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Title: A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4)


Author: Justin McCarthy



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   Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in
   curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
   breaks occurred in the original book.  For its Index, a page
   number has been placed only at the start of that section.

   In the original volumes in this set, each even-numbered page
   had a header consisting of the page number, the volume title,
   and the chapter number.  The odd-numbered page header consisted
   of the year with which the page deals, a subject phrase, and
   the page number.  In this set of e-books, the odd-page year
   and subject phrase have been converted to sidenotes, usually
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   page pair.  If such positioning was not possible for a given
   sidenote, it was positioned where it seemed most logical.

   In the original book set, consisting of four volumes, the
   master index was in Volume 4.  In this set of e-books, the
   index has been duplicated into each of the other volumes, with
   its first page re-numbered as necessary, and an Index item
   added to each volume's Table of Contents.





A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES

by

JUSTIN MCCARTHY, M.P.

Author of "A History of Our Own Times" Etc.

In Four Volumes

VOL. I.







New York
Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square
1901




CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.


CHAP.                                                      PAGE

     I. "MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!" . . . . . . .    1
    II. PARTIES AND LEADERS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   16
   III. "LOST FOR WANT OF SPIRIT"  . . . . . . . . . . . .   39
    IV. THE KING COMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   55
     V. WHAT THE KING CAME TO  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   63
    VI. OXFORD'S HALL; BOLINGBKOKE'S FLIGHT  . . . . . . .   91
   VII. THE WHITE COCKADE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  116
  VIII. AFTER THE REBELLION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  135
    IX. "MALICE DOMESTIC.--FOREIGN LEVY" . . . . . . . . .  158
     X. HOME AFFAIRS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  168
    XI. "THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES" . . . . . . . . . . . . .  183
   XII. AFTER THE STORM  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  202
  XIII. THE BANISHMENT OF ATTERBURY  . . . . . . . . . . .  211
   XIV. WALPOLE IN POWER AS WELL AS OFFICE . . . . . . . .  224
    XV. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  240
   XVI. THE OPPOSITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  249
  XVII. "OSNABRUCK!  OSNABRUCK!" . . . . . . . . . . . . .  262
 XVIII. GEORGE THE SECOND  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  272
   XIX. "THE PATRIOTS" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  284
    XX. A VICTORY FOR THE PATRIOTS . . . . . . . . . . . .  299
        INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  322




{1}

A HISTORY

OF

THE FOUR GEORGES.


CHAPTER I.

"MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!"

"The Queen is pretty well," Swift wrote to Lord Peterborough on May 18,
1714, "at present, but the least disorder she has puts all in alarm."
Swift goes on to tell his correspondent that "when it is over we act as
if she were immortal; neither is it possible to persuade people to make
any preparations against an evil day."  Yet on the condition of Queen
Anne's health depended to all appearance the continuance of peace in
England.  While Anne was sinking down to death, rival claimants were
planning to seize the throne; rival statesmen and rival parties were
plotting, intriguing, sending emissaries, moving troops, organizing
armies, for a great struggle.  Queen Anne had reigned for little more
than twelve years.  She succeeded William the Third on March 8, 1702,
and at the time when Swift wrote the words we have quoted, her reign
was drawing rapidly to a close.

Anne was not a woman of great capacity or of elevated moral tone.  She
was moral indeed in the narrow and more limited sense which the word
has lately come to have among us.  She always observed decorum and
propriety herself; she always discouraged vice in others; but she had
no idea of political morality or of high {2} political purpose, and she
had allowed herself to be made the instrument of one faction or
another, according as one old woman or the other prevailed over her
passing mood.  While she was governed by the Duchess of Marlborough,
the Duke of Marlborough and his party had the ascendant.  When Mrs.
Masham succeeded in establishing herself as chief favorite, the Duke of
Marlborough and his followers went down.  Burnet, in his "History of My
Own Times," says of Queen Anne, that she "is easy of access, and hears
everything very gently; