
+was given high command in the army of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Churchill and William.]
+
+But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned Marlborough from
+plotting treason against James to plot treason against William. Great as
+was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty
+of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely
+combined with a power of winning and retaining love. Churchill's
+affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the dark web of his
+career. In the midst of his marches and from the very battle-field he
+writes to his wife with the same passionate tenderness. The composure
+which no danger or hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish
+depression at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent
+humour. To the last he never left her without a pang. "I did for a great
+while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs," he once wrote to
+her after setting out on a campaign, "in hopes that I might have had one
+sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough
+with a love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the
+Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of state, and
+addressed each other as "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley." It was on his
+wife's influence over her friend that the Earl's ambition counted in its
+designs against William. His subtle policy aimed at availing itself both
+of William's unpopularity and of the dread of a Jacobite restoration.
+His plan was to drive the king from the throne by backing the Tories in
+their opposition to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the
+English hatred of foreigners, and then to use the Whig dread of James's
+return to seat Anne in William's place. The discovery of these designs
+roused the king to a burst of unusual resentment. "Were I and my Lord
+Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, "the sword would have
+to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of his
+offices and command and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed
+her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the centre of the
+Tory opposition: while Marlborough opened a correspondence with James.
+So notorious was his treason that on the eve of the French invasion
+which was foiled by the victory of La Hogue the Earl was one of the
+first among the suspected persons who were sent to the Tower.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of William.]
+
+The death of Mary however forced William to recall the Princess, who
+became by this event his successor; and with Anne the Marlboroughs
+returned to court. Now indeed that Anne's succession was brought near by
+the rapid decay of William's health their loyalty to the throne might
+be counted on; and though William could not bend himself to trust the
+Earl again, he saw in him as death drew near the one man whose splendid
+talents fitted him in spite of the perfidy and treason of his life to
+rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He employed
+Marlborough therefore to negotiate the treaty of alliance with the
+Emperor, and put him at the head of the army in Flanders. But the Earl
+had only just taken the command when a fall from his horse on the
+twenty-first of February 1702 proved fatal to the broken frame of
+William of Orange. "There was a time when I should have been glad to
+have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whispered to
+Portland, "but I own I see another scene, and could wish to live a
+little longer." He knew however that the wish was vain; and he died on
+the morning of the 8th of March, commending Marlborough to Anne as the
+fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal in
+her friend's cause needed no quickening. Three days after her accession
+the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home and
+abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction of the war. His
+supremacy over home affairs was secured by the expulsion of the few
+remaining Whigs among the ministers, and the construction of a purely
+Tory administration with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of
+Marlborough's, as Lord Treasurer at its head. The Queen's affection for
+his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment when Anne's
+personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with the nation. In
+England indeed party feeling for the moment died away. The Parliament
+called on the new accession was strongly Tory; but all save the extreme
+Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a
+Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the Whigs were
+ready to back even a Tory general in waging a Whig war.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough and the Allies.]
+
+Abroad however William's death shook the Alliance to its base; and even
+Holland wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming
+struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with this
+distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue
+with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament was brought to
+sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The new
+general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well
+as of the English forces, and drew the German powers into the
+Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even William might have
+envied. Never indeed was greatness more quickly recognised than in the
+case of Marlborough. In a few months he was regarded by all as the
+guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes whose jealousy had worn out
+the patience of the king yielded without a struggle to the counsels of
+his successor. His temper fitted him in an especial way to be the head
+of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to any
+early training. The trace of his neglected education was seen to the
+last in his reluctance to write. "Of all things," he said to his wife,
+"I do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was a far greater
+trouble to Marlborough than to plan a campaign. But nature had given him
+qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. His capacity
+for business was immense. During the next ten years he assumed the
+general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. He managed every
+negotiation with the courts of the allies. He watched over the shifting
+phases of English politics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a
+change in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due contingent
+of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and the same moment men saw
+him reconciling the Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring
+the Calvinists of the Cévennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of
+Portugal, and providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy.
+
+[Sidenote: His temper.]
+
+But his air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained
+to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was
+never ruffled by an outbreak of temper. Amidst the storm of battle his
+soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry
+giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he
+was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable
+serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch,
+the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political
+opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which
+he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy
+pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from
+being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the
+most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when
+Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing
+him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could
+not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the
+bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous
+letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him; "My
+desire," he wrote, "is that the world may continue in their error of
+thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than
+pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual
+temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment which
+tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. In all
+else he was without affection or resentment, he knew neither doubt nor
+regret. In private life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if
+his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death or lead his
+army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer
+sentiments of mankind he knew nothing; and he turned without a shock
+from guiding Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless
+fortune by peculation and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a
+man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. No life indeed,
+no temper ever stood more aloof from the common life and temper of
+mankind. The passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble or
+ignoble, were to Marlborough simply elements in an intellectual problem
+which had to be solved by patience. "Patience will overcome all things,"
+he writes again and again. "As I think most things are governed by
+destiny, having done all things we should submit with patience."
+
+[Sidenote: Opening of the War.]
+
+As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by his
+bitterest foes. "Over the Confederacy," says Lord Bolingbroke, "he, a
+new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more decided
+influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the crown of
+Great Britain had given to King William." But great as he was in the
+council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone amongst the
+masters of the art of war as a captain whose victories began at an age
+when the work of most men is done. Though he served as a young officer
+under Turenne, and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands,
+Marlborough had held no great command till he took the field in Flanders
+at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone too in his unbroken good
+fortune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did
+not take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difficulties
+indeed came not so much from the enemy as from the ignorance and
+timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in the field, but
+victory after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his
+officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cautious
+strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his plans. Old as
+he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and
+boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once resolved to
+force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled by the
+timidity and resistance of the Dutch deputies. But his resolute advance
+across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him
+to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges, till the
+surrender of Liége closed a campaign which cut off the French from the
+Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of invasion.
+
+[Sidenote: The French in Germany.]
+
+The successes of Marlborough had been brought into bolder relief by the
+fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the Imperialist general,
+Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his powers by a surprise of the French
+army at Cremona, no real successes had been won in Italy. An English
+descent on the Spanish coast ended in failure. In Germany, where the
+Bavarians joined the French, their united armies defeated the army of
+the Empire and opened the line of the Danube to a French advance. It was
+in this quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes in the coming
+year. In the spring of 1703 a French army under Marshal Villars again
+relieved the Bavarian Elector from the pressure of the Austrian forces,
+and only a strife which arose between the two commanders hindered their
+joint armies from marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the
+Dutch deputies served Lewis well in the Low Countries. The hopes of
+Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his services in the
+previous year, were again foiled by the deputies of the States-General.
+Serene as his temper was, it broke down before their refusal to
+co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French Flanders; and the prayers
+of Godolphin and of the Pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to
+withdraw his offer of resignation. In spite of his victories on the
+Danube, indeed, of the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the
+sudden aid of an insurrection against the Court of Vienna which broke
+out in Hungary, the difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The
+accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy
+with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of operations
+against Spain. The French king's energy however rose with the pressure;
+and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was
+despatched against Portugal, and three small armies closed round Savoy,
+the flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on the
+Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes of the war
+by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire under the walls of
+Vienna.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough in Germany.]
+
+The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 1704 to
+a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy and boldness of the Duke's
+plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French army in
+Flanders saw in his march from the Netherlands upon Maintz only a design
+to transfer the war into Elsass. The Dutch on the other hand were lured
+into suffering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz
+by the Duke's proposals for an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was
+only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the centre
+of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was
+revealed to both. After struggling through the hill country of
+Wurtemberg he joined the Imperial army under the Prince of Baden,
+stormed the heights of Donauwerth, crossed the Danube and the Lech, and
+penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew two other armies
+which were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene. The
+arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French troops saved the
+Elector of Bavaria for the moment from the need of submission; but the
+junction of his opponent, Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the
+contending forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies
+met on the north bank of the Danube near the small town of Hochstädt and
+the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to
+one of the most memorable battles in the history of the world.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Blenheim.]
+
+In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled, for
+the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of
+Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wurtembergers and Austrians
+who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who
+numbered like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a
+little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. Their
+position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its
+right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the stream
+rose; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself but was far superior
+to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's hands were free.
+"I have great reason," he wrote calmly home, "to hope that everything
+will go well, for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing
+to obey without knowing any other reason than that it is my desire,
+which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where I was
+obliged to have the consent of a council of war for everything I
+undertook." So formidable were the obstacles, however, that though the
+allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of August it was not till
+midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing
+the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left, and attacked
+the village of Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were
+entrenched; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, while
+as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene in
+check. It was the centre however, where the French believed themselves
+to be unassailable, and which this belief had led them to weaken by
+drawing troops to their wings, that had been chosen by Marlborough from
+the first for the chief point of attack. By making an artificial road
+across the morass which covered it, he was at last enabled to throw his
+eight thousand horsemen on the mass of the French cavalry, which
+occupied this position; and two desperate charges which the Duke headed
+in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back on the
+Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell back in confusion on
+Hochstädt: while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from
+retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only twenty
+thousand men escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen thousand were
+captured. Vienna was saved, Germany finally freed from the French, and
+Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its flight to
+Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle.
+
+[Sidenote: Occasional conformity.]
+
+But the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A
+hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies
+of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the
+flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the
+terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrook"
+became a name of fear to every child in France. In England itself the
+victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a great change in the political
+aspect of affairs. The Tories were already pressing hard on the defeated
+Whigs. If they were willing to support the war abroad, they were
+resolved to use the accession of a Stuart to the throne to secure their
+own power at home. They resolved therefore to make a fresh attempt to
+create a permanent Tory majority in the Commons by excluding
+Nonconformists from the municipal corporations, which returned the bulk
+of the borough members, and whose political tendencies were for the
+most part Whig. The test of receiving the sacrament according to the
+ritual of the Church of England, effective as it was against Catholics,
+was useless against Protestant Dissenters. While adhering to their
+separate congregations, in which they were now protected by the
+Toleration Act, they "qualified for office," as it was called, by the
+"occasional conformity" of receiving the sacrament at church once in the
+year. It was against "occasional conformity" that the Tories introduced
+a test which by excluding the Nonconformists would have given them the
+command of the boroughs; and this test at first received Marlborough's
+support. But it was rejected by the Lords as often as it was sent up to
+them, and it was soon guessed that the resistance of the Lords was
+secretly backed by both Marlborough and Godolphin. Tory as he was, in
+fact, Marlborough had no mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a
+measure which would be fatal to the war by again reviving religious
+strife. But it was in vain that he strove to propitiate his party by
+inducing the Queen to set aside the tenths and first-fruits hitherto
+paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small
+benefices, a fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. The
+Commons showed their resentment against Marlborough by refusing to add a
+grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first campaign; and
+the higher Tories, with Lord Nottingham at their head, began to throw
+every obstacle they could in the way of the continuance of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: The Coalition Ministry.]
+
+Nottingham and his followers at last quitted office in 1704, and
+Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more moderate stamp who were
+still in favour of the war; by Robert Harley, who became Secretary of
+State, and by Henry St. John, a young man of splendid talents, who was
+named Secretary at War. Small as the change seemed, its significance was
+clear to both parties; and the Duke's march into Germany gave his
+enemies an opportunity of embittering the political strife. The original
+aim of the Tories had been to limit English efforts to what seemed
+purely English objects, the defence of the Netherlands and of English
+commerce; and the bulk of them shrank even now from any further
+entanglement in the struggle. But the Duke's march seemed at once to
+pledge England to a strife in the very heart of the Continent, and above
+all to a strife on behalf of the House of Austria, whose designs upon
+Spain were regarded with almost as much suspicion as those of Lewis. It
+was an act indeed of even greater political than military daring. The
+High Tories and Jacobites threatened if Marlborough failed to bring his
+head to the block; and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from
+political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from his
+own party to the party which really backed his policy. He availed
+himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve Parliament;
+and when the election of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in
+favour of the war, his efforts brought about a coalition between the
+moderate Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose support
+was purchased by making a Whig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and by
+sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to Vienna.
+
+[Sidenote: Ramillies.]
+
+The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely foiled by this
+union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at home. But he had to bear
+disappointment abroad. His plan of attack along the line of the Moselle
+was defeated by the refusal of the Imperial army to join him. When he
+transferred the war again to the Netherlands and entered the French
+lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops; and his
+proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of Waterloo was
+rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the States with cries
+of "murder" and "massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke into
+bitterness at this last blow. "Had I the same power I had last year," he
+wrote home, "I could have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim."
+On his complaint indeed the States recalled their commissaries, but the
+year was lost; nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on
+the Rhine. The spirits of the allies were only sustained by the
+romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate,
+unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, and
+his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, a step followed by his
+recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to
+support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been
+acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles
+the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon joined Aragon in declaring for
+Charles: while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at
+Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the
+coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of the Imperial
+generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the Alps and a
+campaign in Italy; and though these designs were defeated by the
+opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he again
+appeared in Flanders in 1706. Marshal Villeroy, the new French general,
+was as eager as Marlborough for an engagement; and the two armies met on
+the 23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on an undulating plain which
+forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide
+curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left,
+Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crushed it
+in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along their whole
+line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of
+Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand men,
+their baggage, and their guns; and the line of the Scheldt, Brussels,
+Antwerp and Bruges became the prize of the victors. It only needed four
+successful sieges which followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the
+deliverance of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: The Union with Scotland.]
+
+The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet more
+memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of England with
+Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had been the first work of
+the Government of the Restoration, its revival was one of the first aims
+of the Government which followed the Revolution. But the project was
+long held in check by religious and commercial jealousies. Scotland
+refused to bear any part of the English debt. England would not yield
+any share in her monopoly of trade with the colonies. The English
+Churchmen longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north of the Border,
+while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal
+toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703 however an Act of Settlement which
+passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought home to English
+statesmen the dangers of further delay. In dealing with this measure the
+Scotch Whigs, who cared only for the independence of their country,
+joined hand in hand with the Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the
+interests of the Pretender. The Jacobites excluded from the Act the
+name of the Princess Sophia; the Whigs introduced a provision that no
+sovereign of England should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save
+upon security given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish
+people. The danger arising from such a measure was undoubtedly great,
+for it pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the
+Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scotland and
+England. The need of a union became at once apparent to every statesman,
+but it was only after three years' delay that the wisdom and resolution
+of Lord Somers brought the question to an issue. The Scotch proposals of
+a federative rather than a legislative union were set aside by his
+firmness; the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
+and the Act of Union as it was completed in 1706, though not finally
+passed till the following year, provided that the two kingdoms should be
+united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that the succession
+to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled by the provisions of
+the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church and the Scotch law were
+left untouched: but all rights of trade were thrown open to both
+nations, a common system of taxation was established, and a uniform
+system of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was henceforth to
+represent the United Kingdom; and for this purpose forty-five Scotch
+members, a number taken to represent the proportion of Scotch property
+and population relatively to England, were added to the five hundred and
+thirteen English members of the House of Commons, and sixteen
+representative peers to the one hundred and eight who formed the English
+House of Lords.
+
+[Sidenote: Its results.]
+
+In Scotland the opposition to this measure was bitter and almost
+universal. The terror of the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of
+Security which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an
+oath to support the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his
+accession. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or
+the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from France and
+plotted a Stuart restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding from
+the Houses which voted for the Union and of establishing a rival
+Parliament. In the end however good sense and the loyalty of the trading
+classes to the cause of the Protestant succession won their way. The
+measure was adopted by the Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union
+became a legislative Act to which Anne in 1707 gave her assent in noble
+words. "I desire," said the Queen, "and expect from my subjects of both
+nations that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and
+kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world they
+have hearts disposed to become one people." Time has more than answered
+these hopes. The two nations whom the Union brought together have ever
+since remained one. England gained in the removal of a constant danger
+of treason and war. To Scotland the Union opened up new avenues of
+wealth which the energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The
+farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing
+town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow. Peace
+and culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands into
+herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any loss of
+national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and more rapid
+developement of national energy than that of Scotland after the Union.
+All that passed away was the jealousy which had parted since the days of
+Edward the First two peoples whom a common blood and common speech
+proclaimed to be one. The Union between Scotland and England has been
+real and stable simply because it was the legislative acknowledgement
+and enforcement of a national fact.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough's difficulties.]
+
+With the defeat of Ramillies and the conclusion of the Union the
+greatness of Marlborough reached its height. In five years he had
+rescued Holland, saved Germany, and thrown France back on a purely
+defensive position. He exercised an undisputed supremacy over an
+alliance which embraced the greatest European powers. At home he was
+practically first minister, commander-in-chief, and absolute master
+through his wife of the Queen herself. He was looked upon as the most
+powerful as he was the wealthiest subject in the world. And while
+Marlborough's fortunes mounted to their height those of France sank to
+their lowest ebb. Eugene in his greatest victory broke the siege of
+Turin, and Lewis saw the loss of Flanders followed by the loss of Italy.
+Not only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the
+Third, with an army of English and Portuguese, entered Madrid. But it
+was in fact only these triumphs abroad that enabled Marlborough to face
+the difficulties which were opening on him at home. His command of the
+Parliament rested now on a coalition of the Whigs with the moderate
+Tories who still adhered to him after his break with the more violent
+members of his old party. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force
+Anne in spite of her hatred of the Whigs to fulfil the compact with them
+from which this coalition had sprung, by admitting Lord Sunderland, the
+bitterest leader of their party, to office as Secretary of State at the
+close of 1706. But with the entry of Sunderland into office the system
+of political balance which the Duke had maintained till now began at
+once to break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last attempt
+to govern England on other terms than those of party government, and the
+union of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from
+the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing
+opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the
+support of the Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: Triumph of the Whigs.]
+
+The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious
+temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had
+carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt
+through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his
+father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a
+strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the
+moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
+them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the
+Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined
+because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his
+resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and
+even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a
+bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's
+favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon
+as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of
+gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to
+office, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes.
+Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition
+of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only
+party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with
+their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion
+in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility
+of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn
+and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough
+died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat
+of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and
+the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her
+husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter
+resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh
+compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by
+removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by
+wresting from Anne her consent in 1708 to the dismissal from office of
+Harley and St. John with the whole of the moderate Tories whom they
+headed. Their removal was followed by the complete triumph of the Whigs
+in the admission of Lords Somers and Wharton into the ministry. Somers
+became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
+while lower posts were occupied by younger men of the same party, who
+were destined to play a great part in our later history, such as the
+young Duke of Newcastle and Robert Walpole.
+
+[Sidenote: Oudenarde.]
+
+Meanwhile, the great struggle abroad went steadily against France,
+though its progress was varied with striking alternations of success.
+France rose indeed with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of
+Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip in 1707 by a victory of
+Marshal Berwick at Almanza. Marshal Villars won fresh triumphs on the
+Rhine; while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back
+into Italy. In Flanders Marlborough's designs for taking advantage of
+his great victory were foiled by the strategy of the Duke of Vendôme and
+by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In
+the campaign of 1708 however Vendôme, in spite of his superiority in
+force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde; and though Marlborough
+was hindered from striking at the heart of France by the timidity of the
+English and Dutch statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its
+frontier fortresses, in the face of an army of relief which numbered a
+hundred thousand men. The blow proved an effective one. The pride of
+Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible sufferings of
+France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had
+fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to
+give up ten Flemish fortresses as a barrier for the Dutch, and to
+surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the Treaty of
+Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from
+his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port
+hateful to England as the home of the French privateers.
+
+[Sidenote: Peace rejected.]
+
+To Marlborough these terms seemed sufficient, and for the moment he
+regarded peace as secure. Peace was indeed now the general wish of the
+nation, and the longing for it was nowhere stronger than with the Queen.
+Dull and sluggish as was Anne's temper, she had the pride and
+stubbornness of her race, and both revolted against the submission to
+which she was forced. If she bowed to the spirit of the Revolution by
+yielding implicitly to the decision of her Parliament, she held firmly
+to the ceremonial traditions of the monarchy of her ancestors. She dined
+in royal state, she touched for the evil in her progresses, she presided
+at every meeting of council or cabinet, she insisted on every measure
+proposed by her ministers being previously laid before her. She shrank
+from party government as an enslavement of the Crown; and claimed the
+right to call on men from either side to aid in the administration of
+the State. But if England was to be governed by a party, she was
+resolved that it should be her own party. She had been bred a Tory. Her
+youth had fallen among the storms of the Exclusion Bill, and she looked
+on Whigs as disguised republicans. Above all her pride was outraged by
+the concessions which were forced from her. She had prayed Godolphin to
+help her in excluding Sunderland as a thing on which the peace of her
+life depended. She trembled every day before the violent temper of the
+Duchess of Marlborough, and before the threat of resignation by which
+the Duke himself crushed her first faint efforts at revolt. She longed
+for a peace which would free her from both Marlborough and the Whigs, as
+the Whigs on the other hand were resolute for a war which kept them in
+power. It was on this ground that they set aside the Duke's counsels and
+answered the French proposals of peace by terms which made peace
+impossible. They insisted on the transfer of the whole Spanish monarchy
+to the Austrian prince. When even this seemed likely to be conceded they
+demanded that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to
+give up the crown of Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: Sacheverell.]
+
+"If I must wage war," replied the French king, "I had rather wage it
+with my enemies than with my children." In a bitter despair he appealed
+to France; and, exhausted as the country was by the struggle, the
+campaign of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The
+terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of Malplaquet
+showed a new temper in the French soldiers. Starving as they were, they
+flung away their rations in their eagerness for the fight, and fell
+back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of Marlborough could
+break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their lines of
+entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that number. Horror at
+such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and
+the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly
+attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest
+which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering
+discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the
+Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church
+divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at
+St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the
+warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his
+impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great
+party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's
+favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and
+the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the
+bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets
+rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of
+the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they
+inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations
+over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.
+
+[Sidenote: Dismissal of the Whigs.]
+
+The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom
+the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
+from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and
+vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the
+first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of
+political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the
+_Examiner_, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed
+in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift,
+an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St.
+John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war
+and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions
+of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of
+us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called
+in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition,
+with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have
+defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the
+maintenance of the war, and encouraged Anne to free herself from the
+yoke beneath which she had bent so long. At the close of Sacheverell's
+trial she broke with the Duchess. Marlborough looked for support to the
+Whigs; but the subtle intrigue of Harley was as busy in undermining the
+Ministry as St. John was in openly attacking it. The Whigs, who knew
+that the Duke's league with them had simply been forced on him by the
+war, and who had already foiled an attempt he had made to secure himself
+by the demand of a grant for life of his office of Commander-in-Chief,
+were easily persuaded that the Queen's sole object was his personal
+humiliation. They looked coolly therefore on at the dismissal of
+Sunderland, who had now become his son-in-law, and of Godolphin, who was
+his closest friend. The same means were adopted to bring about the ruin
+of the Whigs themselves: and Marlborough, lured easily by hopes of
+reconciliation with his old party, looked on as coolly while Anne
+dismissed her Whig counsellors and named a Tory Ministry, with Harley
+and St. John at its head, in their place.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Marlborough.]
+
+The time was now come for a final and decisive blow; but how great a
+dread Marlborough still inspired in his enemies was shown by the
+shameful treachery with which they still thought it needful to bring
+about his fall. The intrigues of Harley paled before the subtler treason
+of Henry St. John. Young as he was, for he had hardly reached his
+thirty-second year, St. John had already shown his ability as Secretary
+of War under Marlborough himself, his brilliant rhetoric gave him a hold
+over the House of Commons which even the sense of his restlessness and
+recklessness failed to shake, while the vigour and eloquence of his
+writings infused a new colour and force into political literature. He
+was resolute for peace; but he pressed on the work of peace with an
+utter indifference to all but party ends. As Marlborough was his great
+obstacle, his aim was to drive him from his command; and earnestly as he
+admired the Duke's greatness, he hounded on a tribe of libellers who
+assailed even his personal courage. Meanwhile St. John was feeding
+Marlborough's hopes of reconciliation with the Tories, till he led him
+to acquiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a
+co-operation with the Tory policy. It was the Duke's belief that a
+reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led him to sanction the
+despatch of troops which should have strengthened his army in Flanders
+on a fruitless expedition against Canada, though this left him too weak
+to carry out a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the
+heart of France in the opening of 1711. He was unable even to risk a
+battle or to do more than to pick up a few seaboard towns, and St. John
+at once turned the small results of the campaign into an argument for
+the conclusion of peace. Peace was indeed all but concluded. In defiance
+of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged its members not to
+carry on separate negotiations with France, St. John, who now became
+Lord Bolingbroke, pushed forward through the summer of 1711 a secret
+accommodation between England and France. It was for this negotiation
+that he had crippled Marlborough's campaign; and it was the discovery of
+his perfidy which revealed to the Duke how utterly he had been betrayed,
+and forced him at last to break with the Tory Minister.
+
+[Sidenote: Treaty of Utrecht.]
+
+He returned to England; and his efforts induced the House of Lords to
+denounce the contemplated peace; but the support of the Commons and the
+Queen, and the general hatred of the war among the people, enabled
+Harley to ride down all resistance. At the opening of 1712 the Whig
+majority in the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve
+Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command, charged with
+peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons.
+The Duke at once withdrew from England, and with his withdrawal all
+opposition to the peace was at an end. His flight was in fact followed
+by the conclusion of a Treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and
+the Dutch; and the desertion of his allies forced even the Emperor at
+last to make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of the
+war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain at once by
+the House of Bourbon, was silently abandoned. No precaution was in fact
+taken against the dangers it involved to the balance of power, save by a
+provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head,
+and by Philip's renunciation of all right of succession to the throne
+of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact
+that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even
+more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain
+and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the
+Netherlands with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had
+now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his claims; while he handed over
+Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he gave up not only Minorca but
+Gibraltar, two positions which secured her the command of the
+Mediterranean. France purchased peace by less costly concessions. She
+had to consent to the re-establishment of the Dutch barrier on a greater
+scale than before; to pacify the English resentment against the French
+privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk; and not only to recognize the
+right of Anne to the crown, and the Protestant succession in the House
+of Hanover, but to consent to the expulsion of the Pretender from her
+soil.
+
+[Sidenote: Harley and Bolingbroke.]
+
+The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question
+of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into faction
+and intrigue. The Whigs, who were still formidable in the Commons, and
+who showed the strength of their party in the Lords by defeating a
+Treaty of Commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest
+financial triumph of William Pitt and secured freedom of trade between
+England and France, were zealous for the succession of the House of
+Hanover in the well-founded belief that the Elector George hated the
+Tories; nor did the Tories, though the Jacobite sympathies of a portion
+of their party forced both Harley and Bolingbroke to keep up a delusive
+correspondence with the Pretender, who had withdrawn to Lorraine, really
+contemplate any other succession than that of the Elector. But on the
+means of providing for his succession Harley and Bolingbroke differed
+widely. Harley, still influenced by the Presbyterian leanings of his
+early life, and more jealous of Lord Rochester and the high Tories he
+headed than of the Whigs themselves, inclined to an alliance between the
+moderate Tories and their opponents, as in the earlier days of
+Marlborough's power. The policy of Bolingbroke on the other hand was so
+to strengthen the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents that
+whatever might be the Elector's sympathies they could force their policy
+on him as king; and in the advances which Harley made to the Whigs he
+saw the means of ruining his rival in the confidence of his party, and
+of taking his place at their head. It was with this purpose that he
+introduced a Schism Bill, which would have hindered any Nonconformist
+from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor. The success of this measure
+broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and
+Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition
+to it. But its effects went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The
+Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and
+warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against
+her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so
+that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the
+Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future
+George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of
+summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was
+simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain
+the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it
+seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would
+render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by
+Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned
+her that "such conduct may imperil the succession itself."
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Anne.]
+
+To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read
+it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a
+dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and
+necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more
+moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the
+breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with
+unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence in Harley by
+conferring on him the earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct
+of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was
+brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of
+Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry which would
+back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis
+grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of
+1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and
+invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his
+name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other
+hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in
+favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the
+district in which either claimant of the crown must land, while he gave
+Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. The appointments were
+probably only to secure Jacobite support, for Bolingbroke had in fact no
+immediate apprehensions of the Queen's death, and his aim was to trim
+between the Court of Hanover and the Court of James while building up a
+strong Tory party which would enable him to meet the accession of either
+with a certainty of retaining power both for himself and the principles
+he represented. With this view he was preparing to attack both the Bank
+and the East India Company, the two great strongholds of the Whigs, as
+well as to tax the bondholders at higher rates than the rest of the
+community by way of conciliating the country gentry, who hated the
+moneyed interest which was rising into greatness beside them. But events
+moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July, three days after
+Harley's dismissal, Anne was suddenly struck with apoplexy. The Privy
+Council at once assembled, and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and
+Somerset entered the Council Chamber without summons and took their
+places at the board. The step had been taken in secret concert with the
+Duke of Shrewsbury, who was President of the Council in the Tory
+Ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke and an adherent of the Hanoverian
+succession. The act was a decisive one. The right of the House of
+Hanover was at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as Lord
+Treasurer by the Council, and the nomination was accepted by the dying
+Queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained Secretary of State, suddenly
+found himself powerless and neglected while the Council took steps to
+provide for the emergency. Four regiments were summoned to the capital
+in the expectation of a civil war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and
+unprepared; and on the death of Anne on the evening of the 10th of
+August, the Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne
+by his mother's death, was proclaimed as king of England without a show
+of opposition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE HOUSE OF HANOVER
+
+1714-1760
+
+
+[Sidenote: England's European position.]
+
+The accession of George the First marked a change in the position of
+England as a member of the European Commonwealth. From the age of the
+Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart
+from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for
+if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House
+of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his
+successor from any effective interference in the strife across the
+Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at
+the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm
+as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the
+ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when
+England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful
+outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts
+of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the
+Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts
+William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against
+France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the
+exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done
+England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples,
+and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its
+head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the
+forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim
+and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of
+Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House
+of Bourbon.
+
+Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could
+withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the
+Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution,
+whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the
+supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite
+restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a
+European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was
+drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch
+every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And
+not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of
+Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of
+the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a
+"balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which
+rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a
+compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great
+struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted
+and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the
+time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty
+of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her
+insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no
+dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy,
+that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to
+the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a
+Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European
+peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties.
+
+[Sidenote: Its results.]
+
+Nothing is at first sight more wearisome than the long line of
+alliances, triple and quadruple, the endless negotiations, the
+interminable congresses, the innumerable treaties, which make up the
+history of Europe during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; nor
+is it easy to follow with patience the meddlesome activity of English
+diplomacy during that period, its protests and interventions, its
+subsidies and guarantees, its intrigues and finessings, its bluster and
+its lies. But wearisome as it all is, it succeeded in its end, and its
+end was a noble one. Of the twenty-five years between the Revolution and
+the Peace of Utrecht all but five were years of war, and the five were a
+mere breathing-space in which the combatants on either side were girding
+themselves for fresh hostilities. That the twenty-five years which
+followed were for Europe as a whole a time of peace was due in great
+measure to the zeal with which England watched over the settlement that
+had been brought about at Utrecht. To a great extent her efforts averted
+war altogether; and when war could not be averted she brought it within
+as narrow limits and to as speedy an end as was possible. Diplomacy
+spent its ingenuity in countless choppings and changings of the smaller
+territories about the Mediterranean and elsewhere; but till the rise of
+Prussia under Frederick the Great it secured Europe as a whole from any
+world-wide struggle. Nor was this maintenance of European peace all the
+gain which the attitude of England brought with it. The stubborn policy
+of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our policy ever since. In
+struggling for peace and for the sanctity of treaties, even though the
+struggle was one of selfish interest, England took a ply which she has
+never wholly lost. Warlike and imperious as is her national temper, she
+has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in
+the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about
+her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,
+amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of
+international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment
+has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at
+once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of
+peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil
+and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these
+sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper
+itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of
+responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of
+tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier
+years of the eighteenth century.
+
+[Sidenote: England's intellectual influence.]
+
+Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the
+new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her
+for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the
+European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English
+letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our
+philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent.
+It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion
+that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions
+were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the
+Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and
+Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they
+carried English ideas. The combination of material and military
+greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere,
+which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of
+1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our
+history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking
+to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that
+drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than
+political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the
+Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English
+literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed,
+even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above
+all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so
+utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove
+Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the
+eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new
+impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about
+him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its
+individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only
+a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new
+literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke
+gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its
+destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of
+Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with
+England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told
+through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the
+nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely
+as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English
+science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal
+world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his
+ideas in politics and education.
+
+[Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]
+
+Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had
+they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at
+the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states
+with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress
+of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same
+rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each
+department of thought, the same interest in political and social
+speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency
+to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of
+thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away
+from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion
+which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in
+a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the
+world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of
+mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature
+of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity
+of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in
+the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all
+delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of
+verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped
+everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick,
+clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of
+Voltaire.
+
+[Sidenote: Creation of a literary class.]
+
+How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the
+instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck
+fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a
+change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these
+later years of his life that his influence over English literature
+became supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom
+letters asserted an almost public importance. The reverence with which
+men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of
+Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the
+days when the wits of the Revolution clustered reverently round the old
+man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or
+recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by
+no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and
+honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more
+than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by
+his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of
+gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants
+wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that
+the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of
+readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the
+smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a
+literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on
+the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose,
+covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for
+literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about
+him, Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new
+power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.
+
+[Sidenote: The new poetry.]
+
+And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction.
+In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the
+impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century
+till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden
+remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject
+seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be,
+he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But
+he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express
+beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational
+things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once
+rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument,
+rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry
+no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no
+longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or
+sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite
+representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its
+reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all
+that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from
+Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that
+had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to
+man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his
+politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides;
+with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the
+use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new
+sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But
+with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden
+indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force;
+to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that
+conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.
+
+[Sidenote: The new prose.]
+
+Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in
+prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of
+phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of
+Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness
+and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work
+of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for
+the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger
+part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express
+the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade
+the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national
+life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture
+which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was
+natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the
+age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming
+an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now
+giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded
+simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes
+for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and
+freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the
+mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social
+intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy,
+its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer
+of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.
+
+[Sidenote: The Essayists.]
+
+What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.
+The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but
+already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The
+popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the
+new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from
+the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the
+brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary
+charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a
+gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped
+and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest
+and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short;
+essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the
+sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.
+Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all
+necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary
+conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious
+display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had
+to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of
+imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of
+phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he
+touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their
+more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold
+is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a
+puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its
+fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of
+a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer
+passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity,
+his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter,
+his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's
+fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would
+startle the group in a modern drawing-room.
+
+[Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]
+
+But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still
+a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual
+problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal
+of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of
+the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all,
+looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet
+enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their
+beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to
+the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and
+picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first
+time made every street and every house teem with living people for us,
+who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their
+inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their
+very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the
+world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in
+its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the
+essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no
+longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness,
+adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of
+playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with
+passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into
+love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand
+with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour,
+whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary
+courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and
+phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our
+literature first became urbane.
+
+[Sidenote: The brutality of Politics.]
+
+It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage
+ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the
+Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been
+carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the
+language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and
+scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest
+statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only
+worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of
+attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary
+of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set
+the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen
+and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty
+playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the
+road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this
+virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and
+corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from
+being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the
+statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors;
+while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they
+stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had
+risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was
+Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public
+duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and
+Sunderlands of the Restoration.
+
+[Sidenote: Public opinion.]
+
+What had really happened was a change not in the attitude of statesmen
+towards the nation, but in the attitude of the nation at large towards
+the class that governed it. From the triumph of Puritanism in 1640 the
+supreme, irresistible force in English politics had been national
+opinion. It created the Long Parliament. It gave it its victory over the
+Church and the Crown. When a strange turn of events placed Puritanism in
+antagonism to it, it crushed Puritanism as easily as it had crushed
+Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no
+sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in
+the Popish Plot and swept them from the country in the Revolution. The
+stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of
+sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest
+with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it
+acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general
+course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed
+there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in
+politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at
+critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it
+could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation
+roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts
+indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to
+public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish
+Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this
+lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his
+opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two
+great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Petitioners
+and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that
+then for the first time the masses of the people were stirred to a more
+prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups
+of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.
+
+[Sidenote: Becomes powerless.]
+
+The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.
+But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the
+national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless
+to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to
+vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of
+the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in
+the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the
+Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the
+Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the
+Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of
+administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse
+from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation
+at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every
+House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly
+Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the
+patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible
+that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and
+amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell
+riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it
+deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment
+of the Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but
+Whig. Passionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all
+meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in
+ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardianship of the whole state
+of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more.
+Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as
+helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the
+standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and
+taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of
+its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical
+as ever, and yet Nonconformists worshipped in their chapels and served
+as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer
+was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought
+about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of
+England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William.
+Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the
+Church as Somers or Godolphin.
+
+[Sidenote: Helplessness of the Tories.]
+
+In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a
+foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any
+undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as
+he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the
+Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a
+monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to
+the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of
+landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into
+measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter;
+and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show
+whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one
+course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and
+that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him
+much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did
+not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English
+freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts
+was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their
+faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what
+such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more
+earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of
+the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without
+striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of
+even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the
+Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the
+consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged
+Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the
+monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at
+the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf
+to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule
+was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an
+impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of
+the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the
+Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the
+Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the
+Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly
+support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep
+distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and
+though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to
+the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive
+one that they refused to take office.
+
+[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]
+
+The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it
+placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did
+even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as
+a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory
+party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In the first
+House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories
+hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their
+strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement
+among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond
+fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the
+Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham
+seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the
+wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the
+Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was
+still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite
+designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow
+to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring
+about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk
+however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they
+might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and
+solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the
+decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did
+was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and
+appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the
+Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Church.]
+
+While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their
+political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming
+weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main
+stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.
+But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution,
+the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart
+indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan
+spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious
+revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which
+changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the
+fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt
+against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or
+the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress
+of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been
+left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material
+channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to
+all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher
+circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England,
+"if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the
+greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and
+distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives.
+Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later
+prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with
+his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were
+sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his
+son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite
+education.
+
+[Sidenote: Sloth of the clergy.]
+
+At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They
+were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for
+the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the
+developement of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious
+or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a
+single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the
+grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were
+fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left
+without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one
+Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time,
+"and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were
+worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of
+London or Birmingham burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and
+pillaged at their will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers
+in the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of
+society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree,
+and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of
+Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to
+drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited
+every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.
+Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and
+sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop
+Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in
+Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least
+severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig
+partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levées of the
+Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed that he
+had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of
+Westmoreland. The system of pluralities which enabled a single clergyman
+to hold at the same time a number of livings turned the wealthier and
+more learned of the clergy into absentees, while the bulk of them were
+indolent, poor, and without social consideration.
+
+[Sidenote: The clergy lose political power.]
+
+Their religious inactivity told necessarily on their political
+influence; but what most weakened their influence was the severance
+between the bulk of the priesthood and its natural leaders. The bishops,
+who were now chosen exclusively from among the small number of Whig
+ecclesiastics, were left politically powerless by the estrangement and
+hatred of their clergy; while the clergy themselves, drawn by their
+secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active
+interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen
+aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots
+had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay
+slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to
+avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters
+pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Walpole openly
+avowed his dread of awaking the passions of religious hate by such a
+measure, and satisfied them by an annual act of indemnity for any breach
+of these penal statutes. By a complete abstinence from all
+ecclesiastical questions no outlet was left for the bigotry of the
+people at large, while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation
+deprived the clergy of their natural centre of agitation and opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Crown.]
+
+And while the Church thus ceased to be a formidable enemy, the Crown
+became a friend. Under Anne the throne had regained much of the older
+influence which it lost through William's unpopularity; but under the
+two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of the Crown lay absolutely
+dormant. They were strangers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense was
+impossible; and their character as nearly approached insignificance as
+it is possible for human character to approach it. Both were honest and
+straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of
+constitutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could make
+their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper of George
+the First was that of a gentleman usher; and his one care was to get
+money for his favourites and himself. The temper of George the Second
+was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his realm
+while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, and which
+his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is familiar enough
+in the witty memoirs of the time; but as political figures the two
+Georges are almost absent from our history. William of Orange, while
+ruling in most home matters by the advice of his Ministers, had not only
+used the power of rejecting bills passed by the two Houses, but had kept
+in his own hands the control of foreign affairs. Anne had never yielded
+even to Marlborough her exclusive right of dealing with Church
+preferment, and had presided to the last at the Cabinet Councils of her
+ministers. But with the accession of the Georges these reserves passed
+away. No sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a Cabinet Council,
+or has ventured to refuse his assent to an Act of Parliament. As
+Elector of Hanover indeed the king still dealt with Continental affairs:
+but his personal interference roused an increasing jealousy, while it
+affected in a very slight degree the foreign policy of his English
+counsellors.
+
+England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig
+Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very
+kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover
+believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support
+of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had
+no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the
+Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for
+republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the
+prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the
+prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as
+any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of
+George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole
+influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct
+power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed
+the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that
+its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The
+generality of the world here," said the new Whig Chancellor, Lord
+Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king
+of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of
+law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in
+good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a
+clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and Parliament.]
+
+It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's
+parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs.
+But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not
+wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers
+or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the
+excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were
+divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real
+eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution
+and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted
+with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to
+the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the
+Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose
+resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy
+in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to
+power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs
+devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the
+House of Commons. The support of the commercial classes and of the great
+towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit,
+but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of
+trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated
+the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the
+bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in
+politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time into
+Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the
+weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years
+relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coarser
+means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses
+was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt
+constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation.
+It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery.
+Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang
+out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had
+begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was
+supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the
+Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only
+at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. The
+secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a
+safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard
+against interference on the part of constituencies. This strange union
+of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about
+its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to
+be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought
+by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.
+
+But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their
+organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed
+their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their
+conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles
+were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred
+years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to
+freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688.
+But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized
+basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It
+was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the
+Whig administration was conducted that made constitutional government a
+part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England
+year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted
+these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over
+Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for
+difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to
+tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a
+Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Walpole.]
+
+That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was
+due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676;
+and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of
+Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and
+air of the class from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his
+vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in
+Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant
+of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste
+for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He
+rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first
+despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the
+temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough
+noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared
+"If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of
+Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of
+his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter
+attacks of a host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial
+good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was
+ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in
+no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his
+assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender,
+he made little use of his power over them.
+
+[Sidenote: His policy.]
+
+Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the
+shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very
+clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could
+not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic
+and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer
+motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members
+who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured
+answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was
+thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as
+they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned
+in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is
+for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats
+only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked
+him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with
+which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the
+Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his
+"Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the
+conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance
+of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as
+it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of
+sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt
+so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with
+hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and
+English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and
+virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this
+argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the
+agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of
+new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was
+hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won
+by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the
+House of Hanover upon the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: The Townshend Ministry.]
+
+Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of
+political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise
+in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that
+no reform was as important to the country at large as a national
+reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the
+necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on
+the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who
+still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give
+fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool
+against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh
+hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole
+clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he
+could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.
+Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter
+hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up
+charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him
+from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of
+George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he
+was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the
+jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now
+served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was
+drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found
+themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power,
+time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715,
+and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The
+man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new
+Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay
+in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which
+the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of
+fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war,
+on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of
+Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support
+of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of
+Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.
+Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both
+as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It
+was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his
+actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of
+Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of
+the Treasury, in the new administration.
+
+[Sidenote: The rising of 1715.]
+
+The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of
+the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for
+the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and
+dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as
+Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had
+secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis
+the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But
+at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from
+France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of
+Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without
+informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the
+signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs
+meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival
+Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they
+had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a
+leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand
+Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct
+kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet
+it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who
+arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and
+incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of
+six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and
+dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger passed away
+like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some
+outbreaks of riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings
+and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne;
+while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its
+victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the
+restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George.
+The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader,
+Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the
+west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party
+to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism,
+showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in
+Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival of
+two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred
+these insurgents to march into Lancashire, where the Catholic party was
+strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a
+surrender.
+
+[Sidenote: England and France.]
+
+The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the
+Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts,
+and to venture on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial
+Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to
+three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling
+power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure
+steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 this necessity
+coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly
+Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to
+seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising
+produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more
+momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the
+Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the
+three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the
+realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple
+alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly
+offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the
+actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland
+had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more
+distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France
+from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had
+been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in
+September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that
+moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for
+the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the
+Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of
+Spain observed the renunciation of his rights which he had made in the
+Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion
+of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with
+a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power
+of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own
+renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every
+Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her
+Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved
+upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce
+with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in
+upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.
+
+[Sidenote: Their alliance against Spain.]
+
+To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had
+stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every
+European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor
+held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on
+the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet
+indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American
+Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish
+Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against
+the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a
+means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In
+spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to
+recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the
+Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater
+than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the
+island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England
+and France together. The Abbé Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had
+already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the
+Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the
+Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of
+Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers
+were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was
+concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the
+existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European
+politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in
+Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an
+English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement
+in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to
+avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which
+the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising
+in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the
+accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death
+of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The
+progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at
+last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were
+withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed
+to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition
+of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work
+of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of
+his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his
+claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.
+
+[Sidenote: Resignation of Townshend.]
+
+Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle
+had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new
+sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of
+England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far
+more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his
+kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to
+strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position
+was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark
+had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to
+annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions;
+but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it secured the help of
+Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of
+alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into
+the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with
+the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return
+bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining
+in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the
+Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the
+court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new
+dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his
+death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them
+had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When
+George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England
+shielded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish
+King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant assent to a measure which
+they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the
+Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the
+Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen
+and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was
+brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to
+England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the
+chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands of a
+friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying
+out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of
+the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops
+entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by
+intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and
+Walpole were forced to resign their posts.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stanhope Ministry.]
+
+The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconstituted
+cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first
+aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional
+change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be
+shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was
+destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king.
+Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular
+nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed
+aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve
+peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht
+showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and
+changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore
+the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord
+Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by
+limiting the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The
+number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the
+House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred.
+Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were substituted for the sixteen
+elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by
+Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political
+quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it
+jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered
+representative government impossible. For representative government was
+now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of
+the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the
+mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the
+Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers
+could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where
+their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of
+Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.
+
+[Sidenote: South Sea Bubble.]
+
+It was to Walpole's opposition that the Peerage Bill owed its defeat;
+and this success forced his rivals again to admit him, with Townshend,
+to a share in the Ministry, though they occupied subordinate offices.
+But this arrangement was soon to yield to a more natural one. The sudden
+increase of English commerce begot at this moment the mania of
+speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of
+Spanish America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of
+Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which
+promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of
+the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions
+of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England
+the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of
+despatching a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite
+of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for
+new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a
+million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the
+country against this "dream." Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company
+followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general
+ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his
+colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea
+Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of
+terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
+was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert
+Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the
+Treasury, while his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, returned to his
+post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now
+reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in
+this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that
+"the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and
+Walpole."
+
+[Sidenote: Walpole's Ministry.]
+
+But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the
+head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared
+worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness
+has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His
+qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full
+justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man;
+nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to
+do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque
+or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe,
+was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on
+this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone
+it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced
+every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among
+English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of
+our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in
+which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while
+it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the
+honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won
+victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his
+negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the
+very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced
+his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and
+a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is
+the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he
+was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our
+Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later
+statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing
+both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense
+to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a
+statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in
+the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he
+can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national
+wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his
+rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more
+conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of
+our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the
+manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be."
+
+[Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]
+
+The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties
+from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of
+importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the
+prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother
+country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their
+rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of
+America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise
+Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English
+Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom
+of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material
+progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our
+exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the
+century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.
+It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England
+a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of
+Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica
+at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the
+Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at £15,000. At his death
+they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth century
+the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were
+estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a
+quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose
+manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.
+Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new
+prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the
+West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the
+kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with
+them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country
+gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year
+threescore years ago," said Burke in 1766, "are at three thousand at
+present."
+
+[Sidenote: His policy of inaction.]
+
+Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than
+the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole
+swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a
+diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First
+the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in
+economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other
+fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than
+tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had
+specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his
+Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the
+quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.
+His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the
+Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry,
+which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by
+any effort to repeal the laws against Nonconformity. His temper was
+naturally vigorous and active; and yet the years of his power are years
+without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long
+administration indeed is almost without a history. All legislative and
+political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after
+year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry
+there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction
+gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of
+the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly
+presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was
+absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of commerce and
+accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and
+temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave
+government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone
+to enjoy their new freedom and develope their new industries. And
+Walpole let them alone. On the other hand, the forces which opposed the
+Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour
+which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted
+idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but
+their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of
+opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on
+friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing
+its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole
+trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite
+of every temptation he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the
+laws that oppressed the Catholic or the Dissenter, he took care that
+they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered.
+Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the Nonconformists from the
+consequences of their infringement of the Test Act. There was no
+tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and
+action were alike left free. No Minister was ever more foully slandered
+by journalists and pamphleteers; but Walpole never meddled with the
+press.
+
+[Sidenote: Fresh efforts of Spain.]
+
+Abroad as well as at home the difficulties in the way of his policy were
+enormous. Peace was still hard to maintain. Defeated as her first
+attempt had been, Spain remained resolute to regain her lost provinces,
+to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and to restore her old monopoly of
+trade with her American colonies. She had learned that she could do
+this only by breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her
+isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league
+in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the
+Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he
+provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his
+daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to
+guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching
+the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support the
+Pragmatic Sanction in return for a pledge on the part of Charles to aid
+in wresting Gibraltar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a
+Spanish prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A grant
+of the highest trading privileges in her American dominions to a
+commercial company which the Emperor had established at Ostend, in
+defiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England
+and Holland, revealed this secret alliance; and there were fears of the
+adhesion of Russia, which still remained hostile to England through the
+quarrel with Hanover. The danger was met for a while by an alliance of
+England, France, and Prussia, in 1725; but the withdrawal of the last
+Power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727 the Spaniards
+besieged Gibraltar while Charles threatened an invasion of Holland. The
+moderation of Walpole alone averted a European war. While sending
+British squadrons to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he
+succeeded by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the Emperor to
+inaction; after weary negotiations Spain was brought in 1729 to sign the
+Treaty of Seville and to content herself with the promise of a
+succession of a Spanish prince to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany; and
+the discontent of Charles the Sixth at this concession was allayed in
+1731 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic Sanction.
+
+[Sidenote: George the Second.]
+
+The patience and even temper which Walpole showed in this business were
+the more remarkable that in the course of it his power received what
+seemed a fatal shock from the death of the king. George the First died
+on a journey to Hanover in 1727; and his successor, George the Second,
+was known to have hated his father's Minister hardly less than he had
+hated his father. But hate Walpole as he might, the new king was
+absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, Caroline of Anspach;
+and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the
+Ministry. After a few days of withdrawal therefore Walpole again
+returned to office; and the years which followed were those in which his
+power reached its height. He gained as great an influence over George
+the Second as he had gained over his father: and in spite of the steady
+increase of his opponents in the House of Commons, his hold over it
+remained unshaken. The country was tranquil and prosperous. The
+prejudices of the landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce
+the land-tax, whose pressure was half the secret of their hostility to
+the Revolution that produced it. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites
+were too hopeless to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept
+quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols
+showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value
+enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be
+in the English tongue.
+
+[Sidenote: Excise Bill.]
+
+Only once did Walpole break this tranquillity by an attempt at a great
+measure of statesmanship; and the result of his attempt proved how wise
+was the inactivity of his general policy. No tax had from the first
+moment of its introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its
+origin was due to Pym and the Long Parliament, who imposed duties on
+beer, cyder, and perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual
+income of more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war with France at
+the Revolution brought with it the imposition of a malt-tax and
+additional duties on spirits, wine, tobacco, and other articles. So
+great had been the increase in the public wealth that the return from
+the Excise amounted at the death of George the First to nearly two
+millions and a half a year. But its unpopularity remained unabated, and
+even philosophers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue
+should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the other
+hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of winning over the
+country gentry to the new dynasty of the Revolution by freeing the land
+from all burdens whatever. He saw too a means of diminishing the loss
+suffered by the revenue from the Customs through smuggling and fraud.
+These losses were immense; that on tobacco alone amounted to a third of
+the whole duty. In 1733 therefore he introduced an Excise Bill, which
+met this evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the
+collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of Excise
+and not of Customs. The first measure would have made London a free
+port, and doubled English trade. The second would have so largely
+increased the revenue, without any loss to the consumer, as to enable
+Walpole to repeal the land-tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the
+change in the mode of levying the duty was estimated to bring in an
+additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The necessaries of life and
+the raw materials of manufacture were in Walpole's plan to remain
+absolutely untaxed. The scheme was in effect an anticipation of the
+principles which have guided English finance since the triumph of free
+trade, and every part of it has now been carried into effect. But in
+1733 Walpole stood ahead of his time. The violence of his opponents was
+hacked by an outburst of popular prejudice; riots almost grew into
+revolt; and in spite of the Queen's wish to put down resistance by
+force, Walpole withdrew the bill. "I will not be the Minister," he said
+with noble self-command, "to enforce taxes at the expense of blood."
+
+[Sidenote: The Patriots.]
+
+What had fanned popular prejudice into a flame during the uproar over
+the Excise Bill was the violence of the so-called "Patriots." In the
+absence of a strong opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a
+party breaks readily into factions; and the weakness of the Tories
+joined with the stagnation of public affairs to breed faction among the
+Whigs. Walpole too was jealous of power; and as his jealousy drove
+colleague after colleague out of office they became leaders of a party
+whose sole aim was to thrust him from his post. Greed of power indeed
+was the one passion which mastered his robust common sense. Townshend
+was turned out of office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield in 1733; and though
+he started with the ablest administration the country had known, Walpole
+was left after twenty years of supremacy with but one man of ability in
+his cabinet, the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke. With the single exception
+of Townshend, the colleagues whom his jealousy dismissed plunged into an
+opposition more factious and unprincipled than has ever disgraced
+English politics. The "Patriots," as they called themselves, owned
+Pulteney, a brilliant speaker and unscrupulous intriguer, as their head;
+they were reinforced by a band of younger Whigs--the "Boys," as Walpole
+named them--whose temper revolted alike against the inaction and
+cynicism of his policy, and whose fiery spokesman was a young cornet of
+horse, William Pitt; and they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory
+party which still took part in politics, a fragment inconsiderable in
+numbers but of far greater weight as representing a large part of the
+nation, and which was guided for a while by the virulent ability of
+Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom
+he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. Inside
+Parliament indeed the invectives of the "Patriots" fell dead before
+Walpole's majorities and his good-humoured contempt; so far were their
+attacks from shaking his power that Bolingbroke abandoned the struggle
+in despair to return again into exile, while Pulteney with his party
+could only take refuge in a silly secession from Parliament. But on the
+nation at large their speeches and pamphlets, with the brilliant
+sarcasms of their literary allies, such as Pope or Johnson, did more
+effective work. Unjust indeed as their outcry was, the growing response
+to it told that the political inactivity of the country was drawing to
+an end. It was the very success of Walpole's policy which was to bring
+about his downfall; for it was the gradual closing of the chasm which
+had all but broken England into two warring peoples that allowed the
+political energy of the country to return to its natural channels and to
+give a new vehemence to political strife. Vague too and hollow as much
+of the "high talk" of the Patriots was, it showed that the age of
+political cynicism, of that unbelief in high sentiment and noble
+aspirations which had followed on the crash of Puritanism, was drawing
+to an end. Rant about ministerial corruption would have fallen flat on
+the public ear had not new moral forces, a new sense of social virtue, a
+new sense of religion been stirring, however blindly, in the minds of
+Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: The Methodists.]
+
+The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from
+the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot
+of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their
+times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion,
+and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of
+"Methodists." Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon
+as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by
+the fervour and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his
+special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led
+it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast
+masses of population which lay concentrated in the towns or around the
+mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor
+of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech
+was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was
+shown when a dread of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the
+pulpits of the Established Church, and forced them to preach in the
+fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous
+corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the
+dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his
+labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's
+preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical,
+extravagant, often commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense
+reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the
+sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring
+gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious
+Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at
+Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits,
+and see as he preached the tears "making white channels down their
+blackened cheeks."
+
+[Sidenote: The religious revival.]
+
+On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke the effect of
+Whitefield and his fellow Methodists was mighty both for good and ill.
+Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in their opponents. Their
+lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they
+were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they
+aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong
+men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by
+bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of
+strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange
+and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a
+conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms
+at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student,
+came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the
+"sweet singer" of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction
+of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more
+extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm
+passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was
+aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public
+devotion throughout England.
+
+[Sidenote: John Wesley.]
+
+But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not
+this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at
+Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon
+as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic
+mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little
+society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a
+preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second
+to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the
+excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly
+deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over
+others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and
+moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of
+men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of
+the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the
+start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost
+covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the
+Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he
+sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been
+impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared
+the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.
+Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived
+on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a
+world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain
+stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement
+of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his
+preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell
+lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or
+without any?--immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in
+the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his
+conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life,
+by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible
+opened.
+
+[Sidenote: His organization of Methodism.]
+
+But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was
+essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at
+the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary.
+In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the
+narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began
+his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself
+to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of
+laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to
+preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and
+looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion
+with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends
+of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their
+contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great
+preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical
+temper of mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be
+the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and
+organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied
+of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more
+than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to
+employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and
+attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered
+in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and
+sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the
+Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of
+age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic
+outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent
+to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the
+new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped
+into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of
+unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers
+and wandering preachers; while the whole body was placed under the
+absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as he
+lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with Wesley
+alone. "If by arbitrary power," he replied with charming simplicity to
+objectors, "you mean a power which I exercise simply without any
+colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt in it."
+
+[Sidenote: Results of the movement.]
+
+The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members
+at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by
+millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the
+Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later,
+broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the
+"Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their
+duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at
+large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and
+wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the
+first impulse to popular education.
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of France.]
+
+From the new England which was springing up about him, from that new
+stir of national life and emotion of which the Wesleyan revival was but
+a part, Walpole stood utterly aloof. National enthusiasm, national
+passion, found no echo in his cool and passionless good sense. The
+growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its
+instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a
+foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and
+loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike
+unintelligible to him. In the talk of patriotism and public virtue he
+saw mere rant and extravagance. "Men would grow wiser," he said, "and
+come out of that." The revival of English religion he looked on with an
+indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism
+which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the
+face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to
+his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now
+threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto
+enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the
+Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. But
+it was clear that such an alliance could hardly be a permanent one. The
+Treaty of Utrecht had been a humiliation for France even more than for
+Spain. It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy
+which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the
+sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned
+from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to
+the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown
+themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with
+reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known
+nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old
+ambition started again into life.
+
+[Sidenote: Its union with Spain.]
+
+It was fired to action by a new rivalry. The naval supremacy of Britain
+was growing into an empire of the sea; and not only was such an empire
+in itself a challenge to France, but it was fatal to the aspirations
+after a colonial dominion, after aggrandizement in America, and the
+upbuilding of a French power in the East, which were already vaguely
+stirring in the breasts of her statesmen. And to this new rivalry was
+added the temptation of a new chance of success. On the Continent the
+mightiest foe of France had ever been the House of Austria; but that
+House was now paralyzed by a question of succession. It was almost
+certain that the quarrels which must follow the death of the Emperor
+would break the strength of Germany, and it was probable that they might
+be so managed as to destroy for ever that of the House of Hapsburg.
+While the main obstacle to her ambition was thus weakened or removed,
+France won a new and invaluable aid to it in the friendship of Spain.
+Accident had hindered for a while the realization of the forebodings
+which led Marlborough and Somers so fiercely to oppose a recognition of
+the union of the two countries under the same royal house in the Peace
+of Utrecht. The age and death of Lewis the Fourteenth, the minority of
+his successor, the hostility between Philip of Spain and the Duke of
+Orleans, the personal quarrel between the two Crowns which broke out
+after the Duke's death, had long held the Bourbon powers apart. France
+had in fact been thrown on the alliance of England, and had been forced
+to play a chief part in opposing Spain and in maintaining the European
+settlement. But at the death of George the First this temporary
+severance was already passing away. The birth of children to Lewis the
+Fifteenth settled all questions of succession; and no obstacle remained
+to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the Bourbon Courts in a
+common action. The boast of Lewis the Fourteenth was at last fulfilled.
+In the mighty struggle for supremacy which France carried on from the
+fall of Walpole to the Peace of Paris her strength was doubled by the
+fact that there were "no Pyrenees."
+
+[Sidenote: The Family Compact.]
+
+The first signs of this new danger showed themselves in 1733, when the
+peace of Europe was broken afresh by disputes which rose out of a
+contested election to the throne of Poland. Austria and France were
+alike drawn into the strife; and in England the awakening jealousy of
+French designs roused a new pressure for war. The new king too was eager
+to fight, and her German sympathies inclined even Caroline to join in
+the fray. But Walpole stood firm for the observance of neutrality. He
+worked hard to avert and to narrow the war; but he denied that British
+interests were so involved in it as to call on England to take a part.
+"There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe," he boasted as
+the strife went on, "and not one Englishman." Meanwhile he laboured to
+bring the quarrel to a close; and in 1736 the intervention of England
+and Holland succeeded in restoring peace. But the country had watched
+with a jealous dread the military energy that proclaimed the revival of
+the French arms; and it noted bitterly that peace was bought by the
+triumph of both branches of the House of Bourbon. A new Bourbon monarchy
+was established at the cost of the House of Austria by the cession of
+the Two Sicilies to a Spanish Prince in exchange for his right of
+succession to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany. On the other hand,
+Lorraine, so long coveted by French ambition, passed finally into the
+hands of France. The political instinct of the nation at once discerned
+in these provisions a union of the Bourbon powers; and its dread of such
+a union proved to be a just one. As early as the outbreak of the war a
+Family Compact had been secretly concluded between France and Spain, the
+main object of which was the ruin of the maritime supremacy of Britain.
+Spain bound herself to deprive England gradually of its commercial
+privileges in her American dominions, and to transfer them to France.
+France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the
+recovery of Gibraltar.
+
+[Sidenote: England and Spain.]
+
+The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered
+this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon
+courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of
+1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made
+inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve
+to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions
+on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish
+sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the
+struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The
+trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely
+through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance
+of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a
+legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow
+restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its
+old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled;
+while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which
+rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip
+however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with
+his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single
+merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the
+moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a
+fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the
+peace; and in 1738 the ill humour of the trading classes was driven to
+madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar
+of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the
+Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst
+taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do
+justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry
+for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as
+it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the
+Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the
+Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the
+highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every
+means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her
+hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great
+crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have
+enabled Walpole to deal with it.
+
+[Sidenote: War with Spain.]
+
+But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy
+of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies
+assailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their
+pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to
+the crowd on "the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position
+had been weakened by the death of the queen; and it was now weakened
+yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred
+of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as
+George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of
+the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were
+slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a
+hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the "Patriots" had
+grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was
+slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his
+support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested
+therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the
+trading classes. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of
+the trading class failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had
+driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this
+juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham,
+who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from
+their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.
+But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and
+that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession.]
+
+"They may ring their bells now," the great minister said bitterly, as
+peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender; "but they will soon be
+wringing their hands." His foresight was at once justified. No sooner
+had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an
+English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication
+of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that
+she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South
+America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was
+plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the
+protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as
+France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her
+pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving
+Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she
+confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for
+finishing the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the
+Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it
+was idle to expect her to pass it by. If once the hereditary dominions
+of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the
+dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the mass of dominion
+which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without
+a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of
+a danger which the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of
+Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the
+Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from
+the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had
+given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when
+in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European
+struggle.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Walpole.]
+
+The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of
+Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as
+destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had
+played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous assailant
+of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria
+claimed the Austrian Duchies, which passed with the other hereditary
+dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as
+she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the
+Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the
+annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and
+Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the
+summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of
+Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria
+stood in such peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its
+dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria
+the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the
+Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still
+true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against
+France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was
+wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held
+aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the
+Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her
+full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by
+this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with
+France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused
+to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its
+constitutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the
+head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria,
+and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On
+England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.
+Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged
+with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the
+selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his
+dread of harm to his hereditary state averted the entry of a French
+army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the
+step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the
+minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still
+repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful spirit; but in a
+new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to
+sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant
+temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.
+"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his
+son, "now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at
+dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless
+than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed
+for an hour together." The end was in fact near; and in the opening of
+1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.
+
+[Sidenote: Carteret.]
+
+His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.
+The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office,
+and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of
+the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of
+foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in
+continental affairs. Carteret mainly followed the system of his
+predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked
+for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in
+Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor;
+and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at
+Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace
+with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The
+peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to
+drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new
+minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.
+One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples
+and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude
+a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the
+French alliance.
+
+[Sidenote: Dettingen.]
+
+The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set
+up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.
+Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsass
+and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to
+the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove
+the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second,
+who warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head of a
+force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and
+marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and
+finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with
+a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing
+31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the
+battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not
+only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of
+the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held
+their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small
+as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated
+Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a
+league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all
+that was needed to secure the results already gained.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Carteret.]
+
+But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of
+Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples,
+with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian
+Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to
+Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh
+attitude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the war on the
+cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than
+suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.
+His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of
+the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the
+Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while
+the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally
+itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment
+that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the
+Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of
+Carteret's weakness in assenting to a change in the character of the
+struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack
+became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led
+an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against
+him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger
+at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now
+became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to
+his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not
+only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the
+king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its
+head.
+
+[Sidenote: The Pelham Ministry.]
+
+Of the reconstituted ministry which followed Henry Pelham became the
+head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity
+disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.
+Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and "the Boys," all
+found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had
+given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the
+first breach in the system of purely party government established on the
+accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by
+the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of
+Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of
+Hanover with Prussia for a headship of North Germany found expression in
+the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in
+accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of
+Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs
+remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots
+into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests
+should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an
+accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams
+forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could
+be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be
+given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the
+superiority of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of Cumberland.
+Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians,
+and Dutch--for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged
+into the war, though by English subsidies--the Duke on the 31st of May
+1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and
+redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into
+this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column,
+doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the
+moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in
+their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and
+orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of
+Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and
+by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of
+July.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles Edward Stuart.]
+
+The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and
+as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was
+placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.
+But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which
+wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had
+sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young
+adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and
+landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood
+almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his
+standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen
+hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair
+Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed "James the
+Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched
+against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the
+21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.
+Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now
+at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the
+people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the
+utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.
+His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after
+skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through
+Lancashire, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here
+all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his
+support as he passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of
+its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.
+Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single squire
+took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English
+towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand
+pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred
+men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of
+Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency
+of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories
+into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere
+Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles
+Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand
+Highlanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of the Highlands.]
+
+He soon learned too that forces of double his own strength were closing
+on either side of him, while a third army under the king and Lord Stair
+covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were away,
+quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its allegiance to
+the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms
+for King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though roused by a
+small French force which landed at Montrose. To advance further south
+was impossible, and Charles fell rapidly back on Glasgow; but the
+reinforcements which he found there raised his army to nine thousand
+men, and on the 23rd January 1746 he boldly attacked an English army
+under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped
+near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for
+the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces
+dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly
+back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the 16th of April
+the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward
+of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they
+were starving and dispirited, while Cumberland's force was nearly double
+that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung
+themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were
+received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke
+through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few
+moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a mass of hunted
+fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.
+In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords,
+Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty
+persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures
+of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were
+abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and
+transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was
+forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which
+followed them, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the
+clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the
+Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.
+
+[Sidenote: Widening of the War.]
+
+Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the
+Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.
+When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for
+weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal
+therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded
+the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and
+withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however
+the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were
+balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe
+inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.
+The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at last
+brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by
+which England surrendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on
+land. But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during which both
+parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier contest which they saw
+impending. The war was in fact widening far beyond the bounds of Germany
+or of Europe. It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to settle the
+destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the valleys of the
+Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great question whether the
+fortunes of the New World were to be moulded by Frenchmen or Englishmen.
+Already too French adventurers were driving English merchants from
+Madras, and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add India
+to the dominions of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Clive.]
+
+The intercourse of England with India had as yet given little promise of
+the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of
+Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco de Gama had crept round the
+Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese settlement on the Goa
+Coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The trade,
+profitable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three early
+factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during the century
+which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of but six
+fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by
+the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza; while Fort
+William, with the mean village which has since grown into Calcutta, owes
+its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of these forts was
+built simply for the protection of the Company's warehouses, and guarded
+by a few "sepahis," sepoys, or paid native soldiers; while the clerks
+and traders of each establishment were under the direction of a
+President and a Council. One of these clerks in the middle of the
+eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near
+Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his
+friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's
+service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of
+wretchedness and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by
+the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by
+home-sickness. Twice he attempted suicide; and it was only on the
+failure of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which
+baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.
+
+[Sidenote: Dupleix.]
+
+A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the
+war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French
+in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.
+Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius,
+besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and
+merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but
+he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his
+clerkship for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was
+busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the
+repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of
+Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in
+India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods
+to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first
+time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the
+line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne,
+the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised
+themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor
+founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the
+Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a
+race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan
+invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the
+capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known
+under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom
+conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands
+along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and
+finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.
+
+[Sidenote: Arcot.]
+
+Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered
+his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced
+his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled
+with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made
+himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and seated a
+creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one
+town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but
+brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came forward with a daring
+scheme for its relief. With a few hundred English and sepoys he pushed
+through a thunderstorm to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital,
+entrenched himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days
+against thousands of assailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas,
+who had never before believed that Englishmen would fight, advanced and
+broke up the siege. But Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal
+vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran away at the
+first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the
+cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their
+Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the ground a
+pompous pillar which the French governor had set up in honour of his
+earlier victories.
+
+[Sidenote: The American Colonies.]
+
+Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the
+struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while
+France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with
+even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West.
+From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England
+States, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to
+those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in
+North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still
+came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia
+received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war
+with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by
+the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which
+was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New
+York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the
+colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed
+William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primæval forest,
+and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among
+which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed
+before a new settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the
+reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General
+Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the
+persecuted Protestants of Germany.
+
+[Sidenote: Their progress.]
+
+Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in
+numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we
+have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of
+negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother
+country. Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia
+were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Massachusetts saw
+five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a
+century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their
+numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia
+boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their
+maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with,
+the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod
+fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction
+indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an
+industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and
+the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as
+many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the
+Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the
+central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New
+England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an
+aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the
+system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of
+Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives
+in houses such as those of Fairfax and Washington. Throughout New
+England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their
+piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry,
+their love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions, remained
+unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was
+general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said
+Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay,
+have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their
+estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political
+activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the
+settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the
+establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of
+America. "Every township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath
+increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to
+teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase
+to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar
+school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New
+England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able
+to read and write.
+
+[Sidenote: Their political condition.]
+
+Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their
+influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main
+features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood
+fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them
+contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first
+time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious
+freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been
+brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had
+never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all
+the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and
+the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large
+part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.
+Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to
+colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among
+the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds
+religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer
+diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and
+organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the
+Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother
+country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she
+had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But
+the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the
+worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at
+home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in
+all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and
+members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual
+re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and
+immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English
+Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and
+invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of
+their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater
+loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the
+colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government
+was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the
+projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save
+in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen
+into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly
+elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected,
+sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the
+Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.
+
+[Sidenote: English control.]
+
+With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference
+on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The
+superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and
+Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the
+Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was
+included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to
+themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost
+America because he read the American despatches, which none of his
+predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any
+interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were
+secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of
+internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt
+afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I
+have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you
+think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to
+England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.
+It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she
+might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own
+products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture
+in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the
+mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small
+import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of
+smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain
+was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the
+Americans enjoyed as British subjects.
+
+[Sidenote: French aggression.]
+
+As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the
+colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French
+aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English
+settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for
+only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before
+the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the
+lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the
+pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English
+statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in
+Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of
+the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English
+settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or
+Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the
+inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke
+of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was
+stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven
+from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose
+settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax,
+the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company was formed, and its
+agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky;
+while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance
+between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor
+were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia.
+A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort.
+A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers
+from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a
+fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at
+once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless
+attack on it under George Washington, a young Virginian, who had been
+despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were
+forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was
+left in the hands of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Rout of Braddock.]
+
+It was natural that at such a crisis the mother country should look to
+the united efforts of the colonies, and Halifax pressed for a joint
+arrangement which should provide a standing force and funds for its
+support. A plan for this purpose on the largest scale was drawn up by
+Benjamin Franklin, who, from a printer's boy, had risen to supreme
+influence in Pennsylvania; but in the way of such a union stood the
+jealousies which each state entertained of its neighbour, the
+disinclination of the colonists to be drawn into an expensive struggle,
+and, above all, suspicion of the motives of Halifax and his colleagues.
+The delay in furnishing any force for defence, the impossibility of
+bringing the colonies to any agreement, and the perpetual squabbles of
+their legislatures with the governors appointed by the Crown, may have
+been the motives which induced Halifax to introduce a Bill which would
+have made orders by the king in spite of the colonial charters law in
+America. The Bill was dropped in deference to the constitutional
+objections of wiser men; but the governors fed the fear in England of
+the "levelling principles" of the colonists, and every official in
+America wrote home to demand that Parliament should do what the colonial
+legislatures seemed unable to do, and establish a common fund for
+defence by a general taxation. Already plans were mooted for deriving a
+revenue from the colonies. But the prudence of Pelham clung to the
+policy of Walpole, and nothing was done; while the nearer approach of a
+struggle in Europe gave fresh vigour to the efforts of France. The
+Marquis of Montcalm, who was now governor of Canada, carried out with
+even greater zeal than his predecessor the plans of annexation; and the
+three forts of Duquesne on the Ohio, of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and
+of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, were linked together by a chain of
+lesser forts, which cut off the English colonists from all access to the
+west. Montcalm was gifted with singular powers of administration; he
+had succeeded in attaching the bulk of the Indian tribes from Canada as
+far as the Mississippi to the cause of France; and the value of their
+aid was shown in 1755, when General Braddock led a force of English
+soldiers and American militia to a fresh attack upon fort Duquesne. The
+force was utterly routed and Braddock slain.
+
+[Sidenote: State of Europe.]
+
+The defeat woke England to its danger; for it was certain that war in
+America would soon be followed by war in Europe itself. Newcastle and
+his fellow-ministers were still true in the main to Walpole's policy.
+They looked on a league with Prussia as indispensable to the formation
+of any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia,"
+wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the
+Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength;
+if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of
+France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement.
+The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England
+desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the
+Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in
+which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice
+had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The
+traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined with the
+tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more
+probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only
+served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to
+regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant
+power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the
+supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house
+and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by
+the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England
+which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It
+was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa
+drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the
+growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth
+to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the
+league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So
+secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry
+Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on
+his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected
+from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself
+fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg.
+
+[Sidenote: Alliance with Prussia.]
+
+The danger to England was hardly less; for France appeared again on the
+stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis the
+Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of the French government were
+screened for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the
+ability of the agents it found to carry them out. In England, on the
+contrary, all was vagueness and indecision. The action of the king
+showed only his Hanoverian jealousy of the House of Brandenburg. It was
+certain that France, as soon as war broke out in the West, would attack
+his Electorate; and George sought help not at Berlin but at St.
+Petersburg. He concluded a treaty with Russia, which promised him the
+help of a Russian army on the Weser in return for a subsidy. Such a
+treaty meant war with Frederick, who had openly announced his refusal to
+allow the entry of Russian forces on German soil; and it was vehemently
+though fruitlessly opposed by William Pitt. But he had hardly withdrawn
+with Grenville and Charles Townshend from the Ministry when Newcastle
+himself recoiled from the king's policy. The Russian subsidy was
+refused, and Hanoverian interests subordinated to those of England by
+the conclusion of the treaty with Frederick of Prussia for which Pitt
+had pressed. The new compact simply provided for the neutrality of both
+Prussia and Hanover in any contest between England and France. But its
+results were far from being as peaceable as its provisions. Russia was
+outraged by Frederick's open opposition to her presence in Germany;
+France resented his compact with and advances towards England; and Maria
+Theresa eagerly seized on the temper of both those powers to draw them
+into common action against the Prussian king. With the treaty between
+England and Frederick indeed began the Seven Years' War.
+
+[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]
+
+No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought
+greater triumphs to England: but few have had more disastrous
+beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and
+yet too greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable
+men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be
+guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit for
+service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was
+quick in her attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the key of the
+Mediterranean, was besieged by the Duke of Richelieu and forced to
+capitulate. To complete the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief
+under Admiral Byng fell back before the French. In Germany Frederick
+seized Dresden at the outset of the war and forced the Saxon army to
+surrender; and in 1757 a victory at Prague made him master for a while
+of Bohemia; but his success was transient, and a defeat at Kolin drove
+him to retreat again into Saxony. In the same year the Duke of
+Cumberland, who had taken post on the Weser with an army of fifty
+thousand men for the defence of Hanover, fell back before a French army
+to the mouth of the Elbe, and engaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven
+to disband his forces. In America things went even worse than in
+Germany. The inactivity of the English generals was contrasted with the
+genius and activity of Montcalm. Already masters of the Ohio by the
+defeat of Braddock, the French drove the English garrison from the forts
+which commanded Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, and their empire
+stretched without a break over the vast territory from Louisiana to the
+St. Lawrence.
+
+[Sidenote: William Pitt.]
+
+A despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our
+coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair,
+"We are no longer a nation." But the nation of which Chesterfield
+despaired was really on the eve of its greatest triumphs, and the
+incapacity of Newcastle only called to the front the genius of William
+Pitt. Pitt was the grandson of a wealthy governor of Madras, who had
+entered Parliament in 1735, as member for one of his father's pocket
+boroughs. A group of younger men, Lord Lyttelton, the Grenvilles,
+Wilkes, and others, gradually gathered round him, and formed a band of
+young "patriots," "the Boys," as Walpole called them, who added to the
+difficulties of that minister. Pitt was as yet a cornet of horse, and
+the restless activity of his genius was seen in the energy with which
+he threw himself into his military duties. He told Lord Shelburne long
+afterwards that "during the time he was cornet of horse there was not a
+military book he did not read through." But the dismissal from the army
+with which Walpole met his violent attacks threw this energy wholly into
+politics. His fiery spirit was hushed in office during the "broad-bottom
+administration" which followed Walpole's fall, and he soon attained
+great influence over Henry Pelham. "I think him," wrote Pelham to his
+brother, "the most able and useful man we have amongst us; truly
+honourable and strictly honest." He remained under Newcastle after
+Pelham's death, till the Duke's jealousy of power not only refused him
+the Secretaryship of State and admission to the Cabinet, but entrusted
+the lead of the House of Commons to a mere dependent. Pitt resisted the
+slight by an attitude of opposition; and his denunciation of the treaty
+with Russia served as a pretext for his dismissal. When the disasters of
+the war however drove Newcastle from office, in November 1756, Pitt
+became Secretary of State, bringing with him into office his relatives,
+George Grenville and Lord Temple, as well as Charles Townshend. But
+though his popularity had forced him into office, and though the
+grandeur of his policy at once showed itself by his rejection of all
+schemes for taxing America, and by his raising a couple of regiments
+amongst the Highlanders, he found himself politically powerless. The
+House was full of Newcastle's creatures, the king hated him, and only
+four months after taking office he was forced to resign. The Duke of
+Cumberland insisted on his dismissal in April 1757, before he would
+start to take the command in Germany. In July however it was necessary
+to recall him. The failure of Newcastle's attempt to construct an
+administration forced the Duke to a junction with his rival, and while
+Newcastle took the head of the Treasury, Pitt again became Secretary of
+State.
+
+[Sidenote: His lofty spirit.]
+
+Fortunately for their country, the character of the two statesmen made
+the compromise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted, for the general
+direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the
+administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor
+inclination. On the other hand his skill in parliamentary management was
+unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living man
+the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. What he
+cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribution of
+patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt turned
+disdainfully away. "I borrow the Duke of Newcastle's majority," his
+colleague owned with cool contempt, "to carry on the public business."
+"Mr. Pitt does everything," wrote Horace Walpole, "and the Duke gives
+everything. So long as they agree in this partition they may do what
+they please." Out of the union of these two strangely-contrasted
+leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as it was the last, of the purely
+Whig administrations. But its real power lay from beginning to end in
+Pitt himself. Poor as he was, for his income was little more than two
+hundred a year, and springing as he did from a family of no political
+importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young cornet of
+horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a
+power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their
+grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
+national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his
+"popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of
+the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs
+and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at
+large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest
+and resolve gathered themselves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious,
+his ambition had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
+took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men
+from France can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once
+breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he
+communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who served him.
+"No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet
+who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when he went in."
+Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his
+failures, he roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
+defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed
+Frederick of Prussia as he recognised a greatness like his own, "but she
+has at last brought forth a man."
+
+It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we
+look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out
+in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society
+critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of
+simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and
+of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of
+itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
+passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,
+his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his
+haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more
+puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he
+appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
+turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
+politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the
+grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. "I know that I
+can save the country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry
+into the Ministry, "and I know no other man can." The groundwork of
+Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride
+which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long
+held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the
+Restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was
+his love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted it
+with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. "I will not go
+to Court," he replied to an offer which was made him, "if I may not
+bring the Constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had
+nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the
+purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to
+the most lucrative office in his administration, that of Paymaster of
+the Forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was,
+Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never
+appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards the
+people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than "the great
+commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who
+commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to
+flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for
+"Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and
+when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily
+declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to
+enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
+flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
+grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far
+greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an
+opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single
+word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political
+party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly
+numbered half a dozen members.
+
+[Sidenote: His patriotism.]
+
+His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament but in the people at
+large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a political revolution.
+"It is the people who have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty
+pride when the nobles of the Cabinet opposed his will. He was the first
+to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased,
+and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great
+middle class, which no longer found its representatives in the
+legislature. "You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt
+sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
+look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of
+Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into
+power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him
+with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. "For weeks,"
+laughs Horace Walpole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him
+through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English
+merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political
+lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
+temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its
+energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its
+moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural
+attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish,
+whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection
+for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their
+enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which his country has
+borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an intense and personal
+love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till
+England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
+her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought
+of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions who
+rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public! I set
+you the example!" His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he
+held England. But even the faults which chequered his character told for
+him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had
+been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence
+of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in
+the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in
+full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was,
+are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day
+to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance
+which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his
+crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing
+into the House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage." But
+the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by
+faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was
+borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or carried into
+the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national
+dishonour.
+
+[Sidenote: His eloquence.]
+
+Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power
+of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the Long
+Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and
+theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of
+the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see
+ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,
+precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of
+business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
+statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,
+no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were
+always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,
+his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
+front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of
+his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the
+earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he
+whispered once to a friend, "for when once I am up everything that is in
+my mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by
+a large and poetic imagination, an imagination so strong that--as he
+said himself--"most things returned to him with stronger force the
+second time than the first," and by a glow of passion which not only
+raised him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front
+rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
+common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy
+with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a
+command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an
+effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the
+keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by
+the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one
+having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words
+were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at
+large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
+detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt
+reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in
+these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate
+appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we
+have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in
+the men of his own.
+
+[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]
+
+But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a
+statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his
+greater struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against
+arbitrary imprisonment under "general warrants," of the liberty of the
+press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against
+the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against
+England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of
+Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of
+Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India
+by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.
+Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of
+England, its "Calvinistic Creed and Arminian Clergy"; he was the first
+to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures
+shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by
+employing its Jacobites in the service of their country and by raising
+Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst
+as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge
+of men.
+
+[Sidenote: Plassey.]
+
+But it was rather Fortune than his genius that showered on Pitt the
+triumphs which signalized the opening of his ministry. In the East the
+daring of a merchant-clerk made a company of English traders the
+sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous career of conquest which
+has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the
+dominions of the British crown. Recalled by broken health to England,
+Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to win for
+England a greater prize than that which his victories had won for it in
+the supremacy of the Carnatic. He had been only a few months at Madras
+when a crime whose horror still lingers in English memories called him
+to Bengal. Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest and most
+fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its silk,
+and the produce of its looms, were famous in European markets. Its
+Viceroys, like their fellow-lieutenants, had become practically
+independent of the Emperor, and had added to Bengal the provinces of
+Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the master of this vast domain, had
+long been jealous of the enterprise and wealth of the English traders;
+and, roused at this moment by the instigation of the French, he appeared
+before Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and fifty
+of them into a small prison called the Black Hole of Calcutta. The heat
+of an Indian summer did its work of death. The wretched prisoners
+trampled each other under foot in the madness of thirst, and in the
+morning only twenty-three remained alive. Clive sailed at the news with
+a thousand Englishmen and two thousand sepoys to wreak vengeance for the
+crime. He was no longer the boy-soldier of Arcot; and the tact and skill
+with which he met Surajah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the
+Viceroy strove to avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental
+falsehood and treachery to which he stooped. But his courage remained
+unbroken. When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey
+the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of
+war counselled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an
+hour's lonely musing gave the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all
+that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who
+were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June 1757 were
+soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and broke in headlong
+rout before the English charge. The death of Surajah Dowlah enabled the
+Company to place a creature of its own on the throne of Bengal; but his
+rule soon became a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey began in
+fact the Empire of England in the East.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and Frederick.]
+
+The year of Plassey was the year of a victory hardly less important in
+the West. In Europe Pitt wisely limited himself to a secondary part.
+There was little in the military expeditions which marked the opening of
+his ministry to justify the trust of the country; for money and blood
+were lavished on buccaneering expeditions against the French coasts
+which did small damage to the enemy. But incidents such as these had
+little weight in the minister's general policy. His greatness lies in
+the fact that he at once recognised the genius of Frederick the Great,
+and resolved without jealousy or reserve to give him an energetic
+support. On his entry into office he refused to ratify the Convention of
+Closter-Seven, which had reduced Frederick to despair by throwing open
+his realm to a French advance; protected his flank by gathering an
+English and Hanoverian force on the Elbe, and on the counsel of the
+Prussian king placed the best of his generals, the Prince of Brunswick,
+at its head; while subsidy after subsidy was poured into Frederick's
+exhausted treasury. Pitt's trust was met by the most brilliant display
+of military genius which the modern world had as yet witnessed. In
+November 1757, two months after his repulse at Kolin, Frederick flung
+himself on a French army which had advanced into the heart of Germany,
+and annihilated it in the victory of Rossbach. Before another month had
+passed he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal
+victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. The victory of
+Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of the world by creating
+the unity of Germany; its immediate effect was to force the French army
+on the Elbe to fall back on the Rhine. Here Ferdinand of Brunswick,
+reinforced with twenty thousand English soldiers, held them at bay
+during the summer of 1758; while Frederick, foiled in an attack on
+Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zorndorf.
+His defeat however by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch proved the
+first of a series of terrible misfortunes; and the year 1759 marks the
+lowest point of his fortunes. A fresh advance of the Russian army forced
+the king to attack it at Kunersdorf in August, and Frederick's repulse
+ended in the utter rout of his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for
+even Berlin lay open to the conqueror. A few days later the surrender
+of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians; and at the close of the year an
+attempt upon them at Plauen was foiled with terrible loss. But every
+disaster was retrieved by the indomitable courage and tenacity of the
+king, and winter found him as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony
+save the ground which Daun's camp covered.
+
+[Sidenote: Minden and Quiberon.]
+
+The year which marked the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes was the
+year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year of Minden and Quiberon and
+Quebec. France aimed both at a descent upon England and at the conquest
+of Hanover; for the one purpose she gathered a naval armament at Brest,
+while fifty thousand men under Contades and Broglie united for the other
+on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty thousand met them (August
+1) on the field of Minden. The French marched along the Weser to the
+attack, with their flanks protected by that river and a brook which ran
+into it, and with their cavalry, ten thousand strong, massed in the
+centre. The six English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French
+horse, and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once upon them
+in line regardless of the batteries on their flank, and rolling back
+charge after charge with volleys of musketry. In an hour the French
+centre was utterly broken. "I have seen," said Contades, "what I never
+thought to be possible--a single line of infantry break through three
+lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin!"
+Nothing but the refusal of Lord John Sackville to complete the victory
+by a charge of the horse which he headed saved the French from utter
+rout. As it was, their army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the
+Rhine. The project of an invasion of England met with the like success.
+Eighteen thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet,
+when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of November at the
+mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast where the
+French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals and granite reefs that
+the pilot remonstrated with the English admiral against his project of
+attack. "You have done your duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly
+replied; "now lay me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships
+were lost on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the
+disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped away.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt in America.]
+
+It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and Quiberon
+brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt had wisely limited
+his efforts to the support of Prussia, but across the Atlantic the field
+was wholly his own, and he had no sooner entered office than the
+desultory raids, which had hitherto been the only resistance to French
+aggression, were superseded by a large and comprehensive plan of
+attack. The sympathies of the colonies were won by an order which gave
+their provincial officers equal rank with the royal officers in the
+field. They raised at Pitt's call twenty thousand men, and taxed
+themselves heavily for their support. Three expeditions were
+simultaneously directed against the French line--one to the Ohio valley,
+one against Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, while a third under General
+Amherst and Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
+The last was brilliantly successful. Louisburg, though defended by a
+garrison of five thousand men, was taken with the fleet in its harbour,
+and the whole province of Cape Breton reduced. The American militia
+supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the forts;
+and though Montcalm, with a far inferior force, was able to repulse
+General Abercromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia and
+Virginia, guided and inspired by the courage of George Washington, made
+itself master of Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to
+their new conquest still commemorates the enthusiasm of the colonists
+for the great Minister who first opened to them the West. The failure at
+Ticonderoga only spurred Pitt to greater efforts. The colonists again
+responded to his call with fresh supplies of troops, and Montcalm felt
+that all was over. The disproportion indeed of strength was enormous. Of
+regular French troops and Canadians alike he could muster only ten
+thousand, while his enemies numbered fifty thousand men. The next year
+(1759) saw Montcalm's previous victory rendered fruitless by the
+evacuation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Amherst, and by the
+capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian force which
+marched to its relief. The capture of the three forts was the close of
+the French effort to bar the advance of the colonists to the valley of
+the Mississippi, and to place in other than English hands the destinies
+of North America.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Canada.]
+
+But Pitt had resolved not merely to foil the designs of Montcalm, but to
+destroy the French rule in America altogether; and while Amherst was
+breaking through the line of forts, an expedition under General Wolfe
+entered the St. Lawrence and anchored below Quebec. Wolfe was already a
+veteran soldier, for he had fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Laffeldt,
+and had played the first part in the capture of Louisburg. Pitt had
+discerned the genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward
+manner and occasional gasconade of the young soldier of thirty-three
+whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the war. But for a while his
+sagacity seemed to have failed. No efforts could draw Montcalm from the
+long line of inaccessible cliffs which borders the river, and for six
+weeks Wolfe saw his men wasting away in inactivity while he himself lay
+prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his resolution was fixed,
+and in a long line of boats the army dropped down the St. Lawrence to a
+point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had
+been discovered to the summit. Not a voice broke the silence of the
+night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated the
+stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," remarking as he
+closed, "I had rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." But
+his nature was as brave as it was tender; he was the first to leap on
+shore and to scale the narrow path where no two men could go abreast.
+His men followed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes
+and the crags, and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army
+stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Montcalm hastened to attack,
+though his force, composed chiefly of raw militia, was far inferior in
+discipline to the English; his onset however was met by a steady fire,
+and at the first English advance his men gave way. Wolfe headed a charge
+which broke the French line, but a ball pierced his breast in the moment
+of victory. "They run," cried an officer who held the dying man in his
+arms--"I protest they run." Wolfe rallied to ask who they were that ran,
+and was told "the French." "Then," he murmured, "I die happy!" The fall
+of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat completed the victory; and the
+submission of Canada, on the capture of Montreal by Amherst in 1760, put
+an end to the dream of a French empire in America.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IX
+
+MODERN ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE
+
+1760-1767
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]
+
+Never had England played so great a part in the history of mankind as in
+the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs in every quarter of the world.
+In September came the news of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In
+October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word of
+the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask every morning what
+victory there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one."
+But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its
+triumphs that the Seven Years' War stood and remains still without a
+rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
+determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of
+Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political
+and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the
+leadership of Prussia and Prussia's kings. With that of Plassey the
+influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander
+on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw
+one of the races of the north-west cast into the heart of Asia new
+manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on
+the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By
+removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother
+country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred
+them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the
+great republic of the west.
+
+[Sidenote: England a World-Power.]
+
+Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War
+is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a
+turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight
+of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within
+Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in
+other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived
+from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their
+fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European
+position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in
+South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her
+empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the
+strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of
+political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new
+road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of
+Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would
+have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes
+in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French
+ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had
+to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance
+of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits
+of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that
+France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered
+little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around
+her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival
+of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that
+of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India,
+claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered
+high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to
+comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.
+
+[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]
+
+It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our
+statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in
+English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English
+race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that
+the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly
+different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that
+the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's
+standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in
+Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
+Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words
+to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But
+greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his
+statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of
+Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own
+among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in
+arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his
+daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay
+before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be
+lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them
+showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into
+far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the
+other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British
+Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the
+British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from
+America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a
+Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements
+spread along its eastern shore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by
+year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain
+to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch
+voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first
+noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New
+Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It
+was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned
+her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace
+of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery
+to the Straits of Magellan.
+
+[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]
+
+"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron,
+"nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime
+power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the
+advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make
+discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed
+beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain
+Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in
+skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner
+traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a
+Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy,
+and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the
+Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small
+vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe
+the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched
+beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society
+Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of
+that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up
+New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles
+of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or
+Australia, on whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the
+district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name
+of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters,
+and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work
+was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New
+Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The
+records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of
+Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep
+blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the
+huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti,
+the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the
+Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the
+sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders
+was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the
+expansion of the English race.
+
+[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]
+
+Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English
+settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of
+the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in
+however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown.
+Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's
+attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but
+part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the
+furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer
+looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it
+claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial
+character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all
+the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all,
+without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas
+of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of
+whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless
+wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than
+half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole
+world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that
+since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of
+five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the
+colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it
+had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative
+a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and
+inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds,
+whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to
+the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British
+statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.
+
+[Sidenote: England and America.]
+
+And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take
+an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain
+seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French
+minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's
+triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in
+Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on
+the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of
+protection was removed. The attitude of England towards its distant
+dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of
+temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long
+existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the
+background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new
+prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to
+submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government
+and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon
+thoughtful men, and spread from them to the masses around them. At this
+very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams,
+then a village schoolmaster of Massachusetts, to lofty forebodings of
+the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.
+"Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than
+England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way
+to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." The sense
+that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.
+"Fools," said a descendant of William Penn, "are always telling their
+fears that the colonies will set up for themselves." Philosophers
+however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the
+fools. "Colonies are like fruits," wrote the foreseeing Turgot, "which
+cling to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take
+care of itself it will do what Carthage did." But from the thought of
+separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The
+Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves
+on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered
+complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as
+obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other
+hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the
+growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms
+was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade
+with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the
+right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this
+great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England,
+it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the
+Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free institutions under
+which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from
+the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding
+them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England
+had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.
+Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part
+was due to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of
+obligation mingled a sense of ingratitude. It was generally held that
+the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this
+debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all
+proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly
+of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.
+Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in
+great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these
+grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the
+government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent
+from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the
+"levelling principles" of the men about them. To statesmen at home the
+temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings
+with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of
+supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but
+republican.
+
+[Sidenote: George the Third.]
+
+To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and
+to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the
+fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother
+country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted
+the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.
+But it was far from being his only aim. For the first and last time
+since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was
+resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George
+succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first
+ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and
+to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before
+twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt
+and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of
+ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and
+often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither
+profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before
+him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural
+powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using
+greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their
+natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men
+was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepitude
+or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him
+from "this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal for a public
+monument to the great statesman as "an offensive measure to me
+personally." But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to
+his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose was to
+rule. "George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually
+repeated to him in youth, "George, be king." He called himself always "a
+Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish to undo the work which he
+believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of
+his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of
+the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which
+the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was
+determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern
+against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of
+parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the
+State.
+
+[Sidenote: Importance of his action.]
+
+How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary
+constitution of the country as it had received its final form from
+Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to
+realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social
+disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and
+humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we
+pass from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife
+of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the
+king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than
+that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these
+wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from
+having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of
+the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the
+century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the
+transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the
+nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power
+of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people
+itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the
+aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal
+sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an
+organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a
+democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]
+
+To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must
+recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to
+take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to
+England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less
+equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory
+the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in
+actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to
+control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very
+moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the
+Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but
+the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of
+government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had
+tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended
+with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed
+classes and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent
+contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed
+showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots
+over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against
+Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old
+power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of
+administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy
+another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the
+general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the
+representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they
+represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the
+majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their
+hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which
+would follow on a return of the Stuarts.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]
+
+The results of such a divorce between the government and that general
+mass of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground
+itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical
+power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the
+consciousness of power carries with it, among the mass of Englishmen
+public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress
+of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to
+Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from
+Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was
+unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on
+the governing class were even more fatal to any right conduct of public
+affairs. Not only had the mass of national sentiment been so utterly
+estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the
+people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the
+Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for
+half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation,
+that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their
+fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time
+it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been
+for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom
+to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious
+bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain
+the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of
+Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to
+become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of
+expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with
+instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from
+the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the
+Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with
+actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them
+representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work
+done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers
+by the mass of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its
+views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the
+benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.
+
+[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]
+
+And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation
+of Parliament to the constituencies made some change in its composition
+a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of
+Commons were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
+wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been
+recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long
+Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of
+Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had
+been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great
+towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while
+members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
+vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns
+to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of
+boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the
+Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring
+landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
+estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the
+narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a
+small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of
+electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered
+their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply
+on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's
+boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the
+day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke
+of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough
+members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could
+alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the
+enormous expense of contesting such constituencies practically left
+their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even
+in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out
+of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and
+sixty thousand were electors at all.
+
+[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]
+
+"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in
+noble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of
+the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from
+really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the
+height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
+Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament;
+and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose
+to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could
+allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative
+of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal
+boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of
+wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives
+naturally told on a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from
+the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary
+proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole
+and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of
+their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming
+more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we
+have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through
+England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in
+the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on
+politics.
+
+[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]
+
+Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had
+been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the
+seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of
+readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social
+changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the
+advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of
+wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large;
+and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave
+a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and
+rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works
+shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the
+diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none
+of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the
+wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten
+editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before
+the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere
+were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were
+far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created
+an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher
+literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That
+such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such
+instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed
+the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment
+outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but
+the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial
+pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and
+imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly
+to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded
+for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a
+pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles
+and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result
+was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they
+were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking
+their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the
+patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called
+poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations
+and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals
+with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.
+
+[Sidenote: Pope.]
+
+It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the
+time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution;
+for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of
+his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all
+active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was
+the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business
+in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and
+there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy
+grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older
+English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his
+arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with
+an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as
+his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny
+frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen
+sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the
+larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid
+temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved
+small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy;
+he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he
+stung right and left with a malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose
+out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to
+anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat
+could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over
+Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range,
+but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately
+to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself
+almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he
+was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never
+led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer
+lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much,
+or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest
+characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From
+the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and
+independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the
+traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into
+hangers-on of the great.
+
+[Sidenote: The Dunciad.]
+
+With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the
+phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet
+his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay
+within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist but of
+the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful
+preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of
+the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the
+work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm
+of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond
+the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and
+buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour,
+its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's
+masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his
+mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic
+path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.
+But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to
+criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted
+from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an
+interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible
+power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by
+mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on
+men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a
+noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces
+that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the
+journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the
+grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of Letters.]
+
+That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not
+have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence
+of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the
+work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of
+design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or
+forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every
+fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck
+at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such
+a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true
+and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled
+itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly
+in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before
+the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into
+fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and
+that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of
+Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude
+of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the
+eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom
+Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going
+on through Walpole's days in the people at large; and it was inevitable
+that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics.
+The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets
+and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the mass of the
+people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all
+the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new
+information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censorship
+after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political
+influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by
+the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the
+writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of
+George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the
+national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast
+raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was
+the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being
+established in almost every considerable town.
+
+[Sidenote: Return of the Tories.]
+
+With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully,
+roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and
+emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military
+triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have passed from its old
+inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very
+position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force
+of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new
+energy in the mass of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the
+national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with
+the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was
+not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but
+simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern
+the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether
+he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of
+Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin.
+But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a
+Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the
+later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin
+coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They
+were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a
+king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman,
+who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the
+opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually
+appeared again at court.
+
+[Sidenote: The King's friends.]
+
+It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a
+steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old
+Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the
+Crown. But from the first the Tory nobles and gentry came in one by one;
+and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics.
+Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the
+progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they
+returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all
+the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of
+the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but
+George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and
+influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the
+Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the
+civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's
+disposal. If this vast mass of patronage had been practically usurped by
+the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by
+George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made
+patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of
+Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy
+to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs
+were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast
+property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of
+office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whigs
+dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily
+continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly,
+"formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that
+the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which
+springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the
+rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness
+and corruption of its representatives.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and the Whigs.]
+
+More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on
+the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were
+represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was
+fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and
+corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a
+character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt
+and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the
+commercial classes, the other by the Whig families and the whole
+machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in
+vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew
+day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the
+traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty
+with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt
+against the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against
+their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would
+have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of
+Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out
+against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of
+1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius.
+Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at
+Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau:
+while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser.
+But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike
+failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and
+the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining
+hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been,
+Pitt was tottering to his fall.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt resigns.]
+
+The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised
+supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes.
+George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in
+the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of
+Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and
+though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was
+forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the
+instant desertion from Pitt of the two ablest of his adherents, George
+Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this
+moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed
+for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace
+party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority
+of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is
+madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his
+correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the
+Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the
+temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was
+he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast
+extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which
+brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and
+Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war
+on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the
+blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way
+from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish
+Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by
+occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish
+dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw
+the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht
+break at last upon England. His proud sense of the national strength
+never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had
+leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his
+colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet
+shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had
+never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him
+from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the
+bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his
+brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind
+himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt,
+was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of
+opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern
+England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of
+the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his
+appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called
+to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself
+accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which
+renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide."
+His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which
+followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.
+
+[Sidenote: George breaks with the Whigs.]
+
+"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories
+to us!" Frederick on the other hand was almost driven to despair. But
+George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the
+realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's
+retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular
+forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His
+declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the
+people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with
+indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of
+being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord
+Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of
+Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the
+King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the
+dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his
+carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their
+break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying
+him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so
+great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to
+deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than
+Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only
+to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his
+young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him
+into retirement. George saw himself triumphant over the two great
+forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which
+arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose
+from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of
+First Minister marked the triumph of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: The Peace.]
+
+Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first
+resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762
+Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was
+brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies;
+it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the
+policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina
+Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the
+Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George
+and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price.
+With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only
+deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the
+basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the
+Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from
+humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been
+justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall;
+and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the
+issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of
+the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the
+year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and
+St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the
+gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest
+of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It
+was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763.
+So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all
+that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented
+himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to
+France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain
+were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right
+to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To
+England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the
+Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in
+compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: George and the Parliament.]
+
+We have already seen how mighty a change in the aspect of the world, and
+above all in the aspect of Britain, was marked by this momentous treaty.
+But no sense of its great issues influenced the young king in pressing
+for its conclusion. His eye was fixed not so much on Europe or the
+British Empire as on the petty game of politics which he was playing
+with the Whigs. The anxiety which he showed for peace abroad sprang
+mainly from his belief that peace was needful for success in his
+struggle for power at home. So long as the war lasted Pitt's return to
+office and the union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly
+danger. But with peace the king's hands were free. He could count on the
+dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the
+influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands.
+But what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of
+Commons. So long as matters went quietly, so long as no gust of popular
+passion or enthusiasm forced its members to bow for a while to outer
+opinion, he saw that "management" could make the House a mere organ of
+his will. George had discovered--to use Lord Bute's words--"that the
+forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government were things not
+altogether incompatible." At a time when it had become all-powerful in
+the State, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective
+sense to be a representative body at all; and its isolation from the
+general opinion of the country left it at ordinary moments amenable only
+to selfish influences. The Whigs had managed it by bribery and
+borough-jobbing, and George in his turn seized bribery and
+borough-jobbing as a base of the power he proposed to give to the
+Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes.
+Day by day the young sovereign scrutinized the voting-list of the two
+Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted
+according to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment
+in the Church, rank in the army, were reserved for "the king's friends."
+Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery was
+employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry an office
+was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and twenty-five
+thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a single day.
+
+[Sidenote: George III. and America.]
+
+The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of the
+Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt; but in
+the teeth of his denunciation the provisions of the Peace of Paris were
+approved by a majority of five to one. It was seen still more in the
+vigour with which George and his minister prepared to carry out the
+plans over which they had brooded for the regulation of America. The
+American question was indeed forced on them, as they pleaded, by the
+state of the revenue. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion,
+and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous loans. The public
+debt now stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need therefore
+which met Bute after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris was that of
+making provision for the new burthens which the nation had incurred,
+and as these had been partly incurred in the defence of the American
+Colonies it was the general opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies
+should bear a share of them. In this opinion Bute and the king
+concurred. But their plans went further than mere taxation. The amount
+indeed which was expected to be raised as revenue by these changes, at
+most two hundred thousand pounds, was far too small to give much relief
+to the financial pressure at home. But this revenue furnished an easy
+pretext for wider changes. Plans for the regulation of the government of
+the Colonies had been suggested from time to time by subordinate
+ministers, but they had been set aside alike by the prudence of Walpole
+and the generosity of Pitt. The appointment of Charles Townshend to the
+Presidency of the Board of Trade however was a sign that Bute had
+adopted a policy not only of taxation, but of restraint. The new
+minister declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the
+Navigation laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade was secured
+to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue within the Colonies
+for the discharge of the debt, and above all on impressing upon the
+colonists a sense of their dependence upon Britain. The direct trade
+between America and the French or Spanish West Indian Islands had
+hitherto been fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily
+evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were now reduced,
+but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted, and a considerable naval
+force was despatched to the American coast by Grenville, who stood at
+the head of the Admiralty Board, with a view of suppressing the
+clandestine trade with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected
+from this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp Tax, a tax
+on all legal documents issued within the Colonies, the plan of which
+seems to have originated with Bute's secretary, Jenkinson, afterwards
+the first Lord Liverpool. That resistance was expected was seen in a
+significant step which was taken by the ministry at the end of the war.
+Though the defeat of the French had left the Colonies without an enemy
+save the Indians, a force of ten thousand men was still kept quartered
+on their inhabitants, and a scheme was broached for an extension of the
+province of Canada over the district round the Lakes, which would have
+turned the western lands into a military settlement, governed at the
+will of the Crown, and have furnished a base of warlike operations, if
+such were needed, against the settled Colonies on the Atlantic.
+
+Had Bute's power lasted it is probable that these measures would have
+brought about the struggle between England and America long before it
+actually began. Fortunately for the two countries the minister found
+himself from the first the object of a sudden and universal hatred. The
+great majority which had rejected Pitt's motion against the Peace had
+filled the court with exultation. "Now indeed," cried the Princess
+Dowager, "my son is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and
+minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular ill-will such
+as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts assailed the throne. Violent
+and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the
+reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher classes who had
+till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the
+side of the Crown. But the mass of the people was only puzzled and
+galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political
+activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of
+Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union
+than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was
+the slave of the king. The king still called himself a Whig, yet he was
+reviving a system of absolutism which Whiggism, to do it justice, had
+long made impossible. His minister was a mere favourite and in
+Englishmen's eyes a foreigner. The masses saw all this, but they saw no
+way of mending it. They knew little of their own strength, and they had
+no means of influencing the Government they hated save by sheer
+violence. They came therefore to the front with their old national and
+religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court,
+their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed
+hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and
+uproar.
+
+[Sidenote: Wilkes.]
+
+It was this temper of the masses which was seized and turned to his
+purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a
+remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a
+singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in
+bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has
+made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform
+by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of
+the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to
+the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish
+the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon
+the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general
+excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to
+gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body
+of the Whigs, and the commercial classes who backed them, were startled
+and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown
+against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at
+the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a
+coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its
+sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and
+disturbances which culminated--in a rough spirit of punning upon the
+name of the minister--in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The
+journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for
+this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the _North-Briton_ that
+Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the
+peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of
+foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated
+minister by name.
+
+[Sidenote: Bute's fall.]
+
+Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a
+revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the
+influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told
+for good. It was the attack of Wilkes which more than all else
+determined Bute to withdraw from office in 1763 as a means of allaying
+the storm of popular indignation. But the king was made of more stubborn
+stuff than his minister. If he suffered his favourite to resign he still
+regarded him as the real head of administration; for the ministry which
+Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more courtly of his
+colleagues, and was in fact formed under his direction. George Grenville
+was its nominal chief, but the measures of the Cabinet were still
+secretly dictated by the favourite. The formation of the Grenville
+ministry indeed was laughed at as a joke. Charles Townshend and the Duke
+of Bedford, the two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after
+Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of ability
+was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman, who had served with credit at
+Minden, and had been rewarded by a post at Court which brought him into
+terms of intimacy with the young sovereign and Bute. Dislike of the Whig
+oligarchy and of the war had thrown Shelburne strongly into the
+opposition to Pitt, and his diplomatic talents were of service in
+securing recruits for his party, as his eloquence had been useful in
+advocating the peace; but it was not till he himself retired from office
+that Bute obtained for his supporter the Presidency of the Board of
+Trade. As yet however Shelburne's powers were little known, and he added
+nothing to the strength of the ministry. It was in fact only the
+disunion of its opponents which allowed it to hold its ground. Townshend
+and Bedford remained apart from the main body of the Whigs, and both
+sections held aloof from Pitt. George had counted on the divisions of
+the opposition in forming such a ministry; and he counted on the
+weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.
+
+[Sidenote: George Grenville.]
+
+But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute.
+Narrow and pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition
+from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too
+proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The
+conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that
+in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry.
+Never had Pitt shown a nobler patriotism or a grander self-command than
+in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at
+his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the
+return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a
+condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore
+constitutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had
+won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of
+this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on
+which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to
+restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown.
+"Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I
+would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as
+powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased
+to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the
+ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the
+formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow Pitt. On the other hand,
+Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed
+ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus
+became strong and compact.
+
+[Sidenote: Grenville and Wilkes.]
+
+Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial
+ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest
+as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal
+forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the
+Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his
+one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over
+king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should
+strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its
+power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in
+the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with
+Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was
+finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity
+of the _North-Briton_ made Wilkes the representative of the new
+journalism, as he was the representative of that mass of general
+sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall
+of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes.
+But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his
+administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the growing
+opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the
+_North-Briton_ Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the
+opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State
+was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this
+seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for
+a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes
+himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal
+that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was
+immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the
+harshness of these proceedings passed into graver disapproval when
+Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial
+tribunal for the trial of its own assailant. While the paper which
+formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of
+justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false,
+scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time
+voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and
+advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the
+two Houses as unconstitutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in
+the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to
+France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons.
+Rapid and successful blows such as these seem to have shown to how
+frivolous an assailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the
+Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The
+assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system
+of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing
+two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of
+indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of
+"Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with
+"No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence:
+and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for
+dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered
+rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.
+
+[Sidenote: Grenville and the Colonies.]
+
+The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same
+obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important
+struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for
+their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement
+and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at
+the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a
+statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of
+Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry,
+again reopened the question. Grenville had fully concurred in a part at
+least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a
+strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On
+one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or
+Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from
+America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of
+independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an
+issue, and in the end--as it was hoped--bring about a reconstruction of
+their democratic institutions and a closer union of the colonies under
+British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative
+and constitutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in
+the institutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne
+the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial
+charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the
+payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he
+desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as
+their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and
+it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial
+plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external
+and an internal revenue from America.
+
+[Sidenote: The Colonies and the Stamp Act.]
+
+If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd
+than that of Bute. Bute had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in
+the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at
+collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even
+this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were
+cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small
+hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a
+dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a
+legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the
+relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of
+her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference
+between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual
+citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state
+which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound
+together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to
+it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To
+Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as
+completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any
+difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial
+legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent.
+What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not
+strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but
+corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have
+been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of
+the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading
+company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will
+of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were
+granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their
+legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as
+completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its
+franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in
+matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial
+Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above
+all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was
+borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted
+its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to
+acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very
+nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.
+No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament
+over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as
+absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law
+Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this;
+for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without
+a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be
+applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact
+of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted
+from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they
+would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had
+imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not
+to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very
+circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into
+being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances.
+No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status
+of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man
+of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being
+represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of
+self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise
+such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of
+inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of
+Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of
+self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.
+But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took
+his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the
+Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such
+share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of
+political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom
+but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's
+fellow-subjects.
+
+[Sidenote: The theory of the colonists.]
+
+The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of
+such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national,
+England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might
+allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life
+of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last
+hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration
+in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their
+legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the
+mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised
+without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother
+country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing
+their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet
+raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous
+contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in
+place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the
+sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.
+The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by
+a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports
+and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies,
+and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen
+like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville
+however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of
+his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid
+enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures
+seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only
+showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the
+restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of
+retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its
+aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no
+protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was
+strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the
+existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would
+probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that
+of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stamp Act passed.]
+
+What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a
+population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to
+guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the
+Minister--his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds
+of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp
+duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected--was of another order from
+his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of
+the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual
+relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another
+spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand.
+America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The
+representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies,
+and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a
+stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts--first as ever in her
+protest--marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade
+are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand
+banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost."
+The distinction was accepted by the assembly of every colony; and it was
+with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who
+had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high
+repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In
+England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the
+colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal
+belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were
+many who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of
+trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no
+work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so
+delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that,
+boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should
+voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right
+to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be
+extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main
+willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin
+could give no assurance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation,
+and without such an assurance Grenville had no mind to change his plans.
+In February 1765 the Stamp Act was passed through both Houses with less
+opposition than a turnpike bill.
+
+At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When
+the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said
+a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so
+great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have
+solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have
+borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position
+where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was
+hardly passed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, by the
+exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel
+which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George
+again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to
+free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to
+Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the
+whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a
+condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy
+in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of
+a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the
+family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new
+ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it
+brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's
+brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family
+ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great
+Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons,
+nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to
+have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his
+brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him
+in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry
+of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now
+Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. His refusal to
+join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary
+strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold
+his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed
+in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he
+returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to
+the main body of the Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: The Rockingham Ministry.]
+
+The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis
+of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had
+been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned
+as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the
+Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the
+Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of
+the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and
+lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid,
+and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the
+great Whig nobles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's
+power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765
+was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham
+looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt
+and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the
+Colonies, and it was probably through this difference of sentiment that
+Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he
+made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered
+preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from
+America which made this attitude impossible. Vigorously as he had
+struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the
+Colonies, when they were passed, but that of submission. But submission
+was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New
+England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper;
+and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and
+Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it
+was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its assembly was the
+first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle
+with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts.
+Massachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but
+proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to
+provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress
+met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and America.]
+
+The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no
+New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its
+members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its assembly reached
+England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose
+members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But
+Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the
+Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in
+the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called
+Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar
+scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from
+Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the
+constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was
+denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this
+kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is
+obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that
+America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the
+feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have
+been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a
+looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the
+absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this
+moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.
+In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition,
+and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should
+return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his
+words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had
+passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were
+opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt
+themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on
+the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal
+feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt
+must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up
+his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen,
+co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which
+the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and
+that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker
+of the day.
+
+[Sidenote: Edmund Burke.]
+
+At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of
+his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor
+and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the
+friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to
+give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and
+literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to
+politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered
+Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp
+Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the
+scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which
+loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of
+the characteristics of his oratory--its passionate ardour, its poetic
+fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in
+which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant
+word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an
+eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's
+clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for
+the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have
+learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at
+a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical
+cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical
+coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was
+poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour
+from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a
+great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose
+institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that
+to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial
+scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which
+was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His
+temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not
+from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order,
+and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every
+institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he
+discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the
+social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be
+risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had
+cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he
+said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement
+may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch
+so complicated a machine."
+
+[Sidenote: Burke and politics.]
+
+Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its
+influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great
+question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served
+him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those
+natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities
+into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their
+actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces
+which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of
+Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical
+basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for
+statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it
+was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to
+time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the
+varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other
+words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual
+state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition
+of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But
+nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a
+state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a
+defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was
+thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution
+of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was
+to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the
+great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left
+him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to
+the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest
+man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption
+of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in
+defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in
+England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
+against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the
+Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work
+seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of
+timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert
+Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement
+of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might
+come from particular or from special reforms.
+
+It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His
+political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party
+must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from
+popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig
+families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular
+tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as
+mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and
+insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the
+representative of forces before which the actual method of government
+must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary
+isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real
+representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was
+drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should
+make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a
+reform, the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of
+political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his
+day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with
+horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was
+leading England on in the path of change.
+
+[Sidenote: Repeal of the Stamp Act.]
+
+At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the
+Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's
+tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing
+with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the
+Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim
+to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His
+genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country,
+the time had come when the union between England and its children across
+the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was
+wholly unintelligible to the mass of the Whigs or the ministry. They
+were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the
+Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the
+English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle
+absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt
+offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were
+driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledgement of the
+policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp
+Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of
+colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first
+brought in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the
+Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no
+doubt to reassure the followers of the ministry as well as their
+opponents, for in the assertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to
+which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a
+public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the
+Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his
+fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in
+a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's
+lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in
+the Lords. The passing of the declaratory act was followed by the
+introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of
+the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George
+himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.
+
+[Sidenote: The Chatham Ministry.]
+
+As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose
+resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which
+waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the multitude reverently
+uncovered their heads and followed him home with blessings. It was the
+noblest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England"
+more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice
+had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though
+but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies.
+Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid
+found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first
+man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's
+hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced
+George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and
+the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve
+in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the
+political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread
+of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before.
+Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly
+inadmissible, was passed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the
+House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely
+Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he
+showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to
+nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham
+stood coldly aside, some of his fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's
+offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the
+young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great
+Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but
+on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the
+people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as
+would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time.
+Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such
+a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to
+strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the
+"king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay
+really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command
+which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity
+indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when
+it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham.
+The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the
+public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him
+to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title
+of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown
+itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had
+never ceased to hang around him, and it had been only at rare intervals
+that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of
+Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun
+the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy.
+The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the
+close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to
+a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we
+are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of
+Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and
+for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the
+Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the
+moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards
+Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from
+Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the
+Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks
+of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little
+effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend
+at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and
+when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year
+his power remained unshaken.
+
+
+END OF VOL. VII.
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     council  Councils  Councillor  Councillors
+     counsel  counsels  counselled  counsellor  counsellors
+
+     ascendant         ascendency
+     burdens           burthens
+     Luxembourg        Luxemburg
+     recognised        recognized
+
+Variations in hyphenation have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     arm-chair             armchair
+     re-organization       reorganization
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 35: success or defeat must be{original has by} equally
+     fatal
+
+     Page 155: or dependents{original has dependants} wringing
+     bread
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME VII (OF 8)***
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume VII (of
+8), by John Richard Green</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8)</p>
+<p>       The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767</p>
+<p>Author: John Richard Green</p>
+<p>Release Date: April 30, 2008  [eBook #25261]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME VII (OF 8)***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="notebox">
+<p class="noindent">Transcriber's note:<br />
+<br />Click on the page number in the left margin to see an image of the original
+page.<br />
+<br />
+The index for the entire 8 volume
+set of <i>History of the English People</i> was located
+at the end of Volume VIII. For ease in
+accessibility, it has been removed and produced as a
+separate volume
+(<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533">http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533</a>).<br />
+<br />
+More notes <a href="#TN">follow</a> the text.</p>
+</div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-i" id="Page_7-i"></a><a href="./images/i.png">7-i</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<span class="main">HISTORY<br />
+OF<br />
+THE ENGLISH PEOPLE</span>
+
+
+<div class="byline">BY<br />
+
+<span class="docauthor">JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.<br />
+HONORARY FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<span class="sub">VOLUME VII</span>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>THE REVOLUTION, 1683-1760.</li>
+  <li> MODERN ENGLAND 1760-1767</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="byline">
+London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap" style="display: inline;">Ltd.</span><br />
+NEW YORK: MACMILLAN &amp; CO.<br />
+1896</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-ii" id="Page_7-ii"></a><a href="./images/ii.png">7-ii</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="titlepage">
+<ul>
+  <li><i>First Edition, 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.</i></li>
+  <li><i>Eversley Edition, 1896.</i></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="toc">
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-iii" id="Page_7-iii"></a><a href="./images/iii.png">7-iii</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="header">CONTENTS</div>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table summary="Table of contents" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
+<tr class="book">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">BOOK VIII<br />
+  THE REVOLUTION. 1683-1760</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr>
+  <td class="tdright" colspan="2">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER III</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdlsc" style="padding-right: 5em;">The Fall of the Stuarts. 1683-1714.</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_7-1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdlsc">The House of Hanover. 1714-1760.</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_7-147">147</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="book">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">BOOK IX<br />
+  MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td>
+</tr>
+<tr class="chapter">
+  <td class="tdlsc">England and its Empire. 1760-1767.</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_7-273">273</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-iv" id="Page_7-iv"></a><a href="./images/iv.png">7-iv</a>]</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-1" id="Page_7-1"></a><a href="./images/1.png">7-001</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="volume">
+<div class="book">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER III</li>
+  <li>THE FALL OF THE STUARTS</li>
+  <li>1683-1714</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The King's Triumph.</span></p>
+
+<p>In 1683 the Constitutional opposition which had held Charles so long in
+check lay crushed at his feet. A weaker man might easily have been led
+to play the mere tyrant by the mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his
+triumph. On the very day when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were
+dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood as in the blood of a martyr the
+University of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive
+obedience even to the worst of rulers was a part of religion. But
+Charles saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a mere
+tyranny. Ormond and the great Tory party which had rallied to his
+succour against the Exclusionists were still steady for parliamentary
+and legal government. The Church was as powerful as ever, and the
+mention of a renewal of the Indulgence to Nonconformists <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-2" id="Page_7-2"></a><a href="./images/2.png">7-002</a>]</span>had to be
+withdrawn before the opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore
+during the few years which remained to him to avoid the appearance of
+any open violation of public law. He suspended no statute. He imposed no
+tax by Royal authority. Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press
+and the Habeas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt
+to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to avoid
+rousing popular resistance, he moved coolly and resolutely forward on
+the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax pressed for energetic
+resistance to the aggressions of France, for the recall of Monmouth, or
+for the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other English
+statesman he found he had been duped. Now that his work was done he was
+suffered to remain in office but left without any influence in the
+government. Hyde, who was created Earl of Rochester, still remained at
+the head of the Treasury; but Charles soon gave more of his confidence
+to the supple and acute Sunderland, who atoned for his desertion of the
+king's cause in the heat of the Exclusion Bill by an acknowledgement of
+his error and a pledge of entire accordance with the king's will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">New Town Charters.</span></p>
+
+<p>The protests both of Halifax and of Danby, who was now released from the
+Tower, in favour of a return to Parliaments were treated with
+indifference, the provisions of the Triennial Act <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-3" id="Page_7-3"></a><a href="./images/3.png">7-003</a>]</span>were disregarded, and
+the Houses remained unassembled during the remainder of the king's
+reign. His secret alliance with France furnished Charles with the funds
+he immediately required, and the rapid growth of the customs through the
+increase of English commerce promised to give him a revenue which, if
+peace were preserved, would save him from any further need of fresh
+appeals to the Commons. Charles was too wise however to look upon
+Parliaments as utterly at an end: and he used this respite to secure a
+House of Commons which should really be at his disposal. The strength of
+the Country party had been broken by its own dissensions over the
+Exclusion Bill and by the flight or death of its more prominent leaders.
+Whatever strength it retained lay chiefly in the towns, whose
+representation was for the most part virtually or directly in the hands
+of their corporations, and whose corporations, like the merchant class
+generally, were in sympathy Whig. The towns were now attacked by writs
+of "quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why their charters
+should not be declared forfeited on the ground of abuse of their
+privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about a
+general surrender of municipal liberties; and the grant of fresh
+charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were carefully excluded from
+their corporations, placed the representation of the boroughs in the
+hands of the Crown. Against <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-4" id="Page_7-4"></a><a href="./images/4.png">7-004</a>]</span>active discontent Charles had long been
+quietly providing by the gradual increase of his Guards. The withdrawal
+of its garrison from Tangier enabled him to raise their force to nine
+thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this force, the
+nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve of six regiments
+which were maintained till they should be needed at home in the service
+of the United Provinces.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of Charles.</span></p>
+
+<p>But great as the danger really was it lay not so much in isolated acts
+of tyranny as in the character and purpose of Charles himself, and his
+death at the very moment of his triumph saved English freedom. He had
+regained his old popularity; and at the news of his sickness in the
+spring of 1685 crowds thronged the churches, praying that God would
+raise him up again to be a father to his people. But while his subjects
+were praying the one anxiety of the king was to die reconciled to the
+Catholic Church. His chamber was cleared, and a priest named Huddleston,
+who had saved his life after the battle of Worcester, received his
+confession and administered the last sacraments. Not a word of this
+ceremony was whispered when the nobles and bishops were recalled into
+the royal presence, and Charles though steadily refusing the communion
+which Bishop Ken offered him accepted the bishop's absolution. All the
+children of his mistresses save Monmouth were gathered round the bed,
+and Charles <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-5" id="Page_7-5"></a><a href="./images/5.png">7-005</a>]</span>commended them to his brother's protection by name. The
+scene which followed is described by a chaplain to one of the prelates
+who stood round the dying king. Charles "blessed all his children one by
+one, pulling them on to his bed; and then the bishops moved him, as he
+was the Lord's anointed and the father of his country, to bless them
+also and all that were there present, and in them the general body of
+his subjects. Whereupon, the room being full, all fell down upon their
+knees, and he raised himself in his bed and very solemnly blessed them
+all." The strange comedy was at last over. Charles died as he had lived:
+brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tortured as he was
+with pain, he begged the bystanders to forgive him for being so
+unconscionable a time in dying. One mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth,
+hung weeping over his bed. His last thought was of another mistress,
+Nell Gwynn. "Do not," he whispered to his successor ere he sank into a
+fatal stupor, "do not let poor Nelly starve!"</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James the Second.</span></p>
+
+<p>The death of Charles in February 1685 placed his brother James, the Duke
+of York, upon the throne. His character and policy were already well
+known. Of all the Stuart rulers James is the only one whose intellect
+was below mediocrity. His mind was dull and narrow though orderly and
+methodical; his temper dogged and arbitrary but sincere. His religious
+and political tendencies <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-6" id="Page_7-6"></a><a href="./images/6.png">7-006</a>]</span>had always been the same. He had always
+cherished an entire belief in the royal authority and a hatred of
+Parliaments. His main desire was for the establishment of Catholicism as
+the only means of ensuring the obedience of his people; and his old love
+of France was quickened by the firm reliance which he placed on the aid
+of Lewis in bringing about that establishment. But the secrecy in which
+his political action had as yet been shrouded and his long absence from
+England had hindered any general knowledge of his designs. His first
+words on his accession, his promise to "preserve this Government both in
+Church and State as it is now by law established," were welcomed by the
+whole country with enthusiasm. All the suspicions of a Catholic
+sovereign seemed to have disappeared. "We have the word of a King!" ran
+the general cry, "and of a King who was never worse than his word." The
+conviction of his brother's faithlessness in fact stood James in good
+stead. He was looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubborn, and despotic
+in heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of being false. Above
+all, incredible as such a belief may seem now, he was believed to be
+keenly alive to the honour of his country and resolute to free it from
+foreign dependence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>From the first indeed there were indications that James understood his
+declaration in a different sense from the nation. He was resolved to
+make <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-7" id="Page_7-7"></a><a href="./images/7.png">7-007</a>]</span>no disguise of his own religion; the chapel in which he had
+hitherto worshipped with closed doors was now thrown open and the king
+seen at Mass. He regarded attacks on his faith as attacks on himself,
+and at once called on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
+London to hinder all preaching against Catholicism as a part of their
+"duty" to their king. He made no secret of his resolve to procure
+freedom of worship for his co-religionists while still refusing it to
+the rest of the Nonconformists, whom he hated as republicans and
+Exclusionists. All was passed over however in the general confidence. It
+was necessary to summon a Parliament, for the royal revenue ceased with
+the death of Charles; but the elections, swayed at once by the tide of
+loyalty and by the command of the boroughs which the surrender of their
+charters had given to the Crown, sent up in May a House of Commons in
+which James found few members who were not to his mind. His appointment
+indeed of Catholic officers in the army was already exciting murmurs;
+but these were hushed as James repeated his pledge of maintaining the
+established order both in Church and State. The question of religious
+security was waived at a hint of the royal displeasure, and a revenue of
+nearly two millions was granted to the king for life.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Argyle's Rising.</span></p>
+
+<p>All that was wanted to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism
+was supplied by a rebellion in the North, and by another under Monmouth
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-8" id="Page_7-8"></a><a href="./images/8.png">7-008</a>]</span>the West. The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the
+Restoration to the house of Argyle. The great Marquis indeed had been
+brought to the block at the king's return. His son, the Earl of Argyle,
+had been unable to save himself even by a life of singular caution and
+obedience from the ill-will of the vile politicians who governed
+Scotland. He was at last convicted of treason in 1682 on grounds at
+which every English statesman stood aghast. "We should not hang a dog
+here," Halifax protested, "on the grounds on which my Lord Argyle has
+been sentenced to death." The Earl escaped however to Holland, and lived
+peaceably there during the last six years of the reign of Charles.
+Monmouth had found the same refuge at the Hague, where a belief in the
+king's love and purpose to recall him secured him a kindly reception
+from William of Orange. But the accession of James was a death-blow to
+the hopes of the Duke, while it stirred the fanaticism of Argyle to a
+resolve of wresting Scotland from the rule of a Catholic king. The two
+leaders determined to appear in arms in England and the North, and the
+two expeditions sailed within a few days of each other. Argyle's attempt
+was soon over. His clan of the Campbells rose on the Earl's landing in
+Cantyre, but the country had been occupied for the king, and quarrels
+among the exiles who accompanied him robbed his effort of every chance
+of success. His <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-9" id="Page_7-9"></a><a href="./images/9.png">7-009</a>]</span>force scattered without a fight; and Argyle, arrested
+in an attempt to escape, was hurried on the 30th of June to a traitor's
+death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Monmouth's Rising.</span></p>
+
+<p>Monmouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the West
+was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme and
+demanded an effective parliamentary government as well as freedom of
+worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the farmers and traders of
+Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns of
+Somerset were true to the Whig cause, as they had been true to the cause
+of the Long Parliament; and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the
+popular enthusiasm showed itself in the flowers which wreathed every
+door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth with a
+Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand men, but
+whatever chance of success he might have had was lost by his assumption
+of the title of king, his right to which he had pledged himself hitherto
+to leave for decision to a free Parliament. The two Houses offered to
+support James with their lives and fortunes, and passed a bill of
+attainder against the Duke. The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary
+and of William, held stubbornly aloof; while the Guards and the
+regiments from Tangier hurried to the scene of the revolt and the
+militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol
+and Bath, Monmouth fell back <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-10" id="Page_7-10"></a><a href="./images/10.png">7-010</a>]</span>on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the
+night of the 6th of July on the king's forces as they lay encamped hard
+by on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners
+who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which
+crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by
+the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain
+effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the
+block.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Bloody Circuit.</span></p>
+
+<p>Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed
+into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the
+victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the
+Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
+were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was
+disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James
+was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the
+Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent
+temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which
+have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
+were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit,"
+while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight
+hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were
+whipped and imprisoned. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-11" id="Page_7-11"></a><a href="./images/11.png">7-011</a>]</span>The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers,
+even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons.
+What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some
+were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
+one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring
+a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned
+at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such
+as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of
+General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly
+been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away
+from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the
+chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and France.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to
+strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
+a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have
+seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thousand men;
+James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The employment of this
+force was to be at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy
+in foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs which James
+had at heart he could look for no consent from Parliament; and however
+his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-12" id="Page_7-12"></a><a href="./images/12.png">7-012</a>]</span>pride revolted against a dependence on France, it was only by
+French gold and French soldiers that he could hope to hold the
+Parliament permanently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he
+assured Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of
+Charles himself. "Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador,
+"that without his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be
+consulted, and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The
+pledge of subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and
+the promise was received with the strongest expressions of delight and
+servility. The hopes which the Prince of Orange had conceived from his
+father-in-law's more warlike temper were nipped by a refusal to allow
+him to visit England. All the caution and reserve of Charles the Second
+in his dealings with France was set aside. Sunderland, the favourite
+Minister of the new king as he had been of the old, not only promised
+during the session to avoid the connection with Spain and Holland which
+the Parliament was known to desire, but "to throw aside the mask and
+openly break with them as soon as the royal revenue is secured." The
+support indeed which James needed was a far closer and firmer support
+than his brother had sought for. Lewis on the other hand trusted him as
+he could never trust Charles. His own bigotry understood the bigotry of
+the new sovereign. "The confirmation <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-13" id="Page_7-13"></a><a href="./images/13.png">7-013</a>]</span>of the King's authority and the
+establishment of religion," he wrote, "are our common interest"; and he
+promised that James should "find in his friendship all the resources
+which he can expect."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.</span></p>
+
+<p>Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger to
+English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of
+Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed warfare
+against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland; he declared war at
+this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the
+measure by which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism
+secured toleration and the free exercise of their worship for his
+Protestant subjects. It had been respected by Richelieu even in his
+victory over the Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin.
+But from the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its
+provisions, and his revocation of it at the end of 1685 was only the
+natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was
+followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva.
+Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung from
+their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from their mothers'
+arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the
+galleys. In spite of the royal edicts which forbade even flight to the
+victims of these horrible atrocities a hundred <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-14" id="Page_7-14"></a><a href="./images/14.png">7-014</a>]</span>thousand Protestants
+fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were
+filled with French exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their
+industry established in the fields east of London the silk trade of
+Spitalfields.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>But while Englishmen were looking with horror on these events in France
+James was taking advantage of the position in which as he believed they
+placed him. The news of the revocation drew from James expressions of
+delight. The rapid increase of the conversions to Catholicism which
+followed on the "dragonnades" raised in him hopes of as general an
+apostasy in his own dominions. His tone took a new haughtiness and
+decision. He admitted more Catholic officers into his fresh regiments.
+He dismissed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to consent to
+a plan for repealing the Test Act. He met the Parliament on its
+reassembling in November with a haughty declaration that whether legal
+or no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and
+with a demand of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of
+the Houses, their alarm for the Church, their dread of a standing army,
+was yet stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a
+single vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were
+redressed, and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal
+commissions on the ground that the continuance of the Catholic officers
+in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-15" id="Page_7-15"></a><a href="./images/15.png">7-015</a>]</span>their posts "may be taken to be a dispensing with that law without
+Act of Parliament." The Lords took a bolder tone; and the protest of the
+bishops against any infringement of the Test Act expressed by Bishop
+Compton of London was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Their desire
+for conciliation indeed was shown in an offer to confirm the existing
+officers in their posts by Act of Parliament, and even to allow fresh
+nominations of Catholics by the king under the same security. But James
+had no wish for such a compromise, and the Houses were at once
+prorogued.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Test set aside.</span></p>
+
+<p>The king resolved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain
+from Parliament. He remodelled the bench by dismissing four judges who
+refused to lend themselves to his plans; and in the June of 1686 their
+successors decided in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer
+in the army, that a royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the
+Test Act. The principle laid down by the judges "that it is a privilege
+inseparably connected with the sovereignty of the King to dispense with
+penal laws, and that according to his own judgment," was applied by
+James with a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint.
+Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices without stint,
+and four Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council. The
+laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the realm or the
+open exercise of Catholic <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-16" id="Page_7-16"></a><a href="./images/16.png">7-016</a>]</span>worship were set at nought. A gorgeous chapel
+was opened in the palace of St. James for the use of the king.
+Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb
+in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the
+Savoy. The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have startled
+a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on an obstinacy
+which never gave way; and a riot which took place on the opening of a
+Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the establishment of a camp
+of thirteen thousand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Scotland and Ireland.</span></p>
+
+<p>The course which James intended to follow in England was shown indeed by
+the course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland he acted
+as a pure despot. At the close of Charles's reign the extreme
+Covenanters or "wild Whigs" of the Western shires had formally renounced
+their allegiance to a "prelatical" king. A smouldering revolt spread
+over the country that was only held in check by the merciless cruelties
+with which the royal troops avenged the "rabbling of priests" and the
+outrages committed by the Whigs on the more prominent persecutors. Such
+a revolt threw strength into the hands of the government by rallying to
+its side all who were bent on public order, and this strength was
+doubled by the landing and failure of Argyle. The Scotch Parliament
+granted excise and customs not to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-17" id="Page_7-17"></a><a href="./images/17.png">7-017</a>]</span>king only but to his successors,
+while it confirmed the Acts which established religious conformity. But
+James was far from being satisfied with a loyalty which made no
+concession to the "king's religion." He placed the government of
+Scotland in the hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had embraced
+his own faith, and put a Catholic in command of the Castle of Edinburgh.
+The drift of these measures was soon seen. The Scotch Parliament had as
+yet been the mere creature of the Crown, but servile as were its members
+there was a point at which their servility stopped. When James boldly
+required them to legalize the toleration of Catholics they refused to
+pass such an Act. It was in vain that the king tempted them to consent
+by the offer of a free trade with England. "Shall we sell our God?" was
+the indignant reply. James at once ordered the Scotch judges to treat
+all laws against Catholics as null and void, and his orders were obeyed.
+In Ireland his policy threw off even the disguise of law. Catholics were
+admitted by the king's command to the council and to civil offices. A
+Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was put at the head of the army, and set
+instantly about its re-organization by cashiering Protestant officers
+and by admitting two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The High Commission.</span></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile in England James was passing from the mere attempt to secure
+freedom for his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-18" id="Page_7-18"></a><a href="./images/18.png">7-018</a>]</span>fellow-religionists to a bold and systematic attack
+upon the Church. He had at the outset of his reign forbidden the clergy
+to preach against "the king's religion"; and ordered the bishops to act
+upon this prohibition. But no steps were taken by them to carry out this
+order; and the pulpits of the capital soon rang with controversial
+sermons. For such a sermon James now called on Compton, the Bishop of
+London, to suspend Dr. Sharp, the rector of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields.
+Compton answered that as judge he was ready to examine into the case if
+brought before him according to law. To James the matter was not one of
+law but of prerogative. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
+weapon providentially left to him for undoing the work which it had
+enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been
+used to turn the Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under
+James it might be used to turn the Church back again from Protestant to
+Catholic. The High Commission indeed which had enforced this supremacy
+had been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this Act
+had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration. But it was
+thought possible to evade this Act by omitting from the instructions on
+which the Commission acted the extraordinary powers and jurisdictions by
+which its predecessor had given offence. With this reserve, seven
+commissioners were appointed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-19" id="Page_7-19"></a><a href="./images/19.png">7-019</a>]</span>in the summer of 1686 for the government
+of the Church with the Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, at their head. The
+first blow of the Commission was at the Bishop of London whose refusal
+to suspend Sharp was punished by his own suspension. But the pressure of
+the Commission only drove the clergy to a bolder defiance of the royal
+will. The legality of the Commission and of its proceedings was denied.
+Not even the Pope, it was said, had claimed such rights over the conduct
+and jurisdiction of English bishops as were claimed by the king. The
+prohibition of attacks on the "king's religion" was set at nought.
+Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the
+two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put
+themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered
+pamphlets and tracts from every printing press.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the Tories.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof and
+predicted the inevitable reaction which the king's course must bring
+about, or that Rome itself counselled greater moderation. James was
+infatuated with what seemed to be the success of his enterprises. He
+looked on the opposition he experienced as due to the influence of the
+High Church Tories who had remained in power since the reaction of 1681,
+and these he determined "to chastise." The Duke of Queensberry, the
+leader of this party in Scotland, was driven from office. Tyrconnell, as
+we have seen, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-20" id="Page_7-20"></a><a href="./images/20.png">7-020</a>]</span>was placed as a check on Ormond in Ireland. In England
+James resolved to show the world that even the closest ties of blood
+were as nothing to him if they conflicted with the demands of his faith.
+His earlier marriage with Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, bound
+both the Chancellor's sons to his fortunes; and on his accession he had
+sent his elder brother-in-law, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as
+Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of
+Rochester, who had long been a minister under Charles the Second, to the
+post of Lord Treasurer. But the sons of Hyde were as staunch to the old
+Cavalier doctrines of Church and State as Hyde himself. Rochester
+therefore was told in the opening of 1687 that the king could not safely
+entrust so great a charge to any one who did not share his sentiments on
+religion, and on his refusal to abandon his faith he was deprived of the
+White Staff. His brother Clarendon shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord
+Bellasys, became First Lord of the Treasury, which was again put into
+commission after Rochester's removal; and another Catholic, Lord
+Arundell, became Lord Privy Seal; while Father Petre, a Jesuit, was
+called to the Privy Council.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Tory Nobles.</span></p>
+
+<p>The dismissal of Rochester sprang mainly from a belief that with such a
+minister James would fail to procure from the Parliament that freedom
+for Catholics which he was bent on establishing. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-21" id="Page_7-21"></a><a href="./images/21.png">7-021</a>]</span>It was in fact a
+declaration that on this matter none in the king's service must oppose
+the king's will, and it was followed up by the dismissal of one official
+after another who refused to aid in the repeal of the Test Act. But acts
+like these were of no avail against the steady growth of resistance. If
+the great Tory nobles were staunch for the Crown, they were as resolute
+Englishmen in their hatred of mere tyranny as the Whigs themselves.
+James gave the Duke of Norfolk the sword of State to carry before him as
+he went to Mass. The Duke stopped at the Chapel door. "Your father would
+have gone further," said the king. "Your Majesty's father was the better
+man," replied the Duke, "and he would not have gone so far." The young
+Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce into the Presence Chamber the
+Papal Nuncio, who was now received in State at Windsor in the teeth of a
+statute which forbade diplomatic relations with Rome. "I am advised,"
+Somerset answered, "that I cannot obey your Majesty without breaking the
+law." "Do you not know that I am above the law?" James asked angrily.
+"Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He was dismissed
+from his post, but the spirit of resistance spread fast. In spite of the
+king's letters the governors of the Charterhouse, who numbered among
+them some of the greatest English nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to
+the benefits of the foundation. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-22" id="Page_7-22"></a><a href="./images/22.png">7-022</a>]</span>most devoted loyalists began to
+murmur when James demanded apostasy as a proof of their loyalty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and the Nonconformists.</span></p>
+
+<p>He had in fact to abandon at last all hope of bringing the Church or the
+Tories over to his will, and in the spring of 1687 he turned, as Charles
+had turned, to the Nonconformists. He published in April a Declaration
+of Indulgence which suspended the operation of the penal laws against
+Nonconformists and Catholics alike, and of every Act which imposed a
+test as a qualification for office in Church or State. A hope was
+expressed that this measure would be sanctioned by Parliament when it
+was suffered to reassemble. The temptation to accept the Indulgence was
+great, for since the fall of Shaftesbury persecution had fallen heavily
+on the Protestant dissidents, and we can hardly wonder that the
+Nonconformists wavered for a time or that numerous addresses of thanks
+were presented to James. But the great body of them, and all the more
+venerable names among them, remained true to the cause of freedom.
+Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan all refused an Indulgence which could only be
+purchased by the violent overthrow of the law. It was plain that the
+only mode of actually securing the end which James had in view was to
+procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself. It was to this
+that the king's dismissal of Rochester and other ministerial changes had
+been directed; but James <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-23" id="Page_7-23"></a><a href="./images/23.png">7-023</a>]</span>found that the temper of the existing Houses,
+so far as he could test it, remained absolutely opposed to his project.
+In July therefore he dissolved the Parliament, and summoned a new one.
+In spite of the support he might expect from the Nonconformists in the
+elections, he knew that no free Parliament could be brought to consent
+to the repeal. The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish creations of
+new peers. "Your troop of horse," Lord Sunderland told Churchill, "shall
+be called up into the House of Lords." But it was a harder matter to
+secure a compliant House of Commons. No effort however was spared. The
+Lord-Lieutenants were directed to bring about such a "regulation" of the
+governing body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates
+pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in
+their county as to his vote. Half of them at once refused to comply, and
+a string of great nobles&mdash;the Lords of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset,
+Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Abergavenny, Thanet, Northampton, and
+Abingdon&mdash;were dismissed from their Lord-Lieutenancies. The justices
+when questioned simply replied that they would vote according to their
+consciences, and send members to Parliament who would protect the
+Protestant religion. After repeated "regulations" it was found
+impossible to form a corporate body which would return representatives
+willing to comply with the royal will. All thought of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-24" id="Page_7-24"></a><a href="./images/24.png">7-024</a>]</span>Parliament had
+to be abandoned; and even the most bigoted courtiers counselled
+moderation at this proof of the stubborn opposition which James must
+prepare to encounter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading
+classes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Attack on the Universities.</span></p>
+
+<p>Estranged as he was from the whole body of the nobles and gentry it
+remained for James to force the clergy also into an attitude of
+resistance. Even the tyranny of the Commission had failed to drive into
+open opposition men who had been preaching Sunday after Sunday the
+doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings. But James who had
+now finally abandoned all hope of winning the aid of the Church in his
+project cared little for passive obedience. He looked on the refusal of
+the clergy to support his plans as freeing him from the pledge he had
+given to maintain the Church as established by law; and he resolved to
+attack it in the great institutions which had till now been its
+strongholds. To secure the Universities for Catholicism was to seize the
+only training schools which the English clergy possessed as well as the
+only centres of higher education which existed for the English gentry.
+It was on such a seizure however that James's mind was set. Little
+indeed was done with Cambridge. A Benedictine monk, who presented
+himself with royal letters recommending him for the degree of a Master
+of Arts, was rejected on his refusal to sign the Articles; and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-25" id="Page_7-25"></a><a href="./images/25.png">7-025</a>]</span>Vice-Chancellor was summoned before the Privy Council and punished for
+his rejection by deprivation from office. But a violent and obstinate
+attack was directed against Oxford. The Master of University College,
+Obadiah Walker, who declared himself a Catholic convert, was authorized
+to retain his post in defiance of the law. A Roman Catholic named Massey
+was presented by the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen was
+the wealthiest College in the University; and James in 1687 recommended
+one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even qualified by
+statute for the office, to its vacant headship. The Fellows
+remonstrated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough,
+one of their own number, as their President. The Ecclesiastical
+Commission declared the election void; and James, shamed out of his
+first candidate, recommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a
+Catholic in heart and the meanest of his courtiers. The Fellows however
+pleaded that Hough was already chosen, and they held stubbornly to their
+legal head. It was in vain that the king visited Oxford, summoned them
+to his presence, and rated them as they knelt before him like
+schoolboys. "I am King," he said; "I will be obeyed! Go to your chapel
+this instant, and elect the Bishop! Let those who refuse look to it, for
+they shall feel the whole weight of my hand!" It was seen that to give
+Magdalen as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-26" id="Page_7-26"></a><a href="./images/26.png">7-026</a>]</span>well as Christ Church into Catholic hands was to turn
+Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the king's threats were
+disregarded. But they were soon carried out. A special Commission
+visited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set aside his
+appeal to the law, burst open the door of his president's house to
+install Parker in his place, and on their refusal to submit deprived the
+Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows was followed
+on a like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who died immediately
+after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman Catholic bishop <i>in
+partibus</i>, named Bonaventure Gifford, and twelve Roman Catholics were
+admitted to fellowships in a single day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and William.</span></p>
+
+<p>With peers, gentry, and clergy in dogged opposition the scheme of
+wresting a repeal of the Test Act from a new Parliament became
+impracticable, and without this&mdash;as James well knew&mdash;his system of
+Indulgence, even if he was able to maintain it so long, must end with
+his death and the accession of a Protestant sovereign. It was to provide
+against such a defeat of his designs that he stooped to ask the aid of
+William of Orange. Ever since his accession William had followed his
+father-in-law's course with a growing anxiety. For while England was
+seething with the madness of the Popish Plot and of the royalist
+reaction the great European struggle which occupied the whole mind of
+the Prince had been drawing nearer and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-27" id="Page_7-27"></a><a href="./images/27.png">7-027</a>]</span>nearer. The patience of Germany
+indeed was worn out by the ceaseless aggressions of Lewis, and in 1686
+its princes had bound themselves at Augsburg to resist all further
+encroachments on the part of France. From that moment war became
+inevitable, and in such a war William had always held that the aid of
+England was essential to success. But his efforts to ensure English aid
+had utterly failed. James, as William soon came to know, had renewed his
+brother's secret treaty with France; and even had this been otherwise
+his quarrel with his people would of itself have prevented him from
+giving any aid in a struggle abroad. The Prince could only silently look
+on with a desperate hope that James might yet be brought to a nobler
+policy. He refused all encouragement to the leading malcontents who were
+already calling on him to interfere in arms. On the other hand he
+declined to support the king in his schemes for the abolition of the
+Test. If he still cherished hopes of bringing about a peace between the
+king and people which might enable him to enlist England in the Grand
+Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before the Declaration of Indulgence. It
+was at this moment, at the end of May, that James called on him and Mary
+to declare themselves in favour of the abolition of the penal laws and
+of the Test. "Conscience, honour, and good policy," wrote James, "bind
+me to procure safety for the Catholics. I cannot <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-28" id="Page_7-28"></a><a href="./images/28.png">7-028</a>]</span>leave those who have
+remained faithful to the old and true religion subject to the oppression
+under which the laws place them."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The King's hopes.</span></p>
+
+<p>But simultaneously with the king's appeal letters of great import
+reached the Prince from the leading nobles. Some, like the Hydes, simply
+assured him of their friendship. The Bishop of London added assurances
+of support. Others, like Devonshire, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury,
+cautiously or openly warned the Prince against compliance with the
+king's demand. Lord Churchill announced the resolve of Mary's sister
+Anne to stand in any case by the cause of Protestantism. Danby, the
+leading representative of the great Tory party, told the Dutch
+ambassador plainly to warn William that if James was suffered to pursue
+his present course, and above all to gain control over the Parliament,
+he would leave the Catholic party strong enough at his death to threaten
+Mary's succession. The letters dictated William's answer. No one, he
+truly protested, loathed religious persecution more than he himself did,
+but in relaxing political disabilities James called on him to
+countenance an attack on his own religion. "I cannot," he ended, "concur
+in what your Majesty desires of me." William's refusal was justified, as
+we have seen, by the result of the efforts to assemble a Parliament
+favourable to the repeal of the Test. The wholesale dismissal of
+justices and Lord-Lieutenants through the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-29" id="Page_7-29"></a><a href="./images/29.png">7-029</a>]</span>summer of 1687 failed to
+shake the resolve of the counties. The "regulation" of their
+corporations by the displacing of their older members and the
+substitution of Nonconformists did little to gain the towns. The year
+1688 indeed had hardly opened when it was found necessary to adjourn the
+elections which had been fixed for February, and to make a fresh attempt
+to win a warmer support from the dissidents and from the country. For
+James clung with a desperate tenacity to the hope of finding a compliant
+Parliament. He knew, what was as yet unknown to the world, the fact that
+his Queen was with child. The birth of an heir would meet the danger
+which he looked for from the succession of William and Mary. But James
+was past middle life, and his death would leave his boy at the mercy of
+a Regency which could hardly fail to be composed of men who would undo
+the king's work and even bring up the young sovereign as a Protestant.
+His own security, as he thought, against such a course lay in the
+building up a strong Catholic party, in placing Catholics in the high
+offices of State, and in providing against their expulsion from these at
+his death by a repeal of the Test. But such a repeal could only be won
+from Parliament, and hopeless as the effort seemed James pressed
+doggedly on in his attempt to secure Houses who would carry out his
+will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Trial of the Bishops.</span></p>
+
+<p>The renewed Declaration of Indulgence which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-30" id="Page_7-30"></a><a href="./images/30.png">7-030</a>]</span>he issued in 1688 was not
+only intended to win the Nonconformists by fresh assurances of the
+king's sincerity, it was an appeal to the nation at large. At its close
+he promised to summon a Parliament in November, and he called on the
+electors to choose such members as would bring to a successful end the
+policy he had begun. His resolve, he said, was to make merit the one
+qualification for office and to establish universal liberty of
+conscience for all future time. It was in this character of a royal
+appeal that he ordered every clergyman to read the Declaration during
+divine service on two successive Sundays. Little time was given for
+deliberation; but little time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a
+man to be the instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was
+read in only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation
+flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all the country
+parsons refused to obey the royal orders, and the Bishops went with the
+rest of the clergy. A few days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop
+Sancroft called his suffragans together, and the six who were able to
+appear at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the king in which they
+declined to publish an illegal Declaration. "It is a standard of
+rebellion," James exclaimed, as the Primate presented the paper; and the
+resistance of the clergy was no sooner announced to him than he
+determined to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-31" id="Page_7-31"></a><a href="./images/31.png">7-031</a>]</span>wreak his vengeance on the prelates who had signed the
+protest. He ordered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of
+their sees; but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from
+obeying him. The Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for
+libel as an easier mode of punishment; and the Bishops, who refused to
+give bail, were committed on this charge to the Tower. They passed to
+their prison amidst the shouts of a great multitude; the sentinels knelt
+for their blessing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the
+garrison drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of the
+nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his obstinacy
+grew with the danger. "Indulgence," he said, "ruined my father"; and on
+the 29th of June the Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the
+King's Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of
+the Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of
+the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered the
+words "Not guilty" than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, and
+horsemen spurred along every road to carry over the country the news of
+the acquittal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The National discontent.</span></p>
+
+<p>James was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him, and as
+he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind him. "What is that?"
+he asked. "It is nothing," was the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-32" id="Page_7-32"></a><a href="./images/32.png">7-032</a>]</span>reply; "only the soldiers are glad
+that the Bishops are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled
+the king. The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm.
+The peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities,
+every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. And now
+his very soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to
+give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since his
+accession and to change the whole nature of his government. All show of
+legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, appointed by
+the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were no real officers
+in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were summoned members returned
+by officers such as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a
+Minister of the Crown or a Privy Councillor exercised any lawful
+authority. James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration
+of legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had
+done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only
+spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. "I will
+lose all," he said to the Spanish ambassador who counselled moderation;
+"I will lose all or win all." He broke up the camp at Hounslow and
+dispersed its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges
+who had favoured the acquittal of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-33" id="Page_7-33"></a><a href="./images/33.png">7-033</a>]</span>Bishops. He ordered the
+chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who had not
+read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke fruitlessly
+against a sullen resistance which met him on every side. Not a
+chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners
+were cowed into inaction by the temper of the nation. When the judges
+who had displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the
+gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the
+king's resolve to supply the place of the English troops whose temper
+proved unserviceable for his purposes by drafts from the Catholic army
+which Tyrconnell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at
+the Council-table protested against this measure; and six officers in a
+single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enrol the Irish
+recruits among their men. The ballad of "Lillibullero," a scurrilous
+attack on the Irish recruits, was sung from one end of England to the
+other.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Invitation.</span></p>
+
+<p>Wide however as the disaffection undoubtedly was the position of James
+seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of France. His army,
+whatever signs of discontent it might show, was still a formidable force
+of twenty thousand men. Scotland, disheartened by the failure of
+Argyle's rising, could give no such help as it gave to the Long
+Parliament. Ireland on the other hand was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-34" id="Page_7-34"></a><a href="./images/34.png">7-034</a>]</span>ready to throw a Catholic
+army in the king's support on the western coast. It was doubtful too if
+in England itself disaffection would turn into actual revolt. The Bloody
+Assize had left its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and Churchmen,
+angered as they were, were still hampered by their horror of rebellion
+and their doctrine of non-resistance. Above all the eyes of the nation
+rested on William and Mary. James was past middle age, and a few years
+must bring a Protestant successor and restore the reign of law. But in
+the midst of the struggle with the Church it was announced that the
+Queen was again with child. The news was received with general unbelief,
+for five years had passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena,
+and the unbelief passed into a general expectation of some imposture as
+men watched the joy of the Catholics and their confident prophecies that
+the child would be a boy. But, truth or imposture, it was plain that the
+appearance of a Prince of Wales must bring on a crisis. If the child
+turned out a boy, and as was certain was brought up a Catholic, the
+highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which
+England lay should go on for ever. The hesitation of the country was at
+an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred of
+subservience to France, answered for the Tories. Compton answered for
+the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-35" id="Page_7-35"></a><a href="./images/35.png">7-035</a>]</span>by the Declaration of
+Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion
+struggle, answered for the Nonconformists, who were satisfied with
+William's promise to procure them toleration, as well as for the general
+body of the Whigs. The announcement of the boy's birth on the 10th of
+June was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to William to
+intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the
+protection of the Protestant religion. The invitation was signed by
+Danby, Devonshire, and Compton, the representatives of the great parties
+whose long fight was hushed at last by a common danger, by two recent
+converts from the Catholic faith, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord
+Lumley, by Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and by Henry the brother
+of Algernon Sidney. It was carried to the Hague by Herbert, the most
+popular of English seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a
+refusal to vote against the Test.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and France.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Invitation called on the Prince of Orange to land with an army
+strong enough to justify those who signed it in rising in arms. An
+outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable, and either its success or
+defeat must be equally fatal to William should he refuse to put himself
+at its head. If the rebels were victorious, their resentment at his
+desertion of their cause in the hour of need would make Mary's
+succession impossible and probably <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-36" id="Page_7-36"></a><a href="./images/36.png">7-036</a>]</span>bring about the establishment of a
+Commonwealth. On the other hand the victory of the king would not only
+ruin English freedom and English Protestantism, but fling the whole
+weight of England in the contest for the liberties of Europe which was
+now about to open into the scale of France. From the opening of 1688 the
+signs of a mutual understanding between the English Court and the French
+had been unmistakeable. James had declared himself on the side of Lewis
+in the negotiations with the Empire which followed on the Treaty of
+Augsburg. He had backed Sweden in its threats of war against the Dutch.
+At the instigation of France he had recalled the English and Scotch
+troops in the service of the States. He had received supplies from Lewis
+to send an English fleet to the coast of Holland; and was at this moment
+supporting at Rome the French side in the quarrel over the Electorate of
+Cologne, a quarrel which rendered war inevitable. It was certain
+therefore that success at home would secure James's aid to France in the
+struggle abroad.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">William's Acceptance.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was this above all which decided the action of the Prince, for the
+ruling passion in William's heart was the longing to free Europe from
+the supremacy of France. It was this too which made his enterprise
+possible, for nothing but a sense of their own danger would have forced
+his opponents in Holland itself to assent to his expedition. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-37" id="Page_7-37"></a><a href="./images/37.png">7-037</a>]</span>Their
+assent however once gained, William strained all his resources as
+Admiral and Captain-General to gather a fleet and a sufficient force
+under pretext of defence against the English fleet which now appeared in
+the Channel, while Brandenburg promised to supply the place of the Dutch
+forces during their absence in England by lending the States nine
+thousand men. As soon as the news of these preparations reached England
+noble after noble made his way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury
+brought &pound;2000 towards the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell,
+the representative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the
+representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of
+Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by Lord
+Macclesfield, a well-known High Churchman. At home the Earls of Danby
+and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the
+North. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all was conducted,
+the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance
+in office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism, detected the
+preparations of William; and the sense that his master's ruin was at
+hand encouraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a
+pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself. James alone remained
+stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by
+the Prince of Orange, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-38" id="Page_7-38"></a><a href="./images/38.png">7-038</a>]</span>he believed that the threat of a French
+attack on Holland itself would render William's departure impossible. At
+the opening of September indeed Lewis declared himself aware of the
+meaning of the Dutch armaments and warned the States that he should look
+on an attack upon James as a war upon himself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James gives way.</span></p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for William so open an announcement of the union between
+England and France suited ill with the plans of James. He still looked
+forward to the coming Parliament, and the knowledge of a league with
+France was certain to make any Parliament reluctant to admit Catholics
+to a share in political life. James therefore roughly disavowed the act
+of Lewis, and William was able to continue his preparations. But even
+had no such disavowal come the threat of Lewis would have remained an
+empty one. In spite of the counsel of Louvois he looked on an invasion
+of Holland as likely to serve English interests rather than French and
+resolved to open the war by a campaign on the Rhine. In September his
+troops marched eastward, and the Dutch at once felt themselves secure.
+The States-General gave their public sanction to William's project, and
+the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news
+of war and of the diversion of the French forces to Germany no sooner
+reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to panic. By drafts
+from Scotland and Ireland he had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-39" id="Page_7-39"></a><a href="./images/39.png">7-039</a>]</span>mustered forty thousand men, but the
+temper of the troops robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France
+was now out of the question. There was nothing for it but to fall back,
+as Sunderland had for some time been advising him to fall back, on the
+older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party of the Church;
+and to win assent for his plans from the coming Parliament by an
+abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with
+which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his
+sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He
+dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he
+had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The
+Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City.
+The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of
+Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">William's Landing.</span></p>
+
+<p>Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was
+still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with
+France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange
+at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's
+counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to
+place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the
+succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-40" id="Page_7-40"></a><a href="./images/40.png">7-040</a>]</span>brought by
+advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again
+therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope
+of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end
+of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had
+hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange
+reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling
+of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion
+on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists
+and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the
+legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession
+to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the
+birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers
+who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds,
+beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of
+six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the
+5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong,
+entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been
+taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force,
+which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it
+consisted of the English and Scottish regiments which had remained in
+the service of the States in spite of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-41" id="Page_7-41"></a><a href="./images/41.png">7-041</a>]</span>their recall by the king. Its
+foreign divisions were representatives of the whole Protestant world.
+With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant
+corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The National Rising.</span></p>
+
+<p>The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet.
+William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner
+joined his forces. Though the king's fleet had failed to intercept the
+expedition it closed in from the Channel to prevent William's escape as
+soon as he had landed, while the king's army moved rapidly to encounter
+him in the field. But the pause was one of momentary surprise. Before a
+week had passed the nobles and squires of the west flocked to William's
+camp and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. The call of the
+king's forces to face the Prince in the south no sooner freed the
+northern parts of England from their presence than the insurrection
+broke out. Scotland threw off the royal rule. Danby, dashing at the head
+of a hundred horsemen into York, gave the signal for a rising. The York
+militia met his appeal with shouts of "A free Parliament and the
+Protestant religion"; peers and gentry flocked to his standard; and a
+march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devonshire who had
+mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties.
+Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-42" id="Page_7-42"></a><a href="./images/42.png">7-042</a>]</span>declared for
+a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of three
+hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. At Oxford townsmen and
+gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace and the forces he led with uproarious
+welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who
+advanced steadily on Salisbury where James had assembled his forces.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Flight of James.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the king's army, broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among
+its leaders, shrank from an engagement and fell back in disorder at his
+approach. Its retreat was the signal for a general abandonment of the
+royal cause. The desertion of Lord Churchill, who had from the first
+made his support conditional on the calling of a Parliament, a step
+which the king still hesitated to take, was followed by that of so many
+other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to
+London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join Danby
+at Nottingham. "God help me," cried the wretched father, "for my own
+children have forsaken me!" His spirit was utterly broken by the sudden
+crash; and though he had promised to call the Houses together and
+despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with William on the
+terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had resolved on flight.
+Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him, would force on
+him concessions he could not endure; while flight would enable him to
+return <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-43" id="Page_7-43"></a><a href="./images/43.png">7-043</a>]</span>and regain his throne with the assistance of French forces. He
+only waited therefore for news of the escape of his wife and child on
+the 10th of December to make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy
+lay ready to carry him to France. Some rough fishermen however who took
+him for a Jesuit prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards
+brought him back in safety to London. His return revived the hopes of
+the Tories, who with Clarendon and Rochester at their head looked on the
+work of the Prince of Orange as done in the overthrow of the king's
+design of establishing a Catholic despotism, and who trusted that their
+system would be restored by a reconciliation of James with the Tory
+Parliament they expected to be returned. Halifax however, though he had
+long acted with the Tories, was too clear-sighted for hopes such as
+these. He had taken no part in the invitation or revolt, but now that
+the revolution was successful he pressed upon William the impossibility
+of carrying out a new system of government with such a sovereign as
+James. The Whigs, who had gone beyond hope of forgiveness, backed
+powerfully these arguments; and in spite of the pledges with which he
+had landed the Prince was soon as convinced of their wisdom as the
+Whigs. From this moment it was the policy of William and his advisers to
+further a flight which removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It
+would have been hard to depose James <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-44" id="Page_7-44"></a><a href="./images/44.png">7-044</a>]</span>had he remained, and perilous to
+keep him prisoner; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the
+silence of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James's filled the king
+with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which
+were almost openly placed at his disposal James a second time quitted
+London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Convention.</span></p>
+
+<p>Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking a new
+Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could all
+means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of panic and
+outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon
+reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in the capital
+provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more
+pressing needs of administration, and quietly resigned their authority
+into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which arose from the
+absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was
+got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body of
+all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the
+Second together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London. Both
+bodies requested William to take on himself the provisional government
+of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters inviting the electors of
+every town and county to send up representatives to a Convention which
+met on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-45" id="Page_7-45"></a><a href="./images/45.png">7-045</a>]</span>22nd of January 1689. In the new Convention both Houses were
+found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the
+fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provisional authority to
+the Prince of Orange. But with this step their unanimity ended. The
+Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which,
+illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in
+its favour every element of the opposition to James, the Churchman who
+was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right of a
+nation to depose its king, the Whig who held the theory of a contract
+between King and People. They voted that King James, "having endeavoured
+to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original
+contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits and other
+wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having
+withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and
+that the throne is thereby vacant." But in the Lords where the Tories
+were still in the ascendant the resolution was fiercely debated.
+Archbishop Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring
+about a forfeiture of the crown and that James still remained king, but
+that his tyranny had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the
+actual exercise of government and to entrust his functions to a Regency.
+The moderate Tories <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-46" id="Page_7-46"></a><a href="./images/46.png">7-046</a>]</span>under Danby's guidance admitted that James had
+ceased to be king but denied that the throne could be vacant, and
+contended that from the moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested
+in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax
+backed the Whig peers in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as
+it stood. The plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's
+scheme was adopted by a large majority.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Declaration of Rights.</span></p>
+
+<p>But both the Tory courses found a sudden obstacle in William. He
+declined to be Regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to be his
+wife's gentleman-usher. Mary on the other hand refused to accept the
+crown save in conjunction with her husband. The two declarations put an
+end to the question, and it was settled that William and Mary should be
+acknowledged as joint sovereigns but that the actual administration
+should rest with William alone. It had been agreed throughout however
+that before the throne was filled up the constitutional liberties of the
+subject must be secured. A Parliamentary Committee in which the most
+active member was John Somers, a young lawyer who had distinguished
+himself in the trial of the Bishops and who was destined to play a great
+part in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which after some
+alterations was adopted by the two Houses. The Declaration recited the
+misgovernment of James, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-47" id="Page_7-47"></a><a href="./images/47.png">7-047</a>]</span>his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords
+and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English
+subjects. It condemned as illegal his establishment of an ecclesiastical
+commission, and his raising of an army without Parliamentary sanction.
+It denied the right of any king to suspend or dispense with laws, as
+they had been suspended or dispensed with of late, or to exact money
+save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to
+petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and to a
+pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared the right of
+both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded securities for the free
+exercise of their religion by all Protestants, and bound the new
+sovereign to maintain the Protestant religion as well as the laws and
+liberties of the nation. "We do claim and insist on the premises," ran
+the Declaration, "as our undoubted rights and liberties; encouraged by
+the Declaration of his Highness the Prince, we have confidence that he
+will perfect the deliverance he has begun and will preserve our rights
+against all further injury." It ended by declaring the Prince and
+Princess of Orange King and Queen of England. The Declaration was
+presented to William and Mary on the 13th of February by the two Houses
+in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall, and at the close of its recital
+Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to receive
+the crown. William <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-48" id="Page_7-48"></a><a href="./images/48.png">7-048</a>]</span>accepted the offer in his own name and in that of
+his wife and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain the
+laws and to govern by advice of Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Lewis and the Revolution.</span></p>
+
+<p>But William's eyes were fixed less on England than on Europe. His
+expedition had had in his own eyes a European rather than an English
+aim, and in his acceptance of the crown he had been moved not so much by
+personal ambition as by the prospect which offered itself of firmly
+knitting together England and Holland, the two great Protestant powers
+whose fleets held the mastery of the sea. But the advance from such a
+union to the formation of the European alliance against France on which
+he was bent was a step that still had to be made. Already indeed his
+action in England had told decisively on the contest. The blunder of
+Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for his point of attack had
+been all but atoned for by the brilliant successes with which he opened
+the war. The whole country west of the Rhine fell at once into his
+hands; his armies made themselves masters of the Palatinate, and
+penetrated even to W&uuml;rtemberg. The hopes of the French king indeed had
+never been higher than at the moment when the arrival of James at St.
+Germain dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at once thrown back on
+a war of defence, and the brutal ravages which marked the retreat of his
+armies from the Rhine revealed the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-49" id="Page_7-49"></a><a href="./images/49.png">7-049</a>]</span>bitterness with which his pride
+stooped to the necessity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Grand Alliance.</span></p>
+
+<p>But his reception of James at St. Germain as still king of England gave
+fresh force to William's efforts. It was yet doubtful whether William
+would be able to bring England to a hearty co-operation in the struggle
+against French ambition. But whatever reluctance there might have been
+to follow him in an attack on France with the view of saving the
+liberties of Europe, the stoutest Tory had none in following him in such
+an attack when it meant simply self-defence against a French restoration
+of the Stuart king at the cost of English freedom. It was with universal
+approval that the English Government declared war against Lewis. It was
+soon followed in this step by Holland, and the two countries at once
+agreed to stand by one another in their struggle against France. But it
+was more difficult to secure the co-operation of the two branches of the
+House of Austria in Germany and Spain, reluctant as they were to join
+the Protestant powers in league against a Catholic king. Spain however
+was forced by Lewis into war, for he aimed at the Netherlands as his
+especial prey; and the court of Vienna at last yielded to the bait held
+out by Holland of a recognition of its claims to the Spanish succession.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Scotland and the Revolution.</span></p>
+
+<p>The adhesion of these powers in the spring of 1689 completed the Grand
+Alliance of the European <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-50" id="Page_7-50"></a><a href="./images/50.png">7-050</a>]</span>powers which William had designed; and the
+union of Savoy with the allies girt France in on every side save that of
+Switzerland with a ring of foes. Lewis was left without a single ally
+save the Turk; for though the Scandinavian kingdoms stood aloof from the
+confederacy of Europe their neutrality was unfriendly to him. But the
+energy and quickness of movement which sprang from the concentration of
+the power of France in a single hand still left the contest an equal
+one. The empire was slow to move; the court of Vienna was distracted
+with a war against the Turks; Spain was all but powerless; Holland and
+England were alone earnest in the struggle, and England could as yet
+give little aid in it. One English brigade indeed, formed from the
+regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on the Sambre, and
+distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been rewarded for his
+treason with the title of Earl of Marlborough, in a brisk skirmish with
+the enemy at Walcourt. But for the bulk of his forces William had as yet
+grave work to do at home. In England not a sword had been drawn for
+James. In Scotland his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and
+so far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and
+complete. No sooner had he called his troops southward to meet William's
+invasion than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western peasants were at
+once up in arms; and the Episcopalian clergy, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-51" id="Page_7-51"></a><a href="./images/51.png">7-051</a>]</span>who had been the
+instruments of the Stuart misgovernment ever since the Restoration, were
+rabbled and driven from their parsonages in every parish. The news of
+these disorders forced William to act, though he was without a show of
+legal authority over Scotland. On the advice of the Scotch Lords present
+in London he ventured to summon a Convention similar to that which had
+been summoned in England, and on his own responsibility to set aside the
+laws passed by the "Drunken Parliament" of the Restoration which
+excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Parliament. This Convention
+resolved that James had forfeited the crown by misgovernment, and
+offered it to William and Mary. The offer was accompanied by a Claim of
+Right framed on the model of the Declaration of Rights to which the two
+sovereigns had consented in England, but closing with a demand for the
+abolition of Prelacy. Both crown and claim were accepted, and the
+arrival of the Scotch regiments which William had brought from Holland
+gave strength to the new Government.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Killiecrankie.</span></p>
+
+<p>Its strength was to be roughly tested. On the revolt of the capital John
+Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of the Western
+Covenanters had been rewarded with high command in the Scotch army and
+with the title of Viscount Dundee, withdrew with a few troopers from
+Edinburgh to the Highlands and appealed to the clans. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-52" id="Page_7-52"></a><a href="./images/52.png">7-052</a>]</span>In the Highlands
+nothing was known of English government or misgovernment: all that the
+Revolution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of the House of
+Argyle. To many of the clans it meant the restoration of lands which had
+been granted them on the Earl's attainder; and the zeal of the
+Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Camerons, who were as ready to join Dundee
+in fighting the Campbells and the Government which upheld them as they
+had been ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before,
+was quickened by a reluctance to disgorge their spoil. They were soon in
+arms. William's Scotch regiments under General Mackay were sent to
+suppress the rising; but as they climbed the pass of Killiecrankie on
+the 27th of July 1689 Dundee charged them at the head of three thousand
+clansmen and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. His death in the
+moment of victory broke however the only bond which held the Highlanders
+together, and in a few weeks the host which had spread terror through
+the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the next summer Mackay was able
+to build the strong post of Fort William in the very heart of the
+disaffected country, and his offers of money and pardon brought about
+the submission of the clans.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Massacre of Glencoe.</span></p>
+
+<p>The work of peace was sullied by an act of cruel treachery the memory of
+which still lingers in the minds of men. Sir John Dalrymple, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-53" id="Page_7-53"></a><a href="./images/53.png">7-053</a>]</span>Master
+of Stair, in whose hands the government of Scotland at this time mainly
+rested, had hoped that a refusal of the oath of allegiance would give
+grounds for a war of extermination and free Scotland for ever from its
+dread of the Highlanders. He had provided for the expected refusal by
+orders of a ruthless severity. "Your troops," he wrote to the officer in
+command, "will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Locheil's
+lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your powers shall be large
+enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with
+prisoners." But his hopes were disappointed by the readiness with which
+the clans accepted the offers of the Government. All submitted in good
+time save Macdonald of Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking of the
+oath till six days after the latest date fixed by the proclamation.
+Foiled in his larger hopes of destruction Dalrymple seized eagerly on
+the pretext given by Macdonald, and an order "for the extirpation of
+that sect of robbers" was laid before William and received the royal
+signature. "The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton who
+undertook it, "must be secret and sudden." The troops were chosen from
+among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, and
+quartered peacefully among the Macdonalds for twelve days till all
+suspicion of their errand disappeared. At daybreak on the 13th of
+February 1692 they fell on their hosts, and in a few <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-54" id="Page_7-54"></a><a href="./images/54.png">7-054</a>]</span>moments thirty of
+the clansfolk lay dead on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm,
+escaped to the mountains to perish for the most part of cold and hunger.
+"The only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair, when the news
+reached him, "is that any got away."</p>
+
+<p>But whatever horror the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in later days few
+save Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace of the Highlands
+enabled the work of reorganization to go on quietly at Edinburgh. In
+accepting the Claim of Right with its repudiation of Prelacy William had
+in effect restored the Presbyterian Church to which nine-tenths of the
+Lowland Scotchmen clung, and its restoration was accompanied by the
+revival of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith and by the
+passing of an Act which abolished lay patronage. Against the Toleration
+Act which the king proposed the Scotch Parliament stood firm. But though
+the measure failed the king was as firm in his purpose as the
+Parliament. So long as he reigned, William declared in memorable words,
+there should be no persecution for conscience' sake. "We never could be
+of that mind that violence was suited to the advancing of true religion,
+nor do we intend that our authority shall ever be a tool to the
+irregular passions of any party."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Irish Rising.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was not in Scotland however but in Ireland that James and Lewis hoped
+to arrest William's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-55" id="Page_7-55"></a><a href="./images/55.png">7-055</a>]</span>progress. Ireland had long been the object of
+special attention on the part of James. In the middle of his reign, when
+his chief aim was to provide against the renewed depression of his
+fellow-religionists at his death by any Protestant successor, he had
+resolved (if we may trust the statement of the French ambassador) to
+place Ireland in such a position of independence that she might serve as
+a refuge for his Catholic subjects. It was with a view to the success of
+this design that Lord Clarendon was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy
+and succeeded in the charge of the island by the Catholic Earl of
+Tyrconnell. The new governor, who was raised to a dukedom, went roughly
+to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. Every Judge, every
+Privy Councillor, every Mayor and Alderman of a borough, was required to
+be a Catholic and an Irishman. The Irish army, raised to the number of
+fifty thousand men and purged of its Protestant soldiers, was entrusted
+to Catholic officers. In a few months the English ascendency was
+overthrown, and the life and fortune of the English settlers were at the
+mercy of the natives on whom they had trampled since Cromwell's day. The
+king's flight and the agitation among the native Irish at the news
+spread panic therefore through the island. Another massacre was believed
+to be at hand; and fifteen hundred Protestant families, chiefly from the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-56" id="Page_7-56"></a><a href="./images/56.png">7-056</a>]</span>south, fled in terror over sea. The Protestants of the north on the
+other hand drew together at Enniskillen and Londonderry, and prepared
+for self-defence. The outbreak however was still delayed, and for two
+months Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government. But his aim was
+simply to gain time. He was at this very moment indeed inviting James to
+return to Ireland, and assuring him of his fidelity. To James this call
+promised the aid of an army which would enable him to help the Scotch
+rising and to effect a landing in England, while Lewis saw in it the
+means of diverting William from giving effectual aid to the Grand
+Alliance. A staff of French officers with arms, ammunition, and a supply
+of money was placed therefore at the service of the exiled king, and the
+news of his coming no sooner reached Dublin at the opening of 1689 than
+Tyrconnell threw off the mask. A flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle
+with the words embroidered on its folds "Now or Never." The signal
+called every Catholic to arms. The maddened Irishmen flung themselves on
+the plunder which their masters had left and in a few weeks havoc was
+done, the French envoy told Lewis, which it would take years to repair.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Siege of Londonderry.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was in this condition that James found Ireland when he landed at
+Kinsale. The rising of the natives had already baffled his plans. To him
+as to Lewis Ireland was simply a basis of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-57" id="Page_7-57"></a><a href="./images/57.png">7-057</a>]</span>operations against William,
+and whatever were their hopes of a future restoration of the soil to its
+older possessors both kings were equally anxious that no strife of races
+should at this moment interrupt their plans of an invasion of England
+with the fifty thousand soldiers that Tyrconnell was said to have at his
+disposal. But long ere James landed the war of races had already begun.
+To Tyrconnell indeed and the Irish leaders the king's plans were utterly
+distasteful. They had no wish for an invasion and conquest of England
+which would replace Ireland again in its position of dependence. Their
+policy was simply that of Ireland for the Irish, and the first step in
+such a policy was to drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in
+Ulster. Half of Tyrconnell's army therefore had already been sent
+against Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter
+behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns and destitute even of a
+ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen behind the wall made
+up for its weakness. They rejected with firmness the offers of James,
+who was still anxious to free his hands from a strife which broke his
+plans. They kept up their fire even when the neighbouring Protestants
+with their women and children were brutally driven under their walls and
+placed in the way of their guns. So fierce were their sallies, so
+crushing the repulse of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-58" id="Page_7-58"></a><a href="./images/58.png">7-058</a>]</span>attack, that the king's general, Hamilton,
+at last turned the siege into a blockade. The Protestants died of hunger
+in the streets and of the fever which comes of hunger, but the cry of
+the town was still "No Surrender." The siege had lasted a hundred and
+five days, and only two days' food remained in Londonderry when on the
+28th of July an English ship broke the boom across the river, and the
+besiegers sullenly withdrew.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">James and Ireland.</span></p>
+
+<p>Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen who
+struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of double their number
+at Newtown Butler, and drove horse and foot before them in a panic which
+soon spread through Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell back
+on Dublin where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied
+Parliament which he had summoned. Every member returned was an Irishman
+and a Catholic, and their one aim was to undo the successive
+confiscations which had given the soil to English settlers and to get
+back Ireland for the Irish. The Act of Settlement, on which all title to
+property rested, was at once repealed in spite of the king's reluctance.
+He was told indeed bluntly that if he did not do Ireland justice not an
+Irishman would fight for him. It was to strengthen this work by ensuring
+the legal forfeiture of their lands that three thousand Protestants of
+name and fortune were massed together in the hugest Bill of Attainder
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-59" id="Page_7-59"></a><a href="./images/59.png">7-059</a>]</span>which the world has seen. To the bitter memory of past wrongs was added
+the fury of religious bigotry. In spite of the king's promise of
+religious freedom the Protestant clergy were everywhere driven from
+their parsonages, Fellows and scholars were turned out of Trinity
+College, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to propose
+that if any Protestant rising took place on the English descent, as was
+expected, it should be met by a general massacre of the Protestants who
+still lingered in the districts which had submitted to James. To his
+credit the king shrank horror-struck from the proposal. "I cannot be so
+cruel," he said, "as to cut their throats while they live peaceably
+under my government." "Mercy to Protestants," was the cold reply, "is
+cruelty to Catholics."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Revolution and the Monarchy.</span></p>
+
+<p>The long agony of Londonderry was invaluable to England: it foiled the
+king's hopes of an invasion which would have roused a fresh civil war,
+and gave the new Government time to breathe. Time was indeed sorely
+needed. Through the proscription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule
+William was forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army
+which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with Marlborough to
+the Sambre, and the political embarrassments which grew up around the
+new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained
+at home. The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even
+amidst the confusion and intrigue <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-60" id="Page_7-60"></a><a href="./images/60.png">7-060</a>]</span>which we shall have to describe, by
+the common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty Whig
+and Tory were now at one. The Declaration of Rights was turned into the
+Bill of Rights by the Convention which had now become a Parliament, and
+the passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the
+character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right
+of the people through its representatives to depose the king, to change
+the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was
+now established. All claim of Divine Right or hereditary right
+independent of the law was formally put an end to by the election of
+William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to
+advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular
+clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, and Anne, were
+sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. George the First and
+his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of
+Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
+Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Taxation and the Army.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nor was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The older
+constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had taught England the
+need of restoring to the Parliament its absolute power over taxation.
+The grant of revenue for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-61" id="Page_7-61"></a><a href="./images/61.png">7-061</a>]</span>life to the last two kings had been the secret
+of their anti-national policy, and the first act of the new legislature
+was to restrict the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years.
+William was bitterly galled by the provision. "The gentlemen of England
+trusted King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion and
+their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and their
+laws have been preserved." But the only change brought about in the
+Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make
+the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which, in spite of the
+slight changes introduced by the next Tory Parliament, soon became an
+invariable rule. A change of almost as great importance established the
+control of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
+had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James; but with the
+Continental war the existence of an army was a necessity. As yet however
+it was a force which had no legal existence. The soldier was simply an
+ordinary subject; there were no legal means of punishing strictly
+military offences or of providing for military discipline: and the
+assumed power of billeting soldiers in private houses had been taken
+away by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army was met
+by a Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for discipline in the army were
+conferred by Parliament <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-62" id="Page_7-62"></a><a href="./images/62.png">7-062</a>]</span>on its officers, and provision was made for the
+pay of the force, but both pay and disciplinary powers were granted only
+for a single year.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Parliament and the Revolution.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has remained annual ever
+since the Revolution; and as it is impossible for the State to exist
+without supplies or for the army to exist without discipline and pay the
+annual assembly of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity.
+The greatest constitutional change which our history has witnessed was
+thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way. The
+dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament itself
+were met with far less skill. Under Charles the Second England had seen
+a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction,
+maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial Bill
+which limited the duration of a Parliament to three was passed with
+little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To
+counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the
+Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, which
+excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat in
+Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. The modern
+course of providing against a pressure from the Court or the
+administration by excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the
+hold of Parliament over the great officers of State by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-63" id="Page_7-63"></a><a href="./images/63.png">7-063</a>]</span>admitting them
+into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It is equally
+strange that while vindicating its right of Parliamentary control over
+the public revenue and the army the Bill of Rights should have left by
+its silence the control of trade to the Crown. It was only a few years
+later, in the discussions on the charter granted to the East India
+Company, that the Houses silently claimed and obtained the right of
+regulating English commerce.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Toleration Act.</span></p>
+
+<p>The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty than
+the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism Churchman and
+Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have seen, strangely at one;
+and schemes of Comprehension became suddenly popular. But with the fall
+of James the union of the two bodies abruptly ceased; and the
+establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, together with the
+"rabbling" of the Episcopalian clergy in its western shires, revived the
+old bitterness of the clergy towards the dissidents. The Convocation
+rejected the scheme of the Latitudinarians for such modifications of the
+Prayer-Book as would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and
+a Comprehension Bill, which was introduced into Parliament, failed to
+pass in spite of the king's strenuous support. William's attempt to
+partially admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of the
+Corporation Act proved equally <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-64" id="Page_7-64"></a><a href="./images/64.png">7-064</a>]</span>fruitless. Active persecution however
+had now become distasteful to all; the pledge of religious liberty given
+to the Nonconformists to ensure their aid in the Revolution had to be
+redeemed; and the passing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically
+established freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of this
+failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may have been its political effect
+has been of the highest value. At no time had the Church been so strong
+or so popular as at the Revolution, and the reconciliation of the
+Nonconformists would have doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether
+the disinclination to all political change which has characterised it
+during the last two hundred years would have been affected by such a
+change; but it is certain that the power of opposition which it has
+wielded would have been enormously increased. As it was, the Toleration
+Act established a group of religious bodies whose religious opposition
+to the Church forced them to support the measures of progress which the
+Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side and on the other
+England has escaped the great stumbling-block in the way of nations
+where the cause of religion has become identified with that of political
+reaction.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Revolution and the Church.</span></p>
+
+<p>A secession from within its own ranks weakened the Church still more.
+The doctrine of Divine Right had a strong hold on the body of the clergy
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-65" id="Page_7-65"></a><a href="./images/65.png">7-065</a>]</span>though they had been driven from their other favourite doctrine of
+passive obedience, and the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the
+new sovereigns from all persons exercising public functions was resented
+as an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. The whole bench of
+bishops resolved, though to no purpose, that Parliament had no right to
+impose such an oath on the clergy. Sancroft, the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number of the higher clergy
+absolutely refused the oath when it was imposed, treated all who took it
+as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament regarded
+themselves and their adherents, who were known as Nonjurors, as the only
+members of the true Church of England. The bulk of the clergy bowed to
+necessity, but their bitterness against the new Government was fanned
+into a flame by the religious policy announced in this assertion of the
+supremacy of Parliament over the Church, and the deposition of bishops
+by an act of the legislature. It was fanned into yet fiercer flame by
+the choice of successors to the nonjuring prelates. The new bishops were
+men of learning and piety, but they were for the most part
+Latitudinarians and some of them Whigs. Tillotson, the new Archbishop of
+Canterbury, was the foremost theologian of the school of Chillingworth
+and Hales. Burnet, the new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-66" id="Page_7-66"></a><a href="./images/66.png">7-066</a>]</span>bishop of Salisbury, was as liberal as
+Tillotson in religion and more liberal in politics. It was indeed only
+among Whigs and Latitudinarians that William and William's successors
+could find friends in the ranks of the clergy; and it was to these that
+they were driven with a few breaks here and there to entrust all the
+higher offices of the Church. The result was a severance between the
+higher dignitaries and the mass of the clergy which broke the strength
+of the Church. From the time of William to the time of George the Third
+its fiercest strife was waged within its own ranks. But the resentment
+at the measure which brought this strife about already added to the
+difficulties which William had to encounter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">William and the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>Yet greater difficulties arose from the temper of his Parliament. In the
+Commons, chosen as they had been in the first moment of revolutionary
+enthusiasm, the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their first aim was
+to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had suffered during the last
+two reigns. The attainder of Lord Russell was reversed. The judgments
+against Sidney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the
+opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Oates had been against
+law the Lords refused to reverse it, but even Oates received a pardon
+and a pension. The Whigs however wanted not merely the redress of wrongs
+but the punishment of the wrong-doers. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-67" id="Page_7-67"></a><a href="./images/67.png">7-067</a>]</span>Whig and Tory had been united
+indeed by the tyranny of James; both parties had shared in the
+Revolution, and William had striven to prolong their union by joining
+the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named the Tory Earl of
+Danby Lord President, made the Whig Earl of Shrewsbury Secretary of
+State, and gave the Privy Seal to Lord Halifax, a trimmer between the
+one party and the other. But save in a moment of common oppression or
+common danger union was impossible. The Whigs clamoured for the
+punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal acts of Charles and
+of James, and refused to pass the Bill of General Indemnity which
+William laid before them. William on the other hand was resolved that no
+bloodshed or proscription should follow the revolution which had placed
+him on the throne. His temper was averse from persecution; he had no
+great love for either of the battling parties; and above all he saw that
+internal strife would be fatal to the effective prosecution of the war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Jacobites.</span></p>
+
+<p>While the cares of his new throne were chaining him to England the
+confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit was proving too slow and
+too loosely compacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of
+France. The armies of Lewis had fallen back within their own borders,
+but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the junction of the English and
+Dutch fleets failed to assure them the mastery of the seas. The English
+navy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-68" id="Page_7-68"></a><a href="./images/68.png">7-068</a>]</span>was paralysed by the corruption which prevailed in the public
+service, as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The
+services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded with the
+earldom of Torrington and the command of the fleet; but his indolence
+suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, and his want of
+seamanship was shown in an indecisive engagement with a French squadron
+in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the
+command of the Channel; the French dockyards were turning out ship after
+ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to
+reinforce the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast
+would have brought serious political danger; for the reaction of popular
+feeling which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the
+pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Nonjurors
+and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the
+spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and
+above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of the
+Jacobites or adherents of King James, was forming around the Nonjurors;
+and it was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of
+a French fleet on the coast.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Schomberg in Ireland.</span></p>
+
+<p>In such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the
+Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. He
+dissolved <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-69" id="Page_7-69"></a><a href="./images/69.png">7-069</a>]</span>the Parliament, which had refused to pass a Bill of Indemnity
+for all political offences, and called a new one to meet in March. The
+result of the elections proved that William had only expressed the
+general temper of the nation. In the new Parliament the bulk of the
+members proved Tories. The boroughs had been alienated from the Whigs by
+their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their desire to secure the
+Corporations for their own party by driving from them all who had taken
+part in the Tory misgovernment under Charles or James. In the counties
+the discontent of the clergy told as heavily against the Whigs; and
+parson after parson led his flock in a body to the poll. The change of
+temper in the Parliament necessarily brought about a change among the
+king's advisers. William accepted the resignation of the more violent
+Whigs among his counsellors and placed Danby at the head of affairs; and
+in May the Houses gave their assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim
+in his sudden change of front was not only to meet the change in the
+national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English faction which
+would suffer him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was
+king in Dublin the attempt to crush treason at home was a hopeless one;
+and so urgent was the danger, so precious every moment in the present
+juncture of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-70" id="Page_7-70"></a><a href="./images/70.png">7-070</a>]</span>as sharply to an end as was needful save himself. In the autumn of the
+year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg, an exiled Huguenot who had followed
+William in his expedition to England and was held to be one of the most
+skilful captains of the time, had been sent with a small force to Ulster
+to take advantage of the panic which had followed the relief of
+Londonderry. James indeed was already talking of flight, and looked upon
+the game as hopeless. But the spirit of the Irish people rose quickly
+from their despair, and the duke's landing roused the whole nation to a
+fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were filled up at once,
+and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda with a force double that
+of his opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits whom it was
+hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field, did all that was
+possible when he entrenched himself at Dundalk and held his ground in a
+camp where pestilence swept off half his numbers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Battle of the Boyne.</span></p>
+
+<p>Winter at last parted the two armies, and during the next six months
+James, whose treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a
+coinage of brass money while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder.
+William meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to
+bring the Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the
+winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached
+thirty thousand <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-71" id="Page_7-71"></a><a href="./images/71.png">7-071</a>]</span>men. Lewis too felt the importance of the coming
+struggle. Seven thousand picked Frenchmen under the Count of Lauzun were
+despatched to reinforce the army of James, but they had hardly arrived
+when William himself landed at Carrickfergus and pushed rapidly with his
+whole army to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish
+forces, hardly exceeding twenty thousand men in number but posted
+strongly behind the Boyne. Lauzun had hoped by falling back on Dublin to
+prolong a defensive war, but retreat was now impossible. "I am glad to
+see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst of delight; "and if you
+escape me now the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of
+July 1690, the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish
+foot, who at first fought well, broke in a sudden panic as soon as the
+passage of the river was effected, but the horse made so gallant a stand
+that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge and for a time the English
+centre was held in check. With the arrival of William however at the
+head of his left wing all was over. James, who had throughout been
+striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops to the nearest defile
+rather than frankly to meet William's onset, abandoned his troops as
+they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale for
+France.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Irish War.</span></p>
+
+<p>But though James had fled in despair, and though the beaten army was
+forced by William's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-72" id="Page_7-72"></a><a href="./images/72.png">7-072</a>]</span>pursuit to abandon the capital, it was still
+resolute to fight. The incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the
+scorn even of his followers. "Change kings with us," an Irish officer
+replied to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne,
+"change kings with us and we will fight you again." They did better in
+fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the
+routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you
+call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon;
+they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand
+Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who
+had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the
+English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm
+the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege.
+The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, but he was hardly
+gone when a new turn was given to the struggle by one who was quietly
+proving himself a master in the art of war. Churchill, rewarded for his
+opportune desertion of James with the earldom of Marlborough, had been
+recalled from Flanders to command a division which landed in the south
+of Ireland. Only a few days remained before the operations were
+interrupted by the coming of winter, but the few days were turned to
+good account. The two ports by which alone <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-73" id="Page_7-73"></a><a href="./images/73.png">7-073</a>]</span>Ireland could receive
+supplies from France fell into English hands. Cork, with five thousand
+men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days
+later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the
+greater part of Munster in Irish hands, the French force remained
+untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with arms
+and supplies encouraged the insurgents. But the summer of 1691 had
+hardly begun when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of
+Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at
+Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was utterly
+broken.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Ireland conquered.</span></p>
+
+<p>The defeat at Aughrim left Limerick alone in its revolt, and in October
+Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of surrender. Two treaties were drawn
+up between the Irish and English generals. By the first it was
+stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in
+the exercise of their religion as were consistent with law, or as they
+had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged itself
+also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to endeavour to
+procure to the good Roman Catholics such further security in that
+particular as "may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account
+of the said religion." By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's
+soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France; and ten
+thousand men, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-74" id="Page_7-74"></a><a href="./images/74.png">7-074</a>]</span>the whole of his force, chose exile rather than life in a
+land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the wild cry of
+the women who stood watching their departure was hushed the silence of
+death settled down upon Ireland. For a hundred years the country
+remained at peace. But the peace was a peace of despair. No Englishman
+who loves what is noble in the English temper can tell without sorrow
+and shame the story of that time of guilt. The work of oppression, it is
+true, was done not directly by England but by the English settlers in
+Ireland; and the cruelty of their rule sprang in great measure from the
+sense of danger and the atmosphere of panic in which the Protestants
+lived. But if thoughts such as these relieve the guilt of those who
+oppressed they leave the fact of oppression as dark as before. The most
+terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the
+rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's bitter words
+of contempt, became "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to their
+conquerors. Such as the work was, however, it was thoroughly done.
+Though local risings of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the
+English settlers in Ireland, all dream of a national revolt passed away.
+Till the very eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source
+of political danger and anxiety to England.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">French Descent on England.</span></p>
+
+<p>Short as the struggle of Ireland had been it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-75" id="Page_7-75"></a><a href="./images/75.png">7-075</a>]</span>had served Lewis well, for
+while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes was
+restoring the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won
+the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of
+Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory which France
+was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very throne of
+William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage than in quitting
+England to fight James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were
+only looking for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise
+in revolt. The French minister in fact hurried the fleet to sea in the
+hope of detaining William in England by a danger at home; and he had
+hardly set out for Ireland when Tourville, the French admiral, appeared
+in the Channel with strict orders to fight. Orders as strict had been
+sent to the allied fleets to engage even at the risk of defeat; and when
+Tourville was met on the 30th of June 1690 by the English and Dutch
+fleet at Beachy Head the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly
+outnumbered it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid; but Herbert,
+whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were
+crushed, and withdrew with the English ships at nightfall to seek
+shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the shame, for
+Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel and his presence off
+the coast of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-76" id="Page_7-76"></a><a href="./images/76.png">7-076</a>]</span>Devon invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the
+discontent of Tories and Nonjurors against William might be all signs of
+it vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by
+Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and the news of the
+Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Intrigues in England.</span></p>
+
+<p>The natural reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a
+new strength for the moment to William in England; but ill luck still
+hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his presence
+abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and
+crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since
+the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the
+Continent at the head of an English army. But the slowness of the allies
+again baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small
+army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the
+strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made themselves masters of it
+in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment
+all trust in William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt
+more heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been crushed
+by the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life.
+Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-77" id="Page_7-77"></a><a href="./images/77.png">7-077</a>]</span>and Lord Dartmouth, opened
+communications with James; and some of the leading Whigs with the Earl
+of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's
+ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's mind
+the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. His design was to
+bring about a revolt which would drive William from the throne without
+replacing James on it, a revolt which would in fact give the crown to
+his daughter Anne whose affection for Marlborough's wife would place the
+real government of England in Churchill's hands. A yet greater danger
+lay in the treason of Admiral Russell who had succeeded Torrington in
+command of the fleet.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Battle of La Hogue.</span></p>
+
+<p>Russell's defection would have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt
+which James was resolved to make for the recovery of his throne and
+which Lewis had been brought to support. James had never wavered from
+his design of returning to England at the head of a foreign force. He
+abandoned Ireland as soon as his hopes of finding such a force there
+vanished at the Boyne; and from that moment he had sought a base of
+invasion in France. Lewis was the more willing to make the trial that
+the pressure of the war had left few troops in England. So certain was
+he of success that the future ambassador to the court of James was
+already nominated, and a treaty of commerce sketched between France and
+England. In the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-78" id="Page_7-78"></a><a href="./images/78.png">7-078</a>]</span>beginning of 1692 an army of thirty thousand troops was
+quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent on the English coast.
+Nearly a half of this force was composed of the Irish regiments who had
+followed Sarsfield into exile after the surrender of Limerick.
+Transports were provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to
+cover it with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as
+many ships as his opponent the belief in his purpose of betraying
+William's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the
+allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's intrigues may
+have meant he was no Herbert. All he would promise was to keep his fleet
+out of the way of hindering a landing. But should Tourville engage, he
+would promise nothing. "Do not think I will let the French triumph over
+us in our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. "If I meet
+them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." When the
+allied fleet, which had been ordered to the Norman coast, met the French
+off the heights of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his
+word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety ships of
+the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the French were
+forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their
+vessels reached St. Malo; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays
+of Cherbourg and La Hogue; but their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-79" id="Page_7-79"></a><a href="./images/79.png">7-079</a>]</span>pursuers were soon upon them, and
+in a bold attack the English boats burned ship after ship under the eyes
+of the French army.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The turn of the War.</span></p>
+
+<p>All dread of the invasion was at once at an end; and the throne of
+William was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite
+conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to support. The
+battle of La Hogue was a death-blow to the project of a Stuart
+restoration by help of foreign arms. Henceforth English Jacobitism would
+have to battle unaided against the throne of the Revolution. But the
+overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory.
+France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval power; for
+though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength the
+confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured
+again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope too dawned
+on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. On land
+indeed the French still held their old mastery. Namur, one of the
+strongest fortresses in Europe, surrendered to Lewis a few days after
+the battle of La Hogue. An inroad into Dauphin&eacute; failed to rouse the
+Huguenots to revolt, and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of
+the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle
+was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the
+conquered. From that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-80" id="Page_7-80"></a><a href="./images/80.png">7-080</a>]</span>moment France felt herself disheartened and
+exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme.
+"The country," F&eacute;n&eacute;lon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The
+tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the
+Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg was hardly able to
+beat off the fierce attack of William at Neerwinden. For the first time
+in his long career of prosperity therefore Lewis bent his pride to seek
+peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort was a
+vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end
+and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Sovereignty of the Commons.</span></p>
+
+<p>Its final triumph however was in great measure brought about by a change
+which now passed over the face of English politics. In outer seeming the
+Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England
+from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful
+and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was
+transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of Commons. From
+the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the
+Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of
+granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons
+became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-81" id="Page_7-81"></a><a href="./images/81.png">7-081</a>]</span>suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either
+course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the
+army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the
+constitutional change was complete the machinery of government was far
+from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which
+such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of
+Commons might be it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear
+upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them
+were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the
+king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they held
+themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the
+Commons could force a king to remove a Minister who contradicted their
+will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen
+statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Lord Sunderland.</span></p>
+
+<p>The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove
+William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous
+of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies
+always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is
+untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical
+difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they
+possess. It grumbled at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-82" id="Page_7-82"></a><a href="./images/82.png">7-082</a>]</span>the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of
+the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the
+Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to
+find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood
+changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold
+over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he
+succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would
+have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the
+Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill
+which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of
+purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact
+without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate
+information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a
+definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political
+capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a
+simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit
+of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the
+lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the
+later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through
+almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by
+compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-83" id="Page_7-83"></a><a href="./images/83.png">7-083</a>]</span>conversion to the Roman Catholic faith; but the ruin of James was no
+sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by
+the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and
+his honour. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape
+public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came
+secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the
+king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the
+Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among
+the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The New Ministerial System.</span></p>
+
+<p>As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each
+great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had
+in theory been independent of his fellow-officers; each was the "King's
+servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the
+king alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower
+above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of
+government, but the predominance was merely personal and never
+permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready
+to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was
+common for a king to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any
+communication with the rest; and so far was even William <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-84" id="Page_7-84"></a><a href="./images/84.png">7-084</a>]</span>from aiming at
+ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself
+the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan
+aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous
+Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments,
+and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and
+loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan
+likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till
+then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had
+never had before. The Ministers who were representatives of the majority
+of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions
+were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or
+opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the
+simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long
+vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name
+to be the king's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee
+representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and
+capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar
+Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the
+House to the other.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Junto.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such was the origin of that system of representative government which
+has gone on from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-85" id="Page_7-85"></a><a href="./images/85.png">7-085</a>]</span>Sunderland's day to our own. But though William showed
+his own political genius in understanding and adopting Sunderland's
+plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it
+out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland believed
+that the balance of political power was really on the side of the Whigs.
+Not only were they the natural representatives of the principles of the
+Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above
+their opponents in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their
+head stood a group of statesmen whose close union in thought and action
+gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet the most prominent of
+these, was the victor of La Hogue; John Somers was an advocate who had
+sprung into fame by his defence of the Seven Bishops; Lord Wharton was
+known as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers; and
+Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English
+financiers. In spite of such considerations however it is doubtful
+whether William would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely
+Whig Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the
+war. Exhausted as France was the war still languished and the allies
+still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all
+but ruined by the French privateers and the nation stood aghast at the
+growth of taxation. The Tories, always <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-86" id="Page_7-86"></a><a href="./images/86.png">7-086</a>]</span>cold in their support of the
+Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs on the other hand
+remained resolute in their support of the war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Bank of England.</span></p>
+
+<p>William, in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was
+thus driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. Already in 1694 indeed
+Montague established his political position and weakened that of the
+Tory Ministers by his success in a great financial measure which at once
+relieved the pressure of taxation and added strength to the new
+monarchy. The war could be kept up only by loans: and loans were still
+raised in England by personal appeal to a few London goldsmiths in whose
+hands men placed money for investment. But the bankruptcies which
+followed the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal had shaken public
+confidence in the goldsmiths, while the dread of a restoration of James
+made these capitalists appear shy of the Ministers' appeals for aid.
+Money therefore could only be raised in scanty quantities and at a heavy
+loss. In this emergency Montague came forward with a plan which had been
+previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson, for the creation
+of a National Bank such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa.
+While serving as an ordinary bank for the supply of capital to
+commercial enterprises the Bank of England, as the new institution was
+called, was in reality an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-87" id="Page_7-87"></a><a href="./images/87.png">7-087</a>]</span>instrument for procuring loans from the
+people at large by the formal pledge of the State to repay the money
+advanced on the demand of the lender. For this purpose a loan of
+&pound;1,200,000 was thrown open to public subscription; and the subscribers
+to it were formed into a chartered company in whose hands the
+negotiation of all after loans was placed. The plan turned out a perfect
+success. In ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of
+power revealed itself in this discovery of the resources afforded by the
+national credit and the national wealth; and the rapid growth of the
+National Debt, as the mass of these loans to the State came to be
+called, gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts whose
+first work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the lenders
+or as they were termed the "fundholders."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Whig Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>The evidence of the public credit gave strength to William abroad as at
+home. In 1694 indeed the army of 90,000 men which he commanded in the
+Netherlands did no more than hold the French successfully at bay; but
+the English fleet rode triumphant in the Channel, ravaged and alarmed
+the coast of France, and foiled by its pressure the attack of a French
+army on Barcelona. The brighter aspect of affairs abroad coincided with
+a new unity of action at home. The change which Sunderland counselled
+was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory Ministers had been replaced
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-88" id="Page_7-88"></a><a href="./images/88.png">7-088</a>]</span>by members of the Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty; Somers was
+named Lord Keeper; Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Montague, Chancellor
+of the Exchequer. Even before this change was completed its effect was
+felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig majority of its
+members, united and disciplined, moved quietly under the direction of
+their natural leaders, the Whig Ministers of the Crown. It was this
+which enabled William to face the shock which was given to his position
+by the death of Queen Mary at the end of 1694. It had been provided
+indeed that on the death of either sovereign the survivor should retain
+the throne; but the renewed attacks of the Tories under Nottingham and
+Halifax on the war and the Bank showed what fresh hopes had been raised
+by William's lonely position. The Parliament however, whom the king had
+just conciliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went
+steadily with the Ministry; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph
+abroad. In September 1695 the Alliance succeeded for the first time in
+winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur. The king
+skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new Parliament, and
+its members at once showed their temper by a vigorous support of the
+measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. The Houses indeed
+were no mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-89" id="Page_7-89"></a><a href="./images/89.png">7-089</a>]</span>prodigal grants of lands which he had made to his Dutch favourites, and
+to remove his Ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild project for
+a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They claimed a right to name
+members of the new Board of Trade which was established in 1696 for the
+regulation of commercial matters. They rejected a proposal, never
+henceforth to be revived, for a censorship of the Press. But there was
+no factious opposition. So strong was the Ministry that Montague was
+enabled to face the general distress which was caused for the moment by
+a reform of the currency, which had been reduced by clipping to far less
+than its nominal value, and although the financial embarrassments
+created by the currency reform hindered any vigorous measures abroad
+William was able to hold the French at bay.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Spanish Succession.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the war was fast drawing to a close. The Catholic powers in the
+Grand Alliance were already in revolt against William's supremacy as
+they had been in revolt against that of Lewis. In 1696 the Pope
+succeeded in detaching Savoy from the league and Lewis was enabled to
+transfer his Italian army to the Low Countries. But France was now
+simply fighting to secure more favourable terms, and William, though he
+held that "the only way of treating with France is with our swords in
+our hands," was almost as eager as Lewis for a peace. The defection of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-90" id="Page_7-90"></a><a href="./images/90.png">7-090</a>]</span>Savoy made it impossible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance,
+that of forcing France back to its position at the Treaty of Westphalia,
+and a new question was drawing every day nearer, the question of the
+succession to the Spanish throne. The death of the King of Spain,
+Charles the Second, was now known to be at hand. With him ended the male
+line of the Austrian princes who for two hundred years had occupied the
+Spanish throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in
+Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the
+extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to
+it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once
+return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces
+of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of
+Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble
+islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the
+dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow
+the work of European independence which William had wrought; and it was
+with a view to prevent either of these results that William resolved to
+free his hands by a conclusion of the war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Peace of Ryswick.</span></p>
+
+<p>In May negotiations were opened at Ryswick; the obstacles thrown in the
+way of an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside in a
+private negotiation between William and Lewis; and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-91" id="Page_7-91"></a><a href="./images/91.png">7-091</a>]</span>peace was finally
+signed in October 1697. In spite of failure and defeat in the field
+William's policy had won. The victories of France remained barren in the
+face of a united Europe; and her exhaustion forced her for the first
+time since Richelieu's day to consent to a disadvantageous peace. On the
+side of the Empire France withdrew from every annexation save that of
+Strassburg which she had made since the Treaty of Nimeguen, and
+Strassburg would have been restored but for the unhappy delays of the
+German negotiators. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the
+conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of
+Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. A far more important provision
+of the peace pledged Lewis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause and a
+recognition of William as King of England. For Europe in general the
+peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce. But for England it was
+the close of a long and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new &aelig;ra
+of political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the
+conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since
+the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a Roman
+Catholic country and into a dependency of France. But it was even more
+than this. It was the definite establishment of England as the centre of
+European resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of
+power.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-92" id="Page_7-92"></a><a href="./images/92.png">7-092</a>]</span>
+<span class="sidenote">William's aims.</span></p>
+
+<p>In leaving England face to face with France the Treaty of Ryswick gave a
+new turn to the policy of William. Hitherto he had aimed at saving the
+balance of European power by the joint action of England and the rest of
+the European states against France. He now saw a means of securing what
+that action had saved by the co-operation of France and the two great
+naval powers. In his new course we see the first indication of that
+triple alliance of France, England, and Holland, which formed the base
+of Walpole's foreign policy, as well as of that common action of England
+and France which since the fall of Holland has so constantly recurred to
+the dreams of English statesmen. Peace therefore was no sooner signed
+than William by stately embassies and a series of secret negotiations
+drew nearer to France. It was in direct negotiation and co-operation
+with Lewis that he aimed at bringing about a peaceful settlement of the
+question which threatened Europe with war. At this moment the claimants
+of the Spanish succession were three: the French Dauphin, a son of the
+Spanish king's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a grandson
+of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son of Charles's aunt.
+In strict law&mdash;if there had been any law really applicable to the
+matter&mdash;the claim of the last was the strongest of the three; for the
+claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renunciation of all right
+to the succession <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-93" id="Page_7-93"></a><a href="./images/93.png">7-093</a>]</span>at his mother's marriage with Lewis XIV., a
+renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and
+a similar renunciation barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The
+claim of the Emperor was more remote in blood, but it was barred by no
+renunciation at all. William however was as resolute in the interests of
+Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis;
+and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession was inevitable
+if the war continued and Spain remained a member of the Grand Alliance,
+in arms against France and leagued with the Emperor, which made him
+suddenly conclude the Peace of Ryswick.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The first Partition Treaty.</span></p>
+
+<p>Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted
+on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish
+dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress
+which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at
+once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of
+Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the
+disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two
+rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some
+hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to
+waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the
+three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-94" id="Page_7-94"></a><a href="./images/94.png">7-094</a>]</span>necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince
+of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its
+Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the
+Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to
+France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the
+Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria
+and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the
+success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe,
+seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both
+England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy
+by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class
+and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every
+day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the
+struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four
+millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at
+sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the
+realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general
+wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to
+fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the
+country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after
+the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-95" id="Page_7-95"></a><a href="./images/95.png">7-095</a>]</span>merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office
+rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a
+greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state
+of war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The second Partition Treaty.</span></p>
+
+<p>The general discontent at the course of the war, the general anxiety to
+preserve the new gains of the peace, told alike on William and on the
+party which had backed his policy. In England almost every one was set
+on two objects, the reduction of taxes and the disbanding of the
+standing army. The war had raised the taxes from two millions a year to
+four. It had bequeathed twenty millions of debt and a fresh six millions
+of deficit. The standing army was still held to be the enemy of liberty,
+as it had been held under the Stuarts; and hardly any one realized the
+new conditions of political life which had robbed its existence of
+danger to the State. The king however resisted desperately the proposals
+for its disbanding; for the maintenance of the army was all-important
+for the success of the negotiations he was carrying on. But his stubborn
+opposition only told against himself. Personally indeed the king still
+remained an object of national gratitude; but his natural partiality to
+his Dutch favourites, the confidence he gave to Sunderland, his cold and
+sullen demeanour, above all his endeavours to maintain the standing
+army, robbed him of popularity and of the strength which comes from
+popularity. The <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-96" id="Page_7-96"></a><a href="./images/96.png">7-096</a>]</span>negotiations too which he was carrying on were a secret
+he could not reveal; and his prayers failed to turn the Parliament from
+its purpose. The army and navy were ruthlessly cut down. How much
+William's hands were weakened by this reduction of forces and by the
+peace-temper of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which
+was concluded in 1700 between the two maritime powers and France. The
+demand of Lewis that the Netherlands should be given to the Elector of
+Bavaria, whose political position would always leave him a puppet in the
+French king's hands, was indeed successfully resisted. Spain, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son of the
+Emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the whole of the Spanish
+territories in Italy were now granted to France; and it was provided
+that Milan should be exchanged for Lorraine, whose Duke was to be
+summarily transferred to the new Duchy. If the Emperor persisted in his
+refusal to come into the Treaty the share of his son was to pass to
+another unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of the Junto.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Emperor, indifferent to the Archduke's personal interest, and
+anxious only to gain a new dominion in Italy for the House of Austria,
+stubbornly protested against this arrangement; but his protest was of
+little moment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly
+together. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-97" id="Page_7-97"></a><a href="./images/97.png">7-097</a>]</span>The new Western Alliance indeed showed how wide its power was
+from the first. The mediation of England and Holland, no longer
+counteracted by France, secured peace between the Emperor and the Turks
+in the Treaty of Carlowitz. The common action of the three powers
+stifled a strife between Holstein and Denmark which would have set North
+Germany on fire. William's European position indeed was more commanding
+than ever. But his difficulties at home were increasing every day. In
+spite of the defection of their supporters on the question of a standing
+army the Whig Ministry for some time retained fairly its hold on the
+Houses. But the elections for a new Parliament at the close of 1698
+showed the growth of a new temper in the nation. A Tory majority,
+pledged to peace as to a reduction of taxation and indifferent to
+foreign affairs, was returned to the House of Commons. The fourteen
+thousand men still retained in the army were at once cut down to seven.
+It was voted that William's Dutch guards should return to Holland. It
+was in vain that William begged for their retention as a personal
+favour, that he threatened to leave England with them, and that the ill
+effect of this strife on his negotiations threw him into a fever. Even
+before the elections he had warned the Dutch Pensionary that in any
+fresh struggle England could be relied on only for naval aid. He was
+forced to give way; and, as he expected, this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-98" id="Page_7-98"></a><a href="./images/98.png">7-098</a>]</span>open display of the
+peace-temper of England told fatally on the resistance he had attempted
+to the pretensions of France. He strove indeed to appease the Parliament
+by calling for the resignation of Russell and Montague, the two
+ministers most hated by the Tories. But all seemed in vain. The Houses
+no sooner met in 1699 than the Tory majority attacked the Crown, passed
+a Bill for resuming estates granted to the Dutch favourites, and
+condemned the Ministers as responsible for these grants. Again
+Sunderland had to intervene, and to press William to carry out the
+policy which had produced the Whig Ministry by its entire dismissal.
+Somers and his friends withdrew, and a new administration composed of
+moderate Tories, with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading
+members, took their place.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Accession of the Duke of Anjou.</span></p>
+
+<p>The moment indeed was one in which the king needed at any price the
+co-operation of the Parliament. Spain had been stirred to bitter
+resentment as news of the Partition Treaty crept abroad. The Spaniards
+cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of
+Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment
+of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. The nobles too
+dreaded the loss of their vast estates in Italy and of the lucrative
+posts they held as governors of these dependencies. Even the dying king
+shared the anger of his subjects. He hesitated only whether to leave his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-99" id="Page_7-99"></a><a href="./images/99.png">7-099</a>]</span>dominions to the House of Austria or the House of Bourbon; but in
+either case he was resolved to leave the whole. A will wrested from him
+by the factions which wrangled over his deathbed bequeathed at last the
+whole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the
+second son of the Dauphin. It was doubtful indeed whether Lewis would
+suffer his grandson to receive the crown. He was still a member of that
+Triple Alliance on which for the last three years the peace of Europe
+had depended. The Treaty of Partition was so recent and the risk of
+accepting this bequest so great that Lewis would have hardly resolved on
+it but for his belief that the temper of England must necessarily render
+William's opposition a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so
+averse from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's policy that
+men openly approved the French king's course. Hardly any one in England
+dreaded the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they
+believed soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events.
+The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far
+better than the increase of power which France would have derived from
+the cessions of the last treaty of Partition. The cession of the
+Sicilies would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French
+lake, and have ruined the English trade with the Levant, while the
+cession of Guipuzcoa <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-100" id="Page_7-100"></a><a href="./images/100.png">7-100</a>]</span>and the annexation of the west coast of Spain,
+which was looked on as certain to follow, would have imperilled the
+American trade and again raised France into a formidable power at sea.
+Backing all these considerations was the dread of losing by a contest
+with Spain and its new king the lucrative trade with the Spanish
+colonies. "It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, "that
+almost every one rejoices that France has preferred the Will to the
+Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at his rival's breach of
+faith, he had no means of punishing it. In the opening of 1701 the Duke
+of Anjou entered Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there
+were no Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Seizure of the Dutch Barrier.</span></p>
+
+<p>The life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dying. His
+cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, his frame so weak that he
+could hardly get into his coach. But never had he shown himself so
+great. His courage rose with every difficulty. His temper, which had
+been heated by the personal affronts lavished on him through English
+faction, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large and
+clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments of
+French diplomacy and English party strife to the great interests which
+he knew must in the end determine the course of European politics.
+Abroad and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had
+no ally save <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-101" id="Page_7-101"></a><a href="./images/101.png">7-101</a>]</span>Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, while the
+attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the House of Austria in
+check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish
+Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French
+side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in
+Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of
+testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute
+against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king
+of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
+could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count
+in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung
+from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards
+under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory
+might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were
+agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands.
+Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which
+the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis
+blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The
+wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the
+former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at
+its close, by which seven <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-102" id="Page_7-102"></a><a href="./images/102.png">7-102</a>]</span>fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and
+Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops.
+The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of
+Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new
+state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his
+negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too
+eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride
+of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at
+the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the
+Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into
+his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took
+possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Act of Settlement.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the
+leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to
+the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which
+followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it
+was and bitterly as it condemned the Partition Treaties, it at once
+supported William in his demand for a withdrawal of the French troops,
+and authorized him to conclude a defensive alliance with Holland, which
+would give that State courage to join in the demand. The disclosure of a
+new Jacobite plot strengthened William's position. The hopes of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-103" id="Page_7-103"></a><a href="./images/103.png">7-103</a>]</span>Jacobites had been raised in the preceding year by the death of the
+young Duke of Gloucester, the only living child of the Princess Anne,
+and who as William was childless ranked, after his mother, as
+heir-presumptive of the throne. William was dying, the health of Anne
+herself was known to be precarious; and to the partisans of James it
+seemed as if the succession of his son, the boy who was known in later
+life as the Old Pretender, was all but secure. But Tory as the
+Parliament was, it had no mind to undo the work of the Revolution. When
+a new Act of Succession was laid before the Houses in 1701 not a voice
+was raised for James or his son. By the ordinary rules of heritage the
+descendants of the daughter of Charles the First, Henrietta of Orleans,
+whose only child had married the Duke of Savoy, would come next as
+claimants; but the house of Savoy was Catholic and its pretensions were
+passed over in the same silence. No other descendants of Charles the
+First remained, and the Parliament fell back on his father's line.
+Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, had married the Elector
+Palatine; but of her twelve children all had died save one. This was
+Sophia, the wife of the late and the mother of the present Elector of
+Hanover. It was in Sophia and the heirs of her body, being Protestants,
+that the Act of Settlement vested the Crown. But the jealousy of a
+foreign ruler accompanied this settlement with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-104" id="Page_7-104"></a><a href="./images/104.png">7-104</a>]</span>remarkable provisions.
+It was enacted that every English sovereign must be in communion with
+the Church of England as by law established. All future kings were
+forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament, and foreigners
+were excluded from all public posts, military or civil. The independence
+of justice, which had been inadequately secured by the Bill of Rights,
+was now established by a clause which provided that no judge should be
+removed from office save on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The
+two principles that the king acts only through his ministers and that
+these ministers are responsible to Parliament were asserted by a
+requirement that all public business should be formally done in the
+Privy Council and all its decisions signed by its members. These two
+last provisions went far to complete the parliamentary Constitution
+which had been drawn by the Bill of Rights.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Country and the War.</span></p>
+
+<p>But, firm as it was in its loyalty to the Revolution, and in its resolve
+to maintain the independence of the Netherlands, the Parliament had
+still no purpose of war. It assented indeed to the alliance with Holland
+in the belief that the pressure of the two powers would bring Lewis to a
+peaceful settlement of the question. Its aim was still to avoid a
+standing army and to reduce taxation; and its bitterness against the
+Partition Treaties sprang from a belief that William had entailed on
+England by their means a contest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-105" id="Page_7-105"></a><a href="./images/105.png">7-105</a>]</span>which must bring back again the army
+and the debt. The king was bitterly blamed, while the late ministers,
+Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were impeached for
+their share in the treaties; and the Commons prayed the king to exclude
+the three from his counsels for ever. But a counter-prayer from the
+Lords gave the first sign of a reaction of opinion. Outside the House of
+Commons indeed the tide of national feeling rose as the designs of Lewis
+grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch barrier to be
+re-established; and a great French fleet gathered in the Channel to
+support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite descent which was proposed by
+the ministers of James in a letter intercepted and laid before
+Parliament. Even the House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet
+was raised to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. But the
+country moved faster than the Parliament. Kent sent up a remonstrance
+against the factious measures by which the Tories still struggled
+against the king's policy, with a prayer "that addresses might be turned
+into Bills of Supply"; and William was encouraged by these signs of a
+change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland, and to
+conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for the recovery of
+the Netherlands from Lewis and for their transfer with the Milanese to
+the house of Austria as a means of counterbalancing the new power added
+to France.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-106" id="Page_7-106"></a><a href="./images/106.png">7-106</a>]</span>
+<span class="sidenote">The Grand Alliance.</span></p>
+
+<p>England however still clung desperately to a hope of peace; and even in
+the Treaty with the Emperor, which followed on the French refusal to
+negotiate on a basis of compensation, William was far from disputing the
+right of Philip of Anjou to the Spanish throne. Hostilities had indeed
+already broken out in Italy between the French and Austrian armies; but
+the king had not abandoned the dream of a peaceful settlement when
+France by a sudden act forced him into war. Lewis had acknowledged
+William as king in the Peace of Ryswick and pledged himself to oppose
+all attacks on his throne; but in September 1701 he entered the
+bedchamber at St. Germain where James the Second was breathing his last,
+and promised to acknowledge his son at his death as king of England,
+Scotland, and Ireland. The promise which was thus made was in fact a
+declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at one in accepting
+the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of
+European politics, but a question whether the work of the Revolution
+should be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be
+replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a
+question as this there was no difference between Tory and Whig. Every
+Englishman backed William in his open resentment of the insult and in
+the recall of his ambassador. The national union showed itself <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-107" id="Page_7-107"></a><a href="./images/107.png">7-107</a>]</span>in the
+warm welcome given to the king on his return from the Hague, where the
+conclusion of a new Grand Alliance in September between the Empire,
+Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and
+skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate,
+and the bulk of the German States. William seized the moment of
+enthusiasm to dissolve the Houses whose action had hitherto embarrassed
+him; and though the new Parliament which met in 1702 was still Tory in
+the main, its Tory members were now as much for war as the Whigs, and
+the House of Commons replied to the king's stirring appeal by voting
+forty thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle. As
+a telling reply to the recognition of the young James by Lewis, a Bill
+of Attainder was passed against the new Pretender, and correspondence
+with him or maintenance of his title was made treason. At the same time
+all members of either House and all public officials were sworn to
+uphold the succession of the House of Hanover as established by law.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Marlborough.</span></p>
+
+<p>The king's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking the
+field; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to the
+one Englishman who had shown himself capable of a great command. John
+Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a
+Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-108" id="Page_7-108"></a><a href="./images/108.png">7-108</a>]</span>the Restoration mistress
+of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more perhaps than her
+father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission in the royal
+Guards; and after five years' service abroad under Turenne the young
+captain became colonel of an English regiment which was retained in the
+service of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great
+soldier, an unruffled courage, a temper naturally bold and venturesome
+but held in check by a cool and serene judgement, a vigilance and
+capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he
+was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blenheim he
+remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms
+did less for Churchill on his return to the English court than his
+personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known as "the handsome
+Englishman"; and his manners were as winning as his person. Even in age
+his address was almost irresistible; "he engrossed the graces," says
+Chesterfield; and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won
+the favour of Lady Castlemaine. A present of &pound;5000 from the king's
+mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to
+greatness, as the prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier
+hardened into the avarice of age.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Churchill and James.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for
+advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member of
+his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-109" id="Page_7-109"></a><a href="./images/109.png">7-109</a>]</span>household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days of
+the Popish Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and on
+his master's return he was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of
+the Life Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession by
+saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been yet
+more splendidly acknowledged but for the king's bigotry. In spite of his
+master's personal solicitations Churchill remained true to
+Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on further favour
+after a formal refusal to abandon his faith. Luckily for him he had now
+found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing influence of his
+wife over the king's second daughter, Anne; and at the crisis of the
+Revolution the adhesion of Anne to the cause of Protestantism was of the
+highest value. No sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered
+Churchill from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from promising
+Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from deserting the ranks of the
+king's army when it faced William in the field. His desertion proved
+fatal to the royal cause; but great as this service was it was eclipsed
+by a second. It was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to
+forsake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupulous as his
+conduct had been, the services which Churchill thus rendered to William
+were too great to miss <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-110" id="Page_7-110"></a><a href="./images/110.png">7-110</a>]</span>their reward. On the new king's accession he
+became Earl of Marlborough; he was put at the head of a force during the
+Irish war where his rapid successes at once won William's regard; and he
+was given high command in the army of Flanders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Churchill and William.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned Marlborough from
+plotting treason against James to plot treason against William. Great as
+was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty
+of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely
+combined with a power of winning and retaining love. Churchill's
+affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the dark web of his
+career. In the midst of his marches and from the very battle-field he
+writes to his wife with the same passionate tenderness. The composure
+which no danger or hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish
+depression at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent
+humour. To the last he never left her without a pang. "I did for a great
+while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs," he once wrote to
+her after setting out on a campaign, "in hopes that I might have had one
+sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough
+with a love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the
+Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of state, and
+addressed each other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-111" id="Page_7-111"></a><a href="./images/111.png">7-111</a>]</span>as "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley." It was on his
+wife's influence over her friend that the Earl's ambition counted in its
+designs against William. His subtle policy aimed at availing itself both
+of William's unpopularity and of the dread of a Jacobite restoration.
+His plan was to drive the king from the throne by backing the Tories in
+their opposition to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the
+English hatred of foreigners, and then to use the Whig dread of James's
+return to seat Anne in William's place. The discovery of these designs
+roused the king to a burst of unusual resentment. "Were I and my Lord
+Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, "the sword would have
+to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of his
+offices and command and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed
+her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the centre of the
+Tory opposition: while Marlborough opened a correspondence with James.
+So notorious was his treason that on the eve of the French invasion
+which was foiled by the victory of La Hogue the Earl was one of the
+first among the suspected persons who were sent to the Tower.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of William.</span></p>
+
+<p>The death of Mary however forced William to recall the Princess, who
+became by this event his successor; and with Anne the Marlboroughs
+returned to court. Now indeed that Anne's succession was brought near by
+the rapid decay of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-112" id="Page_7-112"></a><a href="./images/112.png">7-112</a>]</span>William's health their loyalty to the throne might
+be counted on; and though William could not bend himself to trust the
+Earl again, he saw in him as death drew near the one man whose splendid
+talents fitted him in spite of the perfidy and treason of his life to
+rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He employed
+Marlborough therefore to negotiate the treaty of alliance with the
+Emperor, and put him at the head of the army in Flanders. But the Earl
+had only just taken the command when a fall from his horse on the
+twenty-first of February 1702 proved fatal to the broken frame of
+William of Orange. "There was a time when I should have been glad to
+have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whispered to
+Portland, "but I own I see another scene, and could wish to live a
+little longer." He knew however that the wish was vain; and he died on
+the morning of the 8th of March, commending Marlborough to Anne as the
+fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal in
+her friend's cause needed no quickening. Three days after her accession
+the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home and
+abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction of the war. His
+supremacy over home affairs was secured by the expulsion of the few
+remaining Whigs among the ministers, and the construction of a purely
+Tory administration with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-113" id="Page_7-113"></a><a href="./images/113.png">7-113</a>]</span>Marlborough's, as Lord Treasurer at its head. The Queen's affection for
+his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment when Anne's
+personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with the nation. In
+England indeed party feeling for the moment died away. The Parliament
+called on the new accession was strongly Tory; but all save the extreme
+Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a
+Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the Whigs were
+ready to back even a Tory general in waging a Whig war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Marlborough and the Allies.</span></p>
+
+<p>Abroad however William's death shook the Alliance to its base; and even
+Holland wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming
+struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with this
+distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue
+with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament was brought to
+sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The new
+general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well
+as of the English forces, and drew the German powers into the
+Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even William might have
+envied. Never indeed was greatness more quickly recognised than in the
+case of Marlborough. In a few months he was regarded by all as the
+guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes whose jealousy had worn <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-114" id="Page_7-114"></a><a href="./images/114.png">7-114</a>]</span>out
+the patience of the king yielded without a struggle to the counsels of
+his successor. His temper fitted him in an especial way to be the head
+of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to any
+early training. The trace of his neglected education was seen to the
+last in his reluctance to write. "Of all things," he said to his wife,
+"I do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was a far greater
+trouble to Marlborough than to plan a campaign. But nature had given him
+qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. His capacity
+for business was immense. During the next ten years he assumed the
+general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. He managed every
+negotiation with the courts of the allies. He watched over the shifting
+phases of English politics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a
+change in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due contingent
+of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and the same moment men saw
+him reconciling the Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring
+the Calvinists of the C&eacute;vennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of
+Portugal, and providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His temper.</span></p>
+
+<p>But his air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained
+to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was
+never ruffled by an outbreak of temper. Amidst the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-115" id="Page_7-115"></a><a href="./images/115.png">7-115</a>]</span>storm of battle his
+soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry
+giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he
+was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable
+serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch,
+the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political
+opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which
+he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy
+pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from
+being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the
+most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when
+Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing
+him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could
+not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the
+bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous
+letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him; "My
+desire," he wrote, "is that the world may continue in their error of
+thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than
+pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual
+temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment which
+tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. In all
+else he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-116" id="Page_7-116"></a><a href="./images/116.png">7-116</a>]</span>was without affection or resentment, he knew neither doubt nor
+regret. In private life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if
+his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death or lead his
+army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer
+sentiments of mankind he knew nothing; and he turned without a shock
+from guiding Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless
+fortune by peculation and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a
+man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. No life indeed,
+no temper ever stood more aloof from the common life and temper of
+mankind. The passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble or
+ignoble, were to Marlborough simply elements in an intellectual problem
+which had to be solved by patience. "Patience will overcome all things,"
+he writes again and again. "As I think most things are governed by
+destiny, having done all things we should submit with patience."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Opening of the War.</span></p>
+
+<p>As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by his
+bitterest foes. "Over the Confederacy," says Lord Bolingbroke, "he, a
+new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more decided
+influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the crown of
+Great Britain had given to King William." But great as he was in the
+council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone amongst the
+masters of the art <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-117" id="Page_7-117"></a><a href="./images/117.png">7-117</a>]</span>of war as a captain whose victories began at an age
+when the work of most men is done. Though he served as a young officer
+under Turenne, and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands,
+Marlborough had held no great command till he took the field in Flanders
+at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone too in his unbroken good
+fortune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did
+not take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difficulties
+indeed came not so much from the enemy as from the ignorance and
+timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in the field, but
+victory after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his
+officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cautious
+strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his plans. Old as
+he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and
+boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once resolved to
+force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled by the
+timidity and resistance of the Dutch deputies. But his resolute advance
+across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him
+to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges, till the
+surrender of Li&eacute;ge closed a campaign which cut off the French from the
+Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of invasion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The French in Germany.</span></p>
+
+<p>The successes of Marlborough had been brought <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-118" id="Page_7-118"></a><a href="./images/118.png">7-118</a>]</span>into bolder relief by the
+fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the Imperialist general,
+Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his powers by a surprise of the French
+army at Cremona, no real successes had been won in Italy. An English
+descent on the Spanish coast ended in failure. In Germany, where the
+Bavarians joined the French, their united armies defeated the army of
+the Empire and opened the line of the Danube to a French advance. It was
+in this quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes in the coming
+year. In the spring of 1703 a French army under Marshal Villars again
+relieved the Bavarian Elector from the pressure of the Austrian forces,
+and only a strife which arose between the two commanders hindered their
+joint armies from marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the
+Dutch deputies served Lewis well in the Low Countries. The hopes of
+Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his services in the
+previous year, were again foiled by the deputies of the States-General.
+Serene as his temper was, it broke down before their refusal to
+co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French Flanders; and the prayers
+of Godolphin and of the Pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to
+withdraw his offer of resignation. In spite of his victories on the
+Danube, indeed, of the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the
+sudden aid of an insurrection against the Court of Vienna which broke
+out in Hungary, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-119" id="Page_7-119"></a><a href="./images/119.png">7-119</a>]</span>difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The
+accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy
+with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of operations
+against Spain. The French king's energy however rose with the pressure;
+and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was
+despatched against Portugal, and three small armies closed round Savoy,
+the flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on the
+Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes of the war
+by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire under the walls of
+Vienna.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Marlborough in Germany.</span></p>
+
+<p>The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 1704 to
+a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy and boldness of the Duke's
+plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French army in
+Flanders saw in his march from the Netherlands upon Maintz only a design
+to transfer the war into Elsass. The Dutch on the other hand were lured
+into suffering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz
+by the Duke's proposals for an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was
+only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the centre
+of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was
+revealed to both. After struggling through the hill country of
+Wurtemberg he joined the Imperial army under the Prince of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-120" id="Page_7-120"></a><a href="./images/120.png">7-120</a>]</span>Baden,
+stormed the heights of Donauwerth, crossed the Danube and the Lech, and
+penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew two other armies
+which were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene. The
+arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French troops saved the
+Elector of Bavaria for the moment from the need of submission; but the
+junction of his opponent, Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the
+contending forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies
+met on the north bank of the Danube near the small town of Hochst&auml;dt and
+the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to
+one of the most memorable battles in the history of the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Battle of Blenheim.</span></p>
+
+<p>In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled, for
+the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of
+Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wurtembergers and Austrians
+who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who
+numbered like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a
+little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. Their
+position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its
+right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the stream
+rose; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself but was far superior
+to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's hands were free.
+"I <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-121" id="Page_7-121"></a><a href="./images/121.png">7-121</a>]</span>have great reason," he wrote calmly home, "to hope that everything
+will go well, for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing
+to obey without knowing any other reason than that it is my desire,
+which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where I was
+obliged to have the consent of a council of war for everything I
+undertook." So formidable were the obstacles, however, that though the
+allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of August it was not till
+midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing
+the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left, and attacked
+the village of Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were
+entrenched; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, while
+as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene in
+check. It was the centre however, where the French believed themselves
+to be unassailable, and which this belief had led them to weaken by
+drawing troops to their wings, that had been chosen by Marlborough from
+the first for the chief point of attack. By making an artificial road
+across the morass which covered it, he was at last enabled to throw his
+eight thousand horsemen on the mass of the French cavalry, which
+occupied this position; and two desperate charges which the Duke headed
+in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back on the
+Danube and forced to surrender. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-122" id="Page_7-122"></a><a href="./images/122.png">7-122</a>]</span>Their left fell back in confusion on
+Hochst&auml;dt: while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from
+retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only twenty
+thousand men escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen thousand were
+captured. Vienna was saved, Germany finally freed from the French, and
+Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its flight to
+Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Occasional conformity.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A
+hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies
+of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the
+flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the
+terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrook"
+became a name of fear to every child in France. In England itself the
+victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a great change in the political
+aspect of affairs. The Tories were already pressing hard on the defeated
+Whigs. If they were willing to support the war abroad, they were
+resolved to use the accession of a Stuart to the throne to secure their
+own power at home. They resolved therefore to make a fresh attempt to
+create a permanent Tory majority in the Commons by excluding
+Nonconformists from the municipal corporations, which returned the bulk
+of the borough members, and whose political <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-123" id="Page_7-123"></a><a href="./images/123.png">7-123</a>]</span>tendencies were for the
+most part Whig. The test of receiving the sacrament according to the
+ritual of the Church of England, effective as it was against Catholics,
+was useless against Protestant Dissenters. While adhering to their
+separate congregations, in which they were now protected by the
+Toleration Act, they "qualified for office," as it was called, by the
+"occasional conformity" of receiving the sacrament at church once in the
+year. It was against "occasional conformity" that the Tories introduced
+a test which by excluding the Nonconformists would have given them the
+command of the boroughs; and this test at first received Marlborough's
+support. But it was rejected by the Lords as often as it was sent up to
+them, and it was soon guessed that the resistance of the Lords was
+secretly backed by both Marlborough and Godolphin. Tory as he was, in
+fact, Marlborough had no mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a
+measure which would be fatal to the war by again reviving religious
+strife. But it was in vain that he strove to propitiate his party by
+inducing the Queen to set aside the tenths and first-fruits hitherto
+paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small
+benefices, a fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. The
+Commons showed their resentment against Marlborough by refusing to add a
+grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first campaign; and
+the higher Tories, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-124" id="Page_7-124"></a><a href="./images/124.png">7-124</a>]</span>with Lord Nottingham at their head, began to throw
+every obstacle they could in the way of the continuance of the war.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Coalition Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nottingham and his followers at last quitted office in 1704, and
+Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more moderate stamp who were
+still in favour of the war; by Robert Harley, who became Secretary of
+State, and by Henry St. John, a young man of splendid talents, who was
+named Secretary at War. Small as the change seemed, its significance was
+clear to both parties; and the Duke's march into Germany gave his
+enemies an opportunity of embittering the political strife. The original
+aim of the Tories had been to limit English efforts to what seemed
+purely English objects, the defence of the Netherlands and of English
+commerce; and the bulk of them shrank even now from any further
+entanglement in the struggle. But the Duke's march seemed at once to
+pledge England to a strife in the very heart of the Continent, and above
+all to a strife on behalf of the House of Austria, whose designs upon
+Spain were regarded with almost as much suspicion as those of Lewis. It
+was an act indeed of even greater political than military daring. The
+High Tories and Jacobites threatened if Marlborough failed to bring his
+head to the block; and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from
+political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from his
+own party to the party which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-125" id="Page_7-125"></a><a href="./images/125.png">7-125</a>]</span>really backed his policy. He availed
+himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve Parliament;
+and when the election of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in
+favour of the war, his efforts brought about a coalition between the
+moderate Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose support
+was purchased by making a Whig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and by
+sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to Vienna.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Ramillies.</span></p>
+
+<p>The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely foiled by this
+union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at home. But he had to bear
+disappointment abroad. His plan of attack along the line of the Moselle
+was defeated by the refusal of the Imperial army to join him. When he
+transferred the war again to the Netherlands and entered the French
+lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops; and his
+proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of Waterloo was
+rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the States with cries
+of "murder" and "massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke into
+bitterness at this last blow. "Had I the same power I had last year," he
+wrote home, "I could have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim."
+On his complaint indeed the States recalled their commissaries, but the
+year was lost; nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on
+the Rhine. The spirits of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-126" id="Page_7-126"></a><a href="./images/126.png">7-126</a>]</span>the allies were only sustained by the
+romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate,
+unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, and
+his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, a step followed by his
+recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to
+support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been
+acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles
+the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon joined Aragon in declaring for
+Charles: while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at
+Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the
+coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of the Imperial
+generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the Alps and a
+campaign in Italy; and though these designs were defeated by the
+opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he again
+appeared in Flanders in 1706. Marshal Villeroy, the new French general,
+was as eager as Marlborough for an engagement; and the two armies met on
+the 23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on an undulating plain which
+forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide
+curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left,
+Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crushed it
+in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along their whole
+line <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-127" id="Page_7-127"></a><a href="./images/127.png">7-127</a>]</span>till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of
+Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand men,
+their baggage, and their guns; and the line of the Scheldt, Brussels,
+Antwerp and Bruges became the prize of the victors. It only needed four
+successful sieges which followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the
+deliverance of Flanders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Union with Scotland.</span></p>
+
+<p>The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet more
+memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of England with
+Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had been the first work of
+the Government of the Restoration, its revival was one of the first aims
+of the Government which followed the Revolution. But the project was
+long held in check by religious and commercial jealousies. Scotland
+refused to bear any part of the English debt. England would not yield
+any share in her monopoly of trade with the colonies. The English
+Churchmen longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north of the Border,
+while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal
+toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703 however an Act of Settlement which
+passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought home to English
+statesmen the dangers of further delay. In dealing with this measure the
+Scotch Whigs, who cared only for the independence of their country,
+joined hand in hand with the Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the
+interests of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-128" id="Page_7-128"></a><a href="./images/128.png">7-128</a>]</span>Pretender. The Jacobites excluded from the Act the
+name of the Princess Sophia; the Whigs introduced a provision that no
+sovereign of England should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save
+upon security given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish
+people. The danger arising from such a measure was undoubtedly great,
+for it pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the
+Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scotland and
+England. The need of a union became at once apparent to every statesman,
+but it was only after three years' delay that the wisdom and resolution
+of Lord Somers brought the question to an issue. The Scotch proposals of
+a federative rather than a legislative union were set aside by his
+firmness; the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
+and the Act of Union as it was completed in 1706, though not finally
+passed till the following year, provided that the two kingdoms should be
+united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that the succession
+to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled by the provisions of
+the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church and the Scotch law were
+left untouched: but all rights of trade were thrown open to both
+nations, a common system of taxation was established, and a uniform
+system of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was henceforth to
+represent the United Kingdom; and for this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-129" id="Page_7-129"></a><a href="./images/129.png">7-129</a>]</span>purpose forty-five Scotch
+members, a number taken to represent the proportion of Scotch property
+and population relatively to England, were added to the five hundred and
+thirteen English members of the House of Commons, and sixteen
+representative peers to the one hundred and eight who formed the English
+House of Lords.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its results.</span></p>
+
+<p>In Scotland the opposition to this measure was bitter and almost
+universal. The terror of the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of
+Security which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an
+oath to support the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his
+accession. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or
+the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from France and
+plotted a Stuart restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding from
+the Houses which voted for the Union and of establishing a rival
+Parliament. In the end however good sense and the loyalty of the trading
+classes to the cause of the Protestant succession won their way. The
+measure was adopted by the Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union
+became a legislative Act to which Anne in 1707 gave her assent in noble
+words. "I desire," said the Queen, "and expect from my subjects of both
+nations that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and
+kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world they
+have hearts disposed to become one people." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-130" id="Page_7-130"></a><a href="./images/130.png">7-130</a>]</span>Time has more than answered
+these hopes. The two nations whom the Union brought together have ever
+since remained one. England gained in the removal of a constant danger
+of treason and war. To Scotland the Union opened up new avenues of
+wealth which the energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The
+farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing
+town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow. Peace
+and culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands into
+herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any loss of
+national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and more rapid
+developement of national energy than that of Scotland after the Union.
+All that passed away was the jealousy which had parted since the days of
+Edward the First two peoples whom a common blood and common speech
+proclaimed to be one. The Union between Scotland and England has been
+real and stable simply because it was the legislative acknowledgement
+and enforcement of a national fact.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Marlborough's difficulties.</span></p>
+
+<p>With the defeat of Ramillies and the conclusion of the Union the
+greatness of Marlborough reached its height. In five years he had
+rescued Holland, saved Germany, and thrown France back on a purely
+defensive position. He exercised an undisputed supremacy over an
+alliance which embraced the greatest European powers. At home <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-131" id="Page_7-131"></a><a href="./images/131.png">7-131</a>]</span>he was
+practically first minister, commander-in-chief, and absolute master
+through his wife of the Queen herself. He was looked upon as the most
+powerful as he was the wealthiest subject in the world. And while
+Marlborough's fortunes mounted to their height those of France sank to
+their lowest ebb. Eugene in his greatest victory broke the siege of
+Turin, and Lewis saw the loss of Flanders followed by the loss of Italy.
+Not only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the
+Third, with an army of English and Portuguese, entered Madrid. But it
+was in fact only these triumphs abroad that enabled Marlborough to face
+the difficulties which were opening on him at home. His command of the
+Parliament rested now on a coalition of the Whigs with the moderate
+Tories who still adhered to him after his break with the more violent
+members of his old party. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force
+Anne in spite of her hatred of the Whigs to fulfil the compact with them
+from which this coalition had sprung, by admitting Lord Sunderland, the
+bitterest leader of their party, to office as Secretary of State at the
+close of 1706. But with the entry of Sunderland into office the system
+of political balance which the Duke had maintained till now began at
+once to break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last attempt
+to govern England on other terms than those of party government, and the
+union <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-132" id="Page_7-132"></a><a href="./images/132.png">7-132</a>]</span>of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from
+the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing
+opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the
+support of the Whigs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Triumph of the Whigs.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious
+temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had
+carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt
+through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his
+father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a
+strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the
+moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
+them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the
+Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined
+because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his
+resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and
+even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a
+bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's
+favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon
+as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of
+gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to
+office, was driven by the same fear <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-133" id="Page_7-133"></a><a href="./images/133.png">7-133</a>]</span>to share Harley's schemes.
+Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition
+of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only
+party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with
+their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion
+in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility
+of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn
+and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough
+died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat
+of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and
+the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her
+husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter
+resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh
+compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by
+removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by
+wresting from Anne her consent in 1708 to the dismissal from office of
+Harley and St. John with the whole of the moderate Tories whom they
+headed. Their removal was followed by the complete triumph of the Whigs
+in the admission of Lords Somers and Wharton into the ministry. Somers
+became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
+while lower posts were occupied by younger men of the same party, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-134" id="Page_7-134"></a><a href="./images/134.png">7-134</a>]</span>who
+were destined to play a great part in our later history, such as the
+young Duke of Newcastle and Robert Walpole.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Oudenarde.</span></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the great struggle abroad went steadily against France,
+though its progress was varied with striking alternations of success.
+France rose indeed with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of
+Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip in 1707 by a victory of
+Marshal Berwick at Almanza. Marshal Villars won fresh triumphs on the
+Rhine; while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back
+into Italy. In Flanders Marlborough's designs for taking advantage of
+his great victory were foiled by the strategy of the Duke of Vend&ocirc;me and
+by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In
+the campaign of 1708 however Vend&ocirc;me, in spite of his superiority in
+force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde; and though Marlborough
+was hindered from striking at the heart of France by the timidity of the
+English and Dutch statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its
+frontier fortresses, in the face of an army of relief which numbered a
+hundred thousand men. The blow proved an effective one. The pride of
+Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible sufferings of
+France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had
+fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to
+give <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-135" id="Page_7-135"></a><a href="./images/135.png">7-135</a>]</span>up ten Flemish fortresses as a barrier for the Dutch, and to
+surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the Treaty of
+Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from
+his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port
+hateful to England as the home of the French privateers.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Peace rejected.</span></p>
+
+<p>To Marlborough these terms seemed sufficient, and for the moment he
+regarded peace as secure. Peace was indeed now the general wish of the
+nation, and the longing for it was nowhere stronger than with the Queen.
+Dull and sluggish as was Anne's temper, she had the pride and
+stubbornness of her race, and both revolted against the submission to
+which she was forced. If she bowed to the spirit of the Revolution by
+yielding implicitly to the decision of her Parliament, she held firmly
+to the ceremonial traditions of the monarchy of her ancestors. She dined
+in royal state, she touched for the evil in her progresses, she presided
+at every meeting of council or cabinet, she insisted on every measure
+proposed by her ministers being previously laid before her. She shrank
+from party government as an enslavement of the Crown; and claimed the
+right to call on men from either side to aid in the administration of
+the State. But if England was to be governed by a party, she was
+resolved that it should be her own party. She had been bred a Tory. Her
+youth had fallen among the storms of the Exclusion <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-136" id="Page_7-136"></a><a href="./images/136.png">7-136</a>]</span>Bill, and she looked
+on Whigs as disguised republicans. Above all her pride was outraged by
+the concessions which were forced from her. She had prayed Godolphin to
+help her in excluding Sunderland as a thing on which the peace of her
+life depended. She trembled every day before the violent temper of the
+Duchess of Marlborough, and before the threat of resignation by which
+the Duke himself crushed her first faint efforts at revolt. She longed
+for a peace which would free her from both Marlborough and the Whigs, as
+the Whigs on the other hand were resolute for a war which kept them in
+power. It was on this ground that they set aside the Duke's counsels and
+answered the French proposals of peace by terms which made peace
+impossible. They insisted on the transfer of the whole Spanish monarchy
+to the Austrian prince. When even this seemed likely to be conceded they
+demanded that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to
+give up the crown of Spain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Sacheverell.</span></p>
+
+<p>"If I must wage war," replied the French king, "I had rather wage it
+with my enemies than with my children." In a bitter despair he appealed
+to France; and, exhausted as the country was by the struggle, the
+campaign of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The
+terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of Malplaquet
+showed a new temper in the French soldiers. Starving as they were, they
+flung away their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-137" id="Page_7-137"></a><a href="./images/137.png">7-137</a>]</span>rations in their eagerness for the fight, and fell
+back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of Marlborough could
+break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their lines of
+entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that number. Horror at
+such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and
+the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly
+attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest
+which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering
+discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the
+Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church
+divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at
+St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the
+warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his
+impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great
+party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's
+favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and
+the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the
+bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets
+rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of
+the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they
+inflicted was in effect an acquittal, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-138" id="Page_7-138"></a><a href="./images/138.png">7-138</a>]</span>and bonfires and illuminations
+over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dismissal of the Whigs.</span></p>
+
+<p>The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom
+the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
+from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and
+vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the
+first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of
+political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the
+<i>Examiner</i>, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed
+in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift,
+an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St.
+John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war
+and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions
+of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of
+us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called
+in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition,
+with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have
+defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the
+maintenance of the war, and encouraged Anne to free herself from the
+yoke beneath which she had bent so long. At the close of Sacheverell's
+trial she broke with the Duchess. Marlborough looked for support to the
+Whigs; but the subtle intrigue of Harley was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-139" id="Page_7-139"></a><a href="./images/139.png">7-139</a>]</span>as busy in undermining the
+Ministry as St. John was in openly attacking it. The Whigs, who knew
+that the Duke's league with them had simply been forced on him by the
+war, and who had already foiled an attempt he had made to secure himself
+by the demand of a grant for life of his office of Commander-in-Chief,
+were easily persuaded that the Queen's sole object was his personal
+humiliation. They looked coolly therefore on at the dismissal of
+Sunderland, who had now become his son-in-law, and of Godolphin, who was
+his closest friend. The same means were adopted to bring about the ruin
+of the Whigs themselves: and Marlborough, lured easily by hopes of
+reconciliation with his old party, looked on as coolly while Anne
+dismissed her Whig counsellors and named a Tory Ministry, with Harley
+and St. John at its head, in their place.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of Marlborough.</span></p>
+
+<p>The time was now come for a final and decisive blow; but how great a
+dread Marlborough still inspired in his enemies was shown by the
+shameful treachery with which they still thought it needful to bring
+about his fall. The intrigues of Harley paled before the subtler treason
+of Henry St. John. Young as he was, for he had hardly reached his
+thirty-second year, St. John had already shown his ability as Secretary
+of War under Marlborough himself, his brilliant rhetoric gave him a hold
+over the House of Commons which even the sense of his restlessness and
+recklessness failed to shake, while the vigour and eloquence of his
+writings <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-140" id="Page_7-140"></a><a href="./images/140.png">7-140</a>]</span>infused a new colour and force into political literature. He
+was resolute for peace; but he pressed on the work of peace with an
+utter indifference to all but party ends. As Marlborough was his great
+obstacle, his aim was to drive him from his command; and earnestly as he
+admired the Duke's greatness, he hounded on a tribe of libellers who
+assailed even his personal courage. Meanwhile St. John was feeding
+Marlborough's hopes of reconciliation with the Tories, till he led him
+to acquiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a
+co-operation with the Tory policy. It was the Duke's belief that a
+reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led him to sanction the
+despatch of troops which should have strengthened his army in Flanders
+on a fruitless expedition against Canada, though this left him too weak
+to carry out a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the
+heart of France in the opening of 1711. He was unable even to risk a
+battle or to do more than to pick up a few seaboard towns, and St. John
+at once turned the small results of the campaign into an argument for
+the conclusion of peace. Peace was indeed all but concluded. In defiance
+of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged its members not to
+carry on separate negotiations with France, St. John, who now became
+Lord Bolingbroke, pushed forward through the summer of 1711 a secret
+accommodation between England and France. It <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-141" id="Page_7-141"></a><a href="./images/141.png">7-141</a>]</span>was for this negotiation
+that he had crippled Marlborough's campaign; and it was the discovery of
+his perfidy which revealed to the Duke how utterly he had been betrayed,
+and forced him at last to break with the Tory Minister.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Treaty of Utrecht.</span></p>
+
+<p>He returned to England; and his efforts induced the House of Lords to
+denounce the contemplated peace; but the support of the Commons and the
+Queen, and the general hatred of the war among the people, enabled
+Harley to ride down all resistance. At the opening of 1712 the Whig
+majority in the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve
+Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command, charged with
+peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons.
+The Duke at once withdrew from England, and with his withdrawal all
+opposition to the peace was at an end. His flight was in fact followed
+by the conclusion of a Treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and
+the Dutch; and the desertion of his allies forced even the Emperor at
+last to make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of the
+war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain at once by
+the House of Bourbon, was silently abandoned. No precaution was in fact
+taken against the dangers it involved to the balance of power, save by a
+provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head,
+and by Philip's renunciation of all right of succession to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-142" id="Page_7-142"></a><a href="./images/142.png">7-142</a>]</span>the throne
+of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact
+that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even
+more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain
+and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the
+Netherlands with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had
+now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his claims; while he handed over
+Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he gave up not only Minorca but
+Gibraltar, two positions which secured her the command of the
+Mediterranean. France purchased peace by less costly concessions. She
+had to consent to the re-establishment of the Dutch barrier on a greater
+scale than before; to pacify the English resentment against the French
+privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk; and not only to recognize the
+right of Anne to the crown, and the Protestant succession in the House
+of Hanover, but to consent to the expulsion of the Pretender from her
+soil.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Harley and Bolingbroke.</span></p>
+
+<p>The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question
+of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into faction
+and intrigue. The Whigs, who were still formidable in the Commons, and
+who showed the strength of their party in the Lords by defeating a
+Treaty of Commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest
+financial triumph of William Pitt and secured freedom of trade between
+England and France, were zealous for the succession of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-143" id="Page_7-143"></a><a href="./images/143.png">7-143</a>]</span>House of
+Hanover in the well-founded belief that the Elector George hated the
+Tories; nor did the Tories, though the Jacobite sympathies of a portion
+of their party forced both Harley and Bolingbroke to keep up a delusive
+correspondence with the Pretender, who had withdrawn to Lorraine, really
+contemplate any other succession than that of the Elector. But on the
+means of providing for his succession Harley and Bolingbroke differed
+widely. Harley, still influenced by the Presbyterian leanings of his
+early life, and more jealous of Lord Rochester and the high Tories he
+headed than of the Whigs themselves, inclined to an alliance between the
+moderate Tories and their opponents, as in the earlier days of
+Marlborough's power. The policy of Bolingbroke on the other hand was so
+to strengthen the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents that
+whatever might be the Elector's sympathies they could force their policy
+on him as king; and in the advances which Harley made to the Whigs he
+saw the means of ruining his rival in the confidence of his party, and
+of taking his place at their head. It was with this purpose that he
+introduced a Schism Bill, which would have hindered any Nonconformist
+from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor. The success of this measure
+broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and
+Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition
+to it. But its effects <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-144" id="Page_7-144"></a><a href="./images/144.png">7-144</a>]</span>went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The
+Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and
+warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against
+her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so
+that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the
+Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future
+George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of
+summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was
+simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain
+the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it
+seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would
+render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by
+Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned
+her that "such conduct may imperil the succession itself."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Death of Anne.</span></p>
+
+<p>To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read
+it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a
+dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and
+necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more
+moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the
+breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with
+unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-145" id="Page_7-145"></a><a href="./images/145.png">7-145</a>]</span>in Harley by
+conferring on him the earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct
+of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was
+brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of
+Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry which would
+back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis
+grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of
+1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and
+invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his
+name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other
+hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in
+favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the
+district in which either claimant of the crown must land, while he gave
+Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. The appointments were
+probably only to secure Jacobite support, for Bolingbroke had in fact no
+immediate apprehensions of the Queen's death, and his aim was to trim
+between the Court of Hanover and the Court of James while building up a
+strong Tory party which would enable him to meet the accession of either
+with a certainty of retaining power both for himself and the principles
+he represented. With this view he was preparing to attack both the Bank
+and the East India Company, the two great strongholds of the Whigs, as
+well as to tax the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-146" id="Page_7-146"></a><a href="./images/146.png">7-146</a>]</span>bondholders at higher rates than the rest of the
+community by way of conciliating the country gentry, who hated the
+moneyed interest which was rising into greatness beside them. But events
+moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July, three days after
+Harley's dismissal, Anne was suddenly struck with apoplexy. The Privy
+Council at once assembled, and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and
+Somerset entered the Council Chamber without summons and took their
+places at the board. The step had been taken in secret concert with the
+Duke of Shrewsbury, who was President of the Council in the Tory
+Ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke and an adherent of the Hanoverian
+succession. The act was a decisive one. The right of the House of
+Hanover was at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as Lord
+Treasurer by the Council, and the nomination was accepted by the dying
+Queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained Secretary of State, suddenly
+found himself powerless and neglected while the Council took steps to
+provide for the emergency. Four regiments were summoned to the capital
+in the expectation of a civil war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and
+unprepared; and on the death of Anne on the evening of the 10th of
+August, the Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne
+by his mother's death, was proclaimed as king of England without a show
+of opposition.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-147" id="Page_7-147"></a><a href="./images/147.png">7-147</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER IV</li>
+  <li>THE HOUSE OF HANOVER</li>
+  <li>1714-1760</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England's European position.</span></p>
+
+<p>The accession of George the First marked a change in the position of
+England as a member of the European Commonwealth. From the age of the
+Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart
+from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for
+if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House
+of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his
+successor from any effective interference in the strife across the
+Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at
+the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm
+as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the
+ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when
+England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-148" id="Page_7-148"></a><a href="./images/148.png">7-148</a>]</span>outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts
+of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the
+Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts
+William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against
+France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the
+exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done
+England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples,
+and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its
+head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the
+forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim
+and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of
+Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House
+of Bourbon.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could
+withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the
+Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution,
+whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the
+supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite
+restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a
+European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was
+drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch
+every movement of the nations from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-149" id="Page_7-149"></a><a href="./images/149.png">7-149</a>]</span>Baltic to the Mediterranean. And
+not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of
+Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of
+the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a
+"balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which
+rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a
+compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great
+struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted
+and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the
+time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty
+of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her
+insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no
+dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy,
+that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to
+the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a
+Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European
+peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its results.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing is at first sight more wearisome than the long line of
+alliances, triple and quadruple, the endless negotiations, the
+interminable congresses, the innumerable treaties, which make up the
+history of Europe during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; nor
+is it easy to follow <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-150" id="Page_7-150"></a><a href="./images/150.png">7-150</a>]</span>with patience the meddlesome activity of English
+diplomacy during that period, its protests and interventions, its
+subsidies and guarantees, its intrigues and finessings, its bluster and
+its lies. But wearisome as it all is, it succeeded in its end, and its
+end was a noble one. Of the twenty-five years between the Revolution and
+the Peace of Utrecht all but five were years of war, and the five were a
+mere breathing-space in which the combatants on either side were girding
+themselves for fresh hostilities. That the twenty-five years which
+followed were for Europe as a whole a time of peace was due in great
+measure to the zeal with which England watched over the settlement that
+had been brought about at Utrecht. To a great extent her efforts averted
+war altogether; and when war could not be averted she brought it within
+as narrow limits and to as speedy an end as was possible. Diplomacy
+spent its ingenuity in countless choppings and changings of the smaller
+territories about the Mediterranean and elsewhere; but till the rise of
+Prussia under Frederick the Great it secured Europe as a whole from any
+world-wide struggle. Nor was this maintenance of European peace all the
+gain which the attitude of England brought with it. The stubborn policy
+of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our policy ever since. In
+struggling for peace and for the sanctity of treaties, even though the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-151" id="Page_7-151"></a><a href="./images/151.png">7-151</a>]</span>struggle was one of selfish interest, England took a ply which she has
+never wholly lost. Warlike and imperious as is her national temper, she
+has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in
+the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about
+her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,
+amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of
+international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment
+has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at
+once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of
+peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil
+and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these
+sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper
+itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of
+responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of
+tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier
+years of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England's intellectual influence.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the
+new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her
+for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the
+European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English
+letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our
+philosophy had exercised any corresponding <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-152" id="Page_7-152"></a><a href="./images/152.png">7-152</a>]</span>influence on the Continent.
+It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion
+that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions
+were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the
+Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and
+Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they
+carried English ideas. The combination of material and military
+greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere,
+which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of
+1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our
+history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking
+to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that
+drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than
+political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the
+Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English
+literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed,
+even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above
+all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so
+utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove
+Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the
+eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new
+impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-153" id="Page_7-153"></a><a href="./images/153.png">7-153</a>]</span>about
+him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its
+individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only
+a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new
+literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke
+gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its
+destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of
+Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with
+England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told
+through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the
+nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely
+as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English
+science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal
+world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his
+ideas in politics and education.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The general temper of Europe.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had
+they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at
+the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states
+with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress
+of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same
+rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each
+department of thought, the same interest in political and social
+speculation, the same drift towards physical <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-154" id="Page_7-154"></a><a href="./images/154.png">7-154</a>]</span>inquiry, the same tendency
+to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of
+thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away
+from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion
+which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in
+a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the
+world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of
+mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature
+of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity
+of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in
+the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all
+delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of
+verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped
+everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick,
+clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of
+Voltaire.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Creation of a literary class.</span></p>
+
+<p>How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the
+instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck
+fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a
+change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these
+later years of his life that his influence over English literature
+became <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-155" id="Page_7-155"></a><a href="./images/155.png">7-155</a>]</span>supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom
+letters asserted an almost public importance. The reverence with which
+men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of
+Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the
+days when the wits of the Revolution clustered reverently round the old
+man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or
+recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by
+no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and
+honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more
+than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by
+his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of
+gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants
+wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that
+the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of
+readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the
+smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a
+literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on
+the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose,
+covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for
+literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about
+him, Dryden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-156" id="Page_7-156"></a><a href="./images/156.png">7-156</a>]</span>realized in his own personality the existence of a new
+power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new poetry.</span></p>
+
+<p>And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction.
+In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the
+impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century
+till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden
+remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject
+seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be,
+he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But
+he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express
+beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational
+things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once
+rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument,
+rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry
+no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no
+longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or
+sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite
+representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its
+reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all
+that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from
+Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that
+had sprung from <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-157" id="Page_7-157"></a><a href="./images/157.png">7-157</a>]</span>religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to
+man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his
+politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides;
+with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the
+use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new
+sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But
+with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden
+indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force;
+to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that
+conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The new prose.</span></p>
+
+<p>Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in
+prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of
+phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of
+Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness
+and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work
+of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for
+the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger
+part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express
+the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade
+the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national
+life; and London above all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-158" id="Page_7-158"></a><a href="./images/158.png">7-158</a>]</span>was drawing to it the wealth and culture
+which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was
+natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the
+age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming
+an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now
+giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded
+simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes
+for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and
+freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the
+mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social
+intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy,
+its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer
+of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Essayists.</span></p>
+
+<p>What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.
+The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but
+already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The
+popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the
+new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from
+the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the
+brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary
+charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-159" id="Page_7-159"></a><a href="./images/159.png">7-159</a>]</span>is a
+gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped
+and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest
+and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short;
+essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the
+sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.
+Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all
+necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary
+conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious
+display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had
+to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of
+imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of
+phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he
+touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their
+more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold
+is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a
+puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its
+fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of
+a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer
+passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity,
+his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter,
+his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-160" id="Page_7-160"></a><a href="./images/160.png">7-160</a>]</span>Lear's
+fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would
+startle the group in a modern drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The urbanity of Literature.</span></p>
+
+<p>But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still
+a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual
+problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal
+of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of
+the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all,
+looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet
+enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their
+beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to
+the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and
+picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first
+time made every street and every house teem with living people for us,
+who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their
+inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their
+very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the
+world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in
+its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the
+essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no
+longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness,
+adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-161" id="Page_7-161"></a><a href="./images/161.png">7-161</a>]</span>colouring of
+playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with
+passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into
+love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand
+with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour,
+whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary
+courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and
+phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our
+literature first became urbane.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The brutality of Politics.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage
+ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the
+Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been
+carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the
+language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and
+scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest
+statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only
+worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of
+attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary
+of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set
+the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen
+and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty
+playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-162" id="Page_7-162"></a><a href="./images/162.png">7-162</a>]</span>of the
+road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this
+virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and
+corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from
+being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the
+statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors;
+while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they
+stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had
+risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was
+Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public
+duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and
+Sunderlands of the Restoration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Public opinion.</span></p>
+
+<p>What had really happened was a change not in the attitude of statesmen
+towards the nation, but in the attitude of the nation at large towards
+the class that governed it. From the triumph of Puritanism in 1640 the
+supreme, irresistible force in English politics had been national
+opinion. It created the Long Parliament. It gave it its victory over the
+Church and the Crown. When a strange turn of events placed Puritanism in
+antagonism to it, it crushed Puritanism as easily as it had crushed
+Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no
+sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in
+the Popish Plot and swept them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-163" id="Page_7-163"></a><a href="./images/163.png">7-163</a>]</span>from the country in the Revolution. The
+stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of
+sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest
+with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it
+acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general
+course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed
+there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in
+politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at
+critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it
+could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation
+roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts
+indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to
+public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish
+Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this
+lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his
+opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two
+great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Petitioners
+and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that
+then for the first time the masses of the people were stirred to a more
+prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups
+of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-164" id="Page_7-164"></a><a href="./images/164.png">7-164</a>]</span>
+<span class="sidenote">Becomes powerless.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.
+But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the
+national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless
+to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to
+vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of
+the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in
+the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the
+Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the
+Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the
+Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of
+administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse
+from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation
+at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every
+House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly
+Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the
+patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible
+that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and
+amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell
+riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it
+deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment
+of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-165" id="Page_7-165"></a><a href="./images/165.png">7-165</a>]</span>Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but
+Whig. Passionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all
+meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in
+ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardianship of the whole state
+of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more.
+Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as
+helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the
+standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and
+taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of
+its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical
+as ever, and yet Nonconformists worshipped in their chapels and served
+as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer
+was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought
+about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of
+England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William.
+Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the
+Church as Somers or Godolphin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Helplessness of the Tories.</span></p>
+
+<p>In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a
+foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any
+undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as
+he remained a tool in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-166" id="Page_7-166"></a><a href="./images/166.png">7-166</a>]</span>the hands of France, every monarch that the
+Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a
+monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to
+the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of
+landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into
+measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter;
+and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show
+whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one
+course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and
+that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him
+much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did
+not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English
+freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts
+was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their
+faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what
+such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more
+earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of
+the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without
+striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of
+even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the
+Second and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-167" id="Page_7-167"></a><a href="./images/167.png">7-167</a>]</span>by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the
+consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged
+Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the
+monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at
+the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf
+to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule
+was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an
+impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of
+the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the
+Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the
+Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the
+Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly
+support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep
+distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and
+though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to
+the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive
+one that they refused to take office.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Withdrawal of the Tories.</span></p>
+
+<p>The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it
+placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did
+even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as
+a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory
+party," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-168" id="Page_7-168"></a><a href="./images/168.png">7-168</a>]</span>Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In the first
+House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories
+hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their
+strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement
+among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond
+fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the
+Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham
+seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the
+wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the
+Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was
+still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite
+designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow
+to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring
+about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk
+however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they
+might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and
+solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the
+decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did
+was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and
+appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the
+Whigs.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-169" id="Page_7-169"></a><a href="./images/169.png">7-169</a>]</span>
+<span class="sidenote">The Whigs and the Church.</span></p>
+
+<p>While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their
+political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming
+weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main
+stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.
+But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution,
+the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart
+indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan
+spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious
+revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which
+changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the
+fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt
+against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or
+the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress
+of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been
+left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material
+channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to
+all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher
+circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England,
+"if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the
+greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and
+distinguished for the grossness and immorality <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-170" id="Page_7-170"></a><a href="./images/170.png">7-170</a>]</span>of their lives.
+Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later
+prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with
+his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were
+sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his
+son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite
+education.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Sloth of the clergy.</span></p>
+
+<p>At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They
+were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for
+the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the
+developement of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious
+or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a
+single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the
+grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were
+fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left
+without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one
+Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time,
+"and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were
+worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of
+London or Birmingham burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and
+pillaged at their will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers
+in the face of ruthless laws which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-171" id="Page_7-171"></a><a href="./images/171.png">7-171</a>]</span>only testified to the terror of
+society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree,
+and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of
+Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to
+drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited
+every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.
+Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and
+sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop
+Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in
+Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least
+severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig
+partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The lev&eacute;es of the
+Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed that he
+had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of
+Westmoreland. The system of pluralities which enabled a single clergyman
+to hold at the same time a number of livings turned the wealthier and
+more learned of the clergy into absentees, while the bulk of them were
+indolent, poor, and without social consideration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The clergy lose political power.</span></p>
+
+<p>Their religious inactivity told necessarily on their political
+influence; but what most weakened their influence was the severance
+between the bulk of the priesthood and its natural leaders. The bishops,
+who were now chosen exclusively <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-172" id="Page_7-172"></a><a href="./images/172.png">7-172</a>]</span>from among the small number of Whig
+ecclesiastics, were left politically powerless by the estrangement and
+hatred of their clergy; while the clergy themselves, drawn by their
+secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active
+interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen
+aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots
+had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay
+slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to
+avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters
+pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Walpole openly
+avowed his dread of awaking the passions of religious hate by such a
+measure, and satisfied them by an annual act of indemnity for any breach
+of these penal statutes. By a complete abstinence from all
+ecclesiastical questions no outlet was left for the bigotry of the
+people at large, while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation
+deprived the clergy of their natural centre of agitation and opposition.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Whigs and the Crown.</span></p>
+
+<p>And while the Church thus ceased to be a formidable enemy, the Crown
+became a friend. Under Anne the throne had regained much of the older
+influence which it lost through William's unpopularity; but under the
+two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of the Crown lay absolutely
+dormant. They were strangers, to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-173" id="Page_7-173"></a><a href="./images/173.png">7-173</a>]</span>whom loyalty in its personal sense was
+impossible; and their character as nearly approached insignificance as
+it is possible for human character to approach it. Both were honest and
+straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of
+constitutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could make
+their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper of George
+the First was that of a gentleman usher; and his one care was to get
+money for his favourites and himself. The temper of George the Second
+was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his realm
+while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, and which
+his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is familiar enough
+in the witty memoirs of the time; but as political figures the two
+Georges are almost absent from our history. William of Orange, while
+ruling in most home matters by the advice of his Ministers, had not only
+used the power of rejecting bills passed by the two Houses, but had kept
+in his own hands the control of foreign affairs. Anne had never yielded
+even to Marlborough her exclusive right of dealing with Church
+preferment, and had presided to the last at the Cabinet Councils of her
+ministers. But with the accession of the Georges these reserves passed
+away. No sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a Cabinet Council,
+or has ventured to refuse his assent to an Act of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-174" id="Page_7-174"></a><a href="./images/174.png">7-174</a>]</span>Parliament. As
+Elector of Hanover indeed the king still dealt with Continental affairs:
+but his personal interference roused an increasing jealousy, while it
+affected in a very slight degree the foreign policy of his English
+counsellors.</p>
+
+<p>England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig
+Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very
+kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover
+believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support
+of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had
+no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the
+Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for
+republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the
+prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the
+prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as
+any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of
+George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole
+influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct
+power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed
+the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that
+its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The
+generality of the world here," said the new Whig <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-175" id="Page_7-175"></a><a href="./images/175.png">7-175</a>]</span>Chancellor, Lord
+Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king
+of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of
+law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in
+good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a
+clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Whigs and Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's
+parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs.
+But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not
+wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers
+or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the
+excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were
+divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real
+eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution
+and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted
+with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to
+the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the
+Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose
+resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy
+in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to
+power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-176" id="Page_7-176"></a><a href="./images/176.png">7-176</a>]</span>devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the
+House of Commons. The support of the commercial classes and of the great
+towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit,
+but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of
+trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated
+the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the
+bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in
+politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time into
+Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the
+weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years
+relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coarser
+means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses
+was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt
+constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation.
+It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery.
+Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang
+out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had
+begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was
+supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the
+Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only
+at election time that a member felt <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-177" id="Page_7-177"></a><a href="./images/177.png">7-177</a>]</span>the pressure of public opinion. The
+secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a
+safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard
+against interference on the part of constituencies. This strange union
+of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about
+its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to
+be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought
+by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.</p>
+
+<p>But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their
+organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed
+their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their
+conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles
+were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred
+years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to
+freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688.
+But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized
+basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It
+was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the
+Whig administration was conducted that made constitutional government a
+part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England
+year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-178" id="Page_7-178"></a><a href="./images/178.png">7-178</a>]</span>these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over
+Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for
+difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to
+tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a
+Parliament.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Robert Walpole.</span></p>
+
+<p>That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was
+due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676;
+and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of
+Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and
+air of the class from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his
+vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in
+Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant
+of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste
+for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He
+rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first
+despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the
+temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough
+noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared
+"If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of
+Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of
+his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter
+attacks of a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-179" id="Page_7-179"></a><a href="./images/179.png">7-179</a>]</span>host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial
+good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was
+ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in
+no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his
+assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender,
+he made little use of his power over them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His policy.</span></p>
+
+<p>Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the
+shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very
+clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could
+not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic
+and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer
+motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members
+who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured
+answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was
+thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as
+they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned
+in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is
+for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats
+only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked
+him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-180" id="Page_7-180"></a><a href="./images/180.png">7-180</a>]</span>which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the
+Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his
+"Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the
+conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance
+of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as
+it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of
+sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt
+so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with
+hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and
+English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and
+virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this
+argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the
+agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of
+new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was
+hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won
+by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the
+House of Hanover upon the throne.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Townshend Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of
+political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise
+in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that
+no reform was as <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-181" id="Page_7-181"></a><a href="./images/181.png">7-181</a>]</span>important to the country at large as a national
+reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the
+necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on
+the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who
+still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give
+fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool
+against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh
+hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole
+clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he
+could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.
+Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter
+hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up
+charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him
+from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of
+George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he
+was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the
+jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now
+served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was
+drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found
+themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power,
+time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-182" id="Page_7-182"></a><a href="./images/182.png">7-182</a>]</span>Halifax died in 1715,
+and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The
+man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new
+Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay
+in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which
+the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of
+fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war,
+on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of
+Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support
+of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of
+Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.
+Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both
+as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It
+was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his
+actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of
+Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of
+the Treasury, in the new administration.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The rising of 1715.</span></p>
+
+<p>The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of
+the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for
+the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and
+dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-183" id="Page_7-183"></a><a href="./images/183.png">7-183</a>]</span>Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had
+secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis
+the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But
+at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from
+France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of
+Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without
+informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the
+signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs
+meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival
+Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they
+had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a
+leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand
+Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct
+kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet
+it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who
+arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and
+incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of
+six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and
+dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger passed away
+like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some
+outbreaks of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-184" id="Page_7-184"></a><a href="./images/184.png">7-184</a>]</span>riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings
+and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne;
+while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its
+victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the
+restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George.
+The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader,
+Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the
+west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party
+to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism,
+showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in
+Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival of
+two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred
+these insurgents to march into Lancashire, where the Catholic party was
+strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a
+surrender.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England and France.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the
+Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts,
+and to venture on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial
+Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to
+three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling
+power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure
+steadiness and fixity <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-185" id="Page_7-185"></a><a href="./images/185.png">7-185</a>]</span>of political action; and in 1716 this necessity
+coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly
+Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to
+seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising
+produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more
+momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the
+Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the
+three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the
+realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple
+alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly
+offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the
+actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland
+had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more
+distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France
+from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had
+been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in
+September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that
+moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for
+the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the
+Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of
+Spain observed the renunciation of his rights <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-186" id="Page_7-186"></a><a href="./images/186.png">7-186</a>]</span>which he had made in the
+Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion
+of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with
+a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power
+of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own
+renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every
+Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her
+Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved
+upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce
+with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in
+upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Their alliance against Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had
+stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every
+European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor
+held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on
+the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet
+indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American
+Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish
+Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against
+the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a
+means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In
+spite <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-187" id="Page_7-187"></a><a href="./images/187.png">7-187</a>]</span>of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to
+recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the
+Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater
+than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the
+island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England
+and France together. The Abb&eacute; Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had
+already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the
+Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the
+Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of
+Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers
+were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was
+concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the
+existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European
+politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in
+Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an
+English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement
+in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to
+avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which
+the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising
+in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the
+accession of Austria with Savoy to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-188" id="Page_7-188"></a><a href="./images/188.png">7-188</a>]</span>Triple Alliance, with the death
+of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The
+progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at
+last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were
+withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed
+to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition
+of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work
+of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of
+his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his
+claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Resignation of Townshend.</span></p>
+
+<p>Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle
+had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new
+sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of
+England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far
+more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his
+kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to
+strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position
+was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark
+had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to
+annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions;
+but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-189" id="Page_7-189"></a><a href="./images/189.png">7-189</a>]</span>secured the help of
+Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of
+alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into
+the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with
+the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return
+bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining
+in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the
+Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the
+court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new
+dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his
+death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them
+had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When
+George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England
+shielded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish
+King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant assent to a measure which
+they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the
+Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the
+Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen
+and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was
+brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to
+England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the
+chief inlets for British <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-190" id="Page_7-190"></a><a href="./images/190.png">7-190</a>]</span>commerce into Germany, in the hands of a
+friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying
+out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of
+the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops
+entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by
+intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and
+Walpole were forced to resign their posts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Stanhope Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconstituted
+cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first
+aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional
+change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be
+shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was
+destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king.
+Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular
+nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed
+aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve
+peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht
+showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and
+changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore
+the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord
+Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by
+limiting <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-191" id="Page_7-191"></a><a href="./images/191.png">7-191</a>]</span>the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The
+number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the
+House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred.
+Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were substituted for the sixteen
+elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by
+Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political
+quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it
+jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered
+representative government impossible. For representative government was
+now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of
+the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the
+mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the
+Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers
+could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where
+their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of
+Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">South Sea Bubble.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was to Walpole's opposition that the Peerage Bill owed its defeat;
+and this success forced his rivals again to admit him, with Townshend,
+to a share in the Ministry, though they occupied subordinate offices.
+But this arrangement was soon to yield to a more natural one. The sudden
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-192" id="Page_7-192"></a><a href="./images/192.png">7-192</a>]</span>increase of English commerce begot at this moment the mania of
+speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of
+Spanish America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of
+Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which
+promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of
+the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions
+of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England
+the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of
+despatching a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite
+of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for
+new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a
+million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the
+country against this "dream." Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company
+followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general
+ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his
+colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea
+Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of
+terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
+was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert
+Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the
+Treasury, while his brother-in-law, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-193" id="Page_7-193"></a><a href="./images/193.png">7-193</a>]</span>Lord Townshend, returned to his
+post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now
+reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in
+this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that
+"the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and
+Walpole."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Walpole's Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the
+head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared
+worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness
+has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His
+qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full
+justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man;
+nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to
+do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque
+or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe,
+was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on
+this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone
+it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced
+every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among
+English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of
+our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in
+which this country can be are those <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-194" id="Page_7-194"></a><a href="./images/194.png">7-194</a>]</span>of war; as we must be losers while
+it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the
+honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won
+victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his
+negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the
+very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced
+his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and
+a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is
+the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he
+was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our
+Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later
+statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing
+both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense
+to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a
+statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in
+the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he
+can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national
+wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his
+rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more
+conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of
+our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-195" id="Page_7-195"></a><a href="./images/195.png">7-195</a>]</span>manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Walpole's finance.</span></p>
+
+<p>The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties
+from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of
+importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the
+prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother
+country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their
+rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of
+America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise
+Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English
+Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom
+of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material
+progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our
+exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the
+century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.
+It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England
+a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of
+Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica
+at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the
+Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at &pound;15,000. At his death
+they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-196" id="Page_7-196"></a><a href="./images/196.png">7-196</a>]</span>century
+the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were
+estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a
+quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose
+manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.
+Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new
+prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the
+West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the
+kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with
+them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country
+gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year
+threescore years ago," said Burke in 1766, "are at three thousand at
+present."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His policy of inaction.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than
+the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole
+swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a
+diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First
+the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in
+economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other
+fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than
+tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had
+specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his
+Excise Bill rather than <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-197" id="Page_7-197"></a><a href="./images/197.png">7-197</a>]</span>suffer the agitation it roused to break the
+quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.
+His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the
+Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry,
+which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by
+any effort to repeal the laws against Nonconformity. His temper was
+naturally vigorous and active; and yet the years of his power are years
+without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long
+administration indeed is almost without a history. All legislative and
+political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after
+year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry
+there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction
+gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of
+the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly
+presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was
+absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of commerce and
+accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and
+temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave
+government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone
+to enjoy their new freedom and develope their new industries. And
+Walpole let them alone. On the other hand, the forces which opposed the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-198" id="Page_7-198"></a><a href="./images/198.png">7-198</a>]</span>Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour
+which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted
+idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but
+their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of
+opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on
+friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing
+its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole
+trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite
+of every temptation he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the
+laws that oppressed the Catholic or the Dissenter, he took care that
+they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered.
+Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the Nonconformists from the
+consequences of their infringement of the Test Act. There was no
+tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and
+action were alike left free. No Minister was ever more foully slandered
+by journalists and pamphleteers; but Walpole never meddled with the
+press.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fresh efforts of Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>Abroad as well as at home the difficulties in the way of his policy were
+enormous. Peace was still hard to maintain. Defeated as her first
+attempt had been, Spain remained resolute to regain her lost provinces,
+to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and to restore her old monopoly of
+trade <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-199" id="Page_7-199"></a><a href="./images/199.png">7-199</a>]</span>with her American colonies. She had learned that she could do
+this only by breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her
+isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league
+in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the
+Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he
+provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his
+daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to
+guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching
+the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support the
+Pragmatic Sanction in return for a pledge on the part of Charles to aid
+in wresting Gibraltar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a
+Spanish prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A grant
+of the highest trading privileges in her American dominions to a
+commercial company which the Emperor had established at Ostend, in
+defiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England
+and Holland, revealed this secret alliance; and there were fears of the
+adhesion of Russia, which still remained hostile to England through the
+quarrel with Hanover. The danger was met for a while by an alliance of
+England, France, and Prussia, in 1725; but the withdrawal of the last
+Power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727 the Spaniards
+besieged Gibraltar while Charles <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-200" id="Page_7-200"></a><a href="./images/200.png">7-200</a>]</span>threatened an invasion of Holland. The
+moderation of Walpole alone averted a European war. While sending
+British squadrons to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he
+succeeded by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the Emperor to
+inaction; after weary negotiations Spain was brought in 1729 to sign the
+Treaty of Seville and to content herself with the promise of a
+succession of a Spanish prince to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany; and
+the discontent of Charles the Sixth at this concession was allayed in
+1731 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic Sanction.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George the Second.</span></p>
+
+<p>The patience and even temper which Walpole showed in this business were
+the more remarkable that in the course of it his power received what
+seemed a fatal shock from the death of the king. George the First died
+on a journey to Hanover in 1727; and his successor, George the Second,
+was known to have hated his father's Minister hardly less than he had
+hated his father. But hate Walpole as he might, the new king was
+absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, Caroline of Anspach;
+and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the
+Ministry. After a few days of withdrawal therefore Walpole again
+returned to office; and the years which followed were those in which his
+power reached its height. He gained as great an influence over George
+the Second as he had gained over his father: and in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-201" id="Page_7-201"></a><a href="./images/201.png">7-201</a>]</span>spite of the steady
+increase of his opponents in the House of Commons, his hold over it
+remained unshaken. The country was tranquil and prosperous. The
+prejudices of the landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce
+the land-tax, whose pressure was half the secret of their hostility to
+the Revolution that produced it. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites
+were too hopeless to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept
+quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols
+showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value
+enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be
+in the English tongue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Excise Bill.</span></p>
+
+<p>Only once did Walpole break this tranquillity by an attempt at a great
+measure of statesmanship; and the result of his attempt proved how wise
+was the inactivity of his general policy. No tax had from the first
+moment of its introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its
+origin was due to Pym and the Long Parliament, who imposed duties on
+beer, cyder, and perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual
+income of more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war with France at
+the Revolution brought with it the imposition of a malt-tax and
+additional duties on spirits, wine, tobacco, and other articles. So
+great had been the increase in the public wealth that the return from
+the Excise amounted at the death of George the First to nearly two
+millions and a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-202" id="Page_7-202"></a><a href="./images/202.png">7-202</a>]</span>half a year. But its unpopularity remained unabated, and
+even philosophers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue
+should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the other
+hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of winning over the
+country gentry to the new dynasty of the Revolution by freeing the land
+from all burdens whatever. He saw too a means of diminishing the loss
+suffered by the revenue from the Customs through smuggling and fraud.
+These losses were immense; that on tobacco alone amounted to a third of
+the whole duty. In 1733 therefore he introduced an Excise Bill, which
+met this evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the
+collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of Excise
+and not of Customs. The first measure would have made London a free
+port, and doubled English trade. The second would have so largely
+increased the revenue, without any loss to the consumer, as to enable
+Walpole to repeal the land-tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the
+change in the mode of levying the duty was estimated to bring in an
+additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The necessaries of life and
+the raw materials of manufacture were in Walpole's plan to remain
+absolutely untaxed. The scheme was in effect an anticipation of the
+principles which have guided English finance since the triumph of free
+trade, and every part of it has now been carried into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-203" id="Page_7-203"></a><a href="./images/203.png">7-203</a>]</span>effect. But in
+1733 Walpole stood ahead of his time. The violence of his opponents was
+hacked by an outburst of popular prejudice; riots almost grew into
+revolt; and in spite of the Queen's wish to put down resistance by
+force, Walpole withdrew the bill. "I will not be the Minister," he said
+with noble self-command, "to enforce taxes at the expense of blood."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Patriots.</span></p>
+
+<p>What had fanned popular prejudice into a flame during the uproar over
+the Excise Bill was the violence of the so-called "Patriots." In the
+absence of a strong opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a
+party breaks readily into factions; and the weakness of the Tories
+joined with the stagnation of public affairs to breed faction among the
+Whigs. Walpole too was jealous of power; and as his jealousy drove
+colleague after colleague out of office they became leaders of a party
+whose sole aim was to thrust him from his post. Greed of power indeed
+was the one passion which mastered his robust common sense. Townshend
+was turned out of office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield in 1733; and though
+he started with the ablest administration the country had known, Walpole
+was left after twenty years of supremacy with but one man of ability in
+his cabinet, the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke. With the single exception
+of Townshend, the colleagues whom his jealousy dismissed plunged into an
+opposition more factious and unprincipled than has ever disgraced
+English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-204" id="Page_7-204"></a><a href="./images/204.png">7-204</a>]</span>politics. The "Patriots," as they called themselves, owned
+Pulteney, a brilliant speaker and unscrupulous intriguer, as their head;
+they were reinforced by a band of younger Whigs&mdash;the "Boys," as Walpole
+named them&mdash;whose temper revolted alike against the inaction and
+cynicism of his policy, and whose fiery spokesman was a young cornet of
+horse, William Pitt; and they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory
+party which still took part in politics, a fragment inconsiderable in
+numbers but of far greater weight as representing a large part of the
+nation, and which was guided for a while by the virulent ability of
+Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom
+he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. Inside
+Parliament indeed the invectives of the "Patriots" fell dead before
+Walpole's majorities and his good-humoured contempt; so far were their
+attacks from shaking his power that Bolingbroke abandoned the struggle
+in despair to return again into exile, while Pulteney with his party
+could only take refuge in a silly secession from Parliament. But on the
+nation at large their speeches and pamphlets, with the brilliant
+sarcasms of their literary allies, such as Pope or Johnson, did more
+effective work. Unjust indeed as their outcry was, the growing response
+to it told that the political inactivity of the country was drawing to
+an end. It was the very success of Walpole's policy which was to bring
+about his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-205" id="Page_7-205"></a><a href="./images/205.png">7-205</a>]</span>downfall; for it was the gradual closing of the chasm which
+had all but broken England into two warring peoples that allowed the
+political energy of the country to return to its natural channels and to
+give a new vehemence to political strife. Vague too and hollow as much
+of the "high talk" of the Patriots was, it showed that the age of
+political cynicism, of that unbelief in high sentiment and noble
+aspirations which had followed on the crash of Puritanism, was drawing
+to an end. Rant about ministerial corruption would have fallen flat on
+the public ear had not new moral forces, a new sense of social virtue, a
+new sense of religion been stirring, however blindly, in the minds of
+Englishmen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Methodists.</span></p>
+
+<p>The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from
+the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot
+of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their
+times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion,
+and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of
+"Methodists." Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon
+as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by
+the fervour and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his
+special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led
+it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast
+masses of population which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-206" id="Page_7-206"></a><a href="./images/206.png">7-206</a>]</span>lay concentrated in the towns or around the
+mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor
+of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech
+was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was
+shown when a dread of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the
+pulpits of the Established Church, and forced them to preach in the
+fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous
+corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the
+dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his
+labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's
+preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical,
+extravagant, often commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense
+reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the
+sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring
+gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious
+Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at
+Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits,
+and see as he preached the tears "making white channels down their
+blackened cheeks."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The religious revival.</span></p>
+
+<p>On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke the effect of
+Whitefield and his fellow Methodists was mighty both for good and ill.
+Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in their <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-207" id="Page_7-207"></a><a href="./images/207.png">7-207</a>]</span>opponents. Their
+lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they
+were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they
+aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong
+men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by
+bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of
+strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange
+and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a
+conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms
+at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student,
+came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the
+"sweet singer" of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction
+of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more
+extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm
+passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was
+aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public
+devotion throughout England.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">John Wesley.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not
+this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at
+Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon
+as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic
+mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-208" id="Page_7-208"></a><a href="./images/208.png">7-208</a>]</span>the lead of the little
+society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a
+preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second
+to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the
+excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly
+deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over
+others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and
+moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of
+men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of
+the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the
+start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost
+covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the
+Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he
+sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been
+impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared
+the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.
+Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived
+on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a
+world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain
+stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement
+of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his
+preaching. One day, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-209" id="Page_7-209"></a><a href="./images/209.png">7-209</a>]</span>he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell
+lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or
+without any?&mdash;immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in
+the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his
+conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life,
+by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible
+opened.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His organization of Methodism.</span></p>
+
+<p>But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was
+essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at
+the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary.
+In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the
+narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began
+his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself
+to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of
+laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to
+preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and
+looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion
+with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends
+of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their
+contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great
+preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical
+temper of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-210" id="Page_7-210"></a><a href="./images/210.png">7-210</a>]</span>mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be
+the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and
+organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied
+of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more
+than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to
+employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and
+attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered
+in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and
+sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the
+Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of
+age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic
+outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent
+to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the
+new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped
+into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of
+unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers
+and wandering preachers; while the whole body was placed under the
+absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as he
+lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with Wesley
+alone. "If by arbitrary power," he replied with charming simplicity to
+objectors, "you mean a power which I exercise simply <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-211" id="Page_7-211"></a><a href="./images/211.png">7-211</a>]</span>without any
+colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt in it."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Results of the movement.</span></p>
+
+<p>The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members
+at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by
+millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the
+Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later,
+broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the
+"Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their
+duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at
+large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and
+wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the
+first impulse to popular education.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Revival of France.</span></p>
+
+<p>From the new England which was springing up about him, from that new
+stir of national life and emotion of which the Wesleyan revival was but
+a part, Walpole stood utterly aloof. National enthusiasm, national
+passion, found no echo in his cool and passionless good sense. The
+growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its
+instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a
+foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and
+loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike
+unintelligible to him. In the talk of patriotism and public virtue he
+saw mere rant and extravagance. "Men would <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-212" id="Page_7-212"></a><a href="./images/212.png">7-212</a>]</span>grow wiser," he said, "and
+come out of that." The revival of English religion he looked on with an
+indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism
+which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the
+face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to
+his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now
+threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto
+enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the
+Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. But
+it was clear that such an alliance could hardly be a permanent one. The
+Treaty of Utrecht had been a humiliation for France even more than for
+Spain. It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy
+which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the
+sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned
+from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to
+the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown
+themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with
+reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known
+nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old
+ambition started again into life.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Its union with Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was fired to action by a new rivalry. The naval supremacy of Britain
+was growing into an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-213" id="Page_7-213"></a><a href="./images/213.png">7-213</a>]</span>empire of the sea; and not only was such an empire
+in itself a challenge to France, but it was fatal to the aspirations
+after a colonial dominion, after aggrandizement in America, and the
+upbuilding of a French power in the East, which were already vaguely
+stirring in the breasts of her statesmen. And to this new rivalry was
+added the temptation of a new chance of success. On the Continent the
+mightiest foe of France had ever been the House of Austria; but that
+House was now paralyzed by a question of succession. It was almost
+certain that the quarrels which must follow the death of the Emperor
+would break the strength of Germany, and it was probable that they might
+be so managed as to destroy for ever that of the House of Hapsburg.
+While the main obstacle to her ambition was thus weakened or removed,
+France won a new and invaluable aid to it in the friendship of Spain.
+Accident had hindered for a while the realization of the forebodings
+which led Marlborough and Somers so fiercely to oppose a recognition of
+the union of the two countries under the same royal house in the Peace
+of Utrecht. The age and death of Lewis the Fourteenth, the minority of
+his successor, the hostility between Philip of Spain and the Duke of
+Orleans, the personal quarrel between the two Crowns which broke out
+after the Duke's death, had long held the Bourbon powers apart. France
+had in fact been thrown on the alliance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-214" id="Page_7-214"></a><a href="./images/214.png">7-214</a>]</span>of England, and had been forced
+to play a chief part in opposing Spain and in maintaining the European
+settlement. But at the death of George the First this temporary
+severance was already passing away. The birth of children to Lewis the
+Fifteenth settled all questions of succession; and no obstacle remained
+to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the Bourbon Courts in a
+common action. The boast of Lewis the Fourteenth was at last fulfilled.
+In the mighty struggle for supremacy which France carried on from the
+fall of Walpole to the Peace of Paris her strength was doubled by the
+fact that there were "no Pyrenees."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Family Compact.</span></p>
+
+<p>The first signs of this new danger showed themselves in 1733, when the
+peace of Europe was broken afresh by disputes which rose out of a
+contested election to the throne of Poland. Austria and France were
+alike drawn into the strife; and in England the awakening jealousy of
+French designs roused a new pressure for war. The new king too was eager
+to fight, and her German sympathies inclined even Caroline to join in
+the fray. But Walpole stood firm for the observance of neutrality. He
+worked hard to avert and to narrow the war; but he denied that British
+interests were so involved in it as to call on England to take a part.
+"There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe," he boasted as
+the strife went on, "and not one Englishman." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-215" id="Page_7-215"></a><a href="./images/215.png">7-215</a>]</span>Meanwhile he laboured to
+bring the quarrel to a close; and in 1736 the intervention of England
+and Holland succeeded in restoring peace. But the country had watched
+with a jealous dread the military energy that proclaimed the revival of
+the French arms; and it noted bitterly that peace was bought by the
+triumph of both branches of the House of Bourbon. A new Bourbon monarchy
+was established at the cost of the House of Austria by the cession of
+the Two Sicilies to a Spanish Prince in exchange for his right of
+succession to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany. On the other hand,
+Lorraine, so long coveted by French ambition, passed finally into the
+hands of France. The political instinct of the nation at once discerned
+in these provisions a union of the Bourbon powers; and its dread of such
+a union proved to be a just one. As early as the outbreak of the war a
+Family Compact had been secretly concluded between France and Spain, the
+main object of which was the ruin of the maritime supremacy of Britain.
+Spain bound herself to deprive England gradually of its commercial
+privileges in her American dominions, and to transfer them to France.
+France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the
+recovery of Gibraltar.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England and Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered
+this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-216" id="Page_7-216"></a><a href="./images/216.png">7-216</a>]</span>courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of
+1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made
+inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve
+to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions
+on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish
+sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the
+struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The
+trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely
+through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance
+of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a
+legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow
+restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its
+old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled;
+while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which
+rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip
+however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with
+his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single
+merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the
+moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a
+fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the
+peace; and in 1738 the ill <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-217" id="Page_7-217"></a><a href="./images/217.png">7-217</a>]</span>humour of the trading classes was driven to
+madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar
+of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the
+Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst
+taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do
+justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry
+for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as
+it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the
+Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the
+Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the
+highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every
+means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her
+hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great
+crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have
+enabled Walpole to deal with it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">War with Spain.</span></p>
+
+<p>But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy
+of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies
+assailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their
+pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to
+the crowd on "the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position
+had been weakened by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-218" id="Page_7-218"></a><a href="./images/218.png">7-218</a>]</span>the death of the queen; and it was now weakened
+yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred
+of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as
+George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of
+the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were
+slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a
+hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the "Patriots" had
+grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was
+slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his
+support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested
+therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the
+trading classes. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of
+the trading class failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had
+driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this
+juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham,
+who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from
+their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.
+But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and
+that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Austrian Succession.</span></p>
+
+<p>"They may ring their bells now," the great minister said bitterly, as
+peals and bonfires <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-219" id="Page_7-219"></a><a href="./images/219.png">7-219</a>]</span>welcomed his surrender; "but they will soon be
+wringing their hands." His foresight was at once justified. No sooner
+had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an
+English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication
+of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that
+she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South
+America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was
+plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the
+protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as
+France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her
+pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving
+Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she
+confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for
+finishing the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the
+Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it
+was idle to expect her to pass it by. If once the hereditary dominions
+of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the
+dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the mass of dominion
+which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without
+a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of
+a danger which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-220" id="Page_7-220"></a><a href="./images/220.png">7-220</a>]</span>the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of
+Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the
+Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from
+the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had
+given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when
+in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European
+struggle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of Walpole.</span></p>
+
+<p>The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of
+Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as
+destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had
+played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous assailant
+of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria
+claimed the Austrian Duchies, which passed with the other hereditary
+dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as
+she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the
+Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the
+annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and
+Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the
+summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of
+Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria
+stood in such peril. Its opponents <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-221" id="Page_7-221"></a><a href="./images/221.png">7-221</a>]</span>counted on a division of its
+dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria
+the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the
+Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still
+true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against
+France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was
+wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held
+aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the
+Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her
+full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by
+this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with
+France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused
+to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its
+constitutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the
+head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria,
+and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On
+England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.
+Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged
+with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the
+selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his
+dread of harm to his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-222" id="Page_7-222"></a><a href="./images/222.png">7-222</a>]</span>hereditary state averted the entry of a French
+army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the
+step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the
+minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still
+repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful spirit; but in a
+new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to
+sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant
+temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.
+"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his
+son, "now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at
+dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless
+than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed
+for an hour together." The end was in fact near; and in the opening of
+1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Carteret.</span></p>
+
+<p>His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.
+The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office,
+and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of
+the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of
+foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in
+continental affairs. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-223" id="Page_7-223"></a><a href="./images/223.png">7-223</a>]</span>Carteret mainly followed the system of his
+predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked
+for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in
+Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor;
+and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at
+Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace
+with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The
+peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to
+drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new
+minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.
+One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples
+and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude
+a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the
+French alliance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dettingen.</span></p>
+
+<p>The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set
+up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.
+Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsass
+and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to
+the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove
+the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second,
+who warmly supported Carteret's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-224" id="Page_7-224"></a><a href="./images/224.png">7-224</a>]</span>policy, put himself at the head of a
+force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and
+marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and
+finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with
+a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing
+31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the
+battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not
+only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of
+the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held
+their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small
+as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated
+Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a
+league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all
+that was needed to secure the results already gained.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Fall of Carteret.</span></p>
+
+<p>But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of
+Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples,
+with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian
+Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to
+Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh
+attitude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-225" id="Page_7-225"></a><a href="./images/225.png">7-225</a>]</span>war on the
+cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than
+suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.
+His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of
+the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the
+Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while
+the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally
+itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment
+that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the
+Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of
+Carteret's weakness in assenting to a change in the character of the
+struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack
+became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led
+an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against
+him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger
+at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now
+became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to
+his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not
+only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the
+king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its
+head.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Pelham Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>Of the reconstituted ministry which followed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-226" id="Page_7-226"></a><a href="./images/226.png">7-226</a>]</span>Henry Pelham became the
+head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity
+disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.
+Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and "the Boys," all
+found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had
+given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the
+first breach in the system of purely party government established on the
+accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by
+the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of
+Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of
+Hanover with Prussia for a headship of North Germany found expression in
+the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in
+accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of
+Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs
+remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots
+into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests
+should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an
+accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams
+forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could
+be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be
+given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the
+superiority <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-227" id="Page_7-227"></a><a href="./images/227.png">7-227</a>]</span>of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of Cumberland.
+Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians,
+and Dutch&mdash;for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged
+into the war, though by English subsidies&mdash;the Duke on the 31st of May
+1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and
+redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into
+this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column,
+doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the
+moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in
+their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and
+orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of
+Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and
+by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of
+July.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Charles Edward Stuart.</span></p>
+
+<p>The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and
+as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was
+placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.
+But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which
+wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had
+sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young
+adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-228" id="Page_7-228"></a><a href="./images/228.png">7-228</a>]</span>vessel and
+landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood
+almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his
+standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen
+hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair
+Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed "James the
+Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched
+against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the
+21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.
+Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now
+at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the
+people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the
+utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.
+His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after
+skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through
+Lancashire, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here
+all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his
+support as he passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of
+its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.
+Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single squire
+took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-229" id="Page_7-229"></a><a href="./images/229.png">7-229</a>]</span>English
+towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand
+pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred
+men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of
+Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency
+of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories
+into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere
+Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles
+Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand
+Highlanders.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Conquest of the Highlands.</span></p>
+
+<p>He soon learned too that forces of double his own strength were closing
+on either side of him, while a third army under the king and Lord Stair
+covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were away,
+quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its allegiance to
+the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms
+for King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though roused by a
+small French force which landed at Montrose. To advance further south
+was impossible, and Charles fell rapidly back on Glasgow; but the
+reinforcements which he found there raised his army to nine thousand
+men, and on the 23rd January 1746 he boldly attacked an English army
+under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped
+near Falkirk. Again the wild <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-230" id="Page_7-230"></a><a href="./images/230.png">7-230</a>]</span>charge of his Highlanders won victory for
+the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces
+dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly
+back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the 16th of April
+the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward
+of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they
+were starving and dispirited, while Cumberland's force was nearly double
+that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung
+themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were
+received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke
+through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few
+moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a mass of hunted
+fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.
+In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords,
+Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty
+persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures
+of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were
+abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and
+transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was
+forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which
+followed them, proved effective for their purpose. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-231" id="Page_7-231"></a><a href="./images/231.png">7-231</a>]</span>The dread of the
+clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the
+Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Widening of the War.</span></p>
+
+<p>Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the
+Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.
+When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for
+weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal
+therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded
+the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and
+withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however
+the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were
+balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe
+inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.
+The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at last
+brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by
+which England surrendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on
+land. But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during which both
+parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier contest which they saw
+impending. The war was in fact widening far beyond the bounds of Germany
+or of Europe. It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-232" id="Page_7-232"></a><a href="./images/232.png">7-232</a>]</span>settle the
+destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the valleys of the
+Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great question whether the
+fortunes of the New World were to be moulded by Frenchmen or Englishmen.
+Already too French adventurers were driving English merchants from
+Madras, and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add India
+to the dominions of France.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Clive.</span></p>
+
+<p>The intercourse of England with India had as yet given little promise of
+the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of
+Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco de Gama had crept round the
+Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese settlement on the Goa
+Coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The trade,
+profitable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three early
+factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during the century
+which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of but six
+fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by
+the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza; while Fort
+William, with the mean village which has since grown into Calcutta, owes
+its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of these forts was
+built simply for the protection of the Company's warehouses, and guarded
+by a few "sepahis," sepoys, or paid native soldiers; while the clerks
+and traders of each establishment were under the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-233" id="Page_7-233"></a><a href="./images/233.png">7-233</a>]</span>direction of a
+President and a Council. One of these clerks in the middle of the
+eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near
+Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his
+friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's
+service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of
+wretchedness and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by
+the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by
+home-sickness. Twice he attempted suicide; and it was only on the
+failure of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which
+baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Dupleix.</span></p>
+
+<p>A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the
+war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French
+in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.
+Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius,
+besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and
+merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but
+he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his
+clerkship for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was
+busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the
+repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of
+Pondicherry, to conceive <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-234" id="Page_7-234"></a><a href="./images/234.png">7-234</a>]</span>plans for the creation of a French empire in
+India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods
+to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first
+time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the
+line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne,
+the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised
+themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor
+founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the
+Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a
+race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan
+invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the
+capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known
+under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom
+conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands
+along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and
+finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Arcot.</span></p>
+
+<p>Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered
+his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced
+his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled
+with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made
+himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-235" id="Page_7-235"></a><a href="./images/235.png">7-235</a>]</span>seated a
+creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one
+town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but
+brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came forward with a daring
+scheme for its relief. With a few hundred English and sepoys he pushed
+through a thunderstorm to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital,
+entrenched himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days
+against thousands of assailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas,
+who had never before believed that Englishmen would fight, advanced and
+broke up the siege. But Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal
+vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran away at the
+first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the
+cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their
+Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the ground a
+pompous pillar which the French governor had set up in honour of his
+earlier victories.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The American Colonies.</span></p>
+
+<p>Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the
+struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while
+France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with
+even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West.
+From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England
+States, Massachusetts, New <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-236" id="Page_7-236"></a><a href="./images/236.png">7-236</a>]</span>Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to
+those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in
+North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still
+came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia
+received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war
+with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by
+the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which
+was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New
+York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the
+colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed
+William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the prim&aelig;val forest,
+and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among
+which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed
+before a new settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the
+reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General
+Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the
+persecuted Protestants of Germany.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Their progress.</span></p>
+
+<p>Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in
+numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we
+have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of
+negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother
+country. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-237" id="Page_7-237"></a><a href="./images/237.png">7-237</a>]</span>Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia
+were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Massachusetts saw
+five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a
+century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their
+numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia
+boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their
+maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with,
+the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod
+fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction
+indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an
+industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and
+the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as
+many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the
+Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the
+central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New
+England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an
+aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the
+system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of
+Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives
+in houses such as those of Fairfax and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-238" id="Page_7-238"></a><a href="./images/238.png">7-238</a>]</span>Washington. Throughout New
+England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their
+piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry,
+their love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions, remained
+unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was
+general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said
+Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay,
+have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their
+estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political
+activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the
+settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the
+establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of
+America. "Every township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath
+increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to
+teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase
+to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar
+school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New
+England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able
+to read and write.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Their political condition.</span></p>
+
+<p>Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their
+influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-239" id="Page_7-239"></a><a href="./images/239.png">7-239</a>]</span>features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood
+fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them
+contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first
+time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious
+freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been
+brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had
+never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all
+the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and
+the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large
+part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.
+Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to
+colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among
+the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds
+religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer
+diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and
+organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the
+Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother
+country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she
+had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But
+the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the
+worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at
+home. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-240" id="Page_7-240"></a><a href="./images/240.png">7-240</a>]</span>The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in
+all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and
+members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual
+re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and
+immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English
+Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and
+invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of
+their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater
+loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the
+colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government
+was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the
+projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save
+in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen
+into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly
+elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected,
+sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the
+Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">English control.</span></p>
+
+<p>With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference
+on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The
+superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and
+Plantations, which, though <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-241" id="Page_7-241"></a><a href="./images/241.png">7-241</a>]</span>itself without executive power, advised the
+Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was
+included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to
+themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost
+America because he read the American despatches, which none of his
+predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any
+interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were
+secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of
+internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt
+afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I
+have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you
+think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to
+England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.
+It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she
+might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own
+products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture
+in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the
+mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small
+import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of
+smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-242" id="Page_7-242"></a><a href="./images/242.png">7-242</a>]</span>Great Britain
+was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the
+Americans enjoyed as British subjects.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">French aggression.</span></p>
+
+<p>As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the
+colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French
+aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English
+settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for
+only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before
+the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the
+lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the
+pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English
+statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in
+Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of
+the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English
+settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or
+Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the
+inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke
+of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was
+stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven
+from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose
+settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax,
+the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-243" id="Page_7-243"></a><a href="./images/243.png">7-243</a>]</span>was formed, and its
+agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky;
+while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance
+between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor
+were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia.
+A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort.
+A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers
+from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a
+fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at
+once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless
+attack on it under George Washington, a young Virginian, who had been
+despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were
+forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was
+left in the hands of France.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Rout of Braddock.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was natural that at such a crisis the mother country should look to
+the united efforts of the colonies, and Halifax pressed for a joint
+arrangement which should provide a standing force and funds for its
+support. A plan for this purpose on the largest scale was drawn up by
+Benjamin Franklin, who, from a printer's boy, had risen to supreme
+influence in Pennsylvania; but in the way of such a union stood the
+jealousies which each state entertained of its neighbour, the
+disinclination of the colonists to be drawn into an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-244" id="Page_7-244"></a><a href="./images/244.png">7-244</a>]</span>expensive struggle,
+and, above all, suspicion of the motives of Halifax and his colleagues.
+The delay in furnishing any force for defence, the impossibility of
+bringing the colonies to any agreement, and the perpetual squabbles of
+their legislatures with the governors appointed by the Crown, may have
+been the motives which induced Halifax to introduce a Bill which would
+have made orders by the king in spite of the colonial charters law in
+America. The Bill was dropped in deference to the constitutional
+objections of wiser men; but the governors fed the fear in England of
+the "levelling principles" of the colonists, and every official in
+America wrote home to demand that Parliament should do what the colonial
+legislatures seemed unable to do, and establish a common fund for
+defence by a general taxation. Already plans were mooted for deriving a
+revenue from the colonies. But the prudence of Pelham clung to the
+policy of Walpole, and nothing was done; while the nearer approach of a
+struggle in Europe gave fresh vigour to the efforts of France. The
+Marquis of Montcalm, who was now governor of Canada, carried out with
+even greater zeal than his predecessor the plans of annexation; and the
+three forts of Duquesne on the Ohio, of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and
+of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, were linked together by a chain of
+lesser forts, which cut off the English colonists from all access to the
+west. Montcalm was gifted with singular powers of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-245" id="Page_7-245"></a><a href="./images/245.png">7-245</a>]</span>administration; he
+had succeeded in attaching the bulk of the Indian tribes from Canada as
+far as the Mississippi to the cause of France; and the value of their
+aid was shown in 1755, when General Braddock led a force of English
+soldiers and American militia to a fresh attack upon fort Duquesne. The
+force was utterly routed and Braddock slain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">State of Europe.</span></p>
+
+<p>The defeat woke England to its danger; for it was certain that war in
+America would soon be followed by war in Europe itself. Newcastle and
+his fellow-ministers were still true in the main to Walpole's policy.
+They looked on a league with Prussia as indispensable to the formation
+of any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia,"
+wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the
+Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength;
+if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of
+France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement.
+The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England
+desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the
+Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in
+which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice
+had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The
+traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-246" id="Page_7-246"></a><a href="./images/246.png">7-246</a>]</span>with the
+tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more
+probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only
+served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to
+regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant
+power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the
+supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house
+and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by
+the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England
+which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It
+was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa
+drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the
+growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth
+to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the
+league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So
+secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry
+Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on
+his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected
+from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself
+fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Alliance with Prussia.</span></p>
+
+<p>The danger to England was hardly less; for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-247" id="Page_7-247"></a><a href="./images/247.png">7-247</a>]</span>France appeared again on the
+stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis the
+Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of the French government were
+screened for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the
+ability of the agents it found to carry them out. In England, on the
+contrary, all was vagueness and indecision. The action of the king
+showed only his Hanoverian jealousy of the House of Brandenburg. It was
+certain that France, as soon as war broke out in the West, would attack
+his Electorate; and George sought help not at Berlin but at St.
+Petersburg. He concluded a treaty with Russia, which promised him the
+help of a Russian army on the Weser in return for a subsidy. Such a
+treaty meant war with Frederick, who had openly announced his refusal to
+allow the entry of Russian forces on German soil; and it was vehemently
+though fruitlessly opposed by William Pitt. But he had hardly withdrawn
+with Grenville and Charles Townshend from the Ministry when Newcastle
+himself recoiled from the king's policy. The Russian subsidy was
+refused, and Hanoverian interests subordinated to those of England by
+the conclusion of the treaty with Frederick of Prussia for which Pitt
+had pressed. The new compact simply provided for the neutrality of both
+Prussia and Hanover in any contest between England and France. But its
+results were far from being as peaceable as its provisions. Russia was
+outraged <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-248" id="Page_7-248"></a><a href="./images/248.png">7-248</a>]</span>by Frederick's open opposition to her presence in Germany;
+France resented his compact with and advances towards England; and Maria
+Theresa eagerly seized on the temper of both those powers to draw them
+into common action against the Prussian king. With the treaty between
+England and Frederick indeed began the Seven Years' War.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Seven Years' War.</span></p>
+
+<p>No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought
+greater triumphs to England: but few have had more disastrous
+beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and
+yet too greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable
+men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be
+guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit for
+service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was
+quick in her attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the key of the
+Mediterranean, was besieged by the Duke of Richelieu and forced to
+capitulate. To complete the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief
+under Admiral Byng fell back before the French. In Germany Frederick
+seized Dresden at the outset of the war and forced the Saxon army to
+surrender; and in 1757 a victory at Prague made him master for a while
+of Bohemia; but his success was transient, and a defeat at Kolin drove
+him to retreat again into Saxony. In the same year the Duke of
+Cumberland, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-249" id="Page_7-249"></a><a href="./images/249.png">7-249</a>]</span>who had taken post on the Weser with an army of fifty
+thousand men for the defence of Hanover, fell back before a French army
+to the mouth of the Elbe, and engaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven
+to disband his forces. In America things went even worse than in
+Germany. The inactivity of the English generals was contrasted with the
+genius and activity of Montcalm. Already masters of the Ohio by the
+defeat of Braddock, the French drove the English garrison from the forts
+which commanded Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, and their empire
+stretched without a break over the vast territory from Louisiana to the
+St. Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">William Pitt.</span></p>
+
+<p>A despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our
+coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair,
+"We are no longer a nation." But the nation of which Chesterfield
+despaired was really on the eve of its greatest triumphs, and the
+incapacity of Newcastle only called to the front the genius of William
+Pitt. Pitt was the grandson of a wealthy governor of Madras, who had
+entered Parliament in 1735, as member for one of his father's pocket
+boroughs. A group of younger men, Lord Lyttelton, the Grenvilles,
+Wilkes, and others, gradually gathered round him, and formed a band of
+young "patriots," "the Boys," as Walpole called them, who added to the
+difficulties of that minister. Pitt was as yet a cornet of horse, and
+the restless activity of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-250" id="Page_7-250"></a><a href="./images/250.png">7-250</a>]</span>genius was seen in the energy with which
+he threw himself into his military duties. He told Lord Shelburne long
+afterwards that "during the time he was cornet of horse there was not a
+military book he did not read through." But the dismissal from the army
+with which Walpole met his violent attacks threw this energy wholly into
+politics. His fiery spirit was hushed in office during the "broad-bottom
+administration" which followed Walpole's fall, and he soon attained
+great influence over Henry Pelham. "I think him," wrote Pelham to his
+brother, "the most able and useful man we have amongst us; truly
+honourable and strictly honest." He remained under Newcastle after
+Pelham's death, till the Duke's jealousy of power not only refused him
+the Secretaryship of State and admission to the Cabinet, but entrusted
+the lead of the House of Commons to a mere dependent. Pitt resisted the
+slight by an attitude of opposition; and his denunciation of the treaty
+with Russia served as a pretext for his dismissal. When the disasters of
+the war however drove Newcastle from office, in November 1756, Pitt
+became Secretary of State, bringing with him into office his relatives,
+George Grenville and Lord Temple, as well as Charles Townshend. But
+though his popularity had forced him into office, and though the
+grandeur of his policy at once showed itself by his rejection of all
+schemes for taxing America, and by his raising a couple of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-251" id="Page_7-251"></a><a href="./images/251.png">7-251</a>]</span>regiments
+amongst the Highlanders, he found himself politically powerless. The
+House was full of Newcastle's creatures, the king hated him, and only
+four months after taking office he was forced to resign. The Duke of
+Cumberland insisted on his dismissal in April 1757, before he would
+start to take the command in Germany. In July however it was necessary
+to recall him. The failure of Newcastle's attempt to construct an
+administration forced the Duke to a junction with his rival, and while
+Newcastle took the head of the Treasury, Pitt again became Secretary of
+State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His lofty spirit.</span></p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for their country, the character of the two statesmen made
+the compromise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted, for the general
+direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the
+administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor
+inclination. On the other hand his skill in parliamentary management was
+unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living man
+the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. What he
+cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribution of
+patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt turned
+disdainfully away. "I borrow the Duke of Newcastle's majority," his
+colleague owned with cool contempt, "to carry on the public business."
+"Mr. Pitt does everything," wrote Horace Walpole, "and the Duke gives
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-252" id="Page_7-252"></a><a href="./images/252.png">7-252</a>]</span>everything. So long as they agree in this partition they may do what
+they please." Out of the union of these two strangely-contrasted
+leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as it was the last, of the purely
+Whig administrations. But its real power lay from beginning to end in
+Pitt himself. Poor as he was, for his income was little more than two
+hundred a year, and springing as he did from a family of no political
+importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young cornet of
+horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a
+power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their
+grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
+national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his
+"popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of
+the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs
+and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at
+large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest
+and resolve gathered themselves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious,
+his ambition had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
+took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men
+from France can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once
+breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he
+communicated something of his own grandeur to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-253" id="Page_7-253"></a><a href="./images/253.png">7-253</a>]</span>the men who served him.
+"No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet
+who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when he went in."
+Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his
+failures, he roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
+defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed
+Frederick of Prussia as he recognised a greatness like his own, "but she
+has at last brought forth a man."</p>
+
+<p>It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we
+look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out
+in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society
+critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of
+simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and
+of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of
+itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
+passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,
+his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his
+haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more
+puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he
+appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
+turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
+politics, the undoubting faith which he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-254" id="Page_7-254"></a><a href="./images/254.png">7-254</a>]</span>felt in himself, in the
+grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. "I know that I
+can save the country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry
+into the Ministry, "and I know no other man can." The groundwork of
+Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride
+which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long
+held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the
+Restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was
+his love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted it
+with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. "I will not go
+to Court," he replied to an offer which was made him, "if I may not
+bring the Constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had
+nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the
+purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to
+the most lucrative office in his administration, that of Paymaster of
+the Forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was,
+Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never
+appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards the
+people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than "the great
+commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who
+commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-255" id="Page_7-255"></a><a href="./images/255.png">7-255</a>]</span>flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for
+"Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and
+when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily
+declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to
+enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
+flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
+grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far
+greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an
+opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single
+word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political
+party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly
+numbered half a dozen members.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His patriotism.</span></p>
+
+<p>His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament but in the people at
+large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a political revolution.
+"It is the people who have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty
+pride when the nobles of the Cabinet opposed his will. He was the first
+to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased,
+and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great
+middle class, which no longer found its representatives in the
+legislature. "You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt
+sought to save <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-256" id="Page_7-256"></a><a href="./images/256.png">7-256</a>]</span>Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
+look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of
+Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into
+power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him
+with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. "For weeks,"
+laughs Horace Walpole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him
+through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English
+merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political
+lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
+temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its
+energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its
+moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural
+attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish,
+whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection
+for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their
+enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which his country has
+borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an intense and personal
+love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till
+England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
+her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought
+of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-257" id="Page_7-257"></a><a href="./images/257.png">7-257</a>]</span>who
+rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public! I set
+you the example!" His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he
+held England. But even the faults which chequered his character told for
+him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had
+been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence
+of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in
+the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in
+full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was,
+are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day
+to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance
+which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his
+crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing
+into the House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage." But
+the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by
+faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was
+borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or carried into
+the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national
+dishonour.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His eloquence.</span></p>
+
+<p>Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power
+of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the Long
+Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-258" id="Page_7-258"></a><a href="./images/258.png">7-258</a>]</span>by the legal and
+theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of
+the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see
+ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,
+precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of
+business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
+statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,
+no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were
+always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,
+his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
+front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of
+his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the
+earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he
+whispered once to a friend, "for when once I am up everything that is in
+my mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by
+a large and poetic imagination, an imagination so strong that&mdash;as he
+said himself&mdash;"most things returned to him with stronger force the
+second time than the first," and by a glow of passion which not only
+raised him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front
+rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
+common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy
+with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-259" id="Page_7-259"></a><a href="./images/259.png">7-259</a>]</span>a
+command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an
+effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the
+keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by
+the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one
+having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words
+were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at
+large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
+detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt
+reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in
+these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate
+appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we
+have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in
+the men of his own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">His statesmanship.</span></p>
+
+<p>But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a
+statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his
+greater struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against
+arbitrary imprisonment under "general warrants," of the liberty of the
+press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against
+the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against
+England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of
+Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-260" id="Page_7-260"></a><a href="./images/260.png">7-260</a>]</span>Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India
+by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.
+Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of
+England, its "Calvinistic Creed and Arminian Clergy"; he was the first
+to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures
+shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by
+employing its Jacobites in the service of their country and by raising
+Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst
+as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge
+of men.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Plassey.</span></p>
+
+<p>But it was rather Fortune than his genius that showered on Pitt the
+triumphs which signalized the opening of his ministry. In the East the
+daring of a merchant-clerk made a company of English traders the
+sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous career of conquest which
+has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the
+dominions of the British crown. Recalled by broken health to England,
+Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to win for
+England a greater prize than that which his victories had won for it in
+the supremacy of the Carnatic. He had been only a few months at Madras
+when a crime whose horror still lingers in English memories called him
+to Bengal. Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-261" id="Page_7-261"></a><a href="./images/261.png">7-261</a>]</span>and most
+fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its silk,
+and the produce of its looms, were famous in European markets. Its
+Viceroys, like their fellow-lieutenants, had become practically
+independent of the Emperor, and had added to Bengal the provinces of
+Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the master of this vast domain, had
+long been jealous of the enterprise and wealth of the English traders;
+and, roused at this moment by the instigation of the French, he appeared
+before Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and fifty
+of them into a small prison called the Black Hole of Calcutta. The heat
+of an Indian summer did its work of death. The wretched prisoners
+trampled each other under foot in the madness of thirst, and in the
+morning only twenty-three remained alive. Clive sailed at the news with
+a thousand Englishmen and two thousand sepoys to wreak vengeance for the
+crime. He was no longer the boy-soldier of Arcot; and the tact and skill
+with which he met Surajah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the
+Viceroy strove to avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental
+falsehood and treachery to which he stooped. But his courage remained
+unbroken. When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey
+the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of
+war counselled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an
+hour's lonely musing gave <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-262" id="Page_7-262"></a><a href="./images/262.png">7-262</a>]</span>the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all
+that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who
+were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June 1757 were
+soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and broke in headlong
+rout before the English charge. The death of Surajah Dowlah enabled the
+Company to place a creature of its own on the throne of Bengal; but his
+rule soon became a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey began in
+fact the Empire of England in the East.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pitt and Frederick.</span></p>
+
+<p>The year of Plassey was the year of a victory hardly less important in
+the West. In Europe Pitt wisely limited himself to a secondary part.
+There was little in the military expeditions which marked the opening of
+his ministry to justify the trust of the country; for money and blood
+were lavished on buccaneering expeditions against the French coasts
+which did small damage to the enemy. But incidents such as these had
+little weight in the minister's general policy. His greatness lies in
+the fact that he at once recognised the genius of Frederick the Great,
+and resolved without jealousy or reserve to give him an energetic
+support. On his entry into office he refused to ratify the Convention of
+Closter-Seven, which had reduced Frederick to despair by throwing open
+his realm to a French advance; protected his flank by gathering an
+English and Hanoverian force on the Elbe, and on the counsel of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-263" id="Page_7-263"></a><a href="./images/263.png">7-263</a>]</span>Prussian king placed the best of his generals, the Prince of Brunswick,
+at its head; while subsidy after subsidy was poured into Frederick's
+exhausted treasury. Pitt's trust was met by the most brilliant display
+of military genius which the modern world had as yet witnessed. In
+November 1757, two months after his repulse at Kolin, Frederick flung
+himself on a French army which had advanced into the heart of Germany,
+and annihilated it in the victory of Rossbach. Before another month had
+passed he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal
+victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. The victory of
+Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of the world by creating
+the unity of Germany; its immediate effect was to force the French army
+on the Elbe to fall back on the Rhine. Here Ferdinand of Brunswick,
+reinforced with twenty thousand English soldiers, held them at bay
+during the summer of 1758; while Frederick, foiled in an attack on
+Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zorndorf.
+His defeat however by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch proved the
+first of a series of terrible misfortunes; and the year 1759 marks the
+lowest point of his fortunes. A fresh advance of the Russian army forced
+the king to attack it at Kunersdorf in August, and Frederick's repulse
+ended in the utter rout of his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for
+even Berlin lay <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-264" id="Page_7-264"></a><a href="./images/264.png">7-264</a>]</span>open to the conqueror. A few days later the surrender
+of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians; and at the close of the year an
+attempt upon them at Plauen was foiled with terrible loss. But every
+disaster was retrieved by the indomitable courage and tenacity of the
+king, and winter found him as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony
+save the ground which Daun's camp covered.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Minden and Quiberon.</span></p>
+
+<p>The year which marked the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes was the
+year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year of Minden and Quiberon and
+Quebec. France aimed both at a descent upon England and at the conquest
+of Hanover; for the one purpose she gathered a naval armament at Brest,
+while fifty thousand men under Contades and Broglie united for the other
+on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty thousand met them (August
+1) on the field of Minden. The French marched along the Weser to the
+attack, with their flanks protected by that river and a brook which ran
+into it, and with their cavalry, ten thousand strong, massed in the
+centre. The six English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French
+horse, and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once upon them
+in line regardless of the batteries on their flank, and rolling back
+charge after charge with volleys of musketry. In an hour the French
+centre was utterly broken. "I have seen," said Contades, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-265" id="Page_7-265"></a><a href="./images/265.png">7-265</a>]</span>"what I never
+thought to be possible&mdash;a single line of infantry break through three
+lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin!"
+Nothing but the refusal of Lord John Sackville to complete the victory
+by a charge of the horse which he headed saved the French from utter
+rout. As it was, their army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the
+Rhine. The project of an invasion of England met with the like success.
+Eighteen thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet,
+when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of November at the
+mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast where the
+French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals and granite reefs that
+the pilot remonstrated with the English admiral against his project of
+attack. "You have done your duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly
+replied; "now lay me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships
+were lost on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the
+disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped away.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pitt in America.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and Quiberon
+brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt had wisely limited
+his efforts to the support of Prussia, but across the Atlantic the field
+was wholly his own, and he had no sooner entered office than the
+desultory raids, which had hitherto been the only resistance to French
+aggression, were superseded <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-266" id="Page_7-266"></a><a href="./images/266.png">7-266</a>]</span>by a large and comprehensive plan of
+attack. The sympathies of the colonies were won by an order which gave
+their provincial officers equal rank with the royal officers in the
+field. They raised at Pitt's call twenty thousand men, and taxed
+themselves heavily for their support. Three expeditions were
+simultaneously directed against the French line&mdash;one to the Ohio valley,
+one against Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, while a third under General
+Amherst and Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
+The last was brilliantly successful. Louisburg, though defended by a
+garrison of five thousand men, was taken with the fleet in its harbour,
+and the whole province of Cape Breton reduced. The American militia
+supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the forts;
+and though Montcalm, with a far inferior force, was able to repulse
+General Abercromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia and
+Virginia, guided and inspired by the courage of George Washington, made
+itself master of Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to
+their new conquest still commemorates the enthusiasm of the colonists
+for the great Minister who first opened to them the West. The failure at
+Ticonderoga only spurred Pitt to greater efforts. The colonists again
+responded to his call with fresh supplies of troops, and Montcalm felt
+that all was over. The disproportion indeed of strength was enormous. Of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-267" id="Page_7-267"></a><a href="./images/267.png">7-267</a>]</span>regular French troops and Canadians alike he could muster only ten
+thousand, while his enemies numbered fifty thousand men. The next year
+(1759) saw Montcalm's previous victory rendered fruitless by the
+evacuation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Amherst, and by the
+capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian force which
+marched to its relief. The capture of the three forts was the close of
+the French effort to bar the advance of the colonists to the valley of
+the Mississippi, and to place in other than English hands the destinies
+of North America.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Conquest of Canada.</span></p>
+
+<p>But Pitt had resolved not merely to foil the designs of Montcalm, but to
+destroy the French rule in America altogether; and while Amherst was
+breaking through the line of forts, an expedition under General Wolfe
+entered the St. Lawrence and anchored below Quebec. Wolfe was already a
+veteran soldier, for he had fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Laffeldt,
+and had played the first part in the capture of Louisburg. Pitt had
+discerned the genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward
+manner and occasional gasconade of the young soldier of thirty-three
+whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the war. But for a while his
+sagacity seemed to have failed. No efforts could draw Montcalm from the
+long line of inaccessible cliffs which borders the river, and for six
+weeks Wolfe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-268" id="Page_7-268"></a><a href="./images/268.png">7-268</a>]</span>saw his men wasting away in inactivity while he himself lay
+prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his resolution was fixed,
+and in a long line of boats the army dropped down the St. Lawrence to a
+point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had
+been discovered to the summit. Not a voice broke the silence of the
+night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated the
+stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," remarking as he
+closed, "I had rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." But
+his nature was as brave as it was tender; he was the first to leap on
+shore and to scale the narrow path where no two men could go abreast.
+His men followed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes
+and the crags, and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army
+stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Montcalm hastened to attack,
+though his force, composed chiefly of raw militia, was far inferior in
+discipline to the English; his onset however was met by a steady fire,
+and at the first English advance his men gave way. Wolfe headed a charge
+which broke the French line, but a ball pierced his breast in the moment
+of victory. "They run," cried an officer who held the dying man in his
+arms&mdash;"I protest they run." Wolfe rallied to ask who they were that ran,
+and was told "the French." "Then," he murmured, "I die happy!" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-269" id="Page_7-269"></a><a href="./images/269.png">7-269</a>]</span>The fall
+of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat completed the victory; and the
+submission of Canada, on the capture of Montreal by Amherst in 1760, put
+an end to the dream of a French empire in America.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-270" id="Page_7-270"></a><a href="./images/270.png">7-270</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="book">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-271" id="Page_7-271"></a><a href="./images/271.png">7-271</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="head">
+<ul style="margin-top: 3em; margin-bottom: 3em;">
+  <li>BOOK IX</li>
+  <li>MODERN ENGLAND</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-272" id="Page_7-272"></a><a href="./images/272.png">7-272</a>]</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-273" id="Page_7-273"></a><a href="./images/273.png">7-273</a>]</span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+
+<ul>
+  <li>CHAPTER I</li>
+  <li>ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE</li>
+  <li>1760-1767</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Seven Years' War.</span></p>
+
+<p>Never had England played so great a part in the history of mankind as in
+the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs in every quarter of the world.
+In September came the news of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In
+October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word of
+the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask every morning what
+victory there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one."
+But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its
+triumphs that the Seven Years' War stood and remains still without a
+rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
+determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of
+Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political
+and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the
+leadership of Prussia and Prussia's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-274" id="Page_7-274"></a><a href="./images/274.png">7-274</a>]</span>kings. With that of Plassey the
+influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander
+on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw
+one of the races of the north-west cast into the heart of Asia new
+manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on
+the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By
+removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother
+country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred
+them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the
+great republic of the west.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England a World-Power.</span></p>
+
+<p>Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War
+is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a
+turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight
+of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within
+Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in
+other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived
+from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their
+fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European
+position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in
+South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her
+empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the
+strictly commercial <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-275" id="Page_7-275"></a><a href="./images/275.png">7-275</a>]</span>character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of
+political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new
+road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of
+Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would
+have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes
+in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French
+ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had
+to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance
+of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits
+of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that
+France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered
+little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around
+her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival
+of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that
+of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India,
+claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered
+high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to
+comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England in the Pacific.</span></p>
+
+<p>It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our
+statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in
+English <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-276" id="Page_7-276"></a><a href="./images/276.png">7-276</a>]</span>history&mdash;in the history not of England only, but of the English
+race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that
+the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly
+different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that
+the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's
+standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in
+Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
+Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words
+to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But
+greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his
+statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of
+Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own
+among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in
+arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his
+daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay
+before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be
+lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them
+showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into
+far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the
+other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-277" id="Page_7-277"></a><a href="./images/277.png">7-277</a>]</span>Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the
+British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from
+America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a
+Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements
+spread along its eastern shore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by
+year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain
+to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch
+voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first
+noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New
+Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It
+was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned
+her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace
+of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery
+to the Straits of Magellan.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Captain Cook.</span></p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron,
+"nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime
+power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the
+advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make
+discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed
+beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain
+Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-278" id="Page_7-278"></a><a href="./images/278.png">7-278</a>]</span>Pacific and in
+skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner
+traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a
+Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy,
+and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the
+Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small
+vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe
+the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched
+beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society
+Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of
+that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up
+New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles
+of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or
+Australia, on whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the
+district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name
+of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters,
+and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work
+was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New
+Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The
+records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of
+Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-279" id="Page_7-279"></a><a href="./images/279.png">7-279</a>]</span>of deep
+blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the
+huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti,
+the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the
+Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the
+sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders
+was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the
+expansion of the English race.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Britain and its Empire.</span></p>
+
+<p>Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English
+settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of
+the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in
+however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown.
+Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's
+attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but
+part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the
+furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer
+looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it
+claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial
+character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all
+the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all,
+without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas
+of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-280" id="Page_7-280"></a><a href="./images/280.png">7-280</a>]</span>monopoly of
+whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless
+wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than
+half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole
+world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that
+since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of
+five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the
+colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it
+had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative
+a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and
+inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds,
+whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to
+the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British
+statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">England and America.</span></p>
+
+<p>And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take
+an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain
+seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French
+minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's
+triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in
+Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on
+the mother country. But with the conquest of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-281" id="Page_7-281"></a><a href="./images/281.png">7-281</a>]</span>Canada all need of
+protection was removed. The attitude of England towards its distant
+dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of
+temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long
+existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the
+background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new
+prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to
+submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government
+and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon
+thoughtful men, and spread from them to the masses around them. At this
+very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams,
+then a village schoolmaster of Massachusetts, to lofty forebodings of
+the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.
+"Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than
+England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way
+to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." The sense
+that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.
+"Fools," said a descendant of William Penn, "are always telling their
+fears that the colonies will set up for themselves." Philosophers
+however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the
+fools. "Colonies are like fruits," wrote the foreseeing Turgot, "which
+cling <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-282" id="Page_7-282"></a><a href="./images/282.png">7-282</a>]</span>to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take
+care of itself it will do what Carthage did." But from the thought of
+separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The
+Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves
+on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered
+complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as
+obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other
+hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the
+growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms
+was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade
+with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the
+right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this
+great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England,
+it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the
+Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free institutions under
+which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from
+the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding
+them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England
+had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.
+Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part
+was due <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-283" id="Page_7-283"></a><a href="./images/283.png">7-283</a>]</span>to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of
+obligation mingled a sense of ingratitude. It was generally held that
+the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this
+debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all
+proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly
+of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.
+Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in
+great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these
+grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the
+government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent
+from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the
+"levelling principles" of the men about them. To statesmen at home the
+temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings
+with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of
+supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but
+republican.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George the Third.</span></p>
+
+<p>To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and
+to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the
+fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother
+country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted
+the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.
+But it was far from being his only aim. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-284" id="Page_7-284"></a><a href="./images/284.png">7-284</a>]</span>For the first and last time
+since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was
+resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George
+succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first
+ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and
+to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before
+twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt
+and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of
+ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and
+often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither
+profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before
+him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural
+powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using
+greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their
+natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men
+was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepitude
+or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him
+from "this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal for a public
+monument to the great statesman as "an offensive measure to me
+personally." But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to
+his purpose and obstinate in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-285" id="Page_7-285"></a><a href="./images/285.png">7-285</a>]</span>pursuit of it. And his purpose was to
+rule. "George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually
+repeated to him in youth, "George, be king." He called himself always "a
+Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish to undo the work which he
+believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of
+his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of
+the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which
+the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was
+determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern
+against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of
+parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the
+State.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Importance of his action.</span></p>
+
+<p>How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary
+constitution of the country as it had received its final form from
+Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to
+realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social
+disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and
+humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we
+pass from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife
+of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the
+king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than
+that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-286" id="Page_7-286"></a><a href="./images/286.png">7-286</a>]</span>strife of these
+wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from
+having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of
+the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the
+century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the
+transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the
+nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power
+of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people
+itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the
+aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal
+sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an
+organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a
+democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Revolution and the nation.</span></p>
+
+<p>To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must
+recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to
+take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to
+England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less
+equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory
+the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in
+actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to
+control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-287" id="Page_7-287"></a><a href="./images/287.png">7-287</a>]</span>moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the
+Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but
+the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of
+government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had
+tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended
+with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed
+classes and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent
+contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed
+showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots
+over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against
+Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old
+power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of
+administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy
+another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the
+general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the
+representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they
+represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the
+majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their
+hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which
+would follow on a return of the Stuarts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Parliament and the nation.</span></p>
+
+<p>The results of such a divorce between the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-288" id="Page_7-288"></a><a href="./images/288.png">7-288</a>]</span>government and that general
+mass of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground
+itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical
+power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the
+consciousness of power carries with it, among the mass of Englishmen
+public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress
+of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to
+Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from
+Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was
+unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on
+the governing class were even more fatal to any right conduct of public
+affairs. Not only had the mass of national sentiment been so utterly
+estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the
+people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the
+Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for
+half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation,
+that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their
+fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time
+it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been
+for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom
+to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious
+bigotry, that in spite of their narrow <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-289" id="Page_7-289"></a><a href="./images/289.png">7-289</a>]</span>insularism it had made Britain
+the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of
+Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to
+become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of
+expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with
+instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from
+the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the
+Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with
+actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them
+representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work
+done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers
+by the mass of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its
+views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the
+benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Need of Parliamentary reform.</span></p>
+
+<p>And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation
+of Parliament to the constituencies made some change in its composition
+a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of
+Commons were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
+wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been
+recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long
+Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-290" id="Page_7-290"></a><a href="./images/290.png">7-290</a>]</span>time of
+Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had
+been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great
+towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while
+members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
+vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns
+to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of
+boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the
+Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring
+landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
+estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the
+narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a
+small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of
+electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered
+their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply
+on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's
+boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the
+day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke
+of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough
+members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could
+alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the
+enormous expense of contesting such <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-291" id="Page_7-291"></a><a href="./images/291.png">7-291</a>]</span>constituencies practically left
+their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even
+in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out
+of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and
+sixty thousand were electors at all.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pressure of opinion.</span></p>
+
+<p>"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in
+noble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of
+the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from
+really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the
+height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
+Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament;
+and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose
+to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could
+allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative
+of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal
+boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of
+wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives
+naturally told on a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from
+the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary
+proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole
+and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of
+their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-292" id="Page_7-292"></a><a href="./images/292.png">7-292</a>]</span>were every day becoming
+more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we
+have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through
+England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in
+the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on
+politics.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The intellectual advance.</span></p>
+
+<p>Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had
+been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the
+seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of
+readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social
+changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the
+advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of
+wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large;
+and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave
+a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and
+rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works
+shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the
+diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none
+of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the
+wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten
+editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before
+the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-293" id="Page_7-293"></a><a href="./images/293.png">7-293</a>]</span>Shakspere
+were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were
+far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created
+an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher
+literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That
+such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such
+instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed
+the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment
+outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but
+the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial
+pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and
+imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly
+to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded
+for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a
+pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles
+and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result
+was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they
+were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking
+their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the
+patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called
+poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations
+and abridgements under the guise of history, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-294" id="Page_7-294"></a><a href="./images/294.png">7-294</a>]</span>or filling the journals
+with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pope.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the
+time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution;
+for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of
+his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all
+active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was
+the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business
+in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and
+there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy
+grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older
+English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his
+arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with
+an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as
+his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny
+frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen
+sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the
+larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid
+temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved
+small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy;
+he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he
+stung right and left with a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-295" id="Page_7-295"></a><a href="./images/295.png">7-295</a>]</span>malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose
+out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to
+anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat
+could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over
+Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range,
+but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately
+to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself
+almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he
+was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never
+led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer
+lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much,
+or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest
+characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From
+the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and
+independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the
+traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into
+hangers-on of the great.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Dunciad.</span></p>
+
+<p>With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the
+phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet
+his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay
+within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-296" id="Page_7-296"></a><a href="./images/296.png">7-296</a>]</span>but of
+the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful
+preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of
+the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the
+work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm
+of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond
+the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and
+buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour,
+its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's
+masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his
+mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic
+path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.
+But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to
+criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted
+from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an
+interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible
+power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by
+mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on
+men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a
+noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces
+that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the
+journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-297" id="Page_7-297"></a><a href="./images/297.png">7-297</a>]</span>the
+grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Revival of Letters.</span></p>
+
+<p>That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not
+have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence
+of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the
+work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of
+design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or
+forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every
+fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck
+at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such
+a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true
+and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled
+itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly
+in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before
+the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into
+fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and
+that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of
+Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude
+of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the
+eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom
+Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going
+on through Walpole's days <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-298" id="Page_7-298"></a><a href="./images/298.png">7-298</a>]</span>in the people at large; and it was inevitable
+that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics.
+The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets
+and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the mass of the
+people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all
+the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new
+information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censorship
+after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political
+influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by
+the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the
+writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of
+George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the
+national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast
+raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was
+the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being
+established in almost every considerable town.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Return of the Tories.</span></p>
+
+<p>With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully,
+roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and
+emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military
+triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have passed from its old
+inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-299" id="Page_7-299"></a><a href="./images/299.png">7-299</a>]</span>position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force
+of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new
+energy in the mass of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the
+national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with
+the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was
+not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but
+simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern
+the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether
+he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of
+Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin.
+But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a
+Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the
+later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin
+coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They
+were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a
+king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman,
+who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the
+opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually
+appeared again at court.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The King's friends.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a
+steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-300" id="Page_7-300"></a><a href="./images/300.png">7-300</a>]</span>Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the
+Crown. But from the first the Tory nobles and gentry came in one by one;
+and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics.
+Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the
+progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they
+returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all
+the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of
+the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but
+George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and
+influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the
+Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the
+civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's
+disposal. If this vast mass of patronage had been practically usurped by
+the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by
+George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made
+patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of
+Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy
+to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs
+were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast
+property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of
+office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whigs
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-301" id="Page_7-301"></a><a href="./images/301.png">7-301</a>]</span>dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily
+continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly,
+"formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that
+the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which
+springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the
+rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness
+and corruption of its representatives.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pitt and the Whigs.</span></p>
+
+<p>More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on
+the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were
+represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was
+fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and
+corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a
+character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt
+and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the
+commercial classes, the other by the Whig families and the whole
+machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in
+vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew
+day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the
+traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty
+with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt
+against the war and the supremacy of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-302" id="Page_7-302"></a><a href="./images/302.png">7-302</a>]</span>the Great Commoner. It was against
+their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would
+have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of
+Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out
+against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of
+1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius.
+Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at
+Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau:
+while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser.
+But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike
+failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and
+the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining
+hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been,
+Pitt was tottering to his fall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pitt resigns.</span></p>
+
+<p>The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised
+supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes.
+George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in
+the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of
+Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and
+though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was
+forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the
+instant desertion from Pitt of the two <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-303" id="Page_7-303"></a><a href="./images/303.png">7-303</a>]</span>ablest of his adherents, George
+Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this
+moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed
+for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace
+party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority
+of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is
+madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his
+correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the
+Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the
+temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was
+he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast
+extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which
+brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and
+Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war
+on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the
+blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way
+from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish
+Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by
+occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish
+dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw
+the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht
+break at last upon <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-304" id="Page_7-304"></a><a href="./images/304.png">7-304</a>]</span>England. His proud sense of the national strength
+never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had
+leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his
+colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet
+shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had
+never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him
+from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the
+bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his
+brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind
+himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt,
+was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of
+opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern
+England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of
+the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his
+appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called
+to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself
+accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which
+renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide."
+His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which
+followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George breaks with the Whigs.</span></p>
+
+<p>"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories
+to us!" Frederick on <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-305" id="Page_7-305"></a><a href="./images/305.png">7-305</a>]</span>the other hand was almost driven to despair. But
+George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the
+realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's
+retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular
+forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His
+declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the
+people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with
+indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of
+being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord
+Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of
+Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the
+King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the
+dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his
+carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their
+break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying
+him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so
+great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to
+deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than
+Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only
+to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his
+young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him
+into retirement. George <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-306" id="Page_7-306"></a><a href="./images/306.png">7-306</a>]</span>saw himself triumphant over the two great
+forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which
+arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose
+from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of
+First Minister marked the triumph of the king.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Peace.</span></p>
+
+<p>Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first
+resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762
+Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was
+brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies;
+it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the
+policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina
+Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the
+Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George
+and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price.
+With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only
+deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the
+basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the
+Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from
+humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been
+justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall;
+and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-307" id="Page_7-307"></a><a href="./images/307.png">7-307</a>]</span>issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of
+the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the
+year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and
+St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the
+gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest
+of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It
+was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763.
+So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all
+that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented
+himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to
+France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain
+were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right
+to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To
+England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the
+Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in
+compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George and the Parliament.</span></p>
+
+<p>We have already seen how mighty a change in the aspect of the world, and
+above all in the aspect of Britain, was marked by this momentous treaty.
+But no sense of its great issues influenced the young king in pressing
+for its conclusion. His eye was fixed not so much on Europe or the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-308" id="Page_7-308"></a><a href="./images/308.png">7-308</a>]</span>British Empire as on the petty game of politics which he was playing
+with the Whigs. The anxiety which he showed for peace abroad sprang
+mainly from his belief that peace was needful for success in his
+struggle for power at home. So long as the war lasted Pitt's return to
+office and the union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly
+danger. But with peace the king's hands were free. He could count on the
+dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the
+influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands.
+But what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of
+Commons. So long as matters went quietly, so long as no gust of popular
+passion or enthusiasm forced its members to bow for a while to outer
+opinion, he saw that "management" could make the House a mere organ of
+his will. George had discovered&mdash;to use Lord Bute's words&mdash;"that the
+forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government were things not
+altogether incompatible." At a time when it had become all-powerful in
+the State, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective
+sense to be a representative body at all; and its isolation from the
+general opinion of the country left it at ordinary moments amenable only
+to selfish influences. The Whigs had managed it by bribery and
+borough-jobbing, and George in his turn seized bribery and
+borough-jobbing as a base of the power he proposed to give to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-309" id="Page_7-309"></a><a href="./images/309.png">7-309</a>]</span>Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes.
+Day by day the young sovereign scrutinized the voting-list of the two
+Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted
+according to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment
+in the Church, rank in the army, were reserved for "the king's friends."
+Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery was
+employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry an office
+was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and twenty-five
+thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a single day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George III. and America.</span></p>
+
+<p>The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of the
+Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt; but in
+the teeth of his denunciation the provisions of the Peace of Paris were
+approved by a majority of five to one. It was seen still more in the
+vigour with which George and his minister prepared to carry out the
+plans over which they had brooded for the regulation of America. The
+American question was indeed forced on them, as they pleaded, by the
+state of the revenue. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion,
+and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous loans. The public
+debt now stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need therefore
+which met Bute after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris was that of
+making <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-310" id="Page_7-310"></a><a href="./images/310.png">7-310</a>]</span>provision for the new burthens which the nation had incurred,
+and as these had been partly incurred in the defence of the American
+Colonies it was the general opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies
+should bear a share of them. In this opinion Bute and the king
+concurred. But their plans went further than mere taxation. The amount
+indeed which was expected to be raised as revenue by these changes, at
+most two hundred thousand pounds, was far too small to give much relief
+to the financial pressure at home. But this revenue furnished an easy
+pretext for wider changes. Plans for the regulation of the government of
+the Colonies had been suggested from time to time by subordinate
+ministers, but they had been set aside alike by the prudence of Walpole
+and the generosity of Pitt. The appointment of Charles Townshend to the
+Presidency of the Board of Trade however was a sign that Bute had
+adopted a policy not only of taxation, but of restraint. The new
+minister declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the
+Navigation laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade was secured
+to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue within the Colonies
+for the discharge of the debt, and above all on impressing upon the
+colonists a sense of their dependence upon Britain. The direct trade
+between America and the French or Spanish West Indian Islands had
+hitherto been fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-311" id="Page_7-311"></a><a href="./images/311.png">7-311</a>]</span>evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were now reduced,
+but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted, and a considerable naval
+force was despatched to the American coast by Grenville, who stood at
+the head of the Admiralty Board, with a view of suppressing the
+clandestine trade with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected
+from this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp Tax, a tax
+on all legal documents issued within the Colonies, the plan of which
+seems to have originated with Bute's secretary, Jenkinson, afterwards
+the first Lord Liverpool. That resistance was expected was seen in a
+significant step which was taken by the ministry at the end of the war.
+Though the defeat of the French had left the Colonies without an enemy
+save the Indians, a force of ten thousand men was still kept quartered
+on their inhabitants, and a scheme was broached for an extension of the
+province of Canada over the district round the Lakes, which would have
+turned the western lands into a military settlement, governed at the
+will of the Crown, and have furnished a base of warlike operations, if
+such were needed, against the settled Colonies on the Atlantic.</p>
+
+<p>Had Bute's power lasted it is probable that these measures would have
+brought about the struggle between England and America long before it
+actually began. Fortunately for the two countries the minister found
+himself from the first <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-312" id="Page_7-312"></a><a href="./images/312.png">7-312</a>]</span>the object of a sudden and universal hatred. The
+great majority which had rejected Pitt's motion against the Peace had
+filled the court with exultation. "Now indeed," cried the Princess
+Dowager, "my son is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and
+minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular ill-will such
+as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts assailed the throne. Violent
+and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the
+reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher classes who had
+till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the
+side of the Crown. But the mass of the people was only puzzled and
+galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political
+activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of
+Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union
+than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was
+the slave of the king. The king still called himself a Whig, yet he was
+reviving a system of absolutism which Whiggism, to do it justice, had
+long made impossible. His minister was a mere favourite and in
+Englishmen's eyes a foreigner. The masses saw all this, but they saw no
+way of mending it. They knew little of their own strength, and they had
+no means of influencing the Government they hated save by sheer
+violence. They came therefore to the front with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-313" id="Page_7-313"></a><a href="./images/313.png">7-313</a>]</span>their old national and
+religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court,
+their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed
+hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and
+uproar.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Wilkes.</span></p>
+
+<p>It was this temper of the masses which was seized and turned to his
+purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a
+remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a
+singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in
+bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has
+made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform
+by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of
+the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to
+the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish
+the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon
+the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general
+excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to
+gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body
+of the Whigs, and the commercial classes who backed them, were startled
+and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown
+against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at
+the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-314" id="Page_7-314"></a><a href="./images/314.png">7-314</a>]</span>and by the sense of a
+coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its
+sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and
+disturbances which culminated&mdash;in a rough spirit of punning upon the
+name of the minister&mdash;in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The
+journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for
+this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the <i>North-Briton</i> that
+Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the
+peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of
+foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated
+minister by name.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Bute's fall.</span></p>
+
+<p>Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a
+revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the
+influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told
+for good. It was the attack of Wilkes which more than all else
+determined Bute to withdraw from office in 1763 as a means of allaying
+the storm of popular indignation. But the king was made of more stubborn
+stuff than his minister. If he suffered his favourite to resign he still
+regarded him as the real head of administration; for the ministry which
+Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more courtly of his
+colleagues, and was in fact formed under his direction. George Grenville
+was its nominal chief, but the measures of the Cabinet were still
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-315" id="Page_7-315"></a><a href="./images/315.png">7-315</a>]</span>secretly dictated by the favourite. The formation of the Grenville
+ministry indeed was laughed at as a joke. Charles Townshend and the Duke
+of Bedford, the two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after
+Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of ability
+was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman, who had served with credit at
+Minden, and had been rewarded by a post at Court which brought him into
+terms of intimacy with the young sovereign and Bute. Dislike of the Whig
+oligarchy and of the war had thrown Shelburne strongly into the
+opposition to Pitt, and his diplomatic talents were of service in
+securing recruits for his party, as his eloquence had been useful in
+advocating the peace; but it was not till he himself retired from office
+that Bute obtained for his supporter the Presidency of the Board of
+Trade. As yet however Shelburne's powers were little known, and he added
+nothing to the strength of the ministry. It was in fact only the
+disunion of its opponents which allowed it to hold its ground. Townshend
+and Bedford remained apart from the main body of the Whigs, and both
+sections held aloof from Pitt. George had counted on the divisions of
+the opposition in forming such a ministry; and he counted on the
+weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">George Grenville.</span></p>
+
+<p>But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute.
+Narrow and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-316" id="Page_7-316"></a><a href="./images/316.png">7-316</a>]</span>pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition
+from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too
+proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The
+conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that
+in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry.
+Never had Pitt shown a nobler patriotism or a grander self-command than
+in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at
+his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the
+return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a
+condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore
+constitutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had
+won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of
+this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on
+which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to
+restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown.
+"Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I
+would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as
+powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased
+to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the
+ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the
+formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-317" id="Page_7-317"></a><a href="./images/317.png">7-317</a>]</span>Pitt. On the other hand,
+Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed
+ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus
+became strong and compact.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Grenville and Wilkes.</span></p>
+
+<p>Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial
+ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest
+as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal
+forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the
+Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his
+one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over
+king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should
+strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its
+power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in
+the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with
+Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was
+finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity
+of the <i>North-Briton</i> made Wilkes the representative of the new
+journalism, as he was the representative of that mass of general
+sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall
+of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes.
+But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his
+administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-318" id="Page_7-318"></a><a href="./images/318.png">7-318</a>]</span>growing
+opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the
+<i>North-Briton</i> Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the
+opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State
+was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this
+seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for
+a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes
+himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal
+that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was
+immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the
+harshness of these proceedings passed into graver disapproval when
+Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial
+tribunal for the trial of its own assailant. While the paper which
+formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of
+justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false,
+scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time
+voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and
+advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the
+two Houses as unconstitutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in
+the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to
+France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons.
+Rapid and successful <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-319" id="Page_7-319"></a><a href="./images/319.png">7-319</a>]</span>blows such as these seem to have shown to how
+frivolous an assailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the
+Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The
+assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system
+of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing
+two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of
+indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of
+"Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with
+"No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence:
+and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for
+dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered
+rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Grenville and the Colonies.</span></p>
+
+<p>The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same
+obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important
+struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for
+their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement
+and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at
+the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a
+statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of
+Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry,
+again reopened the question. Grenville had fully <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-320" id="Page_7-320"></a><a href="./images/320.png">7-320</a>]</span>concurred in a part at
+least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a
+strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On
+one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or
+Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from
+America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of
+independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an
+issue, and in the end&mdash;as it was hoped&mdash;bring about a reconstruction of
+their democratic institutions and a closer union of the colonies under
+British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative
+and constitutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in
+the institutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne
+the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial
+charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the
+payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he
+desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as
+their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and
+it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial
+plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external
+and an internal revenue from America.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Colonies and the Stamp Act.</span></p>
+
+<p>If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd
+than that of Bute. Bute <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-321" id="Page_7-321"></a><a href="./images/321.png">7-321</a>]</span>had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in
+the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at
+collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even
+this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were
+cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small
+hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a
+dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a
+legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the
+relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of
+her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference
+between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual
+citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state
+which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound
+together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to
+it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To
+Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as
+completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any
+difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial
+legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent.
+What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not
+strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-322" id="Page_7-322"></a><a href="./images/322.png">7-322</a>]</span>corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have
+been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of
+the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading
+company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will
+of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were
+granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their
+legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as
+completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its
+franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in
+matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial
+Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above
+all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was
+borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted
+its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to
+acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very
+nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.
+No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament
+over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as
+absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law
+Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this;
+for the law had grown up under purely <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-323" id="Page_7-323"></a><a href="./images/323.png">7-323</a>]</span>national conditions, and without
+a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be
+applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact
+of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted
+from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they
+would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had
+imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not
+to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very
+circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into
+being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances.
+No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status
+of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man
+of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being
+represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of
+self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise
+such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of
+inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of
+Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of
+self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.
+But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took
+his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the
+Empire to which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-324" id="Page_7-324"></a><a href="./images/324.png">7-324</a>]</span>the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such
+share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of
+political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom
+but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's
+fellow-subjects.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The theory of the colonists.</span></p>
+
+<p>The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of
+such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national,
+England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might
+allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life
+of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last
+hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration
+in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their
+legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the
+mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised
+without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother
+country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing
+their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet
+raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous
+contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in
+place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the
+sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.
+The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-325" id="Page_7-325"></a><a href="./images/325.png">7-325</a>]</span>somewhat mitigated by
+a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports
+and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies,
+and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen
+like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville
+however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of
+his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid
+enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures
+seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only
+showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the
+restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of
+retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its
+aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no
+protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was
+strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the
+existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would
+probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that
+of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Stamp Act passed.</span></p>
+
+<p>What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a
+population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to
+guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the
+Minister&mdash;his proposal to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-326" id="Page_7-326"></a><a href="./images/326.png">7-326</a>]</span>introduce internal taxation within the bounds
+of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp
+duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected&mdash;was of another order from
+his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of
+the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual
+relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another
+spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand.
+America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The
+representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies,
+and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a
+stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts&mdash;first as ever in her
+protest&mdash;marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade
+are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand
+banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost."
+The distinction was accepted by the assembly of every colony; and it was
+with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who
+had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high
+repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In
+England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the
+colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal
+belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were
+many <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-327" id="Page_7-327"></a><a href="./images/327.png">7-327</a>]</span>who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of
+trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no
+work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so
+delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that,
+boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should
+voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right
+to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be
+extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main
+willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin
+could give no assurance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation,
+and without such an assurance Grenville had no mind to change his plans.
+In February 1765 the Stamp Act was passed through both Houses with less
+opposition than a turnpike bill.</p>
+
+<p>At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When
+the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said
+a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so
+great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have
+solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have
+borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position
+where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was
+hardly passed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-328" id="Page_7-328"></a><a href="./images/328.png">7-328</a>]</span>by the
+exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel
+which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George
+again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to
+free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to
+Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the
+whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a
+condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy
+in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of
+a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the
+family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new
+ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it
+brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's
+brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family
+ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great
+Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons,
+nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to
+have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his
+brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him
+in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry
+of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now
+Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-329" id="Page_7-329"></a><a href="./images/329.png">7-329</a>]</span>His refusal to
+join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary
+strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold
+his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed
+in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he
+returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to
+the main body of the Whigs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Rockingham Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis
+of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had
+been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned
+as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the
+Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the
+Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of
+the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and
+lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid,
+and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the
+great Whig nobles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's
+power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765
+was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham
+looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt
+and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the
+Colonies, and it was <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-330" id="Page_7-330"></a><a href="./images/330.png">7-330</a>]</span>probably through this difference of sentiment that
+Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he
+made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered
+preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from
+America which made this attitude impossible. Vigorously as he had
+struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the
+Colonies, when they were passed, but that of submission. But submission
+was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New
+England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper;
+and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and
+Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it
+was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its assembly was the
+first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle
+with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts.
+Massachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but
+proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to
+provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress
+met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Pitt and America.</span></p>
+
+<p>The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no
+New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its
+members, "but all of us Americans." <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-331" id="Page_7-331"></a><a href="./images/331.png">7-331</a>]</span>The news of its assembly reached
+England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose
+members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But
+Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the
+Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in
+the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called
+Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar
+scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from
+Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the
+constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was
+denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this
+kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is
+obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that
+America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the
+feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have
+been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a
+looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the
+absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this
+moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.
+In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition,
+and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-332" id="Page_7-332"></a><a href="./images/332.png">7-332</a>]</span>return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his
+words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had
+passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were
+opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt
+themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on
+the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal
+feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt
+must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up
+his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen,
+co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which
+the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and
+that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker
+of the day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Edmund Burke.</span></p>
+
+<p>At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of
+his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor
+and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the
+friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to
+give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and
+literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to
+politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered
+Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-333" id="Page_7-333"></a><a href="./images/333.png">7-333</a>]</span>repeal of the Stamp
+Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the
+scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which
+loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of
+the characteristics of his oratory&mdash;its passionate ardour, its poetic
+fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in
+which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant
+word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an
+eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's
+clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for
+the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have
+learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at
+a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical
+cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical
+coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was
+poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour
+from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a
+great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose
+institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that
+to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial
+scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which
+was in itself a natural outcome of its history and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-334" id="Page_7-334"></a><a href="./images/334.png">7-334</a>]</span>developement. His
+temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not
+from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order,
+and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every
+institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he
+discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the
+social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be
+risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had
+cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he
+said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement
+may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch
+so complicated a machine."</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Burke and politics.</span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its
+influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great
+question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served
+him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those
+natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities
+into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their
+actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces
+which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of
+Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical
+basis, seemed to him a work for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-335" id="Page_7-335"></a><a href="./images/335.png">7-335</a>]</span>"metaphysicians," and not for
+statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it
+was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to
+time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the
+varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other
+words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual
+state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition
+of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But
+nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a
+state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a
+defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was
+thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution
+of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was
+to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the
+great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left
+him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to
+the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest
+man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption
+of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in
+defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in
+England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
+against all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-336" id="Page_7-336"></a><a href="./images/336.png">7-336</a>]</span>proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the
+Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work
+seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of
+timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert
+Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement
+of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might
+come from particular or from special reforms.</p>
+
+<p>It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His
+political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party
+must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from
+popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig
+families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular
+tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as
+mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and
+insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the
+representative of forces before which the actual method of government
+must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary
+isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real
+representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was
+drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should
+make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a
+reform, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-337" id="Page_7-337"></a><a href="./images/337.png">7-337</a>]</span>the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of
+political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his
+day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with
+horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was
+leading England on in the path of change.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">Repeal of the Stamp Act.</span></p>
+
+<p>At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the
+Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's
+tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing
+with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the
+Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim
+to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His
+genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country,
+the time had come when the union between England and its children across
+the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was
+wholly unintelligible to the mass of the Whigs or the ministry. They
+were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the
+Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the
+English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle
+absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt
+offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were
+driven, whether they would or no, to a practical <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-338" id="Page_7-338"></a><a href="./images/338.png">7-338</a>]</span>acknowledgement of the
+policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp
+Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of
+colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first
+brought in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the
+Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no
+doubt to reassure the followers of the ministry as well as their
+opponents, for in the assertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to
+which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a
+public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the
+Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his
+fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in
+a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's
+lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in
+the Lords. The passing of the declaratory act was followed by the
+introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of
+the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George
+himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.</p>
+
+<p><span class="sidenote">The Chatham Ministry.</span></p>
+
+<p>As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose
+resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which
+waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the multitude reverently
+uncovered their heads <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-339" id="Page_7-339"></a><a href="./images/339.png">7-339</a>]</span>and followed him home with blessings. It was the
+noblest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England"
+more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice
+had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though
+but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies.
+Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid
+found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first
+man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's
+hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced
+George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and
+the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve
+in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the
+political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread
+of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before.
+Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly
+inadmissible, was passed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the
+House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely
+Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he
+showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to
+nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham
+stood coldly aside, some of his <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-340" id="Page_7-340"></a><a href="./images/340.png">7-340</a>]</span>fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's
+offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the
+young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great
+Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but
+on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the
+people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as
+would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time.
+Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such
+a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to
+strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the
+"king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay
+really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command
+which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity
+indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when
+it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham.
+The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the
+public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him
+to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title
+of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown
+itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had
+never ceased to hang around him, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7-341" id="Page_7-341"></a><a href="./images/341.png">7-341</a>]</span>and it had been only at rare intervals
+that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of
+Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun
+the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy.
+The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the
+close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to
+a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we
+are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of
+Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and
+for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the
+Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the
+moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards
+Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from
+Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the
+Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks
+of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little
+effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend
+at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and
+when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year
+his power remained unshaken.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="head">
+<hr />
+END OF VOL. VII.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2><a name="TN" id="TN"></a>TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES</h2>
+
+<p>Pages iv, 270, and 272 are blank in the original.</p>
+
+<p>Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:</p>
+
+<table summary="variations in spelling" style="margin-left: 10%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">council&nbsp;&nbsp;Councils&nbsp;&nbsp;Councillor&nbsp;&nbsp;Councillors</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2">counsel&nbsp;&nbsp;counsels&nbsp;&nbsp;counselled&nbsp;&nbsp;counsellor&nbsp;&nbsp;counsellors</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">ascendant</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">ascendency</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">burdens</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">burthens</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 4em;">Luxembourg</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Luxemburg</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">recognised</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">recognized</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Variations in hyphenation have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:</p>
+
+<table summary="variations in hyphenation" style="margin-left: 10%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft">arm-chair</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">armchair</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" style="padding-right: 4em;">re-organization</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">reorganization</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The following corrections have been made to the text:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>Page 35: success or defeat must be{original has by} equally
+fatal</p>
+
+<p>Page 155: or dependents{original has dependants} wringing
+bread</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME VII (OF 8)***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, History of the English People, Volume VII (of
+8), by John Richard Green
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8)
+       The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767
+
+
+Author: John Richard Green
+
+
+
+Release Date: April 30, 2008  [eBook #25261]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME VII (OF 8)***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Paul Murray, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes links to images of the original pages.
+      See 25261-h.htm or 25261-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/5/2/6/25261/25261-h/25261-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/5/2/6/25261/25261-h.zip)
+
+      The index for the entire 8 volume set of _History of
+      the English People_ was located at the end of Volume
+      VIII. For ease in accessibility, it has been removed
+      and produced as a separate volume
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25533).
+
+
+
+
+
+HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
+
+by
+
+JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
+Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
+
+
+VOLUME VII
+
+THE REVOLUTION, 1683-1760. MODERN ENGLAND, 1760-1767
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+MacMillan and Co., Ltd.
+New York: MacMillan & Co.
+1896
+
+First Edition 1879; Reprinted 1882, 1886, 1891.
+Eversley Edition, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   BOOK VIII
+
+   THE REVOLUTION. 1683-1760
+
+
+        CHAPTER III
+                                                    PAGE
+        THE FALL OF THE STUARTS. 1683-1714.            1
+
+        CHAPTER IV
+
+        THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 1714-1760.             147
+
+
+   BOOK IX
+
+   MODERN ENGLAND. 1760-1815
+
+
+        CHAPTER I
+
+        ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE. 1760-1767.           273
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FALL OF THE STUARTS
+
+1683-1714
+
+
+[Sidenote: The King's Triumph.]
+
+In 1683 the Constitutional opposition which had held Charles so long in
+check lay crushed at his feet. A weaker man might easily have been led
+to play the mere tyrant by the mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his
+triumph. On the very day when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were
+dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood as in the blood of a martyr the
+University of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive
+obedience even to the worst of rulers was a part of religion. But
+Charles saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a mere
+tyranny. Ormond and the great Tory party which had rallied to his
+succour against the Exclusionists were still steady for parliamentary
+and legal government. The Church was as powerful as ever, and the
+mention of a renewal of the Indulgence to Nonconformists had to be
+withdrawn before the opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore
+during the few years which remained to him to avoid the appearance of
+any open violation of public law. He suspended no statute. He imposed no
+tax by Royal authority. Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press
+and the Habeas Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt
+to curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to avoid
+rousing popular resistance, he moved coolly and resolutely forward on
+the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax pressed for energetic
+resistance to the aggressions of France, for the recall of Monmouth, or
+for the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other English
+statesman he found he had been duped. Now that his work was done he was
+suffered to remain in office but left without any influence in the
+government. Hyde, who was created Earl of Rochester, still remained at
+the head of the Treasury; but Charles soon gave more of his confidence
+to the supple and acute Sunderland, who atoned for his desertion of the
+king's cause in the heat of the Exclusion Bill by an acknowledgement of
+his error and a pledge of entire accordance with the king's will.
+
+[Sidenote: New Town Charters.]
+
+The protests both of Halifax and of Danby, who was now released from the
+Tower, in favour of a return to Parliaments were treated with
+indifference, the provisions of the Triennial Act were disregarded, and
+the Houses remained unassembled during the remainder of the king's
+reign. His secret alliance with France furnished Charles with the funds
+he immediately required, and the rapid growth of the customs through the
+increase of English commerce promised to give him a revenue which, if
+peace were preserved, would save him from any further need of fresh
+appeals to the Commons. Charles was too wise however to look upon
+Parliaments as utterly at an end: and he used this respite to secure a
+House of Commons which should really be at his disposal. The strength of
+the Country party had been broken by its own dissensions over the
+Exclusion Bill and by the flight or death of its more prominent leaders.
+Whatever strength it retained lay chiefly in the towns, whose
+representation was for the most part virtually or directly in the hands
+of their corporations, and whose corporations, like the merchant class
+generally, were in sympathy Whig. The towns were now attacked by writs
+of "quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why their charters
+should not be declared forfeited on the ground of abuse of their
+privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about a
+general surrender of municipal liberties; and the grant of fresh
+charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were carefully excluded from
+their corporations, placed the representation of the boroughs in the
+hands of the Crown. Against active discontent Charles had long been
+quietly providing by the gradual increase of his Guards. The withdrawal
+of its garrison from Tangier enabled him to raise their force to nine
+thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this force, the
+nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve of six regiments
+which were maintained till they should be needed at home in the service
+of the United Provinces.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Charles.]
+
+But great as the danger really was it lay not so much in isolated acts
+of tyranny as in the character and purpose of Charles himself, and his
+death at the very moment of his triumph saved English freedom. He had
+regained his old popularity; and at the news of his sickness in the
+spring of 1685 crowds thronged the churches, praying that God would
+raise him up again to be a father to his people. But while his subjects
+were praying the one anxiety of the king was to die reconciled to the
+Catholic Church. His chamber was cleared, and a priest named Huddleston,
+who had saved his life after the battle of Worcester, received his
+confession and administered the last sacraments. Not a word of this
+ceremony was whispered when the nobles and bishops were recalled into
+the royal presence, and Charles though steadily refusing the communion
+which Bishop Ken offered him accepted the bishop's absolution. All the
+children of his mistresses save Monmouth were gathered round the bed,
+and Charles commended them to his brother's protection by name. The
+scene which followed is described by a chaplain to one of the prelates
+who stood round the dying king. Charles "blessed all his children one by
+one, pulling them on to his bed; and then the bishops moved him, as he
+was the Lord's anointed and the father of his country, to bless them
+also and all that were there present, and in them the general body of
+his subjects. Whereupon, the room being full, all fell down upon their
+knees, and he raised himself in his bed and very solemnly blessed them
+all." The strange comedy was at last over. Charles died as he had lived:
+brave, witty, cynical, even in the presence of death. Tortured as he was
+with pain, he begged the bystanders to forgive him for being so
+unconscionable a time in dying. One mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth,
+hung weeping over his bed. His last thought was of another mistress,
+Nell Gwynn. "Do not," he whispered to his successor ere he sank into a
+fatal stupor, "do not let poor Nelly starve!"
+
+[Sidenote: James the Second.]
+
+The death of Charles in February 1685 placed his brother James, the Duke
+of York, upon the throne. His character and policy were already well
+known. Of all the Stuart rulers James is the only one whose intellect
+was below mediocrity. His mind was dull and narrow though orderly and
+methodical; his temper dogged and arbitrary but sincere. His religious
+and political tendencies had always been the same. He had always
+cherished an entire belief in the royal authority and a hatred of
+Parliaments. His main desire was for the establishment of Catholicism as
+the only means of ensuring the obedience of his people; and his old love
+of France was quickened by the firm reliance which he placed on the aid
+of Lewis in bringing about that establishment. But the secrecy in which
+his political action had as yet been shrouded and his long absence from
+England had hindered any general knowledge of his designs. His first
+words on his accession, his promise to "preserve this Government both in
+Church and State as it is now by law established," were welcomed by the
+whole country with enthusiasm. All the suspicions of a Catholic
+sovereign seemed to have disappeared. "We have the word of a King!" ran
+the general cry, "and of a King who was never worse than his word." The
+conviction of his brother's faithlessness in fact stood James in good
+stead. He was looked upon as narrow, impetuous, stubborn, and despotic
+in heart, but even his enemies did not accuse him of being false. Above
+all, incredible as such a belief may seem now, he was believed to be
+keenly alive to the honour of his country and resolute to free it from
+foreign dependence.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Parliament.]
+
+From the first indeed there were indications that James understood his
+declaration in a different sense from the nation. He was resolved to
+make no disguise of his own religion; the chapel in which he had
+hitherto worshipped with closed doors was now thrown open and the king
+seen at Mass. He regarded attacks on his faith as attacks on himself,
+and at once called on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
+London to hinder all preaching against Catholicism as a part of their
+"duty" to their king. He made no secret of his resolve to procure
+freedom of worship for his co-religionists while still refusing it to
+the rest of the Nonconformists, whom he hated as republicans and
+Exclusionists. All was passed over however in the general confidence. It
+was necessary to summon a Parliament, for the royal revenue ceased with
+the death of Charles; but the elections, swayed at once by the tide of
+loyalty and by the command of the boroughs which the surrender of their
+charters had given to the Crown, sent up in May a House of Commons in
+which James found few members who were not to his mind. His appointment
+indeed of Catholic officers in the army was already exciting murmurs;
+but these were hushed as James repeated his pledge of maintaining the
+established order both in Church and State. The question of religious
+security was waived at a hint of the royal displeasure, and a revenue of
+nearly two millions was granted to the king for life.
+
+[Sidenote: Argyle's Rising.]
+
+All that was wanted to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism
+was supplied by a rebellion in the North, and by another under Monmouth
+in the West. The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the
+Restoration to the house of Argyle. The great Marquis indeed had been
+brought to the block at the king's return. His son, the Earl of Argyle,
+had been unable to save himself even by a life of singular caution and
+obedience from the ill-will of the vile politicians who governed
+Scotland. He was at last convicted of treason in 1682 on grounds at
+which every English statesman stood aghast. "We should not hang a dog
+here," Halifax protested, "on the grounds on which my Lord Argyle has
+been sentenced to death." The Earl escaped however to Holland, and lived
+peaceably there during the last six years of the reign of Charles.
+Monmouth had found the same refuge at the Hague, where a belief in the
+king's love and purpose to recall him secured him a kindly reception
+from William of Orange. But the accession of James was a death-blow to
+the hopes of the Duke, while it stirred the fanaticism of Argyle to a
+resolve of wresting Scotland from the rule of a Catholic king. The two
+leaders determined to appear in arms in England and the North, and the
+two expeditions sailed within a few days of each other. Argyle's attempt
+was soon over. His clan of the Campbells rose on the Earl's landing in
+Cantyre, but the country had been occupied for the king, and quarrels
+among the exiles who accompanied him robbed his effort of every chance
+of success. His force scattered without a fight; and Argyle, arrested
+in an attempt to escape, was hurried on the 30th of June to a traitor's
+death.
+
+[Sidenote: Monmouth's Rising.]
+
+Monmouth for a time found brighter fortune. His popularity in the West
+was great, and though the gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme and
+demanded an effective parliamentary government as well as freedom of
+worship for Protestant Nonconformists, the farmers and traders of
+Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns of
+Somerset were true to the Whig cause, as they had been true to the cause
+of the Long Parliament; and on the entrance of the Duke into Taunton the
+popular enthusiasm showed itself in the flowers which wreathed every
+door, as well as in a train of young girls who presented Monmouth with a
+Bible and a flag. His forces now amounted to six thousand men, but
+whatever chance of success he might have had was lost by his assumption
+of the title of king, his right to which he had pledged himself hitherto
+to leave for decision to a free Parliament. The two Houses offered to
+support James with their lives and fortunes, and passed a bill of
+attainder against the Duke. The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary
+and of William, held stubbornly aloof; while the Guards and the
+regiments from Tangier hurried to the scene of the revolt and the
+militia gathered to the royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on Bristol
+and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridgewater, and flung himself in the
+night of the 6th of July on the king's forces as they lay encamped hard
+by on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed; and the brave peasants and miners
+who followed the Duke, checked in their advance by a deep drain which
+crossed the moor, were broken after a short but desperate resistance by
+the royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, and after a vain
+effort to escape from the realm was captured and sent pitilessly to the
+block.
+
+[Sidenote: The Bloody Circuit.]
+
+Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was changed
+into horror by the terrible measures of repression which followed on the
+victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a servile tool of the
+Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed in which the troops
+were suffered to indulge after the battle. His protest however was
+disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from the Court to die. James
+was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the
+Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent
+temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which
+have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels
+were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit,"
+while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight
+hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger number were
+whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of honour, the courtiers,
+even the Judge himself, made shameless profit from the sale of pardons.
+What roused pity above all were the cruelties wreaked upon women. Some
+were scourged from market-town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of
+one of the Regicides, was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring
+a rebel. Elizabeth Gaunt for the same act of womanly charity was burned
+at Tyburn. Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such
+as this was avowed and sanctioned by the king. Even the cold heart of
+General Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly
+been owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away
+from all appeals for mercy. "This marble," he cried as he struck the
+chimney-piece on which he leant, "is not harder than the king's heart."
+
+[Sidenote: James and France.]
+
+But it was soon plain that the terror which this butchery was meant to
+strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The revolt was made
+a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. Charles, as we have
+seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to nearly ten thousand men;
+James raised it at one swoop to twenty thousand. The employment of this
+force was to be at home, not abroad, for the hope of an English policy
+in foreign affairs had already faded away. In the designs which James
+had at heart he could look for no consent from Parliament; and however
+his pride revolted against a dependence on France, it was only by
+French gold and French soldiers that he could hope to hold the
+Parliament permanently at bay. A week therefore after his accession he
+assured Lewis that his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of
+Charles himself. "Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador,
+"that without his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be
+consulted, and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The
+pledge of subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and
+the promise was received with the strongest expressions of delight and
+servility. The hopes which the Prince of Orange had conceived from his
+father-in-law's more warlike temper were nipped by a refusal to allow
+him to visit England. All the caution and reserve of Charles the Second
+in his dealings with France was set aside. Sunderland, the favourite
+Minister of the new king as he had been of the old, not only promised
+during the session to avoid the connection with Spain and Holland which
+the Parliament was known to desire, but "to throw aside the mask and
+openly break with them as soon as the royal revenue is secured." The
+support indeed which James needed was a far closer and firmer support
+than his brother had sought for. Lewis on the other hand trusted him as
+he could never trust Charles. His own bigotry understood the bigotry of
+the new sovereign. "The confirmation of the King's authority and the
+establishment of religion," he wrote, "are our common interest"; and he
+promised that James should "find in his friendship all the resources
+which he can expect."
+
+[Sidenote: Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.]
+
+Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger to
+English religion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition of
+Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed warfare
+against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland; he declared war at
+this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of Nantes, the
+measure by which Henry the Fourth after his abandonment of Protestantism
+secured toleration and the free exercise of their worship for his
+Protestant subjects. It had been respected by Richelieu even in his
+victory over the Huguenots, and only lightly tampered with by Mazarin.
+But from the beginning of his reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its
+provisions, and his revocation of it at the end of 1685 was only the
+natural close of a progressive system of persecution. The revocation was
+followed by outrages more cruel than even the bloodshed of Alva.
+Dragoons were quartered on Protestant families, women were flung from
+their sick-beds into the streets, children were torn from their mothers'
+arms to be brought up in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the
+galleys. In spite of the royal edicts which forbade even flight to the
+victims of these horrible atrocities a hundred thousand Protestants
+fled over the borders, and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were
+filled with French exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their
+industry established in the fields east of London the silk trade of
+Spitalfields.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Parliament.]
+
+But while Englishmen were looking with horror on these events in France
+James was taking advantage of the position in which as he believed they
+placed him. The news of the revocation drew from James expressions of
+delight. The rapid increase of the conversions to Catholicism which
+followed on the "dragonnades" raised in him hopes of as general an
+apostasy in his own dominions. His tone took a new haughtiness and
+decision. He admitted more Catholic officers into his fresh regiments.
+He dismissed Halifax from the Privy Council on his refusal to consent to
+a plan for repealing the Test Act. He met the Parliament on its
+reassembling in November with a haughty declaration that whether legal
+or no his grant of commissions to Catholics must not be questioned, and
+with a demand of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of
+the Houses, their alarm for the Church, their dread of a standing army,
+was yet stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a
+single vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were
+redressed, and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal
+commissions on the ground that the continuance of the Catholic officers
+in their posts "may be taken to be a dispensing with that law without
+Act of Parliament." The Lords took a bolder tone; and the protest of the
+bishops against any infringement of the Test Act expressed by Bishop
+Compton of London was backed by the eloquence of Halifax. Their desire
+for conciliation indeed was shown in an offer to confirm the existing
+officers in their posts by Act of Parliament, and even to allow fresh
+nominations of Catholics by the king under the same security. But James
+had no wish for such a compromise, and the Houses were at once
+prorogued.
+
+[Sidenote: The Test set aside.]
+
+The king resolved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain
+from Parliament. He remodelled the bench by dismissing four judges who
+refused to lend themselves to his plans; and in the June of 1686 their
+successors decided in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer
+in the army, that a royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the
+Test Act. The principle laid down by the judges "that it is a privilege
+inseparably connected with the sovereignty of the King to dispense with
+penal laws, and that according to his own judgment," was applied by
+James with a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint.
+Catholics were admitted into civil and military offices without stint,
+and four Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council. The
+laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the realm or the
+open exercise of Catholic worship were set at nought. A gorgeous chapel
+was opened in the palace of St. James for the use of the king.
+Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans, appeared in their religious garb
+in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a crowded school in the
+Savoy. The quick growth of discontent at these acts would have startled
+a wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on an obstinacy
+which never gave way; and a riot which took place on the opening of a
+Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the establishment of a camp
+of thirteen thousand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and Ireland.]
+
+The course which James intended to follow in England was shown indeed by
+the course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland he acted
+as a pure despot. At the close of Charles's reign the extreme
+Covenanters or "wild Whigs" of the Western shires had formally renounced
+their allegiance to a "prelatical" king. A smouldering revolt spread
+over the country that was only held in check by the merciless cruelties
+with which the royal troops avenged the "rabbling of priests" and the
+outrages committed by the Whigs on the more prominent persecutors. Such
+a revolt threw strength into the hands of the government by rallying to
+its side all who were bent on public order, and this strength was
+doubled by the landing and failure of Argyle. The Scotch Parliament
+granted excise and customs not to the king only but to his successors,
+while it confirmed the Acts which established religious conformity. But
+James was far from being satisfied with a loyalty which made no
+concession to the "king's religion." He placed the government of
+Scotland in the hands of two lords, Melfort and Perth, who had embraced
+his own faith, and put a Catholic in command of the Castle of Edinburgh.
+The drift of these measures was soon seen. The Scotch Parliament had as
+yet been the mere creature of the Crown, but servile as were its members
+there was a point at which their servility stopped. When James boldly
+required them to legalize the toleration of Catholics they refused to
+pass such an Act. It was in vain that the king tempted them to consent
+by the offer of a free trade with England. "Shall we sell our God?" was
+the indignant reply. James at once ordered the Scotch judges to treat
+all laws against Catholics as null and void, and his orders were obeyed.
+In Ireland his policy threw off even the disguise of law. Catholics were
+admitted by the king's command to the council and to civil offices. A
+Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was put at the head of the army, and set
+instantly about its re-organization by cashiering Protestant officers
+and by admitting two thousand Catholic natives into its ranks.
+
+[Sidenote: The High Commission.]
+
+Meanwhile in England James was passing from the mere attempt to secure
+freedom for his fellow-religionists to a bold and systematic attack
+upon the Church. He had at the outset of his reign forbidden the clergy
+to preach against "the king's religion"; and ordered the bishops to act
+upon this prohibition. But no steps were taken by them to carry out this
+order; and the pulpits of the capital soon rang with controversial
+sermons. For such a sermon James now called on Compton, the Bishop of
+London, to suspend Dr. Sharp, the rector of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields.
+Compton answered that as judge he was ready to examine into the case if
+brought before him according to law. To James the matter was not one of
+law but of prerogative. He regarded his ecclesiastical supremacy as a
+weapon providentially left to him for undoing the work which it had
+enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry and Elizabeth it had been
+used to turn the Church of England from Catholic to Protestant. Under
+James it might be used to turn the Church back again from Protestant to
+Catholic. The High Commission indeed which had enforced this supremacy
+had been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this Act
+had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration. But it was
+thought possible to evade this Act by omitting from the instructions on
+which the Commission acted the extraordinary powers and jurisdictions by
+which its predecessor had given offence. With this reserve, seven
+commissioners were appointed in the summer of 1686 for the government
+of the Church with the Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, at their head. The
+first blow of the Commission was at the Bishop of London whose refusal
+to suspend Sharp was punished by his own suspension. But the pressure of
+the Commission only drove the clergy to a bolder defiance of the royal
+will. The legality of the Commission and of its proceedings was denied.
+Not even the Pope, it was said, had claimed such rights over the conduct
+and jurisdiction of English bishops as were claimed by the king. The
+prohibition of attacks on the "king's religion" was set at nought.
+Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the
+two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put
+themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered
+pamphlets and tracts from every printing press.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Tories.]
+
+It was in vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof and
+predicted the inevitable reaction which the king's course must bring
+about, or that Rome itself counselled greater moderation. James was
+infatuated with what seemed to be the success of his enterprises. He
+looked on the opposition he experienced as due to the influence of the
+High Church Tories who had remained in power since the reaction of 1681,
+and these he determined "to chastise." The Duke of Queensberry, the
+leader of this party in Scotland, was driven from office. Tyrconnell, as
+we have seen, was placed as a check on Ormond in Ireland. In England
+James resolved to show the world that even the closest ties of blood
+were as nothing to him if they conflicted with the demands of his faith.
+His earlier marriage with Anne Hyde, the daughter of Clarendon, bound
+both the Chancellor's sons to his fortunes; and on his accession he had
+sent his elder brother-in-law, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as
+Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised the younger, Laurence, Earl of
+Rochester, who had long been a minister under Charles the Second, to the
+post of Lord Treasurer. But the sons of Hyde were as staunch to the old
+Cavalier doctrines of Church and State as Hyde himself. Rochester
+therefore was told in the opening of 1687 that the king could not safely
+entrust so great a charge to any one who did not share his sentiments on
+religion, and on his refusal to abandon his faith he was deprived of the
+White Staff. His brother Clarendon shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord
+Bellasys, became First Lord of the Treasury, which was again put into
+commission after Rochester's removal; and another Catholic, Lord
+Arundell, became Lord Privy Seal; while Father Petre, a Jesuit, was
+called to the Privy Council.
+
+[Sidenote: The Tory Nobles.]
+
+The dismissal of Rochester sprang mainly from a belief that with such a
+minister James would fail to procure from the Parliament that freedom
+for Catholics which he was bent on establishing. It was in fact a
+declaration that on this matter none in the king's service must oppose
+the king's will, and it was followed up by the dismissal of one official
+after another who refused to aid in the repeal of the Test Act. But acts
+like these were of no avail against the steady growth of resistance. If
+the great Tory nobles were staunch for the Crown, they were as resolute
+Englishmen in their hatred of mere tyranny as the Whigs themselves.
+James gave the Duke of Norfolk the sword of State to carry before him as
+he went to Mass. The Duke stopped at the Chapel door. "Your father would
+have gone further," said the king. "Your Majesty's father was the better
+man," replied the Duke, "and he would not have gone so far." The young
+Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce into the Presence Chamber the
+Papal Nuncio, who was now received in State at Windsor in the teeth of a
+statute which forbade diplomatic relations with Rome. "I am advised,"
+Somerset answered, "that I cannot obey your Majesty without breaking the
+law." "Do you not know that I am above the law?" James asked angrily.
+"Your Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He was dismissed
+from his post, but the spirit of resistance spread fast. In spite of the
+king's letters the governors of the Charterhouse, who numbered among
+them some of the greatest English nobles, refused to admit a Catholic to
+the benefits of the foundation. The most devoted loyalists began to
+murmur when James demanded apostasy as a proof of their loyalty.
+
+[Sidenote: James and the Nonconformists.]
+
+He had in fact to abandon at last all hope of bringing the Church or the
+Tories over to his will, and in the spring of 1687 he turned, as Charles
+had turned, to the Nonconformists. He published in April a Declaration
+of Indulgence which suspended the operation of the penal laws against
+Nonconformists and Catholics alike, and of every Act which imposed a
+test as a qualification for office in Church or State. A hope was
+expressed that this measure would be sanctioned by Parliament when it
+was suffered to reassemble. The temptation to accept the Indulgence was
+great, for since the fall of Shaftesbury persecution had fallen heavily
+on the Protestant dissidents, and we can hardly wonder that the
+Nonconformists wavered for a time or that numerous addresses of thanks
+were presented to James. But the great body of them, and all the more
+venerable names among them, remained true to the cause of freedom.
+Baxter, Howe, and Bunyan all refused an Indulgence which could only be
+purchased by the violent overthrow of the law. It was plain that the
+only mode of actually securing the end which James had in view was to
+procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself. It was to this
+that the king's dismissal of Rochester and other ministerial changes had
+been directed; but James found that the temper of the existing Houses,
+so far as he could test it, remained absolutely opposed to his project.
+In July therefore he dissolved the Parliament, and summoned a new one.
+In spite of the support he might expect from the Nonconformists in the
+elections, he knew that no free Parliament could be brought to consent
+to the repeal. The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish creations of
+new peers. "Your troop of horse," Lord Sunderland told Churchill, "shall
+be called up into the House of Lords." But it was a harder matter to
+secure a compliant House of Commons. No effort however was spared. The
+Lord-Lieutenants were directed to bring about such a "regulation" of the
+governing body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates
+pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in
+their county as to his vote. Half of them at once refused to comply, and
+a string of great nobles--the Lords of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset,
+Derby, Pembroke, Rutland, Abergavenny, Thanet, Northampton, and
+Abingdon--were dismissed from their Lord-Lieutenancies. The justices
+when questioned simply replied that they would vote according to their
+consciences, and send members to Parliament who would protect the
+Protestant religion. After repeated "regulations" it was found
+impossible to form a corporate body which would return representatives
+willing to comply with the royal will. All thought of a Parliament had
+to be abandoned; and even the most bigoted courtiers counselled
+moderation at this proof of the stubborn opposition which James must
+prepare to encounter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading
+classes.
+
+[Sidenote: The Attack on the Universities.]
+
+Estranged as he was from the whole body of the nobles and gentry it
+remained for James to force the clergy also into an attitude of
+resistance. Even the tyranny of the Commission had failed to drive into
+open opposition men who had been preaching Sunday after Sunday the
+doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of kings. But James who had
+now finally abandoned all hope of winning the aid of the Church in his
+project cared little for passive obedience. He looked on the refusal of
+the clergy to support his plans as freeing him from the pledge he had
+given to maintain the Church as established by law; and he resolved to
+attack it in the great institutions which had till now been its
+strongholds. To secure the Universities for Catholicism was to seize the
+only training schools which the English clergy possessed as well as the
+only centres of higher education which existed for the English gentry.
+It was on such a seizure however that James's mind was set. Little
+indeed was done with Cambridge. A Benedictine monk, who presented
+himself with royal letters recommending him for the degree of a Master
+of Arts, was rejected on his refusal to sign the Articles; and the
+Vice-Chancellor was summoned before the Privy Council and punished for
+his rejection by deprivation from office. But a violent and obstinate
+attack was directed against Oxford. The Master of University College,
+Obadiah Walker, who declared himself a Catholic convert, was authorized
+to retain his post in defiance of the law. A Roman Catholic named Massey
+was presented by the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen was
+the wealthiest College in the University; and James in 1687 recommended
+one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even qualified by
+statute for the office, to its vacant headship. The Fellows
+remonstrated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough,
+one of their own number, as their President. The Ecclesiastical
+Commission declared the election void; and James, shamed out of his
+first candidate, recommended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a
+Catholic in heart and the meanest of his courtiers. The Fellows however
+pleaded that Hough was already chosen, and they held stubbornly to their
+legal head. It was in vain that the king visited Oxford, summoned them
+to his presence, and rated them as they knelt before him like
+schoolboys. "I am King," he said; "I will be obeyed! Go to your chapel
+this instant, and elect the Bishop! Let those who refuse look to it, for
+they shall feel the whole weight of my hand!" It was seen that to give
+Magdalen as well as Christ Church into Catholic hands was to turn
+Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the king's threats were
+disregarded. But they were soon carried out. A special Commission
+visited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set aside his
+appeal to the law, burst open the door of his president's house to
+install Parker in his place, and on their refusal to submit deprived the
+Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows was followed
+on a like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who died immediately
+after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman Catholic bishop _in
+partibus_, named Bonaventure Gifford, and twelve Roman Catholics were
+admitted to fellowships in a single day.
+
+[Sidenote: James and William.]
+
+With peers, gentry, and clergy in dogged opposition the scheme of
+wresting a repeal of the Test Act from a new Parliament became
+impracticable, and without this--as James well knew--his system of
+Indulgence, even if he was able to maintain it so long, must end with
+his death and the accession of a Protestant sovereign. It was to provide
+against such a defeat of his designs that he stooped to ask the aid of
+William of Orange. Ever since his accession William had followed his
+father-in-law's course with a growing anxiety. For while England was
+seething with the madness of the Popish Plot and of the royalist
+reaction the great European struggle which occupied the whole mind of
+the Prince had been drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of Germany
+indeed was worn out by the ceaseless aggressions of Lewis, and in 1686
+its princes had bound themselves at Augsburg to resist all further
+encroachments on the part of France. From that moment war became
+inevitable, and in such a war William had always held that the aid of
+England was essential to success. But his efforts to ensure English aid
+had utterly failed. James, as William soon came to know, had renewed his
+brother's secret treaty with France; and even had this been otherwise
+his quarrel with his people would of itself have prevented him from
+giving any aid in a struggle abroad. The Prince could only silently look
+on with a desperate hope that James might yet be brought to a nobler
+policy. He refused all encouragement to the leading malcontents who were
+already calling on him to interfere in arms. On the other hand he
+declined to support the king in his schemes for the abolition of the
+Test. If he still cherished hopes of bringing about a peace between the
+king and people which might enable him to enlist England in the Grand
+Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before the Declaration of Indulgence. It
+was at this moment, at the end of May, that James called on him and Mary
+to declare themselves in favour of the abolition of the penal laws and
+of the Test. "Conscience, honour, and good policy," wrote James, "bind
+me to procure safety for the Catholics. I cannot leave those who have
+remained faithful to the old and true religion subject to the oppression
+under which the laws place them."
+
+[Sidenote: The King's hopes.]
+
+But simultaneously with the king's appeal letters of great import
+reached the Prince from the leading nobles. Some, like the Hydes, simply
+assured him of their friendship. The Bishop of London added assurances
+of support. Others, like Devonshire, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury,
+cautiously or openly warned the Prince against compliance with the
+king's demand. Lord Churchill announced the resolve of Mary's sister
+Anne to stand in any case by the cause of Protestantism. Danby, the
+leading representative of the great Tory party, told the Dutch
+ambassador plainly to warn William that if James was suffered to pursue
+his present course, and above all to gain control over the Parliament,
+he would leave the Catholic party strong enough at his death to threaten
+Mary's succession. The letters dictated William's answer. No one, he
+truly protested, loathed religious persecution more than he himself did,
+but in relaxing political disabilities James called on him to
+countenance an attack on his own religion. "I cannot," he ended, "concur
+in what your Majesty desires of me." William's refusal was justified, as
+we have seen, by the result of the efforts to assemble a Parliament
+favourable to the repeal of the Test. The wholesale dismissal of
+justices and Lord-Lieutenants through the summer of 1687 failed to
+shake the resolve of the counties. The "regulation" of their
+corporations by the displacing of their older members and the
+substitution of Nonconformists did little to gain the towns. The year
+1688 indeed had hardly opened when it was found necessary to adjourn the
+elections which had been fixed for February, and to make a fresh attempt
+to win a warmer support from the dissidents and from the country. For
+James clung with a desperate tenacity to the hope of finding a compliant
+Parliament. He knew, what was as yet unknown to the world, the fact that
+his Queen was with child. The birth of an heir would meet the danger
+which he looked for from the succession of William and Mary. But James
+was past middle life, and his death would leave his boy at the mercy of
+a Regency which could hardly fail to be composed of men who would undo
+the king's work and even bring up the young sovereign as a Protestant.
+His own security, as he thought, against such a course lay in the
+building up a strong Catholic party, in placing Catholics in the high
+offices of State, and in providing against their expulsion from these at
+his death by a repeal of the Test. But such a repeal could only be won
+from Parliament, and hopeless as the effort seemed James pressed
+doggedly on in his attempt to secure Houses who would carry out his
+will.
+
+[Sidenote: The Trial of the Bishops.]
+
+The renewed Declaration of Indulgence which he issued in 1688 was not
+only intended to win the Nonconformists by fresh assurances of the
+king's sincerity, it was an appeal to the nation at large. At its close
+he promised to summon a Parliament in November, and he called on the
+electors to choose such members as would bring to a successful end the
+policy he had begun. His resolve, he said, was to make merit the one
+qualification for office and to establish universal liberty of
+conscience for all future time. It was in this character of a royal
+appeal that he ordered every clergyman to read the Declaration during
+divine service on two successive Sundays. Little time was given for
+deliberation; but little time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a
+man to be the instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was
+read in only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation
+flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all the country
+parsons refused to obey the royal orders, and the Bishops went with the
+rest of the clergy. A few days before the appointed Sunday Archbishop
+Sancroft called his suffragans together, and the six who were able to
+appear at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to the king in which they
+declined to publish an illegal Declaration. "It is a standard of
+rebellion," James exclaimed, as the Primate presented the paper; and the
+resistance of the clergy was no sooner announced to him than he
+determined to wreak his vengeance on the prelates who had signed the
+protest. He ordered the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to deprive them of
+their sees; but in this matter even the Commissioners shrank from
+obeying him. The Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for
+libel as an easier mode of punishment; and the Bishops, who refused to
+give bail, were committed on this charge to the Tower. They passed to
+their prison amidst the shouts of a great multitude; the sentinels knelt
+for their blessing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the
+garrison drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of the
+nation that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his obstinacy
+grew with the danger. "Indulgence," he said, "ruined my father"; and on
+the 29th of June the Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the
+King's Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of
+the Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of
+the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered the
+words "Not guilty" than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, and
+horsemen spurred along every road to carry over the country the news of
+the acquittal.
+
+[Sidenote: The National discontent.]
+
+James was at Hounslow when the news of the verdict reached him, and as
+he rode from the camp he heard a great shout behind him. "What is that?"
+he asked. "It is nothing," was the reply; "only the soldiers are glad
+that the Bishops are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled
+the king. The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm.
+The peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the universities,
+every lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from him. And now
+his very soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics pressed him to
+give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since his
+accession and to change the whole nature of his government. All show of
+legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, appointed by
+the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were no real officers
+in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were summoned members returned
+by officers such as these could form no legal Parliament. Hardly a
+Minister of the Crown or a Privy Councillor exercised any lawful
+authority. James had brought things to such a pass that the restoration
+of legal government meant the absolute reversal of every act he had
+done. But he was in no mood to reverse his acts. His temper was only
+spurred to a more dogged obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. "I will
+lose all," he said to the Spanish ambassador who counselled moderation;
+"I will lose all or win all." He broke up the camp at Hounslow and
+dispersed its troops in distant cantonments. He dismissed the two judges
+who had favoured the acquittal of the Bishops. He ordered the
+chancellor of each diocese to report the names of the clergy who had not
+read the Declaration of Indulgence. But his will broke fruitlessly
+against a sullen resistance which met him on every side. Not a
+chancellor made a return to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners
+were cowed into inaction by the temper of the nation. When the judges
+who had displayed their servility to the Crown went on circuit the
+gentry refused to meet them. A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the
+king's resolve to supply the place of the English troops whose temper
+proved unserviceable for his purposes by drafts from the Catholic army
+which Tyrconnell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at
+the Council-table protested against this measure; and six officers in a
+single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enrol the Irish
+recruits among their men. The ballad of "Lillibullero," a scurrilous
+attack on the Irish recruits, was sung from one end of England to the
+other.
+
+[Sidenote: The Invitation.]
+
+Wide however as the disaffection undoubtedly was the position of James
+seemed fairly secure. He counted on the aid of France. His army,
+whatever signs of discontent it might show, was still a formidable force
+of twenty thousand men. Scotland, disheartened by the failure of
+Argyle's rising, could give no such help as it gave to the Long
+Parliament. Ireland on the other hand was ready to throw a Catholic
+army in the king's support on the western coast. It was doubtful too if
+in England itself disaffection would turn into actual revolt. The Bloody
+Assize had left its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and Churchmen,
+angered as they were, were still hampered by their horror of rebellion
+and their doctrine of non-resistance. Above all the eyes of the nation
+rested on William and Mary. James was past middle age, and a few years
+must bring a Protestant successor and restore the reign of law. But in
+the midst of the struggle with the Church it was announced that the
+Queen was again with child. The news was received with general unbelief,
+for five years had passed since the last pregnancy of Mary of Modena,
+and the unbelief passed into a general expectation of some imposture as
+men watched the joy of the Catholics and their confident prophecies that
+the child would be a boy. But, truth or imposture, it was plain that the
+appearance of a Prince of Wales must bring on a crisis. If the child
+turned out a boy, and as was certain was brought up a Catholic, the
+highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the tyranny under which
+England lay should go on for ever. The hesitation of the country was at
+an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church and firm in his hatred of
+subservience to France, answered for the Tories. Compton answered for
+the High Churchmen, goaded at last into rebellion by the Declaration of
+Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion
+struggle, answered for the Nonconformists, who were satisfied with
+William's promise to procure them toleration, as well as for the general
+body of the Whigs. The announcement of the boy's birth on the 10th of
+June was followed ten days after by a formal invitation to William to
+intervene in arms for the restoration of English liberty and the
+protection of the Protestant religion. The invitation was signed by
+Danby, Devonshire, and Compton, the representatives of the great parties
+whose long fight was hushed at last by a common danger, by two recent
+converts from the Catholic faith, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord
+Lumley, by Edward the cousin of Lord Russell, and by Henry the brother
+of Algernon Sidney. It was carried to the Hague by Herbert, the most
+popular of English seamen, who had been deprived of his command for a
+refusal to vote against the Test.
+
+[Sidenote: James and France.]
+
+The Invitation called on the Prince of Orange to land with an army
+strong enough to justify those who signed it in rising in arms. An
+outbreak of revolt was in fact inevitable, and either its success or
+defeat must be equally fatal to William should he refuse to put himself
+at its head. If the rebels were victorious, their resentment at his
+desertion of their cause in the hour of need would make Mary's
+succession impossible and probably bring about the establishment of a
+Commonwealth. On the other hand the victory of the king would not only
+ruin English freedom and English Protestantism, but fling the whole
+weight of England in the contest for the liberties of Europe which was
+now about to open into the scale of France. From the opening of 1688 the
+signs of a mutual understanding between the English Court and the French
+had been unmistakeable. James had declared himself on the side of Lewis
+in the negotiations with the Empire which followed on the Treaty of
+Augsburg. He had backed Sweden in its threats of war against the Dutch.
+At the instigation of France he had recalled the English and Scotch
+troops in the service of the States. He had received supplies from Lewis
+to send an English fleet to the coast of Holland; and was at this moment
+supporting at Rome the French side in the quarrel over the Electorate of
+Cologne, a quarrel which rendered war inevitable. It was certain
+therefore that success at home would secure James's aid to France in the
+struggle abroad.
+
+[Sidenote: William's Acceptance.]
+
+It was this above all which decided the action of the Prince, for the
+ruling passion in William's heart was the longing to free Europe from
+the supremacy of France. It was this too which made his enterprise
+possible, for nothing but a sense of their own danger would have forced
+his opponents in Holland itself to assent to his expedition. Their
+assent however once gained, William strained all his resources as
+Admiral and Captain-General to gather a fleet and a sufficient force
+under pretext of defence against the English fleet which now appeared in
+the Channel, while Brandenburg promised to supply the place of the Dutch
+forces during their absence in England by lending the States nine
+thousand men. As soon as the news of these preparations reached England
+noble after noble made his way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury
+brought L2000 towards the expenses of the expedition. Edward Russell,
+the representative of the Whig Earl of Bedford, was followed by the
+representatives of great Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of
+Winchester, of Lord Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by Lord
+Macclesfield, a well-known High Churchman. At home the Earls of Danby
+and Devonshire prepared silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the
+North. In spite of the profound secrecy with which all was conducted,
+the keen instinct of Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance
+in office at the price of a secret apostasy to Catholicism, detected the
+preparations of William; and the sense that his master's ruin was at
+hand encouraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a
+pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself. James alone remained
+stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a revolt unaided by
+the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the threat of a French
+attack on Holland itself would render William's departure impossible. At
+the opening of September indeed Lewis declared himself aware of the
+meaning of the Dutch armaments and warned the States that he should look
+on an attack upon James as a war upon himself.
+
+[Sidenote: James gives way.]
+
+Fortunately for William so open an announcement of the union between
+England and France suited ill with the plans of James. He still looked
+forward to the coming Parliament, and the knowledge of a league with
+France was certain to make any Parliament reluctant to admit Catholics
+to a share in political life. James therefore roughly disavowed the act
+of Lewis, and William was able to continue his preparations. But even
+had no such disavowal come the threat of Lewis would have remained an
+empty one. In spite of the counsel of Louvois he looked on an invasion
+of Holland as likely to serve English interests rather than French and
+resolved to open the war by a campaign on the Rhine. In September his
+troops marched eastward, and the Dutch at once felt themselves secure.
+The States-General gave their public sanction to William's project, and
+the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the Scheldt. The news
+of war and of the diversion of the French forces to Germany no sooner
+reached England than the king passed from obstinacy to panic. By drafts
+from Scotland and Ireland he had mustered forty thousand men, but the
+temper of the troops robbed him of all trust in them. Help from France
+was now out of the question. There was nothing for it but to fall back,
+as Sunderland had for some time been advising him to fall back, on the
+older policy of a union with the Tory party and the party of the Church;
+and to win assent for his plans from the coming Parliament by an
+abandonment of his recent acts. But the haste and completeness with
+which James reversed his whole course forbade any belief in his
+sincerity. He personally appealed for support to the Bishops. He
+dissolved the Ecclesiastical Commission. He replaced the magistrates he
+had driven from office. He restored their franchises to the towns. The
+Chancellor carried back the Charter of London in state into the City.
+The Bishop of Winchester was sent to replace the expelled Fellows of
+Magdalen. Catholic chapels and Jesuit schools were ordered to be closed.
+
+[Sidenote: William's Landing.]
+
+Sunderland pressed for the instant calling of a Parliament. But it was
+still plain that any Parliament would as yet be eager for war with
+France and would probably call on the king to put the Prince of Orange
+at the head of his army in such a war. To James therefore Sunderland's
+counsel seemed treachery, the issue of a secret design with William to
+place him helpless in the Prince's hands and above all to imperil the
+succession of his boy, whose birth William had now been brought by
+advice from the English lords to regard as an imposture. He again
+therefore fell back on France which made new advances to him in the hope
+of meeting this fresh danger of an attack from England; and in the end
+of October he dismissed Sunderland from office. But Sunderland had
+hardly left Whitehall when the Declaration of the Prince of Orange
+reached England. It demanded the removal of grievances and the calling
+of a free Parliament which should establish English freedom and religion
+on a secure basis. It promised toleration to Protestant Nonconformists
+and freedom of conscience to Catholics. It left the question of the
+legitimacy of the Prince of Wales and the settlement of the succession
+to Parliament. James was wounded above all by the doubts thrown on the
+birth of a Prince; and he produced proofs of the birth before the peers
+who were in London. But the proofs came too late. Detained by ill winds,
+beaten back on its first venture by a violent storm, William's fleet of
+six hundred transports, escorted by fifty men-of-war, anchored on the
+5th of November in Torbay; and his army, thirteen thousand strong,
+entered Exeter amid the shouts of its citizens. Great pains had been
+taken to strip from William's army the appearance of a foreign force,
+which might have stirred English feeling to resistance. The core of it
+consisted of the English and Scottish regiments which had remained in
+the service of the States in spite of their recall by the king. Its
+foreign divisions were representatives of the whole Protestant world.
+With the Dutchmen were Brandenburgers and Swedes, and the most brilliant
+corps in the whole army was composed of French refugees.
+
+[Sidenote: The National Rising.]
+
+The landing seemed at first a failure. The country remained quiet.
+William's coming had been unexpected in the West, and no great landowner
+joined his forces. Though the king's fleet had failed to intercept the
+expedition it closed in from the Channel to prevent William's escape as
+soon as he had landed, while the king's army moved rapidly to encounter
+him in the field. But the pause was one of momentary surprise. Before a
+week had passed the nobles and squires of the west flocked to William's
+camp and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his rear. The call of the
+king's forces to face the Prince in the south no sooner freed the
+northern parts of England from their presence than the insurrection
+broke out. Scotland threw off the royal rule. Danby, dashing at the head
+of a hundred horsemen into York, gave the signal for a rising. The York
+militia met his appeal with shouts of "A free Parliament and the
+Protestant religion"; peers and gentry flocked to his standard; and a
+march on Nottingham united his forces to those under Devonshire who had
+mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties.
+Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared for
+a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of three
+hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. At Oxford townsmen and
+gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace and the forces he led with uproarious
+welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who
+advanced steadily on Salisbury where James had assembled his forces.
+
+[Sidenote: Flight of James.]
+
+But the king's army, broken by dissensions and mutual suspicions among
+its leaders, shrank from an engagement and fell back in disorder at his
+approach. Its retreat was the signal for a general abandonment of the
+royal cause. The desertion of Lord Churchill, who had from the first
+made his support conditional on the calling of a Parliament, a step
+which the king still hesitated to take, was followed by that of so many
+other officers that James abandoned the struggle in despair. He fled to
+London to hear that his daughter Anne had left St. James's to join Danby
+at Nottingham. "God help me," cried the wretched father, "for my own
+children have forsaken me!" His spirit was utterly broken by the sudden
+crash; and though he had promised to call the Houses together and
+despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with William on the
+terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had resolved on flight.
+Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him, would force on
+him concessions he could not endure; while flight would enable him to
+return and regain his throne with the assistance of French forces. He
+only waited therefore for news of the escape of his wife and child on
+the 10th of December to make his way to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy
+lay ready to carry him to France. Some rough fishermen however who took
+him for a Jesuit prevented his escape, and a troop of Life Guards
+brought him back in safety to London. His return revived the hopes of
+the Tories, who with Clarendon and Rochester at their head looked on the
+work of the Prince of Orange as done in the overthrow of the king's
+design of establishing a Catholic despotism, and who trusted that their
+system would be restored by a reconciliation of James with the Tory
+Parliament they expected to be returned. Halifax however, though he had
+long acted with the Tories, was too clear-sighted for hopes such as
+these. He had taken no part in the invitation or revolt, but now that
+the revolution was successful he pressed upon William the impossibility
+of carrying out a new system of government with such a sovereign as
+James. The Whigs, who had gone beyond hope of forgiveness, backed
+powerfully these arguments; and in spite of the pledges with which he
+had landed the Prince was soon as convinced of their wisdom as the
+Whigs. From this moment it was the policy of William and his advisers to
+further a flight which removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It
+would have been hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to
+keep him prisoner; but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the
+silence of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James's filled the king
+with fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which
+were almost openly placed at his disposal James a second time quitted
+London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France.
+
+[Sidenote: The Convention.]
+
+Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking a new
+Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could all
+means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of panic and
+outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people soon
+reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in the capital
+provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more
+pressing needs of administration, and quietly resigned their authority
+into William's hands on his arrival. The difficulty which arose from the
+absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament together was
+got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a second body of
+all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign of Charles the
+Second together with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of London. Both
+bodies requested William to take on himself the provisional government
+of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters inviting the electors of
+every town and county to send up representatives to a Convention which
+met on the 22nd of January 1689. In the new Convention both Houses were
+found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the
+fallen king. They were united in entrusting a provisional authority to
+the Prince of Orange. But with this step their unanimity ended. The
+Whigs, who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which,
+illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite in
+its favour every element of the opposition to James, the Churchman who
+was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right of a
+nation to depose its king, the Whig who held the theory of a contract
+between King and People. They voted that King James, "having endeavoured
+to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by breaking the original
+contract between King and People, and by the advice of Jesuits and other
+wicked persons having violated the fundamental laws, and having
+withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and
+that the throne is thereby vacant." But in the Lords where the Tories
+were still in the ascendant the resolution was fiercely debated.
+Archbishop Sancroft with the high Tories held that no crime could bring
+about a forfeiture of the crown and that James still remained king, but
+that his tyranny had given the nation a right to withdraw from him the
+actual exercise of government and to entrust his functions to a Regency.
+The moderate Tories under Danby's guidance admitted that James had
+ceased to be king but denied that the throne could be vacant, and
+contended that from the moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested
+in his daughter Mary. It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax
+backed the Whig peers in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as
+it stood. The plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's
+scheme was adopted by a large majority.
+
+[Sidenote: Declaration of Rights.]
+
+But both the Tory courses found a sudden obstacle in William. He
+declined to be Regent. He had no mind, he said to Danby, to be his
+wife's gentleman-usher. Mary on the other hand refused to accept the
+crown save in conjunction with her husband. The two declarations put an
+end to the question, and it was settled that William and Mary should be
+acknowledged as joint sovereigns but that the actual administration
+should rest with William alone. It had been agreed throughout however
+that before the throne was filled up the constitutional liberties of the
+subject must be secured. A Parliamentary Committee in which the most
+active member was John Somers, a young lawyer who had distinguished
+himself in the trial of the Bishops and who was destined to play a great
+part in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which after some
+alterations was adopted by the two Houses. The Declaration recited the
+misgovernment of James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords
+and Commons to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English
+subjects. It condemned as illegal his establishment of an ecclesiastical
+commission, and his raising of an army without Parliamentary sanction.
+It denied the right of any king to suspend or dispense with laws, as
+they had been suspended or dispensed with of late, or to exact money
+save by consent of Parliament. It asserted for the subject a right to
+petition, to a free choice of representatives in Parliament, and to a
+pure and merciful administration of justice. It declared the right of
+both Houses to liberty of debate. It demanded securities for the free
+exercise of their religion by all Protestants, and bound the new
+sovereign to maintain the Protestant religion as well as the laws and
+liberties of the nation. "We do claim and insist on the premises," ran
+the Declaration, "as our undoubted rights and liberties; encouraged by
+the Declaration of his Highness the Prince, we have confidence that he
+will perfect the deliverance he has begun and will preserve our rights
+against all further injury." It ended by declaring the Prince and
+Princess of Orange King and Queen of England. The Declaration was
+presented to William and Mary on the 13th of February by the two Houses
+in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall, and at the close of its recital
+Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to receive
+the crown. William accepted the offer in his own name and in that of
+his wife and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain the
+laws and to govern by advice of Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Lewis and the Revolution.]
+
+But William's eyes were fixed less on England than on Europe. His
+expedition had had in his own eyes a European rather than an English
+aim, and in his acceptance of the crown he had been moved not so much by
+personal ambition as by the prospect which offered itself of firmly
+knitting together England and Holland, the two great Protestant powers
+whose fleets held the mastery of the sea. But the advance from such a
+union to the formation of the European alliance against France on which
+he was bent was a step that still had to be made. Already indeed his
+action in England had told decisively on the contest. The blunder of
+Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for his point of attack had
+been all but atoned for by the brilliant successes with which he opened
+the war. The whole country west of the Rhine fell at once into his
+hands; his armies made themselves masters of the Palatinate, and
+penetrated even to Wuertemberg. The hopes of the French king indeed had
+never been higher than at the moment when the arrival of James at St.
+Germain dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at once thrown back on
+a war of defence, and the brutal ravages which marked the retreat of his
+armies from the Rhine revealed the bitterness with which his pride
+stooped to the necessity.
+
+[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]
+
+But his reception of James at St. Germain as still king of England gave
+fresh force to William's efforts. It was yet doubtful whether William
+would be able to bring England to a hearty co-operation in the struggle
+against French ambition. But whatever reluctance there might have been
+to follow him in an attack on France with the view of saving the
+liberties of Europe, the stoutest Tory had none in following him in such
+an attack when it meant simply self-defence against a French restoration
+of the Stuart king at the cost of English freedom. It was with universal
+approval that the English Government declared war against Lewis. It was
+soon followed in this step by Holland, and the two countries at once
+agreed to stand by one another in their struggle against France. But it
+was more difficult to secure the co-operation of the two branches of the
+House of Austria in Germany and Spain, reluctant as they were to join
+the Protestant powers in league against a Catholic king. Spain however
+was forced by Lewis into war, for he aimed at the Netherlands as his
+especial prey; and the court of Vienna at last yielded to the bait held
+out by Holland of a recognition of its claims to the Spanish succession.
+
+[Sidenote: Scotland and the Revolution.]
+
+The adhesion of these powers in the spring of 1689 completed the Grand
+Alliance of the European powers which William had designed; and the
+union of Savoy with the allies girt France in on every side save that of
+Switzerland with a ring of foes. Lewis was left without a single ally
+save the Turk; for though the Scandinavian kingdoms stood aloof from the
+confederacy of Europe their neutrality was unfriendly to him. But the
+energy and quickness of movement which sprang from the concentration of
+the power of France in a single hand still left the contest an equal
+one. The empire was slow to move; the court of Vienna was distracted
+with a war against the Turks; Spain was all but powerless; Holland and
+England were alone earnest in the struggle, and England could as yet
+give little aid in it. One English brigade indeed, formed from the
+regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on the Sambre, and
+distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been rewarded for his
+treason with the title of Earl of Marlborough, in a brisk skirmish with
+the enemy at Walcourt. But for the bulk of his forces William had as yet
+grave work to do at home. In England not a sword had been drawn for
+James. In Scotland his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and
+so far as the Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and
+complete. No sooner had he called his troops southward to meet William's
+invasion than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western peasants were at
+once up in arms; and the Episcopalian clergy, who had been the
+instruments of the Stuart misgovernment ever since the Restoration, were
+rabbled and driven from their parsonages in every parish. The news of
+these disorders forced William to act, though he was without a show of
+legal authority over Scotland. On the advice of the Scotch Lords present
+in London he ventured to summon a Convention similar to that which had
+been summoned in England, and on his own responsibility to set aside the
+laws passed by the "Drunken Parliament" of the Restoration which
+excluded Presbyterians from the Scotch Parliament. This Convention
+resolved that James had forfeited the crown by misgovernment, and
+offered it to William and Mary. The offer was accompanied by a Claim of
+Right framed on the model of the Declaration of Rights to which the two
+sovereigns had consented in England, but closing with a demand for the
+abolition of Prelacy. Both crown and claim were accepted, and the
+arrival of the Scotch regiments which William had brought from Holland
+gave strength to the new Government.
+
+[Sidenote: Killiecrankie.]
+
+Its strength was to be roughly tested. On the revolt of the capital John
+Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of the Western
+Covenanters had been rewarded with high command in the Scotch army and
+with the title of Viscount Dundee, withdrew with a few troopers from
+Edinburgh to the Highlands and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands
+nothing was known of English government or misgovernment: all that the
+Revolution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of the House of
+Argyle. To many of the clans it meant the restoration of lands which had
+been granted them on the Earl's attainder; and the zeal of the
+Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Camerons, who were as ready to join Dundee
+in fighting the Campbells and the Government which upheld them as they
+had been ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before,
+was quickened by a reluctance to disgorge their spoil. They were soon in
+arms. William's Scotch regiments under General Mackay were sent to
+suppress the rising; but as they climbed the pass of Killiecrankie on
+the 27th of July 1689 Dundee charged them at the head of three thousand
+clansmen and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. His death in the
+moment of victory broke however the only bond which held the Highlanders
+together, and in a few weeks the host which had spread terror through
+the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the next summer Mackay was able
+to build the strong post of Fort William in the very heart of the
+disaffected country, and his offers of money and pardon brought about
+the submission of the clans.
+
+[Sidenote: Massacre of Glencoe.]
+
+The work of peace was sullied by an act of cruel treachery the memory of
+which still lingers in the minds of men. Sir John Dalrymple, the Master
+of Stair, in whose hands the government of Scotland at this time mainly
+rested, had hoped that a refusal of the oath of allegiance would give
+grounds for a war of extermination and free Scotland for ever from its
+dread of the Highlanders. He had provided for the expected refusal by
+orders of a ruthless severity. "Your troops," he wrote to the officer in
+command, "will destroy entirely the country of Lochaber, Locheil's
+lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and Glencoe's. Your powers shall be large
+enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with
+prisoners." But his hopes were disappointed by the readiness with which
+the clans accepted the offers of the Government. All submitted in good
+time save Macdonald of Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking of the
+oath till six days after the latest date fixed by the proclamation.
+Foiled in his larger hopes of destruction Dalrymple seized eagerly on
+the pretext given by Macdonald, and an order "for the extirpation of
+that sect of robbers" was laid before William and received the royal
+signature. "The work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton who
+undertook it, "must be secret and sudden." The troops were chosen from
+among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, and
+quartered peacefully among the Macdonalds for twelve days till all
+suspicion of their errand disappeared. At daybreak on the 13th of
+February 1692 they fell on their hosts, and in a few moments thirty of
+the clansfolk lay dead on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm,
+escaped to the mountains to perish for the most part of cold and hunger.
+"The only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair, when the news
+reached him, "is that any got away."
+
+But whatever horror the Massacre of Glencoe has roused in later days few
+save Dalrymple knew of it at the time. The peace of the Highlands
+enabled the work of reorganization to go on quietly at Edinburgh. In
+accepting the Claim of Right with its repudiation of Prelacy William had
+in effect restored the Presbyterian Church to which nine-tenths of the
+Lowland Scotchmen clung, and its restoration was accompanied by the
+revival of the Westminster Confession as a standard of faith and by the
+passing of an Act which abolished lay patronage. Against the Toleration
+Act which the king proposed the Scotch Parliament stood firm. But though
+the measure failed the king was as firm in his purpose as the
+Parliament. So long as he reigned, William declared in memorable words,
+there should be no persecution for conscience' sake. "We never could be
+of that mind that violence was suited to the advancing of true religion,
+nor do we intend that our authority shall ever be a tool to the
+irregular passions of any party."
+
+[Sidenote: The Irish Rising.]
+
+It was not in Scotland however but in Ireland that James and Lewis hoped
+to arrest William's progress. Ireland had long been the object of
+special attention on the part of James. In the middle of his reign, when
+his chief aim was to provide against the renewed depression of his
+fellow-religionists at his death by any Protestant successor, he had
+resolved (if we may trust the statement of the French ambassador) to
+place Ireland in such a position of independence that she might serve as
+a refuge for his Catholic subjects. It was with a view to the success of
+this design that Lord Clarendon was dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy
+and succeeded in the charge of the island by the Catholic Earl of
+Tyrconnell. The new governor, who was raised to a dukedom, went roughly
+to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. Every Judge, every
+Privy Councillor, every Mayor and Alderman of a borough, was required to
+be a Catholic and an Irishman. The Irish army, raised to the number of
+fifty thousand men and purged of its Protestant soldiers, was entrusted
+to Catholic officers. In a few months the English ascendency was
+overthrown, and the life and fortune of the English settlers were at the
+mercy of the natives on whom they had trampled since Cromwell's day. The
+king's flight and the agitation among the native Irish at the news
+spread panic therefore through the island. Another massacre was believed
+to be at hand; and fifteen hundred Protestant families, chiefly from the
+south, fled in terror over sea. The Protestants of the north on the
+other hand drew together at Enniskillen and Londonderry, and prepared
+for self-defence. The outbreak however was still delayed, and for two
+months Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government. But his aim was
+simply to gain time. He was at this very moment indeed inviting James to
+return to Ireland, and assuring him of his fidelity. To James this call
+promised the aid of an army which would enable him to help the Scotch
+rising and to effect a landing in England, while Lewis saw in it the
+means of diverting William from giving effectual aid to the Grand
+Alliance. A staff of French officers with arms, ammunition, and a supply
+of money was placed therefore at the service of the exiled king, and the
+news of his coming no sooner reached Dublin at the opening of 1689 than
+Tyrconnell threw off the mask. A flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle
+with the words embroidered on its folds "Now or Never." The signal
+called every Catholic to arms. The maddened Irishmen flung themselves on
+the plunder which their masters had left and in a few weeks havoc was
+done, the French envoy told Lewis, which it would take years to repair.
+
+[Sidenote: Siege of Londonderry.]
+
+It was in this condition that James found Ireland when he landed at
+Kinsale. The rising of the natives had already baffled his plans. To him
+as to Lewis Ireland was simply a basis of operations against William,
+and whatever were their hopes of a future restoration of the soil to its
+older possessors both kings were equally anxious that no strife of races
+should at this moment interrupt their plans of an invasion of England
+with the fifty thousand soldiers that Tyrconnell was said to have at his
+disposal. But long ere James landed the war of races had already begun.
+To Tyrconnell indeed and the Irish leaders the king's plans were utterly
+distasteful. They had no wish for an invasion and conquest of England
+which would replace Ireland again in its position of dependence. Their
+policy was simply that of Ireland for the Irish, and the first step in
+such a policy was to drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in
+Ulster. Half of Tyrconnell's army therefore had already been sent
+against Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found shelter
+behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns and destitute even of a
+ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen behind the wall made
+up for its weakness. They rejected with firmness the offers of James,
+who was still anxious to free his hands from a strife which broke his
+plans. They kept up their fire even when the neighbouring Protestants
+with their women and children were brutally driven under their walls and
+placed in the way of their guns. So fierce were their sallies, so
+crushing the repulse of his attack, that the king's general, Hamilton,
+at last turned the siege into a blockade. The Protestants died of hunger
+in the streets and of the fever which comes of hunger, but the cry of
+the town was still "No Surrender." The siege had lasted a hundred and
+five days, and only two days' food remained in Londonderry when on the
+28th of July an English ship broke the boom across the river, and the
+besiegers sullenly withdrew.
+
+[Sidenote: James and Ireland.]
+
+Their defeat was turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen who
+struggled through a bog to charge an Irish force of double their number
+at Newtown Butler, and drove horse and foot before them in a panic which
+soon spread through Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell back
+on Dublin where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied
+Parliament which he had summoned. Every member returned was an Irishman
+and a Catholic, and their one aim was to undo the successive
+confiscations which had given the soil to English settlers and to get
+back Ireland for the Irish. The Act of Settlement, on which all title to
+property rested, was at once repealed in spite of the king's reluctance.
+He was told indeed bluntly that if he did not do Ireland justice not an
+Irishman would fight for him. It was to strengthen this work by ensuring
+the legal forfeiture of their lands that three thousand Protestants of
+name and fortune were massed together in the hugest Bill of Attainder
+which the world has seen. To the bitter memory of past wrongs was added
+the fury of religious bigotry. In spite of the king's promise of
+religious freedom the Protestant clergy were everywhere driven from
+their parsonages, Fellows and scholars were turned out of Trinity
+College, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared even to propose
+that if any Protestant rising took place on the English descent, as was
+expected, it should be met by a general massacre of the Protestants who
+still lingered in the districts which had submitted to James. To his
+credit the king shrank horror-struck from the proposal. "I cannot be so
+cruel," he said, "as to cut their throats while they live peaceably
+under my government." "Mercy to Protestants," was the cold reply, "is
+cruelty to Catholics."
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Monarchy.]
+
+The long agony of Londonderry was invaluable to England: it foiled the
+king's hopes of an invasion which would have roused a fresh civil war,
+and gave the new Government time to breathe. Time was indeed sorely
+needed. Through the proscription and bloodshed of the new Irish rule
+William was forced to look helplessly on. The best troops in the army
+which had been mustered at Hounslow had been sent with Marlborough to
+the Sambre, and the political embarrassments which grew up around the
+new Government made it impossible to spare a man of those who remained
+at home. The great ends of the Revolution were indeed secured, even
+amidst the confusion and intrigue which we shall have to describe, by
+the common consent of all. On the great questions of civil liberty Whig
+and Tory were now at one. The Declaration of Rights was turned into the
+Bill of Rights by the Convention which had now become a Parliament, and
+the passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the
+character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right
+of the people through its representatives to depose the king, to change
+the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was
+now established. All claim of Divine Right or hereditary right
+independent of the law was formally put an end to by the election of
+William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to
+advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular
+clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, and Anne, were
+sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. George the First and
+his successors have been sovereigns solely by virtue of the Act of
+Settlement. An English monarch is now as much the creature of an Act of
+Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his realm.
+
+[Sidenote: Taxation and the Army.]
+
+Nor was the older character of the kingship alone restored. The older
+constitution returned with it. Bitter experience had taught England the
+need of restoring to the Parliament its absolute power over taxation.
+The grant of revenue for life to the last two kings had been the secret
+of their anti-national policy, and the first act of the new legislature
+was to restrict the grant of the royal revenue to a term of four years.
+William was bitterly galled by the provision. "The gentlemen of England
+trusted King James," he said, "who was an enemy of their religion and
+their laws, and they will not trust me, by whom their religion and their
+laws have been preserved." But the only change brought about in the
+Parliament by this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make
+the vote of supplies an annual one, a resolve which, in spite of the
+slight changes introduced by the next Tory Parliament, soon became an
+invariable rule. A change of almost as great importance established the
+control of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which
+had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James; but with the
+Continental war the existence of an army was a necessity. As yet however
+it was a force which had no legal existence. The soldier was simply an
+ordinary subject; there were no legal means of punishing strictly
+military offences or of providing for military discipline: and the
+assumed power of billeting soldiers in private houses had been taken
+away by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army was met
+by a Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for discipline in the army were
+conferred by Parliament on its officers, and provision was made for the
+pay of the force, but both pay and disciplinary powers were granted only
+for a single year.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the Revolution.]
+
+The Mutiny Act, like the grant of supplies, has remained annual ever
+since the Revolution; and as it is impossible for the State to exist
+without supplies or for the army to exist without discipline and pay the
+annual assembly of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity.
+The greatest constitutional change which our history has witnessed was
+thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way. The
+dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament itself
+were met with far less skill. Under Charles the Second England had seen
+a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction,
+maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial Bill
+which limited the duration of a Parliament to three was passed with
+little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. To
+counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding the
+Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, which
+excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat in
+Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. The modern
+course of providing against a pressure from the Court or the
+administration by excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the
+hold of Parliament over the great officers of State by admitting them
+into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It is equally
+strange that while vindicating its right of Parliamentary control over
+the public revenue and the army the Bill of Rights should have left by
+its silence the control of trade to the Crown. It was only a few years
+later, in the discussions on the charter granted to the East India
+Company, that the Houses silently claimed and obtained the right of
+regulating English commerce.
+
+[Sidenote: The Toleration Act.]
+
+The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty than
+the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism Churchman and
+Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have seen, strangely at one;
+and schemes of Comprehension became suddenly popular. But with the fall
+of James the union of the two bodies abruptly ceased; and the
+establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, together with the
+"rabbling" of the Episcopalian clergy in its western shires, revived the
+old bitterness of the clergy towards the dissidents. The Convocation
+rejected the scheme of the Latitudinarians for such modifications of the
+Prayer-Book as would render possible a return of the Nonconformists, and
+a Comprehension Bill, which was introduced into Parliament, failed to
+pass in spite of the king's strenuous support. William's attempt to
+partially admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of the
+Corporation Act proved equally fruitless. Active persecution however
+had now become distasteful to all; the pledge of religious liberty given
+to the Nonconformists to ensure their aid in the Revolution had to be
+redeemed; and the passing of a Toleration Act in 1689 practically
+established freedom of worship. Whatever the religious effect of this
+failure of the Latitudinarian schemes may have been its political effect
+has been of the highest value. At no time had the Church been so strong
+or so popular as at the Revolution, and the reconciliation of the
+Nonconformists would have doubled its strength. It is doubtful whether
+the disinclination to all political change which has characterised it
+during the last two hundred years would have been affected by such a
+change; but it is certain that the power of opposition which it has
+wielded would have been enormously increased. As it was, the Toleration
+Act established a group of religious bodies whose religious opposition
+to the Church forced them to support the measures of progress which the
+Church opposed. With religious forces on the one side and on the other
+England has escaped the great stumbling-block in the way of nations
+where the cause of religion has become identified with that of political
+reaction.
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the Church.]
+
+A secession from within its own ranks weakened the Church still more.
+The doctrine of Divine Right had a strong hold on the body of the clergy
+though they had been driven from their other favourite doctrine of
+passive obedience, and the requirement of an oath of allegiance to the
+new sovereigns from all persons exercising public functions was resented
+as an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. The whole bench of
+bishops resolved, though to no purpose, that Parliament had no right to
+impose such an oath on the clergy. Sancroft, the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number of the higher clergy
+absolutely refused the oath when it was imposed, treated all who took it
+as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament regarded
+themselves and their adherents, who were known as Nonjurors, as the only
+members of the true Church of England. The bulk of the clergy bowed to
+necessity, but their bitterness against the new Government was fanned
+into a flame by the religious policy announced in this assertion of the
+supremacy of Parliament over the Church, and the deposition of bishops
+by an act of the legislature. It was fanned into yet fiercer flame by
+the choice of successors to the nonjuring prelates. The new bishops were
+men of learning and piety, but they were for the most part
+Latitudinarians and some of them Whigs. Tillotson, the new Archbishop of
+Canterbury, was the foremost theologian of the school of Chillingworth
+and Hales. Burnet, the new bishop of Salisbury, was as liberal as
+Tillotson in religion and more liberal in politics. It was indeed only
+among Whigs and Latitudinarians that William and William's successors
+could find friends in the ranks of the clergy; and it was to these that
+they were driven with a few breaks here and there to entrust all the
+higher offices of the Church. The result was a severance between the
+higher dignitaries and the mass of the clergy which broke the strength
+of the Church. From the time of William to the time of George the Third
+its fiercest strife was waged within its own ranks. But the resentment
+at the measure which brought this strife about already added to the
+difficulties which William had to encounter.
+
+[Sidenote: William and the Parliament.]
+
+Yet greater difficulties arose from the temper of his Parliament. In the
+Commons, chosen as they had been in the first moment of revolutionary
+enthusiasm, the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their first aim was
+to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had suffered during the last
+two reigns. The attainder of Lord Russell was reversed. The judgments
+against Sidney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled. In spite of the
+opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Oates had been against
+law the Lords refused to reverse it, but even Oates received a pardon
+and a pension. The Whigs however wanted not merely the redress of wrongs
+but the punishment of the wrong-doers. Whig and Tory had been united
+indeed by the tyranny of James; both parties had shared in the
+Revolution, and William had striven to prolong their union by joining
+the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He named the Tory Earl of
+Danby Lord President, made the Whig Earl of Shrewsbury Secretary of
+State, and gave the Privy Seal to Lord Halifax, a trimmer between the
+one party and the other. But save in a moment of common oppression or
+common danger union was impossible. The Whigs clamoured for the
+punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal acts of Charles and
+of James, and refused to pass the Bill of General Indemnity which
+William laid before them. William on the other hand was resolved that no
+bloodshed or proscription should follow the revolution which had placed
+him on the throne. His temper was averse from persecution; he had no
+great love for either of the battling parties; and above all he saw that
+internal strife would be fatal to the effective prosecution of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]
+
+While the cares of his new throne were chaining him to England the
+confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit was proving too slow and
+too loosely compacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of
+France. The armies of Lewis had fallen back within their own borders,
+but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the junction of the English and
+Dutch fleets failed to assure them the mastery of the seas. The English
+navy was paralysed by the corruption which prevailed in the public
+service, as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The
+services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded with the
+earldom of Torrington and the command of the fleet; but his indolence
+suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, and his want of
+seamanship was shown in an indecisive engagement with a French squadron
+in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the
+command of the Channel; the French dockyards were turning out ship after
+ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to
+reinforce the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast
+would have brought serious political danger; for the reaction of popular
+feeling which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the
+pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Nonjurors
+and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the
+spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and
+above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of the
+Jacobites or adherents of King James, was forming around the Nonjurors;
+and it was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of
+a French fleet on the coast.
+
+[Sidenote: Schomberg in Ireland.]
+
+In such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the
+Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. He
+dissolved the Parliament, which had refused to pass a Bill of Indemnity
+for all political offences, and called a new one to meet in March. The
+result of the elections proved that William had only expressed the
+general temper of the nation. In the new Parliament the bulk of the
+members proved Tories. The boroughs had been alienated from the Whigs by
+their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their desire to secure the
+Corporations for their own party by driving from them all who had taken
+part in the Tory misgovernment under Charles or James. In the counties
+the discontent of the clergy told as heavily against the Whigs; and
+parson after parson led his flock in a body to the poll. The change of
+temper in the Parliament necessarily brought about a change among the
+king's advisers. William accepted the resignation of the more violent
+Whigs among his counsellors and placed Danby at the head of affairs; and
+in May the Houses gave their assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim
+in his sudden change of front was not only to meet the change in the
+national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English faction which
+would suffer him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was
+king in Dublin the attempt to crush treason at home was a hopeless one;
+and so urgent was the danger, so precious every moment in the present
+juncture of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work
+as sharply to an end as was needful save himself. In the autumn of the
+year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg, an exiled Huguenot who had followed
+William in his expedition to England and was held to be one of the most
+skilful captains of the time, had been sent with a small force to Ulster
+to take advantage of the panic which had followed the relief of
+Londonderry. James indeed was already talking of flight, and looked upon
+the game as hopeless. But the spirit of the Irish people rose quickly
+from their despair, and the duke's landing roused the whole nation to a
+fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were filled up at once,
+and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda with a force double that
+of his opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits whom it was
+hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field, did all that was
+possible when he entrenched himself at Dundalk and held his ground in a
+camp where pestilence swept off half his numbers.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of the Boyne.]
+
+Winter at last parted the two armies, and during the next six months
+James, whose treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a
+coinage of brass money while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder.
+William meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to
+bring the Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the
+winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached
+thirty thousand men. Lewis too felt the importance of the coming
+struggle. Seven thousand picked Frenchmen under the Count of Lauzun were
+despatched to reinforce the army of James, but they had hardly arrived
+when William himself landed at Carrickfergus and pushed rapidly with his
+whole army to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish
+forces, hardly exceeding twenty thousand men in number but posted
+strongly behind the Boyne. Lauzun had hoped by falling back on Dublin to
+prolong a defensive war, but retreat was now impossible. "I am glad to
+see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst of delight; "and if you
+escape me now the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of
+July 1690, the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish
+foot, who at first fought well, broke in a sudden panic as soon as the
+passage of the river was effected, but the horse made so gallant a stand
+that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge and for a time the English
+centre was held in check. With the arrival of William however at the
+head of his left wing all was over. James, who had throughout been
+striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops to the nearest defile
+rather than frankly to meet William's onset, abandoned his troops as
+they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale for
+France.
+
+[Sidenote: Irish War.]
+
+But though James had fled in despair, and though the beaten army was
+forced by William's pursuit to abandon the capital, it was still
+resolute to fight. The incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the
+scorn even of his followers. "Change kings with us," an Irish officer
+replied to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne,
+"change kings with us and we will fight you again." They did better in
+fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the
+routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you
+call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon;
+they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand
+Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who
+had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the
+English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm
+the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege.
+The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, but he was hardly
+gone when a new turn was given to the struggle by one who was quietly
+proving himself a master in the art of war. Churchill, rewarded for his
+opportune desertion of James with the earldom of Marlborough, had been
+recalled from Flanders to command a division which landed in the south
+of Ireland. Only a few days remained before the operations were
+interrupted by the coming of winter, but the few days were turned to
+good account. The two ports by which alone Ireland could receive
+supplies from France fell into English hands. Cork, with five thousand
+men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days
+later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the
+greater part of Munster in Irish hands, the French force remained
+untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with arms
+and supplies encouraged the insurgents. But the summer of 1691 had
+hardly begun when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of
+Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at
+Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was utterly
+broken.
+
+[Sidenote: Ireland conquered.]
+
+The defeat at Aughrim left Limerick alone in its revolt, and in October
+Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of surrender. Two treaties were drawn
+up between the Irish and English generals. By the first it was
+stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in
+the exercise of their religion as were consistent with law, or as they
+had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged itself
+also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to endeavour to
+procure to the good Roman Catholics such further security in that
+particular as "may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account
+of the said religion." By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's
+soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France; and ten
+thousand men, the whole of his force, chose exile rather than life in a
+land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the wild cry of
+the women who stood watching their departure was hushed the silence of
+death settled down upon Ireland. For a hundred years the country
+remained at peace. But the peace was a peace of despair. No Englishman
+who loves what is noble in the English temper can tell without sorrow
+and shame the story of that time of guilt. The work of oppression, it is
+true, was done not directly by England but by the English settlers in
+Ireland; and the cruelty of their rule sprang in great measure from the
+sense of danger and the atmosphere of panic in which the Protestants
+lived. But if thoughts such as these relieve the guilt of those who
+oppressed they leave the fact of oppression as dark as before. The most
+terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the
+rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's bitter words
+of contempt, became "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to their
+conquerors. Such as the work was, however, it was thoroughly done.
+Though local risings of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the
+English settlers in Ireland, all dream of a national revolt passed away.
+Till the very eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source
+of political danger and anxiety to England.
+
+[Sidenote: French Descent on England.]
+
+Short as the struggle of Ireland had been it had served Lewis well, for
+while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes was
+restoring the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won
+the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of
+Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory which France
+was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very throne of
+William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage than in quitting
+England to fight James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were
+only looking for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise
+in revolt. The French minister in fact hurried the fleet to sea in the
+hope of detaining William in England by a danger at home; and he had
+hardly set out for Ireland when Tourville, the French admiral, appeared
+in the Channel with strict orders to fight. Orders as strict had been
+sent to the allied fleets to engage even at the risk of defeat; and when
+Tourville was met on the 30th of June 1690 by the English and Dutch
+fleet at Beachy Head the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly
+outnumbered it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid; but Herbert,
+whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were
+crushed, and withdrew with the English ships at nightfall to seek
+shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the shame, for
+Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel and his presence off
+the coast of Devon invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the
+discontent of Tories and Nonjurors against William might be all signs of
+it vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by
+Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and the news of the
+Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James.
+
+[Sidenote: Intrigues in England.]
+
+The natural reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a
+new strength for the moment to William in England; but ill luck still
+hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his presence
+abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and
+crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since
+the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the
+Continent at the head of an English army. But the slowness of the allies
+again baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small
+army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the
+strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made themselves masters of it
+in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment
+all trust in William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt
+more heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been crushed
+by the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life.
+Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened
+communications with James; and some of the leading Whigs with the Earl
+of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's
+ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's mind
+the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. His design was to
+bring about a revolt which would drive William from the throne without
+replacing James on it, a revolt which would in fact give the crown to
+his daughter Anne whose affection for Marlborough's wife would place the
+real government of England in Churchill's hands. A yet greater danger
+lay in the treason of Admiral Russell who had succeeded Torrington in
+command of the fleet.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of La Hogue.]
+
+Russell's defection would have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt
+which James was resolved to make for the recovery of his throne and
+which Lewis had been brought to support. James had never wavered from
+his design of returning to England at the head of a foreign force. He
+abandoned Ireland as soon as his hopes of finding such a force there
+vanished at the Boyne; and from that moment he had sought a base of
+invasion in France. Lewis was the more willing to make the trial that
+the pressure of the war had left few troops in England. So certain was
+he of success that the future ambassador to the court of James was
+already nominated, and a treaty of commerce sketched between France and
+England. In the beginning of 1692 an army of thirty thousand troops was
+quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent on the English coast.
+Nearly a half of this force was composed of the Irish regiments who had
+followed Sarsfield into exile after the surrender of Limerick.
+Transports were provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to
+cover it with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as
+many ships as his opponent the belief in his purpose of betraying
+William's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the
+allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's intrigues may
+have meant he was no Herbert. All he would promise was to keep his fleet
+out of the way of hindering a landing. But should Tourville engage, he
+would promise nothing. "Do not think I will let the French triumph over
+us in our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. "If I meet
+them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." When the
+allied fleet, which had been ordered to the Norman coast, met the French
+off the heights of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his
+word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety ships of
+the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the French were
+forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their
+vessels reached St. Malo; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays
+of Cherbourg and La Hogue; but their pursuers were soon upon them, and
+in a bold attack the English boats burned ship after ship under the eyes
+of the French army.
+
+[Sidenote: The turn of the War.]
+
+All dread of the invasion was at once at an end; and the throne of
+William was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite
+conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to support. The
+battle of La Hogue was a death-blow to the project of a Stuart
+restoration by help of foreign arms. Henceforth English Jacobitism would
+have to battle unaided against the throne of the Revolution. But the
+overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory.
+France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval power; for
+though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength the
+confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured
+again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope too dawned
+on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. On land
+indeed the French still held their old mastery. Namur, one of the
+strongest fortresses in Europe, surrendered to Lewis a few days after
+the battle of La Hogue. An inroad into Dauphine failed to rouse the
+Huguenots to revolt, and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of
+the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle
+was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the
+conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheartened and
+exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme.
+"The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The
+tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the
+Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg was hardly able to
+beat off the fierce attack of William at Neerwinden. For the first time
+in his long career of prosperity therefore Lewis bent his pride to seek
+peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort was a
+vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end
+and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.
+
+[Sidenote: The Sovereignty of the Commons.]
+
+Its final triumph however was in great measure brought about by a change
+which now passed over the face of English politics. In outer seeming the
+Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England
+from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful
+and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was
+transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of Commons. From
+the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the
+Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of
+granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons
+became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to
+suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either
+course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the
+army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the
+constitutional change was complete the machinery of government was far
+from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which
+such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of
+Commons might be it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear
+upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them
+were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the
+king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they held
+themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the
+Commons could force a king to remove a Minister who contradicted their
+will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen
+statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.
+
+[Sidenote: Lord Sunderland.]
+
+The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove
+William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous
+of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies
+always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is
+untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical
+difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they
+possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of
+the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the
+Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to
+find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood
+changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold
+over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he
+succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would
+have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the
+Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill
+which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of
+purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact
+without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate
+information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a
+definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political
+capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a
+simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit
+of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the
+lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the
+later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through
+almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by
+compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned
+conversion to the Roman Catholic faith; but the ruin of James was no
+sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by
+the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and
+his honour. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape
+public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came
+secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the
+king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the
+Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among
+the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.
+
+[Sidenote: The New Ministerial System.]
+
+As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each
+great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had
+in theory been independent of his fellow-officers; each was the "King's
+servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the
+king alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower
+above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of
+government, but the predominance was merely personal and never
+permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready
+to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was
+common for a king to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any
+communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at
+ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself
+the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan
+aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous
+Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments,
+and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and
+loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan
+likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till
+then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had
+never had before. The Ministers who were representatives of the majority
+of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions
+were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or
+opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the
+simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long
+vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name
+to be the king's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee
+representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and
+capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar
+Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the
+House to the other.
+
+[Sidenote: The Junto.]
+
+Such was the origin of that system of representative government which
+has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But though William showed
+his own political genius in understanding and adopting Sunderland's
+plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it
+out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland believed
+that the balance of political power was really on the side of the Whigs.
+Not only were they the natural representatives of the principles of the
+Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above
+their opponents in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their
+head stood a group of statesmen whose close union in thought and action
+gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet the most prominent of
+these, was the victor of La Hogue; John Somers was an advocate who had
+sprung into fame by his defence of the Seven Bishops; Lord Wharton was
+known as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers; and
+Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English
+financiers. In spite of such considerations however it is doubtful
+whether William would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely
+Whig Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the
+war. Exhausted as France was the war still languished and the allies
+still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all
+but ruined by the French privateers and the nation stood aghast at the
+growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold in their support of the
+Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs on the other hand
+remained resolute in their support of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: Bank of England.]
+
+William, in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was
+thus driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. Already in 1694 indeed
+Montague established his political position and weakened that of the
+Tory Ministers by his success in a great financial measure which at once
+relieved the pressure of taxation and added strength to the new
+monarchy. The war could be kept up only by loans: and loans were still
+raised in England by personal appeal to a few London goldsmiths in whose
+hands men placed money for investment. But the bankruptcies which
+followed the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal had shaken public
+confidence in the goldsmiths, while the dread of a restoration of James
+made these capitalists appear shy of the Ministers' appeals for aid.
+Money therefore could only be raised in scanty quantities and at a heavy
+loss. In this emergency Montague came forward with a plan which had been
+previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson, for the creation
+of a National Bank such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa.
+While serving as an ordinary bank for the supply of capital to
+commercial enterprises the Bank of England, as the new institution was
+called, was in reality an instrument for procuring loans from the
+people at large by the formal pledge of the State to repay the money
+advanced on the demand of the lender. For this purpose a loan of
+L1,200,000 was thrown open to public subscription; and the subscribers
+to it were formed into a chartered company in whose hands the
+negotiation of all after loans was placed. The plan turned out a perfect
+success. In ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of
+power revealed itself in this discovery of the resources afforded by the
+national credit and the national wealth; and the rapid growth of the
+National Debt, as the mass of these loans to the State came to be
+called, gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts whose
+first work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the lenders
+or as they were termed the "fundholders."
+
+[Sidenote: The Whig Ministry.]
+
+The evidence of the public credit gave strength to William abroad as at
+home. In 1694 indeed the army of 90,000 men which he commanded in the
+Netherlands did no more than hold the French successfully at bay; but
+the English fleet rode triumphant in the Channel, ravaged and alarmed
+the coast of France, and foiled by its pressure the attack of a French
+army on Barcelona. The brighter aspect of affairs abroad coincided with
+a new unity of action at home. The change which Sunderland counselled
+was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory Ministers had been replaced
+by members of the Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty; Somers was
+named Lord Keeper; Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Montague, Chancellor
+of the Exchequer. Even before this change was completed its effect was
+felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig majority of its
+members, united and disciplined, moved quietly under the direction of
+their natural leaders, the Whig Ministers of the Crown. It was this
+which enabled William to face the shock which was given to his position
+by the death of Queen Mary at the end of 1694. It had been provided
+indeed that on the death of either sovereign the survivor should retain
+the throne; but the renewed attacks of the Tories under Nottingham and
+Halifax on the war and the Bank showed what fresh hopes had been raised
+by William's lonely position. The Parliament however, whom the king had
+just conciliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went
+steadily with the Ministry; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph
+abroad. In September 1695 the Alliance succeeded for the first time in
+winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur. The king
+skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new Parliament, and
+its members at once showed their temper by a vigorous support of the
+measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. The Houses indeed
+were no mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume the
+prodigal grants of lands which he had made to his Dutch favourites, and
+to remove his Ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild project for
+a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They claimed a right to name
+members of the new Board of Trade which was established in 1696 for the
+regulation of commercial matters. They rejected a proposal, never
+henceforth to be revived, for a censorship of the Press. But there was
+no factious opposition. So strong was the Ministry that Montague was
+enabled to face the general distress which was caused for the moment by
+a reform of the currency, which had been reduced by clipping to far less
+than its nominal value, and although the financial embarrassments
+created by the currency reform hindered any vigorous measures abroad
+William was able to hold the French at bay.
+
+[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession.]
+
+But the war was fast drawing to a close. The Catholic powers in the
+Grand Alliance were already in revolt against William's supremacy as
+they had been in revolt against that of Lewis. In 1696 the Pope
+succeeded in detaching Savoy from the league and Lewis was enabled to
+transfer his Italian army to the Low Countries. But France was now
+simply fighting to secure more favourable terms, and William, though he
+held that "the only way of treating with France is with our swords in
+our hands," was almost as eager as Lewis for a peace. The defection of
+Savoy made it impossible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance,
+that of forcing France back to its position at the Treaty of Westphalia,
+and a new question was drawing every day nearer, the question of the
+succession to the Spanish throne. The death of the King of Spain,
+Charles the Second, was now known to be at hand. With him ended the male
+line of the Austrian princes who for two hundred years had occupied the
+Spanish throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in
+Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the
+extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to
+it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once
+return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces
+of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of
+Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble
+islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the
+dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow
+the work of European independence which William had wrought; and it was
+with a view to prevent either of these results that William resolved to
+free his hands by a conclusion of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: Peace of Ryswick.]
+
+In May negotiations were opened at Ryswick; the obstacles thrown in the
+way of an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside in a
+private negotiation between William and Lewis; and peace was finally
+signed in October 1697. In spite of failure and defeat in the field
+William's policy had won. The victories of France remained barren in the
+face of a united Europe; and her exhaustion forced her for the first
+time since Richelieu's day to consent to a disadvantageous peace. On the
+side of the Empire France withdrew from every annexation save that of
+Strassburg which she had made since the Treaty of Nimeguen, and
+Strassburg would have been restored but for the unhappy delays of the
+German negotiators. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the
+conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of
+Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. A far more important provision
+of the peace pledged Lewis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause and a
+recognition of William as King of England. For Europe in general the
+peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce. But for England it was
+the close of a long and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new aera
+of political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the
+conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since
+the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a Roman
+Catholic country and into a dependency of France. But it was even more
+than this. It was the definite establishment of England as the centre of
+European resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of
+power.
+
+[Sidenote: William's aims.]
+
+In leaving England face to face with France the Treaty of Ryswick gave a
+new turn to the policy of William. Hitherto he had aimed at saving the
+balance of European power by the joint action of England and the rest of
+the European states against France. He now saw a means of securing what
+that action had saved by the co-operation of France and the two great
+naval powers. In his new course we see the first indication of that
+triple alliance of France, England, and Holland, which formed the base
+of Walpole's foreign policy, as well as of that common action of England
+and France which since the fall of Holland has so constantly recurred to
+the dreams of English statesmen. Peace therefore was no sooner signed
+than William by stately embassies and a series of secret negotiations
+drew nearer to France. It was in direct negotiation and co-operation
+with Lewis that he aimed at bringing about a peaceful settlement of the
+question which threatened Europe with war. At this moment the claimants
+of the Spanish succession were three: the French Dauphin, a son of the
+Spanish king's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a grandson
+of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son of Charles's aunt.
+In strict law--if there had been any law really applicable to the
+matter--the claim of the last was the strongest of the three; for the
+claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renunciation of all right
+to the succession at his mother's marriage with Lewis XIV., a
+renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and
+a similar renunciation barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The
+claim of the Emperor was more remote in blood, but it was barred by no
+renunciation at all. William however was as resolute in the interests of
+Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis;
+and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession was inevitable
+if the war continued and Spain remained a member of the Grand Alliance,
+in arms against France and leagued with the Emperor, which made him
+suddenly conclude the Peace of Ryswick.
+
+[Sidenote: The first Partition Treaty.]
+
+Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted
+on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish
+dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress
+which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at
+once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of
+Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the
+disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two
+rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some
+hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to
+waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the
+three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became
+necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince
+of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its
+Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the
+Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to
+France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the
+Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria
+and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the
+success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe,
+seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both
+England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy
+by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class
+and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every
+day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the
+struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four
+millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at
+sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the
+realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general
+wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to
+fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the
+country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after
+the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the
+merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office
+rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a
+greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state
+of war.
+
+[Sidenote: The second Partition Treaty.]
+
+The general discontent at the course of the war, the general anxiety to
+preserve the new gains of the peace, told alike on William and on the
+party which had backed his policy. In England almost every one was set
+on two objects, the reduction of taxes and the disbanding of the
+standing army. The war had raised the taxes from two millions a year to
+four. It had bequeathed twenty millions of debt and a fresh six millions
+of deficit. The standing army was still held to be the enemy of liberty,
+as it had been held under the Stuarts; and hardly any one realized the
+new conditions of political life which had robbed its existence of
+danger to the State. The king however resisted desperately the proposals
+for its disbanding; for the maintenance of the army was all-important
+for the success of the negotiations he was carrying on. But his stubborn
+opposition only told against himself. Personally indeed the king still
+remained an object of national gratitude; but his natural partiality to
+his Dutch favourites, the confidence he gave to Sunderland, his cold and
+sullen demeanour, above all his endeavours to maintain the standing
+army, robbed him of popularity and of the strength which comes from
+popularity. The negotiations too which he was carrying on were a secret
+he could not reveal; and his prayers failed to turn the Parliament from
+its purpose. The army and navy were ruthlessly cut down. How much
+William's hands were weakened by this reduction of forces and by the
+peace-temper of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which
+was concluded in 1700 between the two maritime powers and France. The
+demand of Lewis that the Netherlands should be given to the Elector of
+Bavaria, whose political position would always leave him a puppet in the
+French king's hands, was indeed successfully resisted. Spain, the
+Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son of the
+Emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the whole of the Spanish
+territories in Italy were now granted to France; and it was provided
+that Milan should be exchanged for Lorraine, whose Duke was to be
+summarily transferred to the new Duchy. If the Emperor persisted in his
+refusal to come into the Treaty the share of his son was to pass to
+another unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of the Junto.]
+
+The Emperor, indifferent to the Archduke's personal interest, and
+anxious only to gain a new dominion in Italy for the House of Austria,
+stubbornly protested against this arrangement; but his protest was of
+little moment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly
+together. The new Western Alliance indeed showed how wide its power was
+from the first. The mediation of England and Holland, no longer
+counteracted by France, secured peace between the Emperor and the Turks
+in the Treaty of Carlowitz. The common action of the three powers
+stifled a strife between Holstein and Denmark which would have set North
+Germany on fire. William's European position indeed was more commanding
+than ever. But his difficulties at home were increasing every day. In
+spite of the defection of their supporters on the question of a standing
+army the Whig Ministry for some time retained fairly its hold on the
+Houses. But the elections for a new Parliament at the close of 1698
+showed the growth of a new temper in the nation. A Tory majority,
+pledged to peace as to a reduction of taxation and indifferent to
+foreign affairs, was returned to the House of Commons. The fourteen
+thousand men still retained in the army were at once cut down to seven.
+It was voted that William's Dutch guards should return to Holland. It
+was in vain that William begged for their retention as a personal
+favour, that he threatened to leave England with them, and that the ill
+effect of this strife on his negotiations threw him into a fever. Even
+before the elections he had warned the Dutch Pensionary that in any
+fresh struggle England could be relied on only for naval aid. He was
+forced to give way; and, as he expected, this open display of the
+peace-temper of England told fatally on the resistance he had attempted
+to the pretensions of France. He strove indeed to appease the Parliament
+by calling for the resignation of Russell and Montague, the two
+ministers most hated by the Tories. But all seemed in vain. The Houses
+no sooner met in 1699 than the Tory majority attacked the Crown, passed
+a Bill for resuming estates granted to the Dutch favourites, and
+condemned the Ministers as responsible for these grants. Again
+Sunderland had to intervene, and to press William to carry out the
+policy which had produced the Whig Ministry by its entire dismissal.
+Somers and his friends withdrew, and a new administration composed of
+moderate Tories, with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading
+members, took their place.
+
+[Sidenote: Accession of the Duke of Anjou.]
+
+The moment indeed was one in which the king needed at any price the
+co-operation of the Parliament. Spain had been stirred to bitter
+resentment as news of the Partition Treaty crept abroad. The Spaniards
+cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of
+Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment
+of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. The nobles too
+dreaded the loss of their vast estates in Italy and of the lucrative
+posts they held as governors of these dependencies. Even the dying king
+shared the anger of his subjects. He hesitated only whether to leave his
+dominions to the House of Austria or the House of Bourbon; but in
+either case he was resolved to leave the whole. A will wrested from him
+by the factions which wrangled over his deathbed bequeathed at last the
+whole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the
+second son of the Dauphin. It was doubtful indeed whether Lewis would
+suffer his grandson to receive the crown. He was still a member of that
+Triple Alliance on which for the last three years the peace of Europe
+had depended. The Treaty of Partition was so recent and the risk of
+accepting this bequest so great that Lewis would have hardly resolved on
+it but for his belief that the temper of England must necessarily render
+William's opposition a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so
+averse from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's policy that
+men openly approved the French king's course. Hardly any one in England
+dreaded the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they
+believed soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events.
+The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far
+better than the increase of power which France would have derived from
+the cessions of the last treaty of Partition. The cession of the
+Sicilies would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French
+lake, and have ruined the English trade with the Levant, while the
+cession of Guipuzcoa and the annexation of the west coast of Spain,
+which was looked on as certain to follow, would have imperilled the
+American trade and again raised France into a formidable power at sea.
+Backing all these considerations was the dread of losing by a contest
+with Spain and its new king the lucrative trade with the Spanish
+colonies. "It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, "that
+almost every one rejoices that France has preferred the Will to the
+Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at his rival's breach of
+faith, he had no means of punishing it. In the opening of 1701 the Duke
+of Anjou entered Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there
+were no Pyrenees.
+
+[Sidenote: Seizure of the Dutch Barrier.]
+
+The life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dying. His
+cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, his frame so weak that he
+could hardly get into his coach. But never had he shown himself so
+great. His courage rose with every difficulty. His temper, which had
+been heated by the personal affronts lavished on him through English
+faction, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large and
+clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments of
+French diplomacy and English party strife to the great interests which
+he knew must in the end determine the course of European politics.
+Abroad and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had
+no ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, while the
+attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the House of Austria in
+check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish
+Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French
+side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in
+Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of
+testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute
+against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king
+of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He
+could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count
+in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung
+from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards
+under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory
+might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were
+agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands.
+Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which
+the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis
+blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The
+wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the
+former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at
+its close, by which seven fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and
+Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops.
+The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of
+Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new
+state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his
+negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too
+eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride
+of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at
+the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the
+Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into
+his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took
+possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: The Act of Settlement.]
+
+The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the
+leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to
+the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which
+followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it
+was and bitterly as it condemned the Partition Treaties, it at once
+supported William in his demand for a withdrawal of the French troops,
+and authorized him to conclude a defensive alliance with Holland, which
+would give that State courage to join in the demand. The disclosure of a
+new Jacobite plot strengthened William's position. The hopes of the
+Jacobites had been raised in the preceding year by the death of the
+young Duke of Gloucester, the only living child of the Princess Anne,
+and who as William was childless ranked, after his mother, as
+heir-presumptive of the throne. William was dying, the health of Anne
+herself was known to be precarious; and to the partisans of James it
+seemed as if the succession of his son, the boy who was known in later
+life as the Old Pretender, was all but secure. But Tory as the
+Parliament was, it had no mind to undo the work of the Revolution. When
+a new Act of Succession was laid before the Houses in 1701 not a voice
+was raised for James or his son. By the ordinary rules of heritage the
+descendants of the daughter of Charles the First, Henrietta of Orleans,
+whose only child had married the Duke of Savoy, would come next as
+claimants; but the house of Savoy was Catholic and its pretensions were
+passed over in the same silence. No other descendants of Charles the
+First remained, and the Parliament fell back on his father's line.
+Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, had married the Elector
+Palatine; but of her twelve children all had died save one. This was
+Sophia, the wife of the late and the mother of the present Elector of
+Hanover. It was in Sophia and the heirs of her body, being Protestants,
+that the Act of Settlement vested the Crown. But the jealousy of a
+foreign ruler accompanied this settlement with remarkable provisions.
+It was enacted that every English sovereign must be in communion with
+the Church of England as by law established. All future kings were
+forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament, and foreigners
+were excluded from all public posts, military or civil. The independence
+of justice, which had been inadequately secured by the Bill of Rights,
+was now established by a clause which provided that no judge should be
+removed from office save on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The
+two principles that the king acts only through his ministers and that
+these ministers are responsible to Parliament were asserted by a
+requirement that all public business should be formally done in the
+Privy Council and all its decisions signed by its members. These two
+last provisions went far to complete the parliamentary Constitution
+which had been drawn by the Bill of Rights.
+
+[Sidenote: The Country and the War.]
+
+But, firm as it was in its loyalty to the Revolution, and in its resolve
+to maintain the independence of the Netherlands, the Parliament had
+still no purpose of war. It assented indeed to the alliance with Holland
+in the belief that the pressure of the two powers would bring Lewis to a
+peaceful settlement of the question. Its aim was still to avoid a
+standing army and to reduce taxation; and its bitterness against the
+Partition Treaties sprang from a belief that William had entailed on
+England by their means a contest which must bring back again the army
+and the debt. The king was bitterly blamed, while the late ministers,
+Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were impeached for
+their share in the treaties; and the Commons prayed the king to exclude
+the three from his counsels for ever. But a counter-prayer from the
+Lords gave the first sign of a reaction of opinion. Outside the House of
+Commons indeed the tide of national feeling rose as the designs of Lewis
+grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch barrier to be
+re-established; and a great French fleet gathered in the Channel to
+support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite descent which was proposed by
+the ministers of James in a letter intercepted and laid before
+Parliament. Even the House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet
+was raised to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. But the
+country moved faster than the Parliament. Kent sent up a remonstrance
+against the factious measures by which the Tories still struggled
+against the king's policy, with a prayer "that addresses might be turned
+into Bills of Supply"; and William was encouraged by these signs of a
+change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland, and to
+conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for the recovery of
+the Netherlands from Lewis and for their transfer with the Milanese to
+the house of Austria as a means of counterbalancing the new power added
+to France.
+
+[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]
+
+England however still clung desperately to a hope of peace; and even in
+the Treaty with the Emperor, which followed on the French refusal to
+negotiate on a basis of compensation, William was far from disputing the
+right of Philip of Anjou to the Spanish throne. Hostilities had indeed
+already broken out in Italy between the French and Austrian armies; but
+the king had not abandoned the dream of a peaceful settlement when
+France by a sudden act forced him into war. Lewis had acknowledged
+William as king in the Peace of Ryswick and pledged himself to oppose
+all attacks on his throne; but in September 1701 he entered the
+bedchamber at St. Germain where James the Second was breathing his last,
+and promised to acknowledge his son at his death as king of England,
+Scotland, and Ireland. The promise which was thus made was in fact a
+declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at one in accepting
+the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of
+European politics, but a question whether the work of the Revolution
+should be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be
+replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a
+question as this there was no difference between Tory and Whig. Every
+Englishman backed William in his open resentment of the insult and in
+the recall of his ambassador. The national union showed itself in the
+warm welcome given to the king on his return from the Hague, where the
+conclusion of a new Grand Alliance in September between the Empire,
+Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and
+skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate,
+and the bulk of the German States. William seized the moment of
+enthusiasm to dissolve the Houses whose action had hitherto embarrassed
+him; and though the new Parliament which met in 1702 was still Tory in
+the main, its Tory members were now as much for war as the Whigs, and
+the House of Commons replied to the king's stirring appeal by voting
+forty thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle. As
+a telling reply to the recognition of the young James by Lewis, a Bill
+of Attainder was passed against the new Pretender, and correspondence
+with him or maintenance of his title was made treason. At the same time
+all members of either House and all public officials were sworn to
+uphold the succession of the House of Hanover as established by law.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough.]
+
+The king's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking the
+field; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to the
+one Englishman who had shown himself capable of a great command. John
+Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a
+Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restoration mistress
+of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more perhaps than her
+father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission in the royal
+Guards; and after five years' service abroad under Turenne the young
+captain became colonel of an English regiment which was retained in the
+service of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great
+soldier, an unruffled courage, a temper naturally bold and venturesome
+but held in check by a cool and serene judgement, a vigilance and
+capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he
+was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blenheim he
+remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms
+did less for Churchill on his return to the English court than his
+personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known as "the handsome
+Englishman"; and his manners were as winning as his person. Even in age
+his address was almost irresistible; "he engrossed the graces," says
+Chesterfield; and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won
+the favour of Lady Castlemaine. A present of L5000 from the king's
+mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to
+greatness, as the prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier
+hardened into the avarice of age.
+
+[Sidenote: Churchill and James.]
+
+But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for
+advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member of
+his household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days of
+the Popish Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and on
+his master's return he was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of
+the Life Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession by
+saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been yet
+more splendidly acknowledged but for the king's bigotry. In spite of his
+master's personal solicitations Churchill remained true to
+Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on further favour
+after a formal refusal to abandon his faith. Luckily for him he had now
+found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing influence of his
+wife over the king's second daughter, Anne; and at the crisis of the
+Revolution the adhesion of Anne to the cause of Protestantism was of the
+highest value. No sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered
+Churchill from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from promising
+Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from deserting the ranks of the
+king's army when it faced William in the field. His desertion proved
+fatal to the royal cause; but great as this service was it was eclipsed
+by a second. It was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to
+forsake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupulous as his
+conduct had been, the services which Churchill thus rendered to William
+were too great to miss their reward. On the new king's accession he
+became Earl of Marlborough; he was put at the head of a force during the
+Irish war where his rapid successes at once won William's regard; and he
+was given high command in the army of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Churchill and William.]
+
+But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned Marlborough from
+plotting treason against James to plot treason against William. Great as
+was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty
+of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely
+combined with a power of winning and retaining love. Churchill's
+affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the dark web of his
+career. In the midst of his marches and from the very battle-field he
+writes to his wife with the same passionate tenderness. The composure
+which no danger or hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish
+depression at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent
+humour. To the last he never left her without a pang. "I did for a great
+while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs," he once wrote to
+her after setting out on a campaign, "in hopes that I might have had one
+sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough
+with a love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the
+Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of state, and
+addressed each other as "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley." It was on his
+wife's influence over her friend that the Earl's ambition counted in its
+designs against William. His subtle policy aimed at availing itself both
+of William's unpopularity and of the dread of a Jacobite restoration.
+His plan was to drive the king from the throne by backing the Tories in
+their opposition to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the
+English hatred of foreigners, and then to use the Whig dread of James's
+return to seat Anne in William's place. The discovery of these designs
+roused the king to a burst of unusual resentment. "Were I and my Lord
+Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, "the sword would have
+to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of his
+offices and command and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed
+her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the centre of the
+Tory opposition: while Marlborough opened a correspondence with James.
+So notorious was his treason that on the eve of the French invasion
+which was foiled by the victory of La Hogue the Earl was one of the
+first among the suspected persons who were sent to the Tower.
+
+[Sidenote: Death of William.]
+
+The death of Mary however forced William to recall the Princess, who
+became by this event his successor; and with Anne the Marlboroughs
+returned to court. Now indeed that Anne's succession was brought near by
+the rapid decay of William's health their loyalty to the throne might
+be counted on; and though William could not bend himself to trust the
+Earl again, he saw in him as death drew near the one man whose splendid
+talents fitted him in spite of the perfidy and treason of his life to
+rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He employed
+Marlborough therefore to negotiate the treaty of alliance with the
+Emperor, and put him at the head of the army in Flanders. But the Earl
+had only just taken the command when a fall from his horse on the
+twenty-first of February 1702 proved fatal to the broken frame of
+William of Orange. "There was a time when I should have been glad to
+have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whispered to
+Portland, "but I own I see another scene, and could wish to live a
+little longer." He knew however that the wish was vain; and he died on
+the morning of the 8th of March, commending Marlborough to Anne as the
+fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal in
+her friend's cause needed no quickening. Three days after her accession
+the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home and
+abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction of the war. His
+supremacy over home affairs was secured by the expulsion of the few
+remaining Whigs among the ministers, and the construction of a purely
+Tory administration with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of
+Marlborough's, as Lord Treasurer at its head. The Queen's affection for
+his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment when Anne's
+personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with the nation. In
+England indeed party feeling for the moment died away. The Parliament
+called on the new accession was strongly Tory; but all save the extreme
+Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a
+Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the Whigs were
+ready to back even a Tory general in waging a Whig war.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough and the Allies.]
+
+Abroad however William's death shook the Alliance to its base; and even
+Holland wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming
+struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with this
+distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue
+with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament was brought to
+sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The new
+general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well
+as of the English forces, and drew the German powers into the
+Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even William might have
+envied. Never indeed was greatness more quickly recognised than in the
+case of Marlborough. In a few months he was regarded by all as the
+guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes whose jealousy had worn out
+the patience of the king yielded without a struggle to the counsels of
+his successor. His temper fitted him in an especial way to be the head
+of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to any
+early training. The trace of his neglected education was seen to the
+last in his reluctance to write. "Of all things," he said to his wife,
+"I do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was a far greater
+trouble to Marlborough than to plan a campaign. But nature had given him
+qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. His capacity
+for business was immense. During the next ten years he assumed the
+general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. He managed every
+negotiation with the courts of the allies. He watched over the shifting
+phases of English politics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a
+change in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due contingent
+of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and the same moment men saw
+him reconciling the Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring
+the Calvinists of the Cevennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of
+Portugal, and providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy.
+
+[Sidenote: His temper.]
+
+But his air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained
+to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was
+never ruffled by an outbreak of temper. Amidst the storm of battle his
+soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry
+giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he
+was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable
+serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch,
+the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political
+opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which
+he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy
+pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from
+being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the
+most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when
+Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing
+him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could
+not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the
+bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous
+letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him; "My
+desire," he wrote, "is that the world may continue in their error of
+thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than
+pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual
+temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment which
+tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. In all
+else he was without affection or resentment, he knew neither doubt nor
+regret. In private life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if
+his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death or lead his
+army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer
+sentiments of mankind he knew nothing; and he turned without a shock
+from guiding Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless
+fortune by peculation and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a
+man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. No life indeed,
+no temper ever stood more aloof from the common life and temper of
+mankind. The passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble or
+ignoble, were to Marlborough simply elements in an intellectual problem
+which had to be solved by patience. "Patience will overcome all things,"
+he writes again and again. "As I think most things are governed by
+destiny, having done all things we should submit with patience."
+
+[Sidenote: Opening of the War.]
+
+As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by his
+bitterest foes. "Over the Confederacy," says Lord Bolingbroke, "he, a
+new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more decided
+influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the crown of
+Great Britain had given to King William." But great as he was in the
+council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone amongst the
+masters of the art of war as a captain whose victories began at an age
+when the work of most men is done. Though he served as a young officer
+under Turenne, and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands,
+Marlborough had held no great command till he took the field in Flanders
+at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone too in his unbroken good
+fortune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did
+not take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difficulties
+indeed came not so much from the enemy as from the ignorance and
+timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in the field, but
+victory after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his
+officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cautious
+strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his plans. Old as
+he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and
+boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once resolved to
+force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled by the
+timidity and resistance of the Dutch deputies. But his resolute advance
+across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him
+to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges, till the
+surrender of Liege closed a campaign which cut off the French from the
+Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of invasion.
+
+[Sidenote: The French in Germany.]
+
+The successes of Marlborough had been brought into bolder relief by the
+fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the Imperialist general,
+Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his powers by a surprise of the French
+army at Cremona, no real successes had been won in Italy. An English
+descent on the Spanish coast ended in failure. In Germany, where the
+Bavarians joined the French, their united armies defeated the army of
+the Empire and opened the line of the Danube to a French advance. It was
+in this quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes in the coming
+year. In the spring of 1703 a French army under Marshal Villars again
+relieved the Bavarian Elector from the pressure of the Austrian forces,
+and only a strife which arose between the two commanders hindered their
+joint armies from marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the
+Dutch deputies served Lewis well in the Low Countries. The hopes of
+Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his services in the
+previous year, were again foiled by the deputies of the States-General.
+Serene as his temper was, it broke down before their refusal to
+co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French Flanders; and the prayers
+of Godolphin and of the Pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to
+withdraw his offer of resignation. In spite of his victories on the
+Danube, indeed, of the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the
+sudden aid of an insurrection against the Court of Vienna which broke
+out in Hungary, the difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The
+accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy
+with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of operations
+against Spain. The French king's energy however rose with the pressure;
+and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was
+despatched against Portugal, and three small armies closed round Savoy,
+the flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on the
+Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes of the war
+by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire under the walls of
+Vienna.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough in Germany.]
+
+The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 1704 to
+a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy and boldness of the Duke's
+plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French army in
+Flanders saw in his march from the Netherlands upon Maintz only a design
+to transfer the war into Elsass. The Dutch on the other hand were lured
+into suffering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz
+by the Duke's proposals for an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was
+only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the centre
+of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was
+revealed to both. After struggling through the hill country of
+Wurtemberg he joined the Imperial army under the Prince of Baden,
+stormed the heights of Donauwerth, crossed the Danube and the Lech, and
+penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew two other armies
+which were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene. The
+arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French troops saved the
+Elector of Bavaria for the moment from the need of submission; but the
+junction of his opponent, Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the
+contending forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies
+met on the north bank of the Danube near the small town of Hochstaedt and
+the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to
+one of the most memorable battles in the history of the world.
+
+[Sidenote: Battle of Blenheim.]
+
+In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled, for
+the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of
+Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wurtembergers and Austrians
+who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who
+numbered like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a
+little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. Their
+position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its
+right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the stream
+rose; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself but was far superior
+to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's hands were free.
+"I have great reason," he wrote calmly home, "to hope that everything
+will go well, for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing
+to obey without knowing any other reason than that it is my desire,
+which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where I was
+obliged to have the consent of a council of war for everything I
+undertook." So formidable were the obstacles, however, that though the
+allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of August it was not till
+midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing
+the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left, and attacked
+the village of Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were
+entrenched; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, while
+as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene in
+check. It was the centre however, where the French believed themselves
+to be unassailable, and which this belief had led them to weaken by
+drawing troops to their wings, that had been chosen by Marlborough from
+the first for the chief point of attack. By making an artificial road
+across the morass which covered it, he was at last enabled to throw his
+eight thousand horsemen on the mass of the French cavalry, which
+occupied this position; and two desperate charges which the Duke headed
+in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back on the
+Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell back in confusion on
+Hochstaedt: while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from
+retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only twenty
+thousand men escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen thousand were
+captured. Vienna was saved, Germany finally freed from the French, and
+Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its flight to
+Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle.
+
+[Sidenote: Occasional conformity.]
+
+But the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A
+hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies
+of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the
+flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the
+terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrook"
+became a name of fear to every child in France. In England itself the
+victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a great change in the political
+aspect of affairs. The Tories were already pressing hard on the defeated
+Whigs. If they were willing to support the war abroad, they were
+resolved to use the accession of a Stuart to the throne to secure their
+own power at home. They resolved therefore to make a fresh attempt to
+create a permanent Tory majority in the Commons by excluding
+Nonconformists from the municipal corporations, which returned the bulk
+of the borough members, and whose political tendencies were for the
+most part Whig. The test of receiving the sacrament according to the
+ritual of the Church of England, effective as it was against Catholics,
+was useless against Protestant Dissenters. While adhering to their
+separate congregations, in which they were now protected by the
+Toleration Act, they "qualified for office," as it was called, by the
+"occasional conformity" of receiving the sacrament at church once in the
+year. It was against "occasional conformity" that the Tories introduced
+a test which by excluding the Nonconformists would have given them the
+command of the boroughs; and this test at first received Marlborough's
+support. But it was rejected by the Lords as often as it was sent up to
+them, and it was soon guessed that the resistance of the Lords was
+secretly backed by both Marlborough and Godolphin. Tory as he was, in
+fact, Marlborough had no mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a
+measure which would be fatal to the war by again reviving religious
+strife. But it was in vain that he strove to propitiate his party by
+inducing the Queen to set aside the tenths and first-fruits hitherto
+paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small
+benefices, a fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. The
+Commons showed their resentment against Marlborough by refusing to add a
+grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first campaign; and
+the higher Tories, with Lord Nottingham at their head, began to throw
+every obstacle they could in the way of the continuance of the war.
+
+[Sidenote: The Coalition Ministry.]
+
+Nottingham and his followers at last quitted office in 1704, and
+Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more moderate stamp who were
+still in favour of the war; by Robert Harley, who became Secretary of
+State, and by Henry St. John, a young man of splendid talents, who was
+named Secretary at War. Small as the change seemed, its significance was
+clear to both parties; and the Duke's march into Germany gave his
+enemies an opportunity of embittering the political strife. The original
+aim of the Tories had been to limit English efforts to what seemed
+purely English objects, the defence of the Netherlands and of English
+commerce; and the bulk of them shrank even now from any further
+entanglement in the struggle. But the Duke's march seemed at once to
+pledge England to a strife in the very heart of the Continent, and above
+all to a strife on behalf of the House of Austria, whose designs upon
+Spain were regarded with almost as much suspicion as those of Lewis. It
+was an act indeed of even greater political than military daring. The
+High Tories and Jacobites threatened if Marlborough failed to bring his
+head to the block; and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from
+political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from his
+own party to the party which really backed his policy. He availed
+himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve Parliament;
+and when the election of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in
+favour of the war, his efforts brought about a coalition between the
+moderate Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose support
+was purchased by making a Whig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and by
+sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to Vienna.
+
+[Sidenote: Ramillies.]
+
+The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely foiled by this
+union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at home. But he had to bear
+disappointment abroad. His plan of attack along the line of the Moselle
+was defeated by the refusal of the Imperial army to join him. When he
+transferred the war again to the Netherlands and entered the French
+lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops; and his
+proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of Waterloo was
+rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the States with cries
+of "murder" and "massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke into
+bitterness at this last blow. "Had I the same power I had last year," he
+wrote home, "I could have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim."
+On his complaint indeed the States recalled their commissaries, but the
+year was lost; nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on
+the Rhine. The spirits of the allies were only sustained by the
+romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate,
+unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, and
+his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, a step followed by his
+recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to
+support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been
+acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles
+the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon joined Aragon in declaring for
+Charles: while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at
+Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the
+coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of the Imperial
+generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the Alps and a
+campaign in Italy; and though these designs were defeated by the
+opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he again
+appeared in Flanders in 1706. Marshal Villeroy, the new French general,
+was as eager as Marlborough for an engagement; and the two armies met on
+the 23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on an undulating plain which
+forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide
+curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left,
+Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crushed it
+in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along their whole
+line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of
+Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand men,
+their baggage, and their guns; and the line of the Scheldt, Brussels,
+Antwerp and Bruges became the prize of the victors. It only needed four
+successful sieges which followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the
+deliverance of Flanders.
+
+[Sidenote: The Union with Scotland.]
+
+The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet more
+memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of England with
+Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had been the first work of
+the Government of the Restoration, its revival was one of the first aims
+of the Government which followed the Revolution. But the project was
+long held in check by religious and commercial jealousies. Scotland
+refused to bear any part of the English debt. England would not yield
+any share in her monopoly of trade with the colonies. The English
+Churchmen longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north of the Border,
+while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of the legal
+toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703 however an Act of Settlement which
+passed through the Scotch Parliament at last brought home to English
+statesmen the dangers of further delay. In dealing with this measure the
+Scotch Whigs, who cared only for the independence of their country,
+joined hand in hand with the Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the
+interests of the Pretender. The Jacobites excluded from the Act the
+name of the Princess Sophia; the Whigs introduced a provision that no
+sovereign of England should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save
+upon security given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish
+people. The danger arising from such a measure was undoubtedly great,
+for it pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the
+Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scotland and
+England. The need of a union became at once apparent to every statesman,
+but it was only after three years' delay that the wisdom and resolution
+of Lord Somers brought the question to an issue. The Scotch proposals of
+a federative rather than a legislative union were set aside by his
+firmness; the commercial jealousies of the English traders were put by;
+and the Act of Union as it was completed in 1706, though not finally
+passed till the following year, provided that the two kingdoms should be
+united into one under the name of Great Britain, and that the succession
+to the crown of this United Kingdom should be ruled by the provisions of
+the English Act of Settlement. The Scotch Church and the Scotch law were
+left untouched: but all rights of trade were thrown open to both
+nations, a common system of taxation was established, and a uniform
+system of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was henceforth to
+represent the United Kingdom; and for this purpose forty-five Scotch
+members, a number taken to represent the proportion of Scotch property
+and population relatively to England, were added to the five hundred and
+thirteen English members of the House of Commons, and sixteen
+representative peers to the one hundred and eight who formed the English
+House of Lords.
+
+[Sidenote: Its results.]
+
+In Scotland the opposition to this measure was bitter and almost
+universal. The terror of the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of
+Security which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an
+oath to support the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his
+accession. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or
+the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from France and
+plotted a Stuart restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding from
+the Houses which voted for the Union and of establishing a rival
+Parliament. In the end however good sense and the loyalty of the trading
+classes to the cause of the Protestant succession won their way. The
+measure was adopted by the Scotch Parliament, and the Treaty of Union
+became a legislative Act to which Anne in 1707 gave her assent in noble
+words. "I desire," said the Queen, "and expect from my subjects of both
+nations that from henceforth they act with all possible respect and
+kindness to one another, that so it may appear to all the world they
+have hearts disposed to become one people." Time has more than answered
+these hopes. The two nations whom the Union brought together have ever
+since remained one. England gained in the removal of a constant danger
+of treason and war. To Scotland the Union opened up new avenues of
+wealth which the energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The
+farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing
+town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow. Peace
+and culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands into
+herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any loss of
+national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and more rapid
+developement of national energy than that of Scotland after the Union.
+All that passed away was the jealousy which had parted since the days of
+Edward the First two peoples whom a common blood and common speech
+proclaimed to be one. The Union between Scotland and England has been
+real and stable simply because it was the legislative acknowledgement
+and enforcement of a national fact.
+
+[Sidenote: Marlborough's difficulties.]
+
+With the defeat of Ramillies and the conclusion of the Union the
+greatness of Marlborough reached its height. In five years he had
+rescued Holland, saved Germany, and thrown France back on a purely
+defensive position. He exercised an undisputed supremacy over an
+alliance which embraced the greatest European powers. At home he was
+practically first minister, commander-in-chief, and absolute master
+through his wife of the Queen herself. He was looked upon as the most
+powerful as he was the wealthiest subject in the world. And while
+Marlborough's fortunes mounted to their height those of France sank to
+their lowest ebb. Eugene in his greatest victory broke the siege of
+Turin, and Lewis saw the loss of Flanders followed by the loss of Italy.
+Not only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the
+Third, with an army of English and Portuguese, entered Madrid. But it
+was in fact only these triumphs abroad that enabled Marlborough to face
+the difficulties which were opening on him at home. His command of the
+Parliament rested now on a coalition of the Whigs with the moderate
+Tories who still adhered to him after his break with the more violent
+members of his old party. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force
+Anne in spite of her hatred of the Whigs to fulfil the compact with them
+from which this coalition had sprung, by admitting Lord Sunderland, the
+bitterest leader of their party, to office as Secretary of State at the
+close of 1706. But with the entry of Sunderland into office the system
+of political balance which the Duke had maintained till now began at
+once to break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last attempt
+to govern England on other terms than those of party government, and the
+union of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from
+the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing
+opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the
+support of the Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: Triumph of the Whigs.]
+
+The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious
+temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had
+carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt
+through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his
+father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a
+strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the
+moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
+them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the
+Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined
+because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his
+resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and
+even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a
+bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's
+favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon
+as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of
+gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to
+office, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes.
+Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition
+of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only
+party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with
+their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion
+in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility
+of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn
+and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough
+died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat
+of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and
+the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her
+husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter
+resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh
+compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by
+removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by
+wresting from Anne her consent in 1708 to the dismissal from office of
+Harley and St. John with the whole of the moderate Tories whom they
+headed. Their removal was followed by the complete triumph of the Whigs
+in the admission of Lords Somers and Wharton into the ministry. Somers
+became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland,
+while lower posts were occupied by younger men of the same party, who
+were destined to play a great part in our later history, such as the
+young Duke of Newcastle and Robert Walpole.
+
+[Sidenote: Oudenarde.]
+
+Meanwhile, the great struggle abroad went steadily against France,
+though its progress was varied with striking alternations of success.
+France rose indeed with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of
+Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip in 1707 by a victory of
+Marshal Berwick at Almanza. Marshal Villars won fresh triumphs on the
+Rhine; while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back
+into Italy. In Flanders Marlborough's designs for taking advantage of
+his great victory were foiled by the strategy of the Duke of Vendome and
+by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In
+the campaign of 1708 however Vendome, in spite of his superiority in
+force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde; and though Marlborough
+was hindered from striking at the heart of France by the timidity of the
+English and Dutch statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its
+frontier fortresses, in the face of an army of relief which numbered a
+hundred thousand men. The blow proved an effective one. The pride of
+Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible sufferings of
+France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had
+fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to
+give up ten Flemish fortresses as a barrier for the Dutch, and to
+surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the Treaty of
+Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from
+his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port
+hateful to England as the home of the French privateers.
+
+[Sidenote: Peace rejected.]
+
+To Marlborough these terms seemed sufficient, and for the moment he
+regarded peace as secure. Peace was indeed now the general wish of the
+nation, and the longing for it was nowhere stronger than with the Queen.
+Dull and sluggish as was Anne's temper, she had the pride and
+stubbornness of her race, and both revolted against the submission to
+which she was forced. If she bowed to the spirit of the Revolution by
+yielding implicitly to the decision of her Parliament, she held firmly
+to the ceremonial traditions of the monarchy of her ancestors. She dined
+in royal state, she touched for the evil in her progresses, she presided
+at every meeting of council or cabinet, she insisted on every measure
+proposed by her ministers being previously laid before her. She shrank
+from party government as an enslavement of the Crown; and claimed the
+right to call on men from either side to aid in the administration of
+the State. But if England was to be governed by a party, she was
+resolved that it should be her own party. She had been bred a Tory. Her
+youth had fallen among the storms of the Exclusion Bill, and she looked
+on Whigs as disguised republicans. Above all her pride was outraged by
+the concessions which were forced from her. She had prayed Godolphin to
+help her in excluding Sunderland as a thing on which the peace of her
+life depended. She trembled every day before the violent temper of the
+Duchess of Marlborough, and before the threat of resignation by which
+the Duke himself crushed her first faint efforts at revolt. She longed
+for a peace which would free her from both Marlborough and the Whigs, as
+the Whigs on the other hand were resolute for a war which kept them in
+power. It was on this ground that they set aside the Duke's counsels and
+answered the French proposals of peace by terms which made peace
+impossible. They insisted on the transfer of the whole Spanish monarchy
+to the Austrian prince. When even this seemed likely to be conceded they
+demanded that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to
+give up the crown of Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: Sacheverell.]
+
+"If I must wage war," replied the French king, "I had rather wage it
+with my enemies than with my children." In a bitter despair he appealed
+to France; and, exhausted as the country was by the struggle, the
+campaign of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The
+terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of Malplaquet
+showed a new temper in the French soldiers. Starving as they were, they
+flung away their rations in their eagerness for the fight, and fell
+back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of Marlborough could
+break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their lines of
+entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that number. Horror at
+such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and
+the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly
+attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest
+which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering
+discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the
+Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church
+divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at
+St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the
+warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his
+impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great
+party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's
+favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and
+the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the
+bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets
+rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of
+the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they
+inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations
+over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.
+
+[Sidenote: Dismissal of the Whigs.]
+
+The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom
+the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
+from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and
+vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the
+first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of
+political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the
+_Examiner_, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed
+in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift,
+an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St.
+John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war
+and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions
+of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of
+us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called
+in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition,
+with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have
+defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the
+maintenance of the war, and encouraged Anne to free herself from the
+yoke beneath which she had bent so long. At the close of Sacheverell's
+trial she broke with the Duchess. Marlborough looked for support to the
+Whigs; but the subtle intrigue of Harley was as busy in undermining the
+Ministry as St. John was in openly attacking it. The Whigs, who knew
+that the Duke's league with them had simply been forced on him by the
+war, and who had already foiled an attempt he had made to secure himself
+by the demand of a grant for life of his office of Commander-in-Chief,
+were easily persuaded that the Queen's sole object was his personal
+humiliation. They looked coolly therefore on at the dismissal of
+Sunderland, who had now become his son-in-law, and of Godolphin, who was
+his closest friend. The same means were adopted to bring about the ruin
+of the Whigs themselves: and Marlborough, lured easily by hopes of
+reconciliation with his old party, looked on as coolly while Anne
+dismissed her Whig counsellors and named a Tory Ministry, with Harley
+and St. John at its head, in their place.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Marlborough.]
+
+The time was now come for a final and decisive blow; but how great a
+dread Marlborough still inspired in his enemies was shown by the
+shameful treachery with which they still thought it needful to bring
+about his fall. The intrigues of Harley paled before the subtler treason
+of Henry St. John. Young as he was, for he had hardly reached his
+thirty-second year, St. John had already shown his ability as Secretary
+of War under Marlborough himself, his brilliant rhetoric gave him a hold
+over the House of Commons which even the sense of his restlessness and
+recklessness failed to shake, while the vigour and eloquence of his
+writings infused a new colour and force into political literature. He
+was resolute for peace; but he pressed on the work of peace with an
+utter indifference to all but party ends. As Marlborough was his great
+obstacle, his aim was to drive him from his command; and earnestly as he
+admired the Duke's greatness, he hounded on a tribe of libellers who
+assailed even his personal courage. Meanwhile St. John was feeding
+Marlborough's hopes of reconciliation with the Tories, till he led him
+to acquiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a
+co-operation with the Tory policy. It was the Duke's belief that a
+reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led him to sanction the
+despatch of troops which should have strengthened his army in Flanders
+on a fruitless expedition against Canada, though this left him too weak
+to carry out a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the
+heart of France in the opening of 1711. He was unable even to risk a
+battle or to do more than to pick up a few seaboard towns, and St. John
+at once turned the small results of the campaign into an argument for
+the conclusion of peace. Peace was indeed all but concluded. In defiance
+of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged its members not to
+carry on separate negotiations with France, St. John, who now became
+Lord Bolingbroke, pushed forward through the summer of 1711 a secret
+accommodation between England and France. It was for this negotiation
+that he had crippled Marlborough's campaign; and it was the discovery of
+his perfidy which revealed to the Duke how utterly he had been betrayed,
+and forced him at last to break with the Tory Minister.
+
+[Sidenote: Treaty of Utrecht.]
+
+He returned to England; and his efforts induced the House of Lords to
+denounce the contemplated peace; but the support of the Commons and the
+Queen, and the general hatred of the war among the people, enabled
+Harley to ride down all resistance. At the opening of 1712 the Whig
+majority in the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve
+Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command, charged with
+peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons.
+The Duke at once withdrew from England, and with his withdrawal all
+opposition to the peace was at an end. His flight was in fact followed
+by the conclusion of a Treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and
+the Dutch; and the desertion of his allies forced even the Emperor at
+last to make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of the
+war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain at once by
+the House of Bourbon, was silently abandoned. No precaution was in fact
+taken against the dangers it involved to the balance of power, save by a
+provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head,
+and by Philip's renunciation of all right of succession to the throne
+of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact
+that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even
+more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain
+and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the
+Netherlands with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had
+now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his claims; while he handed over
+Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he gave up not only Minorca but
+Gibraltar, two positions which secured her the command of the
+Mediterranean. France purchased peace by less costly concessions. She
+had to consent to the re-establishment of the Dutch barrier on a greater
+scale than before; to pacify the English resentment against the French
+privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk; and not only to recognize the
+right of Anne to the crown, and the Protestant succession in the House
+of Hanover, but to consent to the expulsion of the Pretender from her
+soil.
+
+[Sidenote: Harley and Bolingbroke.]
+
+The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question
+of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into faction
+and intrigue. The Whigs, who were still formidable in the Commons, and
+who showed the strength of their party in the Lords by defeating a
+Treaty of Commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest
+financial triumph of William Pitt and secured freedom of trade between
+England and France, were zealous for the succession of the House of
+Hanover in the well-founded belief that the Elector George hated the
+Tories; nor did the Tories, though the Jacobite sympathies of a portion
+of their party forced both Harley and Bolingbroke to keep up a delusive
+correspondence with the Pretender, who had withdrawn to Lorraine, really
+contemplate any other succession than that of the Elector. But on the
+means of providing for his succession Harley and Bolingbroke differed
+widely. Harley, still influenced by the Presbyterian leanings of his
+early life, and more jealous of Lord Rochester and the high Tories he
+headed than of the Whigs themselves, inclined to an alliance between the
+moderate Tories and their opponents, as in the earlier days of
+Marlborough's power. The policy of Bolingbroke on the other hand was so
+to strengthen the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents that
+whatever might be the Elector's sympathies they could force their policy
+on him as king; and in the advances which Harley made to the Whigs he
+saw the means of ruining his rival in the confidence of his party, and
+of taking his place at their head. It was with this purpose that he
+introduced a Schism Bill, which would have hindered any Nonconformist
+from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor. The success of this measure
+broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and
+Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition
+to it. But its effects went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The
+Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and
+warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against
+her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so
+that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the
+Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future
+George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of
+summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was
+simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain
+the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it
+seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would
+render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by
+Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned
+her that "such conduct may imperil the succession itself."
+
+[Sidenote: Death of Anne.]
+
+To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read
+it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a
+dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and
+necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more
+moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the
+breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with
+unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence in Harley by
+conferring on him the earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct
+of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was
+brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of
+Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry which would
+back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis
+grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of
+1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and
+invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his
+name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other
+hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in
+favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the
+district in which either claimant of the crown must land, while he gave
+Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. The appointments were
+probably only to secure Jacobite support, for Bolingbroke had in fact no
+immediate apprehensions of the Queen's death, and his aim was to trim
+between the Court of Hanover and the Court of James while building up a
+strong Tory party which would enable him to meet the accession of either
+with a certainty of retaining power both for himself and the principles
+he represented. With this view he was preparing to attack both the Bank
+and the East India Company, the two great strongholds of the Whigs, as
+well as to tax the bondholders at higher rates than the rest of the
+community by way of conciliating the country gentry, who hated the
+moneyed interest which was rising into greatness beside them. But events
+moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July, three days after
+Harley's dismissal, Anne was suddenly struck with apoplexy. The Privy
+Council at once assembled, and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and
+Somerset entered the Council Chamber without summons and took their
+places at the board. The step had been taken in secret concert with the
+Duke of Shrewsbury, who was President of the Council in the Tory
+Ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke and an adherent of the Hanoverian
+succession. The act was a decisive one. The right of the House of
+Hanover was at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as Lord
+Treasurer by the Council, and the nomination was accepted by the dying
+Queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained Secretary of State, suddenly
+found himself powerless and neglected while the Council took steps to
+provide for the emergency. Four regiments were summoned to the capital
+in the expectation of a civil war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and
+unprepared; and on the death of Anne on the evening of the 10th of
+August, the Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne
+by his mother's death, was proclaimed as king of England without a show
+of opposition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE HOUSE OF HANOVER
+
+1714-1760
+
+
+[Sidenote: England's European position.]
+
+The accession of George the First marked a change in the position of
+England as a member of the European Commonwealth. From the age of the
+Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart
+from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for
+if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House
+of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his
+successor from any effective interference in the strife across the
+Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at
+the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm
+as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the
+ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when
+England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful
+outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts
+of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the
+Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts
+William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against
+France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the
+exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done
+England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples,
+and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its
+head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the
+forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim
+and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of
+Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House
+of Bourbon.
+
+Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could
+withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the
+Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution,
+whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the
+supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite
+restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a
+European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was
+drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch
+every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And
+not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of
+Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of
+the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a
+"balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which
+rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a
+compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great
+struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted
+and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the
+time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty
+of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her
+insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no
+dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy,
+that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to
+the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a
+Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European
+peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties.
+
+[Sidenote: Its results.]
+
+Nothing is at first sight more wearisome than the long line of
+alliances, triple and quadruple, the endless negotiations, the
+interminable congresses, the innumerable treaties, which make up the
+history of Europe during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; nor
+is it easy to follow with patience the meddlesome activity of English
+diplomacy during that period, its protests and interventions, its
+subsidies and guarantees, its intrigues and finessings, its bluster and
+its lies. But wearisome as it all is, it succeeded in its end, and its
+end was a noble one. Of the twenty-five years between the Revolution and
+the Peace of Utrecht all but five were years of war, and the five were a
+mere breathing-space in which the combatants on either side were girding
+themselves for fresh hostilities. That the twenty-five years which
+followed were for Europe as a whole a time of peace was due in great
+measure to the zeal with which England watched over the settlement that
+had been brought about at Utrecht. To a great extent her efforts averted
+war altogether; and when war could not be averted she brought it within
+as narrow limits and to as speedy an end as was possible. Diplomacy
+spent its ingenuity in countless choppings and changings of the smaller
+territories about the Mediterranean and elsewhere; but till the rise of
+Prussia under Frederick the Great it secured Europe as a whole from any
+world-wide struggle. Nor was this maintenance of European peace all the
+gain which the attitude of England brought with it. The stubborn policy
+of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our policy ever since. In
+struggling for peace and for the sanctity of treaties, even though the
+struggle was one of selfish interest, England took a ply which she has
+never wholly lost. Warlike and imperious as is her national temper, she
+has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in
+the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about
+her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,
+amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of
+international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment
+has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at
+once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of
+peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil
+and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these
+sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper
+itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of
+responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of
+tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier
+years of the eighteenth century.
+
+[Sidenote: England's intellectual influence.]
+
+Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the
+new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her
+for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the
+European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English
+letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our
+philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent.
+It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion
+that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions
+were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the
+Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and
+Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they
+carried English ideas. The combination of material and military
+greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere,
+which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of
+1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our
+history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking
+to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that
+drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than
+political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the
+Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English
+literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed,
+even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above
+all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so
+utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove
+Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the
+eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new
+impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about
+him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its
+individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only
+a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new
+literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke
+gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its
+destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of
+Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with
+England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told
+through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the
+nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely
+as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English
+science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal
+world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his
+ideas in politics and education.
+
+[Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]
+
+Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had
+they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at
+the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states
+with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress
+of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same
+rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each
+department of thought, the same interest in political and social
+speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency
+to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of
+thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away
+from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion
+which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in
+a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the
+world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of
+mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature
+of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity
+of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in
+the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all
+delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of
+verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped
+everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick,
+clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of
+Voltaire.
+
+[Sidenote: Creation of a literary class.]
+
+How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the
+instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck
+fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a
+change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these
+later years of his life that his influence over English literature
+became supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom
+letters asserted an almost public importance. The reverence with which
+men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of
+Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the
+days when the wits of the Revolution clustered reverently round the old
+man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or
+recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by
+no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and
+honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more
+than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by
+his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of
+gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants
+wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that
+the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of
+readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the
+smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a
+literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on
+the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose,
+covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for
+literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about
+him, Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new
+power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.
+
+[Sidenote: The new poetry.]
+
+And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction.
+In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the
+impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century
+till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden
+remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject
+seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be,
+he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But
+he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express
+beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational
+things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once
+rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument,
+rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry
+no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no
+longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or
+sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite
+representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its
+reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all
+that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from
+Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that
+had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to
+man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his
+politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides;
+with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the
+use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new
+sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But
+with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden
+indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force;
+to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that
+conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.
+
+[Sidenote: The new prose.]
+
+Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in
+prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of
+phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of
+Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness
+and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work
+of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for
+the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger
+part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express
+the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade
+the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national
+life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture
+which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was
+natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the
+age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming
+an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now
+giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded
+simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes
+for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and
+freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the
+mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social
+intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy,
+its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer
+of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.
+
+[Sidenote: The Essayists.]
+
+What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.
+The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but
+already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The
+popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the
+new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from
+the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the
+brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary
+charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a
+gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped
+and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest
+and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short;
+essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the
+sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.
+Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all
+necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary
+conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious
+display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had
+to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of
+imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of
+phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he
+touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their
+more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold
+is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a
+puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its
+fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of
+a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer
+passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity,
+his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter,
+his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's
+fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would
+startle the group in a modern drawing-room.
+
+[Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]
+
+But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still
+a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual
+problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal
+of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of
+the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all,
+looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet
+enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their
+beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to
+the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and
+picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first
+time made every street and every house teem with living people for us,
+who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their
+inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their
+very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the
+world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in
+its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the
+essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no
+longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness,
+adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of
+playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with
+passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into
+love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand
+with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour,
+whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary
+courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and
+phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our
+literature first became urbane.
+
+[Sidenote: The brutality of Politics.]
+
+It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage
+ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the
+Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been
+carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the
+language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and
+scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest
+statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only
+worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of
+attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary
+of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set
+the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen
+and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty
+playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the
+road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this
+virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and
+corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from
+being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the
+statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors;
+while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they
+stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had
+risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was
+Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public
+duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and
+Sunderlands of the Restoration.
+
+[Sidenote: Public opinion.]
+
+What had really happened was a change not in the attitude of statesmen
+towards the nation, but in the attitude of the nation at large towards
+the class that governed it. From the triumph of Puritanism in 1640 the
+supreme, irresistible force in English politics had been national
+opinion. It created the Long Parliament. It gave it its victory over the
+Church and the Crown. When a strange turn of events placed Puritanism in
+antagonism to it, it crushed Puritanism as easily as it had crushed
+Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no
+sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in
+the Popish Plot and swept them from the country in the Revolution. The
+stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of
+sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest
+with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it
+acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general
+course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed
+there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in
+politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at
+critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it
+could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation
+roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts
+indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to
+public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish
+Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this
+lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his
+opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two
+great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Petitioners
+and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that
+then for the first time the masses of the people were stirred to a more
+prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups
+of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.
+
+[Sidenote: Becomes powerless.]
+
+The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.
+But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the
+national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless
+to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to
+vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of
+the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in
+the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the
+Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the
+Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the
+Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of
+administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse
+from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation
+at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every
+House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly
+Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the
+patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible
+that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and
+amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell
+riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it
+deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment
+of the Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but
+Whig. Passionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all
+meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in
+ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardianship of the whole state
+of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more.
+Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as
+helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the
+standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and
+taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of
+its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical
+as ever, and yet Nonconformists worshipped in their chapels and served
+as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer
+was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought
+about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of
+England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William.
+Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the
+Church as Somers or Godolphin.
+
+[Sidenote: Helplessness of the Tories.]
+
+In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a
+foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any
+undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as
+he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the
+Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a
+monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to
+the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of
+landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into
+measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter;
+and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show
+whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one
+course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and
+that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him
+much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did
+not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English
+freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts
+was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their
+faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what
+such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more
+earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of
+the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without
+striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of
+even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the
+Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the
+consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged
+Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the
+monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at
+the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf
+to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule
+was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an
+impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of
+the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the
+Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the
+Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the
+Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly
+support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep
+distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and
+though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to
+the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive
+one that they refused to take office.
+
+[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]
+
+The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it
+placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did
+even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as
+a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory
+party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In the first
+House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories
+hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their
+strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement
+among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond
+fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the
+Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham
+seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the
+wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the
+Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was
+still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite
+designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow
+to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring
+about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk
+however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they
+might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and
+solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the
+decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did
+was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and
+appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the
+Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Church.]
+
+While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their
+political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming
+weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main
+stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.
+But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution,
+the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart
+indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan
+spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious
+revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which
+changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the
+fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt
+against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or
+the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress
+of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been
+left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material
+channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to
+all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher
+circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England,
+"if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the
+greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and
+distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives.
+Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later
+prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with
+his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were
+sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his
+son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite
+education.
+
+[Sidenote: Sloth of the clergy.]
+
+At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They
+were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for
+the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the
+developement of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious
+or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a
+single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the
+grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were
+fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left
+without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one
+Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time,
+"and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were
+worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of
+London or Birmingham burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and
+pillaged at their will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers
+in the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of
+society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree,
+and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of
+Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to
+drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited
+every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.
+Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and
+sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop
+Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in
+Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least
+severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig
+partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levees of the
+Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed that he
+had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of
+Westmoreland. The system of pluralities which enabled a single clergyman
+to hold at the same time a number of livings turned the wealthier and
+more learned of the clergy into absentees, while the bulk of them were
+indolent, poor, and without social consideration.
+
+[Sidenote: The clergy lose political power.]
+
+Their religious inactivity told necessarily on their political
+influence; but what most weakened their influence was the severance
+between the bulk of the priesthood and its natural leaders. The bishops,
+who were now chosen exclusively from among the small number of Whig
+ecclesiastics, were left politically powerless by the estrangement and
+hatred of their clergy; while the clergy themselves, drawn by their
+secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active
+interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen
+aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots
+had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay
+slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to
+avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters
+pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Walpole openly
+avowed his dread of awaking the passions of religious hate by such a
+measure, and satisfied them by an annual act of indemnity for any breach
+of these penal statutes. By a complete abstinence from all
+ecclesiastical questions no outlet was left for the bigotry of the
+people at large, while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation
+deprived the clergy of their natural centre of agitation and opposition.
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Crown.]
+
+And while the Church thus ceased to be a formidable enemy, the Crown
+became a friend. Under Anne the throne had regained much of the older
+influence which it lost through William's unpopularity; but under the
+two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of the Crown lay absolutely
+dormant. They were strangers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense was
+impossible; and their character as nearly approached insignificance as
+it is possible for human character to approach it. Both were honest and
+straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of
+constitutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could make
+their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper of George
+the First was that of a gentleman usher; and his one care was to get
+money for his favourites and himself. The temper of George the Second
+was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his realm
+while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, and which
+his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is familiar enough
+in the witty memoirs of the time; but as political figures the two
+Georges are almost absent from our history. William of Orange, while
+ruling in most home matters by the advice of his Ministers, had not only
+used the power of rejecting bills passed by the two Houses, but had kept
+in his own hands the control of foreign affairs. Anne had never yielded
+even to Marlborough her exclusive right of dealing with Church
+preferment, and had presided to the last at the Cabinet Councils of her
+ministers. But with the accession of the Georges these reserves passed
+away. No sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a Cabinet Council,
+or has ventured to refuse his assent to an Act of Parliament. As
+Elector of Hanover indeed the king still dealt with Continental affairs:
+but his personal interference roused an increasing jealousy, while it
+affected in a very slight degree the foreign policy of his English
+counsellors.
+
+England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig
+Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very
+kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover
+believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support
+of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had
+no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the
+Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for
+republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the
+prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the
+prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as
+any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of
+George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole
+influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct
+power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed
+the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that
+its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The
+generality of the world here," said the new Whig Chancellor, Lord
+Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king
+of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of
+law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in
+good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a
+clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."
+
+[Sidenote: The Whigs and Parliament.]
+
+It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's
+parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs.
+But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not
+wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers
+or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the
+excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were
+divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real
+eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution
+and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted
+with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to
+the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the
+Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose
+resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy
+in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to
+power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs
+devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the
+House of Commons. The support of the commercial classes and of the great
+towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit,
+but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of
+trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated
+the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the
+bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in
+politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time into
+Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the
+weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years
+relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coarser
+means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses
+was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt
+constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation.
+It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery.
+Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang
+out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had
+begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was
+supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the
+Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only
+at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. The
+secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a
+safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard
+against interference on the part of constituencies. This strange union
+of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about
+its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to
+be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought
+by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.
+
+But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their
+organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed
+their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their
+conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles
+were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred
+years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to
+freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688.
+But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized
+basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It
+was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the
+Whig administration was conducted that made constitutional government a
+part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England
+year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted
+these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over
+Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for
+difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to
+tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a
+Parliament.
+
+[Sidenote: Robert Walpole.]
+
+That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was
+due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676;
+and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of
+Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and
+air of the class from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his
+vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in
+Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant
+of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste
+for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He
+rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first
+despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the
+temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough
+noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared
+"If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of
+Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of
+his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter
+attacks of a host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial
+good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was
+ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in
+no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his
+assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender,
+he made little use of his power over them.
+
+[Sidenote: His policy.]
+
+Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the
+shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very
+clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could
+not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic
+and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer
+motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members
+who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured
+answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was
+thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as
+they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned
+in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is
+for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats
+only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked
+him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with
+which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the
+Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his
+"Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the
+conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance
+of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as
+it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of
+sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt
+so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with
+hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and
+English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and
+virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this
+argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the
+agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of
+new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was
+hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won
+by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the
+House of Hanover upon the throne.
+
+[Sidenote: The Townshend Ministry.]
+
+Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of
+political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise
+in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that
+no reform was as important to the country at large as a national
+reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the
+necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on
+the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who
+still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give
+fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool
+against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh
+hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole
+clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he
+could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.
+Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter
+hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up
+charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him
+from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of
+George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he
+was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the
+jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now
+served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was
+drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found
+themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power,
+time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715,
+and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The
+man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new
+Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay
+in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which
+the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of
+fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war,
+on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of
+Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support
+of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of
+Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.
+Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both
+as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It
+was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his
+actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of
+Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of
+the Treasury, in the new administration.
+
+[Sidenote: The rising of 1715.]
+
+The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of
+the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for
+the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and
+dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as
+Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had
+secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis
+the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But
+at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from
+France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of
+Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without
+informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the
+signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs
+meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival
+Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they
+had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a
+leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand
+Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct
+kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet
+it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who
+arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and
+incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of
+six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and
+dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger passed away
+like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some
+outbreaks of riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings
+and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne;
+while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its
+victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the
+restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George.
+The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader,
+Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the
+west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party
+to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism,
+showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in
+Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival of
+two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred
+these insurgents to march into Lancashire, where the Catholic party was
+strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a
+surrender.
+
+[Sidenote: England and France.]
+
+The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the
+Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts,
+and to venture on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial
+Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to
+three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling
+power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure
+steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 this necessity
+coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly
+Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to
+seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising
+produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more
+momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the
+Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the
+three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the
+realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple
+alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly
+offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the
+actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland
+had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more
+distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France
+from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had
+been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in
+September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that
+moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for
+the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the
+Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of
+Spain observed the renunciation of his rights which he had made in the
+Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion
+of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with
+a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power
+of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own
+renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every
+Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her
+Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved
+upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce
+with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in
+upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.
+
+[Sidenote: Their alliance against Spain.]
+
+To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had
+stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every
+European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor
+held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on
+the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet
+indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American
+Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish
+Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against
+the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a
+means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In
+spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to
+recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the
+Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater
+than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the
+island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England
+and France together. The Abbe Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had
+already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the
+Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the
+Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of
+Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers
+were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was
+concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the
+existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European
+politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in
+Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an
+English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement
+in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to
+avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which
+the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising
+in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the
+accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death
+of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The
+progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at
+last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were
+withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed
+to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition
+of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work
+of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of
+his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his
+claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.
+
+[Sidenote: Resignation of Townshend.]
+
+Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle
+had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new
+sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of
+England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far
+more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his
+kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to
+strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position
+was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark
+had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to
+annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions;
+but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it secured the help of
+Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of
+alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into
+the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with
+the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return
+bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining
+in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the
+Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the
+court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new
+dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his
+death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them
+had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When
+George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England
+shielded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish
+King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant assent to a measure which
+they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the
+Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the
+Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen
+and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was
+brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to
+England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the
+chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands of a
+friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying
+out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of
+the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops
+entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by
+intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and
+Walpole were forced to resign their posts.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stanhope Ministry.]
+
+The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconstituted
+cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first
+aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional
+change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be
+shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was
+destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king.
+Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular
+nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed
+aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve
+peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht
+showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and
+changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore
+the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord
+Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by
+limiting the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The
+number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the
+House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred.
+Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were substituted for the sixteen
+elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by
+Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political
+quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it
+jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered
+representative government impossible. For representative government was
+now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of
+the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the
+mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the
+Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers
+could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where
+their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of
+Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.
+
+[Sidenote: South Sea Bubble.]
+
+It was to Walpole's opposition that the Peerage Bill owed its defeat;
+and this success forced his rivals again to admit him, with Townshend,
+to a share in the Ministry, though they occupied subordinate offices.
+But this arrangement was soon to yield to a more natural one. The sudden
+increase of English commerce begot at this moment the mania of
+speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of
+Spanish America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of
+Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which
+promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of
+the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions
+of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England
+the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of
+despatching a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite
+of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for
+new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a
+million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the
+country against this "dream." Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company
+followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general
+ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his
+colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea
+Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of
+terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
+was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert
+Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the
+Treasury, while his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, returned to his
+post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now
+reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in
+this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that
+"the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and
+Walpole."
+
+[Sidenote: Walpole's Ministry.]
+
+But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the
+head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared
+worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness
+has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His
+qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full
+justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man;
+nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to
+do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque
+or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe,
+was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on
+this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone
+it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced
+every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among
+English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of
+our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in
+which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while
+it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the
+honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won
+victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his
+negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the
+very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced
+his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and
+a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is
+the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he
+was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our
+Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later
+statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing
+both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense
+to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a
+statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in
+the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he
+can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national
+wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his
+rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more
+conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of
+our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the
+manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be."
+
+[Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]
+
+The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties
+from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of
+importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the
+prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother
+country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their
+rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of
+America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise
+Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English
+Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom
+of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material
+progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our
+exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the
+century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.
+It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England
+a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of
+Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica
+at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the
+Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at L15,000. At his death
+they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth century
+the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were
+estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a
+quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose
+manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.
+Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new
+prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the
+West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the
+kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with
+them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country
+gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year
+threescore years ago," said Burke in 1766, "are at three thousand at
+present."
+
+[Sidenote: His policy of inaction.]
+
+Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than
+the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole
+swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a
+diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First
+the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in
+economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other
+fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than
+tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had
+specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his
+Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the
+quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.
+His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the
+Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry,
+which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by
+any effort to repeal the laws against Nonconformity. His temper was
+naturally vigorous and active; and yet the years of his power are years
+without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long
+administration indeed is almost without a history. All legislative and
+political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after
+year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry
+there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction
+gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of
+the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly
+presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was
+absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of commerce and
+accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and
+temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave
+government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone
+to enjoy their new freedom and develope their new industries. And
+Walpole let them alone. On the other hand, the forces which opposed the
+Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour
+which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted
+idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but
+their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of
+opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on
+friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing
+its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole
+trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite
+of every temptation he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the
+laws that oppressed the Catholic or the Dissenter, he took care that
+they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered.
+Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the Nonconformists from the
+consequences of their infringement of the Test Act. There was no
+tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and
+action were alike left free. No Minister was ever more foully slandered
+by journalists and pamphleteers; but Walpole never meddled with the
+press.
+
+[Sidenote: Fresh efforts of Spain.]
+
+Abroad as well as at home the difficulties in the way of his policy were
+enormous. Peace was still hard to maintain. Defeated as her first
+attempt had been, Spain remained resolute to regain her lost provinces,
+to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and to restore her old monopoly of
+trade with her American colonies. She had learned that she could do
+this only by breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her
+isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league
+in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the
+Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he
+provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his
+daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to
+guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching
+the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support the
+Pragmatic Sanction in return for a pledge on the part of Charles to aid
+in wresting Gibraltar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a
+Spanish prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A grant
+of the highest trading privileges in her American dominions to a
+commercial company which the Emperor had established at Ostend, in
+defiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England
+and Holland, revealed this secret alliance; and there were fears of the
+adhesion of Russia, which still remained hostile to England through the
+quarrel with Hanover. The danger was met for a while by an alliance of
+England, France, and Prussia, in 1725; but the withdrawal of the last
+Power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727 the Spaniards
+besieged Gibraltar while Charles threatened an invasion of Holland. The
+moderation of Walpole alone averted a European war. While sending
+British squadrons to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he
+succeeded by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the Emperor to
+inaction; after weary negotiations Spain was brought in 1729 to sign the
+Treaty of Seville and to content herself with the promise of a
+succession of a Spanish prince to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany; and
+the discontent of Charles the Sixth at this concession was allayed in
+1731 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic Sanction.
+
+[Sidenote: George the Second.]
+
+The patience and even temper which Walpole showed in this business were
+the more remarkable that in the course of it his power received what
+seemed a fatal shock from the death of the king. George the First died
+on a journey to Hanover in 1727; and his successor, George the Second,
+was known to have hated his father's Minister hardly less than he had
+hated his father. But hate Walpole as he might, the new king was
+absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, Caroline of Anspach;
+and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the
+Ministry. After a few days of withdrawal therefore Walpole again
+returned to office; and the years which followed were those in which his
+power reached its height. He gained as great an influence over George
+the Second as he had gained over his father: and in spite of the steady
+increase of his opponents in the House of Commons, his hold over it
+remained unshaken. The country was tranquil and prosperous. The
+prejudices of the landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce
+the land-tax, whose pressure was half the secret of their hostility to
+the Revolution that produced it. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites
+were too hopeless to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept
+quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols
+showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value
+enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be
+in the English tongue.
+
+[Sidenote: Excise Bill.]
+
+Only once did Walpole break this tranquillity by an attempt at a great
+measure of statesmanship; and the result of his attempt proved how wise
+was the inactivity of his general policy. No tax had from the first
+moment of its introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its
+origin was due to Pym and the Long Parliament, who imposed duties on
+beer, cyder, and perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual
+income of more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war with France at
+the Revolution brought with it the imposition of a malt-tax and
+additional duties on spirits, wine, tobacco, and other articles. So
+great had been the increase in the public wealth that the return from
+the Excise amounted at the death of George the First to nearly two
+millions and a half a year. But its unpopularity remained unabated, and
+even philosophers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue
+should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the other
+hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of winning over the
+country gentry to the new dynasty of the Revolution by freeing the land
+from all burdens whatever. He saw too a means of diminishing the loss
+suffered by the revenue from the Customs through smuggling and fraud.
+These losses were immense; that on tobacco alone amounted to a third of
+the whole duty. In 1733 therefore he introduced an Excise Bill, which
+met this evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the
+collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of Excise
+and not of Customs. The first measure would have made London a free
+port, and doubled English trade. The second would have so largely
+increased the revenue, without any loss to the consumer, as to enable
+Walpole to repeal the land-tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the
+change in the mode of levying the duty was estimated to bring in an
+additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The necessaries of life and
+the raw materials of manufacture were in Walpole's plan to remain
+absolutely untaxed. The scheme was in effect an anticipation of the
+principles which have guided English finance since the triumph of free
+trade, and every part of it has now been carried into effect. But in
+1733 Walpole stood ahead of his time. The violence of his opponents was
+hacked by an outburst of popular prejudice; riots almost grew into
+revolt; and in spite of the Queen's wish to put down resistance by
+force, Walpole withdrew the bill. "I will not be the Minister," he said
+with noble self-command, "to enforce taxes at the expense of blood."
+
+[Sidenote: The Patriots.]
+
+What had fanned popular prejudice into a flame during the uproar over
+the Excise Bill was the violence of the so-called "Patriots." In the
+absence of a strong opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a
+party breaks readily into factions; and the weakness of the Tories
+joined with the stagnation of public affairs to breed faction among the
+Whigs. Walpole too was jealous of power; and as his jealousy drove
+colleague after colleague out of office they became leaders of a party
+whose sole aim was to thrust him from his post. Greed of power indeed
+was the one passion which mastered his robust common sense. Townshend
+was turned out of office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield in 1733; and though
+he started with the ablest administration the country had known, Walpole
+was left after twenty years of supremacy with but one man of ability in
+his cabinet, the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke. With the single exception
+of Townshend, the colleagues whom his jealousy dismissed plunged into an
+opposition more factious and unprincipled than has ever disgraced
+English politics. The "Patriots," as they called themselves, owned
+Pulteney, a brilliant speaker and unscrupulous intriguer, as their head;
+they were reinforced by a band of younger Whigs--the "Boys," as Walpole
+named them--whose temper revolted alike against the inaction and
+cynicism of his policy, and whose fiery spokesman was a young cornet of
+horse, William Pitt; and they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory
+party which still took part in politics, a fragment inconsiderable in
+numbers but of far greater weight as representing a large part of the
+nation, and which was guided for a while by the virulent ability of
+Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom
+he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. Inside
+Parliament indeed the invectives of the "Patriots" fell dead before
+Walpole's majorities and his good-humoured contempt; so far were their
+attacks from shaking his power that Bolingbroke abandoned the struggle
+in despair to return again into exile, while Pulteney with his party
+could only take refuge in a silly secession from Parliament. But on the
+nation at large their speeches and pamphlets, with the brilliant
+sarcasms of their literary allies, such as Pope or Johnson, did more
+effective work. Unjust indeed as their outcry was, the growing response
+to it told that the political inactivity of the country was drawing to
+an end. It was the very success of Walpole's policy which was to bring
+about his downfall; for it was the gradual closing of the chasm which
+had all but broken England into two warring peoples that allowed the
+political energy of the country to return to its natural channels and to
+give a new vehemence to political strife. Vague too and hollow as much
+of the "high talk" of the Patriots was, it showed that the age of
+political cynicism, of that unbelief in high sentiment and noble
+aspirations which had followed on the crash of Puritanism, was drawing
+to an end. Rant about ministerial corruption would have fallen flat on
+the public ear had not new moral forces, a new sense of social virtue, a
+new sense of religion been stirring, however blindly, in the minds of
+Englishmen.
+
+[Sidenote: The Methodists.]
+
+The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from
+the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot
+of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their
+times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion,
+and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of
+"Methodists." Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon
+as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by
+the fervour and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his
+special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led
+it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast
+masses of population which lay concentrated in the towns or around the
+mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor
+of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech
+was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was
+shown when a dread of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the
+pulpits of the Established Church, and forced them to preach in the
+fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous
+corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the
+dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his
+labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's
+preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical,
+extravagant, often commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense
+reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the
+sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring
+gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious
+Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at
+Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits,
+and see as he preached the tears "making white channels down their
+blackened cheeks."
+
+[Sidenote: The religious revival.]
+
+On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke the effect of
+Whitefield and his fellow Methodists was mighty both for good and ill.
+Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in their opponents. Their
+lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they
+were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they
+aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong
+men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by
+bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of
+strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange
+and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a
+conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms
+at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student,
+came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the
+"sweet singer" of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction
+of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more
+extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm
+passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was
+aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public
+devotion throughout England.
+
+[Sidenote: John Wesley.]
+
+But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not
+this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at
+Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon
+as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic
+mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little
+society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a
+preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second
+to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the
+excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly
+deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over
+others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and
+moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of
+men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of
+the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the
+start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost
+covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the
+Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he
+sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been
+impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared
+the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.
+Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived
+on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a
+world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain
+stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement
+of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his
+preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell
+lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or
+without any?--immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in
+the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his
+conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life,
+by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible
+opened.
+
+[Sidenote: His organization of Methodism.]
+
+But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was
+essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at
+the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary.
+In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the
+narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began
+his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself
+to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of
+laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to
+preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and
+looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion
+with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends
+of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their
+contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great
+preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical
+temper of mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be
+the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and
+organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied
+of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more
+than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to
+employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and
+attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered
+in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and
+sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the
+Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of
+age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic
+outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent
+to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the
+new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped
+into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of
+unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers
+and wandering preachers; while the whole body was placed under the
+absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as he
+lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with Wesley
+alone. "If by arbitrary power," he replied with charming simplicity to
+objectors, "you mean a power which I exercise simply without any
+colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt in it."
+
+[Sidenote: Results of the movement.]
+
+The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members
+at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by
+millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the
+Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later,
+broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the
+"Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their
+duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at
+large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and
+wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the
+first impulse to popular education.
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of France.]
+
+From the new England which was springing up about him, from that new
+stir of national life and emotion of which the Wesleyan revival was but
+a part, Walpole stood utterly aloof. National enthusiasm, national
+passion, found no echo in his cool and passionless good sense. The
+growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its
+instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a
+foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and
+loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike
+unintelligible to him. In the talk of patriotism and public virtue he
+saw mere rant and extravagance. "Men would grow wiser," he said, "and
+come out of that." The revival of English religion he looked on with an
+indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism
+which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the
+face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to
+his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now
+threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto
+enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the
+Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. But
+it was clear that such an alliance could hardly be a permanent one. The
+Treaty of Utrecht had been a humiliation for France even more than for
+Spain. It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy
+which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the
+sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned
+from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to
+the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown
+themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with
+reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known
+nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old
+ambition started again into life.
+
+[Sidenote: Its union with Spain.]
+
+It was fired to action by a new rivalry. The naval supremacy of Britain
+was growing into an empire of the sea; and not only was such an empire
+in itself a challenge to France, but it was fatal to the aspirations
+after a colonial dominion, after aggrandizement in America, and the
+upbuilding of a French power in the East, which were already vaguely
+stirring in the breasts of her statesmen. And to this new rivalry was
+added the temptation of a new chance of success. On the Continent the
+mightiest foe of France had ever been the House of Austria; but that
+House was now paralyzed by a question of succession. It was almost
+certain that the quarrels which must follow the death of the Emperor
+would break the strength of Germany, and it was probable that they might
+be so managed as to destroy for ever that of the House of Hapsburg.
+While the main obstacle to her ambition was thus weakened or removed,
+France won a new and invaluable aid to it in the friendship of Spain.
+Accident had hindered for a while the realization of the forebodings
+which led Marlborough and Somers so fiercely to oppose a recognition of
+the union of the two countries under the same royal house in the Peace
+of Utrecht. The age and death of Lewis the Fourteenth, the minority of
+his successor, the hostility between Philip of Spain and the Duke of
+Orleans, the personal quarrel between the two Crowns which broke out
+after the Duke's death, had long held the Bourbon powers apart. France
+had in fact been thrown on the alliance of England, and had been forced
+to play a chief part in opposing Spain and in maintaining the European
+settlement. But at the death of George the First this temporary
+severance was already passing away. The birth of children to Lewis the
+Fifteenth settled all questions of succession; and no obstacle remained
+to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the Bourbon Courts in a
+common action. The boast of Lewis the Fourteenth was at last fulfilled.
+In the mighty struggle for supremacy which France carried on from the
+fall of Walpole to the Peace of Paris her strength was doubled by the
+fact that there were "no Pyrenees."
+
+[Sidenote: The Family Compact.]
+
+The first signs of this new danger showed themselves in 1733, when the
+peace of Europe was broken afresh by disputes which rose out of a
+contested election to the throne of Poland. Austria and France were
+alike drawn into the strife; and in England the awakening jealousy of
+French designs roused a new pressure for war. The new king too was eager
+to fight, and her German sympathies inclined even Caroline to join in
+the fray. But Walpole stood firm for the observance of neutrality. He
+worked hard to avert and to narrow the war; but he denied that British
+interests were so involved in it as to call on England to take a part.
+"There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe," he boasted as
+the strife went on, "and not one Englishman." Meanwhile he laboured to
+bring the quarrel to a close; and in 1736 the intervention of England
+and Holland succeeded in restoring peace. But the country had watched
+with a jealous dread the military energy that proclaimed the revival of
+the French arms; and it noted bitterly that peace was bought by the
+triumph of both branches of the House of Bourbon. A new Bourbon monarchy
+was established at the cost of the House of Austria by the cession of
+the Two Sicilies to a Spanish Prince in exchange for his right of
+succession to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany. On the other hand,
+Lorraine, so long coveted by French ambition, passed finally into the
+hands of France. The political instinct of the nation at once discerned
+in these provisions a union of the Bourbon powers; and its dread of such
+a union proved to be a just one. As early as the outbreak of the war a
+Family Compact had been secretly concluded between France and Spain, the
+main object of which was the ruin of the maritime supremacy of Britain.
+Spain bound herself to deprive England gradually of its commercial
+privileges in her American dominions, and to transfer them to France.
+France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the
+recovery of Gibraltar.
+
+[Sidenote: England and Spain.]
+
+The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered
+this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon
+courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of
+1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made
+inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve
+to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions
+on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish
+sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the
+struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The
+trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely
+through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance
+of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a
+legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow
+restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its
+old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled;
+while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which
+rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip
+however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with
+his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single
+merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the
+moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a
+fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the
+peace; and in 1738 the ill humour of the trading classes was driven to
+madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar
+of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the
+Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst
+taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do
+justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry
+for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as
+it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the
+Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the
+Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the
+highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every
+means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her
+hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great
+crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have
+enabled Walpole to deal with it.
+
+[Sidenote: War with Spain.]
+
+But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy
+of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies
+assailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their
+pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to
+the crowd on "the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position
+had been weakened by the death of the queen; and it was now weakened
+yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred
+of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as
+George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of
+the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were
+slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a
+hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the "Patriots" had
+grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was
+slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his
+support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested
+therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the
+trading classes. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of
+the trading class failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had
+driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this
+juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham,
+who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from
+their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.
+But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and
+that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.
+
+[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession.]
+
+"They may ring their bells now," the great minister said bitterly, as
+peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender; "but they will soon be
+wringing their hands." His foresight was at once justified. No sooner
+had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an
+English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication
+of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that
+she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South
+America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was
+plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the
+protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as
+France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her
+pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving
+Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she
+confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for
+finishing the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the
+Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it
+was idle to expect her to pass it by. If once the hereditary dominions
+of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the
+dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the mass of dominion
+which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without
+a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of
+a danger which the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of
+Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the
+Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from
+the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had
+given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when
+in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European
+struggle.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Walpole.]
+
+The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of
+Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as
+destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had
+played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous assailant
+of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria
+claimed the Austrian Duchies, which passed with the other hereditary
+dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as
+she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the
+Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the
+annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and
+Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the
+summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of
+Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria
+stood in such peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its
+dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria
+the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the
+Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still
+true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against
+France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was
+wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held
+aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the
+Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her
+full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by
+this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with
+France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused
+to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its
+constitutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the
+head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria,
+and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On
+England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.
+Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged
+with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the
+selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his
+dread of harm to his hereditary state averted the entry of a French
+army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the
+step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the
+minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still
+repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful spirit; but in a
+new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to
+sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant
+temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.
+"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his
+son, "now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at
+dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless
+than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed
+for an hour together." The end was in fact near; and in the opening of
+1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.
+
+[Sidenote: Carteret.]
+
+His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.
+The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office,
+and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of
+the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of
+foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in
+continental affairs. Carteret mainly followed the system of his
+predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked
+for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in
+Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor;
+and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at
+Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace
+with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The
+peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to
+drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new
+minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.
+One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples
+and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude
+a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the
+French alliance.
+
+[Sidenote: Dettingen.]
+
+The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set
+up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.
+Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsass
+and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to
+the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove
+the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second,
+who warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head of a
+force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and
+marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and
+finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with
+a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing
+31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the
+battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not
+only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of
+the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held
+their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small
+as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated
+Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a
+league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all
+that was needed to secure the results already gained.
+
+[Sidenote: Fall of Carteret.]
+
+But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of
+Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples,
+with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian
+Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to
+Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh
+attitude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the war on the
+cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than
+suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.
+His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of
+the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the
+Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while
+the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally
+itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment
+that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the
+Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of
+Carteret's weakness in assenting to a change in the character of the
+struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack
+became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led
+an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against
+him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger
+at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now
+became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to
+his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not
+only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the
+king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its
+head.
+
+[Sidenote: The Pelham Ministry.]
+
+Of the reconstituted ministry which followed Henry Pelham became the
+head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity
+disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.
+Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and "the Boys," all
+found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had
+given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the
+first breach in the system of purely party government established on the
+accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by
+the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of
+Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of
+Hanover with Prussia for a headship of North Germany found expression in
+the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in
+accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of
+Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs
+remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots
+into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests
+should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an
+accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams
+forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could
+be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be
+given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the
+superiority of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of Cumberland.
+Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians,
+and Dutch--for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged
+into the war, though by English subsidies--the Duke on the 31st of May
+1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and
+redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into
+this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column,
+doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the
+moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in
+their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and
+orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of
+Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and
+by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of
+July.
+
+[Sidenote: Charles Edward Stuart.]
+
+The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and
+as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was
+placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.
+But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which
+wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had
+sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young
+adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and
+landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood
+almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his
+standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen
+hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair
+Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed "James the
+Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched
+against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the
+21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.
+Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now
+at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the
+people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the
+utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.
+His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after
+skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through
+Lancashire, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here
+all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his
+support as he passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of
+its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.
+Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single squire
+took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English
+towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand
+pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred
+men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of
+Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency
+of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories
+into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere
+Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles
+Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand
+Highlanders.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of the Highlands.]
+
+He soon learned too that forces of double his own strength were closing
+on either side of him, while a third army under the king and Lord Stair
+covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were away,
+quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its allegiance to
+the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms
+for King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though roused by a
+small French force which landed at Montrose. To advance further south
+was impossible, and Charles fell rapidly back on Glasgow; but the
+reinforcements which he found there raised his army to nine thousand
+men, and on the 23rd January 1746 he boldly attacked an English army
+under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped
+near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for
+the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces
+dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly
+back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the 16th of April
+the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward
+of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they
+were starving and dispirited, while Cumberland's force was nearly double
+that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung
+themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were
+received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke
+through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few
+moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a mass of hunted
+fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.
+In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords,
+Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty
+persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures
+of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were
+abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and
+transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was
+forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which
+followed them, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the
+clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the
+Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.
+
+[Sidenote: Widening of the War.]
+
+Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the
+Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.
+When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for
+weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal
+therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded
+the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and
+withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however
+the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were
+balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe
+inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.
+The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at last
+brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by
+which England surrendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on
+land. But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during which both
+parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier contest which they saw
+impending. The war was in fact widening far beyond the bounds of Germany
+or of Europe. It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to settle the
+destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the valleys of the
+Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great question whether the
+fortunes of the New World were to be moulded by Frenchmen or Englishmen.
+Already too French adventurers were driving English merchants from
+Madras, and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add India
+to the dominions of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Clive.]
+
+The intercourse of England with India had as yet given little promise of
+the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of
+Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco de Gama had crept round the
+Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese settlement on the Goa
+Coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The trade,
+profitable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three early
+factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during the century
+which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of but six
+fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by
+the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza; while Fort
+William, with the mean village which has since grown into Calcutta, owes
+its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of these forts was
+built simply for the protection of the Company's warehouses, and guarded
+by a few "sepahis," sepoys, or paid native soldiers; while the clerks
+and traders of each establishment were under the direction of a
+President and a Council. One of these clerks in the middle of the
+eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near
+Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his
+friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's
+service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of
+wretchedness and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by
+the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by
+home-sickness. Twice he attempted suicide; and it was only on the
+failure of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which
+baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.
+
+[Sidenote: Dupleix.]
+
+A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the
+war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French
+in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.
+Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius,
+besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and
+merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but
+he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his
+clerkship for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was
+busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the
+repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of
+Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in
+India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods
+to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first
+time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the
+line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne,
+the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised
+themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor
+founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the
+Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a
+race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan
+invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the
+capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known
+under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom
+conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands
+along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and
+finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.
+
+[Sidenote: Arcot.]
+
+Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered
+his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced
+his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled
+with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made
+himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and seated a
+creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one
+town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but
+brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came forward with a daring
+scheme for its relief. With a few hundred English and sepoys he pushed
+through a thunderstorm to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital,
+entrenched himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days
+against thousands of assailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas,
+who had never before believed that Englishmen would fight, advanced and
+broke up the siege. But Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal
+vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran away at the
+first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the
+cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their
+Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the ground a
+pompous pillar which the French governor had set up in honour of his
+earlier victories.
+
+[Sidenote: The American Colonies.]
+
+Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the
+struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while
+France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with
+even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West.
+From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England
+States, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to
+those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in
+North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still
+came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia
+received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war
+with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by
+the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which
+was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New
+York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the
+colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed
+William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primaeval forest,
+and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among
+which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed
+before a new settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the
+reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General
+Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the
+persecuted Protestants of Germany.
+
+[Sidenote: Their progress.]
+
+Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in
+numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we
+have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of
+negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother
+country. Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia
+were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Massachusetts saw
+five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a
+century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their
+numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia
+boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their
+maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with,
+the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod
+fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction
+indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an
+industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and
+the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as
+many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the
+Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the
+central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New
+England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an
+aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the
+system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of
+Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives
+in houses such as those of Fairfax and Washington. Throughout New
+England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their
+piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry,
+their love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions, remained
+unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was
+general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said
+Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay,
+have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their
+estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political
+activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the
+settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the
+establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of
+America. "Every township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath
+increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to
+teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase
+to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar
+school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New
+England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able
+to read and write.
+
+[Sidenote: Their political condition.]
+
+Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their
+influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main
+features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood
+fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them
+contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first
+time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious
+freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been
+brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had
+never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all
+the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and
+the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large
+part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.
+Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to
+colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among
+the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds
+religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer
+diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and
+organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the
+Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother
+country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she
+had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But
+the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the
+worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at
+home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in
+all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and
+members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual
+re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and
+immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English
+Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and
+invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of
+their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater
+loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the
+colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government
+was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the
+projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save
+in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen
+into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly
+elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected,
+sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the
+Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.
+
+[Sidenote: English control.]
+
+With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference
+on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The
+superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and
+Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the
+Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was
+included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to
+themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost
+America because he read the American despatches, which none of his
+predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any
+interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were
+secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of
+internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt
+afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I
+have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you
+think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to
+England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.
+It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she
+might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own
+products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture
+in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the
+mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small
+import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of
+smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain
+was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the
+Americans enjoyed as British subjects.
+
+[Sidenote: French aggression.]
+
+As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the
+colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French
+aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English
+settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for
+only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before
+the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the
+lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the
+pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English
+statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in
+Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of
+the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English
+settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or
+Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the
+inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke
+of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was
+stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven
+from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose
+settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax,
+the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company was formed, and its
+agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky;
+while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance
+between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor
+were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia.
+A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort.
+A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers
+from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a
+fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at
+once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless
+attack on it under George Washington, a young Virginian, who had been
+despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were
+forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was
+left in the hands of France.
+
+[Sidenote: Rout of Braddock.]
+
+It was natural that at such a crisis the mother country should look to
+the united efforts of the colonies, and Halifax pressed for a joint
+arrangement which should provide a standing force and funds for its
+support. A plan for this purpose on the largest scale was drawn up by
+Benjamin Franklin, who, from a printer's boy, had risen to supreme
+influence in Pennsylvania; but in the way of such a union stood the
+jealousies which each state entertained of its neighbour, the
+disinclination of the colonists to be drawn into an expensive struggle,
+and, above all, suspicion of the motives of Halifax and his colleagues.
+The delay in furnishing any force for defence, the impossibility of
+bringing the colonies to any agreement, and the perpetual squabbles of
+their legislatures with the governors appointed by the Crown, may have
+been the motives which induced Halifax to introduce a Bill which would
+have made orders by the king in spite of the colonial charters law in
+America. The Bill was dropped in deference to the constitutional
+objections of wiser men; but the governors fed the fear in England of
+the "levelling principles" of the colonists, and every official in
+America wrote home to demand that Parliament should do what the colonial
+legislatures seemed unable to do, and establish a common fund for
+defence by a general taxation. Already plans were mooted for deriving a
+revenue from the colonies. But the prudence of Pelham clung to the
+policy of Walpole, and nothing was done; while the nearer approach of a
+struggle in Europe gave fresh vigour to the efforts of France. The
+Marquis of Montcalm, who was now governor of Canada, carried out with
+even greater zeal than his predecessor the plans of annexation; and the
+three forts of Duquesne on the Ohio, of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and
+of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, were linked together by a chain of
+lesser forts, which cut off the English colonists from all access to the
+west. Montcalm was gifted with singular powers of administration; he
+had succeeded in attaching the bulk of the Indian tribes from Canada as
+far as the Mississippi to the cause of France; and the value of their
+aid was shown in 1755, when General Braddock led a force of English
+soldiers and American militia to a fresh attack upon fort Duquesne. The
+force was utterly routed and Braddock slain.
+
+[Sidenote: State of Europe.]
+
+The defeat woke England to its danger; for it was certain that war in
+America would soon be followed by war in Europe itself. Newcastle and
+his fellow-ministers were still true in the main to Walpole's policy.
+They looked on a league with Prussia as indispensable to the formation
+of any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia,"
+wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the
+Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength;
+if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of
+France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement.
+The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England
+desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the
+Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in
+which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice
+had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The
+traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined with the
+tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more
+probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only
+served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to
+regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant
+power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the
+supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house
+and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by
+the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England
+which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It
+was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa
+drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the
+growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth
+to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the
+league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So
+secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry
+Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on
+his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected
+from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself
+fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg.
+
+[Sidenote: Alliance with Prussia.]
+
+The danger to England was hardly less; for France appeared again on the
+stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis the
+Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of the French government were
+screened for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the
+ability of the agents it found to carry them out. In England, on the
+contrary, all was vagueness and indecision. The action of the king
+showed only his Hanoverian jealousy of the House of Brandenburg. It was
+certain that France, as soon as war broke out in the West, would attack
+his Electorate; and George sought help not at Berlin but at St.
+Petersburg. He concluded a treaty with Russia, which promised him the
+help of a Russian army on the Weser in return for a subsidy. Such a
+treaty meant war with Frederick, who had openly announced his refusal to
+allow the entry of Russian forces on German soil; and it was vehemently
+though fruitlessly opposed by William Pitt. But he had hardly withdrawn
+with Grenville and Charles Townshend from the Ministry when Newcastle
+himself recoiled from the king's policy. The Russian subsidy was
+refused, and Hanoverian interests subordinated to those of England by
+the conclusion of the treaty with Frederick of Prussia for which Pitt
+had pressed. The new compact simply provided for the neutrality of both
+Prussia and Hanover in any contest between England and France. But its
+results were far from being as peaceable as its provisions. Russia was
+outraged by Frederick's open opposition to her presence in Germany;
+France resented his compact with and advances towards England; and Maria
+Theresa eagerly seized on the temper of both those powers to draw them
+into common action against the Prussian king. With the treaty between
+England and Frederick indeed began the Seven Years' War.
+
+[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]
+
+No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought
+greater triumphs to England: but few have had more disastrous
+beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and
+yet too greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable
+men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be
+guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit for
+service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was
+quick in her attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the key of the
+Mediterranean, was besieged by the Duke of Richelieu and forced to
+capitulate. To complete the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief
+under Admiral Byng fell back before the French. In Germany Frederick
+seized Dresden at the outset of the war and forced the Saxon army to
+surrender; and in 1757 a victory at Prague made him master for a while
+of Bohemia; but his success was transient, and a defeat at Kolin drove
+him to retreat again into Saxony. In the same year the Duke of
+Cumberland, who had taken post on the Weser with an army of fifty
+thousand men for the defence of Hanover, fell back before a French army
+to the mouth of the Elbe, and engaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven
+to disband his forces. In America things went even worse than in
+Germany. The inactivity of the English generals was contrasted with the
+genius and activity of Montcalm. Already masters of the Ohio by the
+defeat of Braddock, the French drove the English garrison from the forts
+which commanded Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, and their empire
+stretched without a break over the vast territory from Louisiana to the
+St. Lawrence.
+
+[Sidenote: William Pitt.]
+
+A despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our
+coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair,
+"We are no longer a nation." But the nation of which Chesterfield
+despaired was really on the eve of its greatest triumphs, and the
+incapacity of Newcastle only called to the front the genius of William
+Pitt. Pitt was the grandson of a wealthy governor of Madras, who had
+entered Parliament in 1735, as member for one of his father's pocket
+boroughs. A group of younger men, Lord Lyttelton, the Grenvilles,
+Wilkes, and others, gradually gathered round him, and formed a band of
+young "patriots," "the Boys," as Walpole called them, who added to the
+difficulties of that minister. Pitt was as yet a cornet of horse, and
+the restless activity of his genius was seen in the energy with which
+he threw himself into his military duties. He told Lord Shelburne long
+afterwards that "during the time he was cornet of horse there was not a
+military book he did not read through." But the dismissal from the army
+with which Walpole met his violent attacks threw this energy wholly into
+politics. His fiery spirit was hushed in office during the "broad-bottom
+administration" which followed Walpole's fall, and he soon attained
+great influence over Henry Pelham. "I think him," wrote Pelham to his
+brother, "the most able and useful man we have amongst us; truly
+honourable and strictly honest." He remained under Newcastle after
+Pelham's death, till the Duke's jealousy of power not only refused him
+the Secretaryship of State and admission to the Cabinet, but entrusted
+the lead of the House of Commons to a mere dependent. Pitt resisted the
+slight by an attitude of opposition; and his denunciation of the treaty
+with Russia served as a pretext for his dismissal. When the disasters of
+the war however drove Newcastle from office, in November 1756, Pitt
+became Secretary of State, bringing with him into office his relatives,
+George Grenville and Lord Temple, as well as Charles Townshend. But
+though his popularity had forced him into office, and though the
+grandeur of his policy at once showed itself by his rejection of all
+schemes for taxing America, and by his raising a couple of regiments
+amongst the Highlanders, he found himself politically powerless. The
+House was full of Newcastle's creatures, the king hated him, and only
+four months after taking office he was forced to resign. The Duke of
+Cumberland insisted on his dismissal in April 1757, before he would
+start to take the command in Germany. In July however it was necessary
+to recall him. The failure of Newcastle's attempt to construct an
+administration forced the Duke to a junction with his rival, and while
+Newcastle took the head of the Treasury, Pitt again became Secretary of
+State.
+
+[Sidenote: His lofty spirit.]
+
+Fortunately for their country, the character of the two statesmen made
+the compromise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted, for the general
+direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the
+administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor
+inclination. On the other hand his skill in parliamentary management was
+unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living man
+the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. What he
+cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribution of
+patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt turned
+disdainfully away. "I borrow the Duke of Newcastle's majority," his
+colleague owned with cool contempt, "to carry on the public business."
+"Mr. Pitt does everything," wrote Horace Walpole, "and the Duke gives
+everything. So long as they agree in this partition they may do what
+they please." Out of the union of these two strangely-contrasted
+leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as it was the last, of the purely
+Whig administrations. But its real power lay from beginning to end in
+Pitt himself. Poor as he was, for his income was little more than two
+hundred a year, and springing as he did from a family of no political
+importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young cornet of
+horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a
+power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their
+grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
+national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his
+"popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of
+the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs
+and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at
+large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest
+and resolve gathered themselves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious,
+his ambition had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
+took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men
+from France can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once
+breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he
+communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who served him.
+"No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet
+who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when he went in."
+Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his
+failures, he roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
+defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed
+Frederick of Prussia as he recognised a greatness like his own, "but she
+has at last brought forth a man."
+
+It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we
+look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out
+in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society
+critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of
+simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and
+of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of
+itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his
+passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,
+his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his
+haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more
+puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he
+appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
+turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of
+politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the
+grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. "I know that I
+can save the country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry
+into the Ministry, "and I know no other man can." The groundwork of
+Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride
+which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long
+held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the
+Restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was
+his love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted it
+with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. "I will not go
+to Court," he replied to an offer which was made him, "if I may not
+bring the Constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had
+nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the
+purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to
+the most lucrative office in his administration, that of Paymaster of
+the Forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was,
+Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never
+appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards the
+people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than "the great
+commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who
+commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to
+flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for
+"Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and
+when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily
+declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to
+enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
+flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
+grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far
+greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an
+opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single
+word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political
+party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly
+numbered half a dozen members.
+
+[Sidenote: His patriotism.]
+
+His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament but in the people at
+large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a political revolution.
+"It is the people who have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty
+pride when the nobles of the Cabinet opposed his will. He was the first
+to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased,
+and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great
+middle class, which no longer found its representatives in the
+legislature. "You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt
+sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
+look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of
+Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into
+power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him
+with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. "For weeks,"
+laughs Horace Walpole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him
+through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English
+merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political
+lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
+temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its
+energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its
+moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural
+attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish,
+whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection
+for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their
+enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which his country has
+borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an intense and personal
+love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till
+England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
+her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought
+of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions who
+rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public! I set
+you the example!" His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he
+held England. But even the faults which chequered his character told for
+him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had
+been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence
+of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in
+the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in
+full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was,
+are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day
+to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance
+which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his
+crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing
+into the House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage." But
+the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by
+faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was
+borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or carried into
+the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national
+dishonour.
+
+[Sidenote: His eloquence.]
+
+Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power
+of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the Long
+Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and
+theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of
+the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see
+ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,
+precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of
+business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of
+statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,
+no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were
+always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,
+his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
+front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of
+his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the
+earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he
+whispered once to a friend, "for when once I am up everything that is in
+my mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by
+a large and poetic imagination, an imagination so strong that--as he
+said himself--"most things returned to him with stronger force the
+second time than the first," and by a glow of passion which not only
+raised him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front
+rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the
+common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy
+with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a
+command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an
+effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the
+keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by
+the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one
+having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words
+were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at
+large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
+detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt
+reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in
+these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate
+appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we
+have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in
+the men of his own.
+
+[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]
+
+But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a
+statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his
+greater struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against
+arbitrary imprisonment under "general warrants," of the liberty of the
+press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against
+the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against
+England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of
+Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of
+Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India
+by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.
+Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of
+England, its "Calvinistic Creed and Arminian Clergy"; he was the first
+to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures
+shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by
+employing its Jacobites in the service of their country and by raising
+Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst
+as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge
+of men.
+
+[Sidenote: Plassey.]
+
+But it was rather Fortune than his genius that showered on Pitt the
+triumphs which signalized the opening of his ministry. In the East the
+daring of a merchant-clerk made a company of English traders the
+sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous career of conquest which
+has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the
+dominions of the British crown. Recalled by broken health to England,
+Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to win for
+England a greater prize than that which his victories had won for it in
+the supremacy of the Carnatic. He had been only a few months at Madras
+when a crime whose horror still lingers in English memories called him
+to Bengal. Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest and most
+fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its silk,
+and the produce of its looms, were famous in European markets. Its
+Viceroys, like their fellow-lieutenants, had become practically
+independent of the Emperor, and had added to Bengal the provinces of
+Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the master of this vast domain, had
+long been jealous of the enterprise and wealth of the English traders;
+and, roused at this moment by the instigation of the French, he appeared
+before Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and fifty
+of them into a small prison called the Black Hole of Calcutta. The heat
+of an Indian summer did its work of death. The wretched prisoners
+trampled each other under foot in the madness of thirst, and in the
+morning only twenty-three remained alive. Clive sailed at the news with
+a thousand Englishmen and two thousand sepoys to wreak vengeance for the
+crime. He was no longer the boy-soldier of Arcot; and the tact and skill
+with which he met Surajah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the
+Viceroy strove to avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental
+falsehood and treachery to which he stooped. But his courage remained
+unbroken. When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey
+the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of
+war counselled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an
+hour's lonely musing gave the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all
+that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who
+were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June 1757 were
+soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and broke in headlong
+rout before the English charge. The death of Surajah Dowlah enabled the
+Company to place a creature of its own on the throne of Bengal; but his
+rule soon became a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey began in
+fact the Empire of England in the East.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and Frederick.]
+
+The year of Plassey was the year of a victory hardly less important in
+the West. In Europe Pitt wisely limited himself to a secondary part.
+There was little in the military expeditions which marked the opening of
+his ministry to justify the trust of the country; for money and blood
+were lavished on buccaneering expeditions against the French coasts
+which did small damage to the enemy. But incidents such as these had
+little weight in the minister's general policy. His greatness lies in
+the fact that he at once recognised the genius of Frederick the Great,
+and resolved without jealousy or reserve to give him an energetic
+support. On his entry into office he refused to ratify the Convention of
+Closter-Seven, which had reduced Frederick to despair by throwing open
+his realm to a French advance; protected his flank by gathering an
+English and Hanoverian force on the Elbe, and on the counsel of the
+Prussian king placed the best of his generals, the Prince of Brunswick,
+at its head; while subsidy after subsidy was poured into Frederick's
+exhausted treasury. Pitt's trust was met by the most brilliant display
+of military genius which the modern world had as yet witnessed. In
+November 1757, two months after his repulse at Kolin, Frederick flung
+himself on a French army which had advanced into the heart of Germany,
+and annihilated it in the victory of Rossbach. Before another month had
+passed he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal
+victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. The victory of
+Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of the world by creating
+the unity of Germany; its immediate effect was to force the French army
+on the Elbe to fall back on the Rhine. Here Ferdinand of Brunswick,
+reinforced with twenty thousand English soldiers, held them at bay
+during the summer of 1758; while Frederick, foiled in an attack on
+Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zorndorf.
+His defeat however by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch proved the
+first of a series of terrible misfortunes; and the year 1759 marks the
+lowest point of his fortunes. A fresh advance of the Russian army forced
+the king to attack it at Kunersdorf in August, and Frederick's repulse
+ended in the utter rout of his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for
+even Berlin lay open to the conqueror. A few days later the surrender
+of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians; and at the close of the year an
+attempt upon them at Plauen was foiled with terrible loss. But every
+disaster was retrieved by the indomitable courage and tenacity of the
+king, and winter found him as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony
+save the ground which Daun's camp covered.
+
+[Sidenote: Minden and Quiberon.]
+
+The year which marked the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes was the
+year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year of Minden and Quiberon and
+Quebec. France aimed both at a descent upon England and at the conquest
+of Hanover; for the one purpose she gathered a naval armament at Brest,
+while fifty thousand men under Contades and Broglie united for the other
+on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty thousand met them (August
+1) on the field of Minden. The French marched along the Weser to the
+attack, with their flanks protected by that river and a brook which ran
+into it, and with their cavalry, ten thousand strong, massed in the
+centre. The six English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French
+horse, and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once upon them
+in line regardless of the batteries on their flank, and rolling back
+charge after charge with volleys of musketry. In an hour the French
+centre was utterly broken. "I have seen," said Contades, "what I never
+thought to be possible--a single line of infantry break through three
+lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin!"
+Nothing but the refusal of Lord John Sackville to complete the victory
+by a charge of the horse which he headed saved the French from utter
+rout. As it was, their army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the
+Rhine. The project of an invasion of England met with the like success.
+Eighteen thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet,
+when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of November at the
+mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast where the
+French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals and granite reefs that
+the pilot remonstrated with the English admiral against his project of
+attack. "You have done your duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly
+replied; "now lay me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships
+were lost on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the
+disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped away.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt in America.]
+
+It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and Quiberon
+brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt had wisely limited
+his efforts to the support of Prussia, but across the Atlantic the field
+was wholly his own, and he had no sooner entered office than the
+desultory raids, which had hitherto been the only resistance to French
+aggression, were superseded by a large and comprehensive plan of
+attack. The sympathies of the colonies were won by an order which gave
+their provincial officers equal rank with the royal officers in the
+field. They raised at Pitt's call twenty thousand men, and taxed
+themselves heavily for their support. Three expeditions were
+simultaneously directed against the French line--one to the Ohio valley,
+one against Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, while a third under General
+Amherst and Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St. Lawrence.
+The last was brilliantly successful. Louisburg, though defended by a
+garrison of five thousand men, was taken with the fleet in its harbour,
+and the whole province of Cape Breton reduced. The American militia
+supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the forts;
+and though Montcalm, with a far inferior force, was able to repulse
+General Abercromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia and
+Virginia, guided and inspired by the courage of George Washington, made
+itself master of Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to
+their new conquest still commemorates the enthusiasm of the colonists
+for the great Minister who first opened to them the West. The failure at
+Ticonderoga only spurred Pitt to greater efforts. The colonists again
+responded to his call with fresh supplies of troops, and Montcalm felt
+that all was over. The disproportion indeed of strength was enormous. Of
+regular French troops and Canadians alike he could muster only ten
+thousand, while his enemies numbered fifty thousand men. The next year
+(1759) saw Montcalm's previous victory rendered fruitless by the
+evacuation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Amherst, and by the
+capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian force which
+marched to its relief. The capture of the three forts was the close of
+the French effort to bar the advance of the colonists to the valley of
+the Mississippi, and to place in other than English hands the destinies
+of North America.
+
+[Sidenote: Conquest of Canada.]
+
+But Pitt had resolved not merely to foil the designs of Montcalm, but to
+destroy the French rule in America altogether; and while Amherst was
+breaking through the line of forts, an expedition under General Wolfe
+entered the St. Lawrence and anchored below Quebec. Wolfe was already a
+veteran soldier, for he had fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Laffeldt,
+and had played the first part in the capture of Louisburg. Pitt had
+discerned the genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward
+manner and occasional gasconade of the young soldier of thirty-three
+whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the war. But for a while his
+sagacity seemed to have failed. No efforts could draw Montcalm from the
+long line of inaccessible cliffs which borders the river, and for six
+weeks Wolfe saw his men wasting away in inactivity while he himself lay
+prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his resolution was fixed,
+and in a long line of boats the army dropped down the St. Lawrence to a
+point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had
+been discovered to the summit. Not a voice broke the silence of the
+night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated the
+stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," remarking as he
+closed, "I had rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." But
+his nature was as brave as it was tender; he was the first to leap on
+shore and to scale the narrow path where no two men could go abreast.
+His men followed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes
+and the crags, and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army
+stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Montcalm hastened to attack,
+though his force, composed chiefly of raw militia, was far inferior in
+discipline to the English; his onset however was met by a steady fire,
+and at the first English advance his men gave way. Wolfe headed a charge
+which broke the French line, but a ball pierced his breast in the moment
+of victory. "They run," cried an officer who held the dying man in his
+arms--"I protest they run." Wolfe rallied to ask who they were that ran,
+and was told "the French." "Then," he murmured, "I die happy!" The fall
+of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat completed the victory; and the
+submission of Canada, on the capture of Montreal by Amherst in 1760, put
+an end to the dream of a French empire in America.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IX
+
+MODERN ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE
+
+1760-1767
+
+
+[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]
+
+Never had England played so great a part in the history of mankind as in
+the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs in every quarter of the world.
+In September came the news of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In
+October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word of
+the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask every morning what
+victory there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one."
+But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its
+triumphs that the Seven Years' War stood and remains still without a
+rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories
+determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of
+Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political
+and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the
+leadership of Prussia and Prussia's kings. With that of Plassey the
+influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander
+on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw
+one of the races of the north-west cast into the heart of Asia new
+manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on
+the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By
+removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother
+country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred
+them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the
+great republic of the west.
+
+[Sidenote: England a World-Power.]
+
+Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War
+is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a
+turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight
+of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within
+Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in
+other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived
+from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their
+fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European
+position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in
+South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her
+empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the
+strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of
+political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new
+road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of
+Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would
+have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes
+in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French
+ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had
+to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance
+of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits
+of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that
+France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered
+little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around
+her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival
+of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that
+of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India,
+claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered
+high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to
+comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.
+
+[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]
+
+It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our
+statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in
+English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English
+race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that
+the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly
+different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that
+the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's
+standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in
+Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.
+Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words
+to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But
+greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his
+statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of
+Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own
+among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in
+arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his
+daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay
+before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be
+lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them
+showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into
+far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the
+other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British
+Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the
+British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from
+America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a
+Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements
+spread along its eastern shore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by
+year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain
+to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch
+voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first
+noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New
+Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It
+was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned
+her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace
+of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery
+to the Straits of Magellan.
+
+[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]
+
+"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron,
+"nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime
+power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the
+advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make
+discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed
+beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain
+Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in
+skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner
+traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a
+Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy,
+and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the
+Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small
+vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe
+the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched
+beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society
+Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of
+that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up
+New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles
+of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or
+Australia, on whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the
+district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name
+of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters,
+and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work
+was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New
+Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The
+records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of
+Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep
+blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the
+huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti,
+the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the
+Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the
+sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders
+was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the
+expansion of the English race.
+
+[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]
+
+Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English
+settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of
+the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in
+however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown.
+Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's
+attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but
+part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the
+furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer
+looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it
+claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial
+character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all
+the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all,
+without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas
+of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of
+whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless
+wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than
+half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole
+world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that
+since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of
+five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the
+colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it
+had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative
+a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and
+inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds,
+whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to
+the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British
+statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.
+
+[Sidenote: England and America.]
+
+And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take
+an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain
+seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French
+minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's
+triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in
+Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on
+the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of
+protection was removed. The attitude of England towards its distant
+dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of
+temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long
+existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the
+background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new
+prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to
+submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government
+and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon
+thoughtful men, and spread from them to the masses around them. At this
+very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams,
+then a village schoolmaster of Massachusetts, to lofty forebodings of
+the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.
+"Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than
+England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way
+to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." The sense
+that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.
+"Fools," said a descendant of William Penn, "are always telling their
+fears that the colonies will set up for themselves." Philosophers
+however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the
+fools. "Colonies are like fruits," wrote the foreseeing Turgot, "which
+cling to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take
+care of itself it will do what Carthage did." But from the thought of
+separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The
+Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves
+on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered
+complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as
+obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other
+hand looked on America as her noblest possession. It was the wealth, the
+growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms
+was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade
+with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the
+right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this
+great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England,
+it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the
+Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free institutions under
+which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from
+the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding
+them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England
+had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.
+Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part
+was due to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of
+obligation mingled a sense of ingratitude. It was generally held that
+the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this
+debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all
+proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly
+of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.
+Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in
+great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these
+grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the
+government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent
+from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the
+"levelling principles" of the men about them. To statesmen at home the
+temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings
+with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of
+supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but
+republican.
+
+[Sidenote: George the Third.]
+
+To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and
+to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the
+fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother
+country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted
+the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.
+But it was far from being his only aim. For the first and last time
+since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was
+resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George
+succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first
+ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and
+to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before
+twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt
+and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of
+ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and
+often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither
+profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before
+him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural
+powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using
+greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their
+natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men
+was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepitude
+or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him
+from "this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal for a public
+monument to the great statesman as "an offensive measure to me
+personally." But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to
+his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose was to
+rule. "George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually
+repeated to him in youth, "George, be king." He called himself always "a
+Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish to undo the work which he
+believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of
+his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of
+the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which
+the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was
+determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern
+against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of
+parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the
+State.
+
+[Sidenote: Importance of his action.]
+
+How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary
+constitution of the country as it had received its final form from
+Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to
+realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social
+disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and
+humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we
+pass from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife
+of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the
+king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than
+that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these
+wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from
+having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of
+the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the
+century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the
+transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the
+nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power
+of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people
+itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the
+aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal
+sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an
+organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a
+democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.
+
+[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]
+
+To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must
+recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to
+take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to
+England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less
+equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory
+the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in
+actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to
+control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very
+moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the
+Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but
+the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of
+government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had
+tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended
+with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed
+classes and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent
+contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed
+showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots
+over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against
+Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old
+power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of
+administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy
+another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the
+general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the
+representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they
+represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the
+majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their
+hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which
+would follow on a return of the Stuarts.
+
+[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]
+
+The results of such a divorce between the government and that general
+mass of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground
+itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical
+power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the
+consciousness of power carries with it, among the mass of Englishmen
+public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress
+of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to
+Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from
+Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was
+unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on
+the governing class were even more fatal to any right conduct of public
+affairs. Not only had the mass of national sentiment been so utterly
+estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the
+people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the
+Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for
+half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation,
+that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their
+fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time
+it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been
+for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom
+to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious
+bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain
+the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of
+Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to
+become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of
+expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with
+instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from
+the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the
+Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with
+actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them
+representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work
+done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers
+by the mass of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its
+views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the
+benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.
+
+[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]
+
+And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation
+of Parliament to the constituencies made some change in its composition
+a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of
+Commons were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
+wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been
+recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long
+Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of
+Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had
+been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great
+towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while
+members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
+vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns
+to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of
+boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the
+Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring
+landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
+estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the
+narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a
+small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of
+electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered
+their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply
+on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's
+boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the
+day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke
+of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough
+members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could
+alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the
+enormous expense of contesting such constituencies practically left
+their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even
+in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out
+of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and
+sixty thousand were electors at all.
+
+[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]
+
+"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in
+noble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of
+the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from
+really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the
+height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
+Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament;
+and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose
+to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could
+allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative
+of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal
+boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of
+wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives
+naturally told on a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from
+the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary
+proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole
+and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of
+their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming
+more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we
+have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through
+England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in
+the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on
+politics.
+
+[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]
+
+Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had
+been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the
+seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of
+readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social
+changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the
+advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of
+wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large;
+and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave
+a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and
+rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works
+shows the amazing effect of the new passion for literature on the
+diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none
+of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the
+wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten
+editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before
+the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere
+were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were
+far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created
+an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher
+literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That
+such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such
+instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed
+the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment
+outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but
+the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial
+pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and
+imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly
+to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded
+for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a
+pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles
+and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result
+was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they
+were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking
+their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the
+patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called
+poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations
+and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals
+with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.
+
+[Sidenote: Pope.]
+
+It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the
+time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution;
+for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of
+his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all
+active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was
+the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business
+in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and
+there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy
+grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older
+English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his
+arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with
+an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as
+his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny
+frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen
+sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the
+larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid
+temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved
+small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy;
+he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he
+stung right and left with a malignant venom. But nobler qualities rose
+out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to
+anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat
+could sting him to passion, he could never read the lament of Priam over
+Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range,
+but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung passionately
+to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself
+almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he
+was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never
+led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer
+lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much,
+or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest
+characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From
+the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and
+independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the
+traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into
+hangers-on of the great.
+
+[Sidenote: The Dunciad.]
+
+With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the
+phase of transition through which English letters were passing. As yet
+his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay
+within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist but of
+the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful
+preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of
+the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the
+work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm
+of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it passes far beyond
+the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and
+buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour,
+its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's
+masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his
+mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic
+path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.
+But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to
+criticism. All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted
+from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an
+interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible
+power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by
+mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on
+men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a
+noble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces
+that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the
+journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the
+grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.
+
+[Sidenote: Revival of Letters.]
+
+That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not
+have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence
+of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the
+work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of
+design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or
+forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every
+fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck
+at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such
+a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true
+and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled
+itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly
+in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before
+the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into
+fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and
+that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of
+Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude
+of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the
+eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom
+Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going
+on through Walpole's days in the people at large; and it was inevitable
+that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics.
+The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets
+and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the mass of the
+people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all
+the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new
+information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censorship
+after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political
+influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by
+the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the
+writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of
+George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the
+national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast
+raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was
+the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being
+established in almost every considerable town.
+
+[Sidenote: Return of the Tories.]
+
+With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully,
+roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and
+emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military
+triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have passed from its old
+inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very
+position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force
+of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new
+energy in the mass of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the
+national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with
+the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was
+not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but
+simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern
+the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether
+he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of
+Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin.
+But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a
+Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the
+later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin
+coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They
+were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a
+king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman,
+who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the
+opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually
+appeared again at court.
+
+[Sidenote: The King's friends.]
+
+It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a
+steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old
+Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the
+Crown. But from the first the Tory nobles and gentry came in one by one;
+and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics.
+Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the
+progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they
+returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all
+the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of
+the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but
+George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and
+influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the
+Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the
+civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's
+disposal. If this vast mass of patronage had been practically usurped by
+the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by
+George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made
+patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of
+Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy
+to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs
+were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast
+property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of
+office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whigs
+dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily
+continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly,
+"formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that
+the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which
+springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the
+rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness
+and corruption of its representatives.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and the Whigs.]
+
+More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on
+the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were
+represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was
+fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and
+corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a
+character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt
+and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the
+commercial classes, the other by the Whig families and the whole
+machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in
+vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew
+day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the
+traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty
+with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt
+against the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against
+their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would
+have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of
+Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out
+against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of
+1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius.
+Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at
+Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau:
+while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser.
+But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike
+failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and
+the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining
+hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been,
+Pitt was tottering to his fall.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt resigns.]
+
+The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised
+supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes.
+George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in
+the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of
+Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and
+though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was
+forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the
+instant desertion from Pitt of the two ablest of his adherents, George
+Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this
+moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed
+for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace
+party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority
+of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is
+madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his
+correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the
+Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the
+temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was
+he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast
+extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which
+brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and
+Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war
+on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to anticipate the
+blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way
+from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish
+Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by
+occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish
+dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw
+the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht
+break at last upon England. His proud sense of the national strength
+never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had
+leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his
+colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet
+shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had
+never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him
+from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the
+bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his
+brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind
+himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt,
+was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of
+opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern
+England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of
+the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his
+appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called
+to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself
+accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which
+renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide."
+His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which
+followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.
+
+[Sidenote: George breaks with the Whigs.]
+
+"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories
+to us!" Frederick on the other hand was almost driven to despair. But
+George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the
+realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's
+retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular
+forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His
+declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the
+people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with
+indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of
+being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord
+Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of
+Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the
+King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the
+dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his
+carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their
+break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying
+him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so
+great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to
+deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than
+Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only
+to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his
+young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him
+into retirement. George saw himself triumphant over the two great
+forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which
+arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose
+from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of
+First Minister marked the triumph of the king.
+
+[Sidenote: The Peace.]
+
+Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first
+resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762
+Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was
+brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies;
+it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the
+policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina
+Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the
+Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George
+and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price.
+With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only
+deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the
+basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the
+Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from
+humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been
+justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall;
+and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the
+issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of
+the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the
+year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and
+St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the
+gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest
+of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It
+was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763.
+So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all
+that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented
+himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to
+France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain
+were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right
+to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To
+England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the
+Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in
+compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.
+
+[Sidenote: George and the Parliament.]
+
+We have already seen how mighty a change in the aspect of the world, and
+above all in the aspect of Britain, was marked by this momentous treaty.
+But no sense of its great issues influenced the young king in pressing
+for its conclusion. His eye was fixed not so much on Europe or the
+British Empire as on the petty game of politics which he was playing
+with the Whigs. The anxiety which he showed for peace abroad sprang
+mainly from his belief that peace was needful for success in his
+struggle for power at home. So long as the war lasted Pitt's return to
+office and the union of the Whigs under his guidance was an hourly
+danger. But with peace the king's hands were free. He could count on the
+dissensions of the Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the
+influence of the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands.
+But what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of
+Commons. So long as matters went quietly, so long as no gust of popular
+passion or enthusiasm forced its members to bow for a while to outer
+opinion, he saw that "management" could make the House a mere organ of
+his will. George had discovered--to use Lord Bute's words--"that the
+forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government were things not
+altogether incompatible." At a time when it had become all-powerful in
+the State, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and effective
+sense to be a representative body at all; and its isolation from the
+general opinion of the country left it at ordinary moments amenable only
+to selfish influences. The Whigs had managed it by bribery and
+borough-jobbing, and George in his turn seized bribery and
+borough-jobbing as a base of the power he proposed to give to the
+Crown. The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes.
+Day by day the young sovereign scrutinized the voting-list of the two
+Houses, and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted
+according to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment
+in the Church, rank in the army, were reserved for "the king's friends."
+Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery was
+employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry an office
+was opened at the Treasury for the purchase of members, and twenty-five
+thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a single day.
+
+[Sidenote: George III. and America.]
+
+The result of these measures was soon seen in the tone of the
+Parliament. Till now it had bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt; but in
+the teeth of his denunciation the provisions of the Peace of Paris were
+approved by a majority of five to one. It was seen still more in the
+vigour with which George and his minister prepared to carry out the
+plans over which they had brooded for the regulation of America. The
+American question was indeed forced on them, as they pleaded, by the
+state of the revenue. Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion,
+and he had defrayed the cost of the war by enormous loans. The public
+debt now stood at a hundred and forty millions. The first need therefore
+which met Bute after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris was that of
+making provision for the new burthens which the nation had incurred,
+and as these had been partly incurred in the defence of the American
+Colonies it was the general opinion of Englishmen that the Colonies
+should bear a share of them. In this opinion Bute and the king
+concurred. But their plans went further than mere taxation. The amount
+indeed which was expected to be raised as revenue by these changes, at
+most two hundred thousand pounds, was far too small to give much relief
+to the financial pressure at home. But this revenue furnished an easy
+pretext for wider changes. Plans for the regulation of the government of
+the Colonies had been suggested from time to time by subordinate
+ministers, but they had been set aside alike by the prudence of Walpole
+and the generosity of Pitt. The appointment of Charles Townshend to the
+Presidency of the Board of Trade however was a sign that Bute had
+adopted a policy not only of taxation, but of restraint. The new
+minister declared himself resolved on a rigorous execution of the
+Navigation laws, laws by which a monopoly of American trade was secured
+to the mother country, on the raising of a revenue within the Colonies
+for the discharge of the debt, and above all on impressing upon the
+colonists a sense of their dependence upon Britain. The direct trade
+between America and the French or Spanish West Indian Islands had
+hitherto been fettered by prohibitory duties, but these had been easily
+evaded by a general system of smuggling. The duties were now reduced,
+but the reduced duties were rigorously exacted, and a considerable naval
+force was despatched to the American coast by Grenville, who stood at
+the head of the Admiralty Board, with a view of suppressing the
+clandestine trade with the foreigner. The revenue which was expected
+from this measure was to be supplemented by an internal Stamp Tax, a tax
+on all legal documents issued within the Colonies, the plan of which
+seems to have originated with Bute's secretary, Jenkinson, afterwards
+the first Lord Liverpool. That resistance was expected was seen in a
+significant step which was taken by the ministry at the end of the war.
+Though the defeat of the French had left the Colonies without an enemy
+save the Indians, a force of ten thousand men was still kept quartered
+on their inhabitants, and a scheme was broached for an extension of the
+province of Canada over the district round the Lakes, which would have
+turned the western lands into a military settlement, governed at the
+will of the Crown, and have furnished a base of warlike operations, if
+such were needed, against the settled Colonies on the Atlantic.
+
+Had Bute's power lasted it is probable that these measures would have
+brought about the struggle between England and America long before it
+actually began. Fortunately for the two countries the minister found
+himself from the first the object of a sudden and universal hatred. The
+great majority which had rejected Pitt's motion against the Peace had
+filled the court with exultation. "Now indeed," cried the Princess
+Dowager, "my son is king." But the victory was hardly won when king and
+minister found themselves battling with a storm of popular ill-will such
+as never since the overthrow of the Stuarts assailed the throne. Violent
+and reckless as it was, the storm only marked a fresh advance in the
+reawakening of public opinion. The bulk of the higher classes who had
+till now stood apart from government were coming gradually in to the
+side of the Crown. But the mass of the people was only puzzled and
+galled by the turn of events. It felt itself called again to political
+activity, but it saw nothing to change its hatred and distrust of
+Parliament and the Crown. On the contrary it saw them in greater union
+than of old. The House of Commons was more corrupt than ever, and it was
+the slave of the king. The king still called himself a Whig, yet he was
+reviving a system of absolutism which Whiggism, to do it justice, had
+long made impossible. His minister was a mere favourite and in
+Englishmen's eyes a foreigner. The masses saw all this, but they saw no
+way of mending it. They knew little of their own strength, and they had
+no means of influencing the Government they hated save by sheer
+violence. They came therefore to the front with their old national and
+religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court,
+their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed
+hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and
+uproar.
+
+[Sidenote: Wilkes.]
+
+It was this temper of the masses which was seized and turned to his
+purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a
+remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a
+singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in
+bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has
+made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform
+by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of
+the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to
+the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish
+the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon
+the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general
+excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to
+gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body
+of the Whigs, and the commercial classes who backed them, were startled
+and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown
+against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at
+the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a
+coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its
+sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and
+disturbances which culminated--in a rough spirit of punning upon the
+name of the minister--in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The
+journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for
+this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the _North-Briton_ that
+Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the
+peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of
+foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated
+minister by name.
+
+[Sidenote: Bute's fall.]
+
+Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a
+revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the
+influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told
+for good. It was the attack of Wilkes which more than all else
+determined Bute to withdraw from office in 1763 as a means of allaying
+the storm of popular indignation. But the king was made of more stubborn
+stuff than his minister. If he suffered his favourite to resign he still
+regarded him as the real head of administration; for the ministry which
+Bute left behind him consisted simply of the more courtly of his
+colleagues, and was in fact formed under his direction. George Grenville
+was its nominal chief, but the measures of the Cabinet were still
+secretly dictated by the favourite. The formation of the Grenville
+ministry indeed was laughed at as a joke. Charles Townshend and the Duke
+of Bedford, the two ablest of the Whigs who had remained with Bute after
+Newcastle's dismissal, refused to join it; and its one man of ability
+was Lord Shelburne, a young Irishman, who had served with credit at
+Minden, and had been rewarded by a post at Court which brought him into
+terms of intimacy with the young sovereign and Bute. Dislike of the Whig
+oligarchy and of the war had thrown Shelburne strongly into the
+opposition to Pitt, and his diplomatic talents were of service in
+securing recruits for his party, as his eloquence had been useful in
+advocating the peace; but it was not till he himself retired from office
+that Bute obtained for his supporter the Presidency of the Board of
+Trade. As yet however Shelburne's powers were little known, and he added
+nothing to the strength of the ministry. It was in fact only the
+disunion of its opponents which allowed it to hold its ground. Townshend
+and Bedford remained apart from the main body of the Whigs, and both
+sections held aloof from Pitt. George had counted on the divisions of
+the opposition in forming such a ministry; and he counted on the
+weakness of the ministry to make it the creature of his will.
+
+[Sidenote: George Grenville.]
+
+But Grenville had no mind to be a puppet either of the king or of Bute.
+Narrow and pedantic as he was, severed by sheer jealousy and ambition
+from his kinsman Pitt and the bulk of the Whigs, his temper was too
+proud to stoop to the position which George designed for him. The
+conflicts between the king and his minister soon became so bitter that
+in August 1763 George appealed in despair to Pitt to form a ministry.
+Never had Pitt shown a nobler patriotism or a grander self-command than
+in the reception he gave to this appeal. He set aside all resentment at
+his own expulsion from office by Newcastle and the Whigs, and made the
+return to office of the whole party, with the exception of Bedford, a
+condition of his own. His aim, in other words, was to restore
+constitutional government by a reconstruction of the ministry which had
+won the triumphs of the Seven Years' War. But it was the destruction of
+this ministry and the erection of a kingly government in its place on
+which George prided himself most. To restore it was, in his belief, to
+restore the tyranny under which the Whigs had so long held the Crown.
+"Rather than submit," he cried, "to the terms proposed by Mr. Pitt, I
+would die in the room I now stand in." The result left Grenville as
+powerful as he had been weak. Bute retired into the country and ceased
+to exercise any political influence. Shelburne, the one statesman in the
+ministry, and who had borne a chief part in the negotiations for the
+formation of a new Cabinet, resigned to follow Pitt. On the other hand,
+Bedford, irritated by Pitt's exclusion of him from his proposed
+ministry, joined Grenville with his whole party, and the ministry thus
+became strong and compact.
+
+[Sidenote: Grenville and Wilkes.]
+
+Grenville himself was ploddingly industrious and not without financial
+ability. But his mind was narrow and pedantic in its tone; and, honest
+as was his belief in his own Whig creed, he saw nothing beyond legal
+forms. He was resolute to withstand the people as he had withstood the
+Crown. His one standard of conduct was the approval of Parliament; his
+one aim to enforce the supremacy of Parliament over subject as over
+king. With such an aim as this, it was inevitable that Grenville should
+strike fiercely at the new force of opinion which had just shown its
+power in the fall of Bute. He was resolved to see public opinion only in
+the voice of Parliament; and his resolve led at once to a contest with
+Wilkes as with the press. It was in the press that the nation was
+finding a court of appeal from the Houses of Parliament. The popularity
+of the _North-Briton_ made Wilkes the representative of the new
+journalism, as he was the representative of that mass of general
+sentiment of which it was beginning to be the mouthpiece; and the fall
+of Bute had shown how real a power lay behind the agitator's diatribes.
+But Grenville was of stouter stuff than the court favourite, and his
+administration was hardly reformed when he struck at the growing
+opposition to Parliament by a blow at its leader. In "Number 45" of the
+_North-Briton_ Wilkes had censured the speech from the throne at the
+opening of Parliament, and a "general warrant" by the Secretary of State
+was issued against the "authors, printers, and publishers of this
+seditious libel." Under this warrant forty-nine persons were seized for
+a time; and in spite of his privilege as a member of Parliament Wilkes
+himself was sent to the Tower. The arrest however was so utterly illegal
+that he was at once released by the Court of Common Pleas; but he was
+immediately prosecuted for libel. The national indignation at the
+harshness of these proceedings passed into graver disapproval when
+Parliament took advantage of the case to set itself up as a judicial
+tribunal for the trial of its own assailant. While the paper which
+formed the subject for prosecution was still before the courts of
+justice it was condemned by the House of Commons as a "false,
+scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of Lords at the same time
+voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers to be blasphemous, and
+advised a prosecution. Though Pitt at once denounced the course of the
+two Houses as unconstitutional, his protest, like that of Shelburne in
+the Lords, proved utterly ineffectual; and Wilkes, who fled in terror to
+France, was expelled at the opening of 1764 from the House of Commons.
+Rapid and successful blows such as these seem to have shown to how
+frivolous an assailant Bute had yielded. But if Wilkes fled over the
+Channel, Grenville found he had still England to deal with. The
+assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and the system
+of terror which the Minister put in force against the Press by issuing
+two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a storm of
+indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded with cries of
+"Wilkes and Liberty!" Every shutter through the town was chalked with
+"No. 45"; the old bonfires and tumults broke out with fresh violence:
+and the Common Council of London refused to thank the sheriffs for
+dispersing the mob. It was soon clear that opinion had been embittered
+rather than silenced by the blow at Wilkes.
+
+[Sidenote: Grenville and the Colonies.]
+
+The same narrowness of view, the same honesty of purpose, the same
+obstinacy of temper, were shown by Grenville in a yet more important
+struggle, a struggle with the American Colonies. The plans of Bute for
+their taxation and restraint had fallen to the ground on his retirement
+and that of Townshend from office. Lord Shelburne succeeded Townshend at
+the Board of Trade, and young as he was, Shelburne was too sound a
+statesman to suffer these plans to be revived. But the resignation of
+Shelburne in 1763, after the failure of Pitt to form a united ministry,
+again reopened the question. Grenville had fully concurred in a part at
+least of Bute's designs; and now that he found himself at the head of a
+strong administration he again turned his attention to the Colonies. On
+one important side his policy wholly differed from that of Townshend or
+Bute. With Bute as with the king the question of deriving a revenue from
+America was chiefly important as one which would bring the claims of
+independent taxation and legislation put forward by the colonies to an
+issue, and in the end--as it was hoped--bring about a reconstruction of
+their democratic institutions and a closer union of the colonies under
+British rule. Grenville's aim was strictly financial. His conservative
+and constitutional temper made him averse from any sweeping changes in
+the institutions of the Colonies. He put aside as roughly as Shelburne
+the projects which had been suggested for the suppression of colonial
+charters, the giving power in the Colonies to military officers, or the
+payment of Crown officers in America by the English treasury. All he
+desired was that the colonies should contribute what he looked on as
+their just share towards the relief of the burthens left by the war; and
+it was with a view to this that he proceeded to carry out the financial
+plans which had been devised for the purpose of raising both an external
+and an internal revenue from America.
+
+[Sidenote: The Colonies and the Stamp Act.]
+
+If such a policy was more honest, it was at the same time more absurd
+than that of Bute. Bute had at any rate aimed at a great revolution in
+the whole system of colonial government. Grenville aimed simply at
+collecting a couple of hundred thousand pounds, and he knew that even
+this wretched sum must be immensely lessened unless his plans were
+cordially accepted by the colonists. He knew too that there was small
+hope of such an acceptance. On the contrary, they at once met with a
+dogged opposition; and though the shape which that opposition took was a
+legal and technical one, it really opened up the whole question of the
+relation of the Colonies to the mother country. Proud as England was of
+her imperial position, she had as yet failed to grasp the difference
+between an empire and a nation. A nation is an aggregate of individual
+citizens, bound together in a common and equal relation to the state
+which they form. An empire is an aggregate of political bodies, bound
+together by a common relation to a central state, but whose relations to
+it may vary from the closest dependency to the loosest adhesion. To
+Grenville and the bulk of his fellow-countrymen the Colonies were as
+completely English soil as England itself, nor did they see any
+difference in political rights or in their relation to the Imperial
+legislature between an Englishman of Massachusetts and a man of Kent.
+What rights their charters gave the Colonies they looked on as not
+strictly political but municipal rights; they were not states but
+corporations; and, as corporate bodies, whatever privileges might have
+been given them, they were as completely the creatures and subjects of
+the English Crown as the corporate body of a borough or of a trading
+company. Their very existence in fact rested in a like way on the will
+of the Crown; on a breach of the conditions under which they were
+granted their charters were revocable and their privileges ceased, their
+legislatures and the rights of their legislatures came to an end as
+completely as the common council of a borough that had forfeited its
+franchise or the rights of that common council. It was true that save in
+matters of trade and navigation the Imperial Parliament or the Imperial
+Crown had as yet left them mainly to their own self-government; above
+all that it had not subjected them to the burthen of taxation which was
+borne by other Englishmen at home. But it had more than once asserted
+its right to tax the colonies; it had again and again refused assent to
+acts of their legislatures which denied such a right; and from the very
+nature of things they held it impossible that such a right could exist.
+No bounds could be fixed for the supremacy of the king in Parliament
+over every subject of the Crown, and the colonist of America was as
+absolutely a subject as the ordinary Englishman. On mere grounds of law
+Grenville was undoubtedly right in his assertion of such a view as this;
+for the law had grown up under purely national conditions, and without
+a consciousness of the new political world to which it was now to be
+applied. What the colonists had to urge against it was really the fact
+of such a world. They were Englishmen, but they were Englishmen parted
+from England by three thousand miles of sea. They could not, if they
+would, share the common political life of men at home; nature had
+imposed on them their own political life; what charters had done was not
+to create but to recognize a state of things which sprang from the very
+circumstances under which the Colonies had originated and grown into
+being. Nor could any cancelling of charters cancel those circumstances.
+No Act of Parliament could annihilate the Atlantic. The political status
+of the man of Massachusetts could not be identical with that of the man
+of Kent, because that of the Kentish man rested on his right of being
+represented in Parliament and thus sharing in the work of
+self-government, while the other from sheer distance could not exercise
+such a right. The pretence of equality was in effect the assertion of
+inequality; for it was to subject the colonist to the burthens of
+Englishmen without giving him any effective share in the right of
+self-government which Englishmen purchased by supporting those burthens.
+But the wrong was even greater than this. The Kentish man really took
+his share in governing through his representative in Parliament the
+Empire to which the colonist belonged. If the colonist had no such
+share he became the subject of the Kentish man. The pretence of
+political identity had ended in the establishment not only of serfdom
+but of the most odious form of serfdom, a subjection to one's
+fellow-subjects.
+
+[Sidenote: The theory of the colonists.]
+
+The only alternative for so impossible a relation was the recognition of
+such relations as actually existed. While its laws remained national,
+England had grown from a nation into an empire. Whatever theorists might
+allege, the Colonies were in fact political bodies with a distinct life
+of their own, whose connexion with the mother country had in the last
+hundred years taken a definite and peculiar form. Their administration
+in its higher parts was in the hands of the mother country. Their
+legislation on all internal affairs, though lightly supervised by the
+mother country, was practically in their own hands. They exercised
+without interference the right of self-taxation, while the mother
+country exercised with as little interference the right of monopolizing
+their trade. Against this monopoly of their trade not a voice was as yet
+raised among the colonists. They justly looked on it as an enormous
+contribution to the wealth of Britain, which might fairly be taken in
+place of any direct supplies, and which while it asserted the
+sovereignty of the mother country, left their local freedom untouched.
+The harshness of such a monopoly had indeed been somewhat mitigated by
+a system of contraband trade which had grown up between American ports
+and the adjacent Spanish islands, a trade so necessary for the Colonies,
+and in the end so beneficial to British commerce itself, that statesmen
+like Walpole had winked at its developement. The pedantry of Grenville
+however saw in it only an infringement of British monopoly; and one of
+his first steps was to suppress this contraband trade by a rigid
+enforcement of the navigation laws. Harsh and unwise as these measures
+seemed, the colonists owned their legality; and their resentment only
+showed itself in a pledge to use no British manufactures till the
+restrictions were relaxed. But such a stroke was a mere measure of
+retaliation, whose pressure was pretty sure in the end to effect its
+aim; and even in their moment of irritation the colonists uttered no
+protest against the monopoly of their trade. Their position indeed was
+strictly conservative; what they claimed was a continuance of the
+existing connexion; and had their claim been admitted, they would
+probably have drifted quietly into such a relation to the crown as that
+of our actual colonies in Canada and Australasia.
+
+[Sidenote: The Stamp Act passed.]
+
+What the issue of such a policy might have been as America grew to a
+population and wealth beyond those of the mother country, it is hard to
+guess. But no such policy was to be tried. The next scheme of the
+Minister--his proposal to introduce internal taxation within the bounds
+of the Colonies themselves by reviving the project of an excise or stamp
+duty, which Walpole's good sense had rejected--was of another order from
+his schemes for suppressing the contraband traffic. Unlike the system of
+the Navigation Acts, it was a gigantic change in the whole actual
+relations of England and its colonies. They met it therefore in another
+spirit. Taxation and representation, they asserted, went hand in hand.
+America had no representatives in the British Parliament. The
+representatives of the colonists met in their own colonial assemblies,
+and these were willing to grant supplies of a larger amount than a
+stamp-tax would produce. Massachusetts--first as ever in her
+protest--marked accurately the position she took. "Prohibitions of trade
+are neither equitable nor just; but the power of taxing is the grand
+banner of British liberty. If that is once broken down, all is lost."
+The distinction was accepted by the assembly of every colony; and it was
+with their protest and offer that they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who
+had risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high
+repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. In
+England Franklin found few who recognized the distinction which the
+colonists had drawn; it was indeed incompatible with the universal
+belief in the omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament. But there were
+many who held that such taxation was unadvisable, that the control of
+trade was what a country really gained from its colonies, that it was no
+work of a statesman to introduce radical changes into relations so
+delicate as those of a mother country and its dependencies, and that,
+boundless as was the power of Parliament in theory, "it should
+voluntarily set bounds to the exercise of its power." It had the right
+to tax Ireland but it never used it. The same self-restraint might be
+extended to America, and the more that the colonists were in the main
+willing to tax themselves for the general defence. Unluckily Franklin
+could give no assurance as to a union for the purpose of such taxation,
+and without such an assurance Grenville had no mind to change his plans.
+In February 1765 the Stamp Act was passed through both Houses with less
+opposition than a turnpike bill.
+
+At this critical moment Pitt was absent from the House of Commons. "When
+the resolution was taken to tax America, I was ill and in bed," he said
+a few months later. "If I could have endured to be carried in my bed, so
+great was the agitation of my mind for the consequences, I would have
+solicited some kind hand to have laid me down on this floor, to have
+borne my testimony against it." He was soon however called to a position
+where his protest might have been turned to action. The Stamp Act was
+hardly passed when an insult offered to the Princess Dowager, by the
+exclusion of her name from a Regency Act, brought to a head the quarrel
+which had long been growing between the ministry and the king. George
+again offered power to William Pitt, and so great was his anxiety to
+free himself from Grenville's dictation that he consented absolutely to
+Pitt's terms. He waived his objection to that general return of the
+whole Whig party to office which Pitt had laid down in 1763 as a
+condition of his own. He consented to his demands for a change of policy
+in America, for the abolition of general warrants, and the formation of
+a Protestant system of German alliances as a means of counteracting the
+family compact of the house of Bourbon. The formation of the new
+ministry seemed secured, when the refusal of Earl Temple to join it
+brought Pitt's efforts abruptly to an end. Temple was Pitt's
+brother-in-law, and Pitt was not only bound to him by strong family
+ties, but he found in him his only Parliamentary support. The Great
+Commoner had not a single follower of his own in the House of Commons,
+nor a single seat in it at his disposal. What following he seemed to
+have was simply that of the Grenvilles; and it was the support of his
+brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville, which had enabled him
+in great part to hold his own against the Whig connexion in the Ministry
+of 1757. But George Grenville had parted from him at its close, and now
+Lord Temple drew to his brother rather than to Pitt. His refusal to
+join the Cabinet left Pitt absolutely alone so far as Parliamentary
+strength went, and he felt himself too weak, when thus deserted, to hold
+his ground in any ministerial combination with the Whigs. Disappointed
+in two successive efforts to form a ministry by the same obstacle, he
+returned to his seat in Somersetshire, while the king turned for help to
+the main body of the Whigs.
+
+[Sidenote: The Rockingham Ministry.]
+
+The age and incapacity of the Duke of Newcastle had placed the Marquis
+of Rockingham at the head of this section of the party, after it had
+been driven from office to make way for the supremacy of Bute. Thinned
+as it was by the desertion of Grenville and Townshend, as well as of the
+Bedford faction, it still claimed an exclusive right to the name of the
+Whigs. Rockingham was honest of purpose, he was free from all taint of
+the corruption of men like Newcastle, and he was inclined to a pure and
+lofty view of the nature and end of government. But he was young, timid,
+and of small abilities, and he shared to the full the dislike of the
+great Whig nobles to Pitt and the popular sympathies on which Pitt's
+power rested. The weakness of the ministry which he formed in July 1765
+was seen in its slowness to deal with American affairs. Rockingham
+looked on the Stamp Act as inexpedient; but he held firmly against Pitt
+and Shelburne the right of Parliament to tax and legislate for the
+Colonies, and it was probably through this difference of sentiment that
+Pitt refused to join his ministry on its formation. For six months he
+made no effort to repeal the obnoxious Acts, and in fact suffered
+preparations to go on for enforcing them. News however soon came from
+America which made this attitude impossible. Vigorously as he had
+struggled against the Acts, Franklin had seen no other course for the
+Colonies, when they were passed, but that of submission. But submission
+was the last thing the colonists dreamed of. Everywhere through New
+England riots broke out on the news of the arrival of the stamped paper;
+and the frightened collectors resigned their posts. Northern and
+Southern States were drawn together by the new danger. "Virginia," it
+was proudly said afterwards, "rang the alarm bell"; its assembly was the
+first to formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle
+with internal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Acts.
+Massachusetts not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but
+proposed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial assemblies to
+provide for common and united action; and in October 1765 this Congress
+met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia.
+
+[Sidenote: Pitt and America.]
+
+The Congress was the beginning of American union. "There ought to be no
+New Englandman, no New Yorker known on this continent," said one of its
+members, "but all of us Americans." The news of its assembly reached
+England at the end of the year and perplexed the ministry, two of whose
+members now declared themselves in favour of repealing the Acts. But
+Rockingham would promise at most no more than suspension; and when the
+Houses met in the spring of 1766 no voice but Shelburne's was raised in
+the Peers for repeal. In the Commons however the news at once called
+Pitt to the front. As a minister he had long since rejected a similar
+scheme for taxing the Colonies. He had been ill and absent from
+Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed. But he adopted to the full the
+constitutional claim of America. He gloried in a resistance, which was
+denounced in Parliament as rebellion. "In my opinion," he said, "this
+kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the Colonies.... America is
+obstinate! America is almost in open rebellion! Sir, I rejoice that
+America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the
+feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have
+been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a
+looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the
+absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this
+moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.
+In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition,
+and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should
+return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his
+words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had
+passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were
+opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt
+themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on
+the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal
+feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt
+must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up
+his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen,
+co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which
+the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and
+that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker
+of the day.
+
+[Sidenote: Edmund Burke.]
+
+At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of
+his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor
+and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the
+friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to
+give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and
+literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to
+politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered
+Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp
+Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the
+scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which
+loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of
+the characteristics of his oratory--its passionate ardour, its poetic
+fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in
+which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant
+word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an
+eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's
+clearness of statement, Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for
+the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have
+learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at
+a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical
+cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical
+coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was
+poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour
+from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a
+great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose
+institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that
+to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial
+scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which
+was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His
+temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not
+from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order,
+and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every
+institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he
+discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the
+social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be
+risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had
+cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he
+said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement
+may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch
+so complicated a machine."
+
+[Sidenote: Burke and politics.]
+
+Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its
+influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great
+question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served
+him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those
+natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities
+into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their
+actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces
+which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of
+Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical
+basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for
+statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it
+was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from time to
+time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the
+varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other
+words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual
+state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition
+of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But
+nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a
+state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a
+defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was
+thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution
+of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was
+to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the
+great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left
+him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to
+the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest
+man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption
+of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in
+defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in
+England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
+against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the
+Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work
+seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of
+timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert
+Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement
+of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might
+come from particular or from special reforms.
+
+It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His
+political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party
+must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from
+popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig
+families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular
+tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as
+mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and
+insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the
+representative of forces before which the actual method of government
+must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary
+isolation was a sign that the House of Commons was no real
+representative of the English people. Burke foresaw that Pitt was
+drifting inevitably to a demand for a reform of the House which should
+make it representative in fact as in name. The full issues of such a
+reform, the changes which it would bring with it, the displacement of
+political power which it would involve, Burke alone of the men of his
+day understood. But he understood them only to shrink from them with
+horror, and to shrink with almost as great a horror from the man who was
+leading England on in the path of change.
+
+[Sidenote: Repeal of the Stamp Act.]
+
+At this crisis then the temper of Burke squared with the temper of the
+Whig party and of Rockingham; and the difference between Pitt's
+tendencies and their own came to the front on the question of dealing
+with the troubles in America. Pitt was not only for a repeal of the
+Stamp Acts, but for an open and ungrudging acknowledgement of the claim
+to a partial independence which had been made by the colonists. His
+genius saw that, whatever were the legal rights of the mother country,
+the time had come when the union between England and its children across
+the Atlantic must rest rather on sentiment than on law. Such a view was
+wholly unintelligible to the mass of the Whigs or the ministry. They
+were willing, rather than heighten American discontent, to repeal the
+Stamp Acts; but they looked on the supremacy of England and of the
+English Parliament over all English dependencies as a principle
+absolutely beyond question. From the union, therefore, which Pitt
+offered Rockingham and his fellow-ministers stood aloof. They were
+driven, whether they would or no, to a practical acknowledgement of the
+policy which he demanded; but they resolved that the repeal of the Stamp
+Acts should be accompanied by a formal repudiation of the principles of
+colonial freedom which Pitt had laid down. A declaratory act was first
+brought in, which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the
+Colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The declaration was intended no
+doubt to reassure the followers of the ministry as well as their
+opponents, for in the assertion of the omnipotence of the two Houses to
+which they belonged Whig and Tory were at one. But it served also as a
+public declaration of the difference which severed the Whigs from the
+Great Commoner. In a full house Pitt found but two supporters in his
+fierce attack upon the declaratory bill, which was supported by Burke in
+a speech which at once gave him rank as an orator; while Pitt's
+lieutenant, Shelburne, found but four supporters in a similar attack in
+the Lords. The passing of the declaratory act was followed by the
+introduction of a bill for the repeal of the Stamp Acts; and in spite of
+the resistance of the king's friends, a resistance instigated by George
+himself, the bill was carried in February 1766 by a large majority.
+
+[Sidenote: The Chatham Ministry.]
+
+As the members left the House of Commons, George Grenville, whose
+resistance had been fierce and dogged, was hooted by the crowd which
+waited to learn the issue without. Before Pitt the multitude reverently
+uncovered their heads and followed him home with blessings. It was the
+noblest hour of his life. For the moment indeed he had "saved England"
+more truly than even at the crisis of the Seven Years' War. His voice
+had forced on the ministry and the king a measure which averted, though
+but for a while, the fatal struggle between England and her Colonies.
+Lonely as he was, the ministry which had rejected his offers of aid
+found itself unable to stand against the general sense that the first
+man in the country should be its ruler; and bitter as was the king's
+hatred of him, Rockingham's resignation in the summer of 1766 forced
+George to call Pitt into office. His acceptance of the king's call and
+the measures which he took to construct a ministry showed a new resolve
+in the great statesman. He had determined to break finally with the
+political tradition which hampered him, and to set aside even the dread
+of Parliamentary weakness which had fettered him three years before.
+Temple's refusal of aid, save on terms of equality which were wholly
+inadmissible, was passed by, though it left Pitt without a party in the
+House of Commons. In the same temper he set at defiance the merely
+Parliamentary organization of the Whigs by excluding Newcastle, while he
+showed his wish to unite the party as a whole by his offer of posts to
+nearly all the members of the late administration. Though Rockingham
+stood coldly aside, some of his fellow-ministers accepted Pitt's
+offers, and they were reinforced by Lords Shelburne and Camden, the
+young Duke of Grafton, and the few friends who still clung to the Great
+Commoner. Such a ministry however rested for power not on Parliament but
+on public opinion. It was in effect an appeal from Parliament to the
+people; and it was an appeal which made such a reform in Parliament as
+would bring it into unison with public opinion a mere question of time.
+Whatever may have been Pitt's ultimate designs, however, no word of such
+a reform was uttered by any one. On the contrary, Pitt stooped to
+strengthen his Parliamentary support by admitting some even of the
+"king's friends" to a share in the administration. But its life lay
+really in Pitt himself, in his immense popularity, and in the command
+which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His popularity
+indeed was soon roughly shaken; for the ministry was hardly formed when
+it was announced that its leader had accepted the earldom of Chatham.
+The step removed him to the House of Lords, and for a while ruined the
+public confidence which his reputation for unselfishness had aided him
+to win. But it was from no vulgar ambition that Pitt laid down his title
+of the Great Commoner. The nervous disorganization which had shown
+itself three years before in his despair upon Temple's desertion had
+never ceased to hang around him, and it had been only at rare intervals
+that he had forced himself from his retirement to appear in the House of
+Commons. It was the consciousness of coming weakness that made him shun
+the storms of debate. But in the Cabinet he showed all his old energy.
+The most jealous of his fellow-ministers owned his supremacy. At the
+close of one of his earliest councils Charles Townshend acknowledged to
+a colleague "Lord Chatham has just shown to us what inferior animals we
+are!" Plans were at once set on foot for the better government of
+Ireland, for the transfer of India from the Company to the Crown, and
+for the formation of an alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the
+Family Compact of the House of Bourbon. The alliance was foiled for the
+moment by the coldness of Frederick of Prussia. The first steps towards
+Indian reform were only taken by the ministry under severe pressure from
+Pitt. Petty jealousies, too, brought about the withdrawal of some of the
+Whigs, and the hostility of Rockingham was shown by the fierce attacks
+of Burke in the House of Commons. But secession and invective had little
+effect on the ministry. "The session," wrote Horace Walpole to a friend
+at the close of 1766, "has ended triumphantly for the Great Earl"; and
+when Chatham withdrew to Bath to mature his plans for the coming year
+his power remained unshaken.
+
+
+END OF VOL. VII.
+
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+
+Variations in spelling have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     council  Councils  Councillor  Councillors
+     counsel  counsels  counselled  counsellor  counsellors
+
+     ascendant         ascendency
+     burdens           burthens
+     Luxembourg        Luxemburg
+     recognised        recognized
+
+Variations in hyphenation have been left as in the original. Examples
+include the following:
+
+     arm-chair             armchair
+     re-organization       reorganization
+
+The following corrections have been made to the text:
+
+     Page 35: success or defeat must be{original has by} equally
+     fatal
+
+     Page 155: or dependents{original has dependants} wringing
+     bread
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,
+VOLUME VII (OF 8)***
+
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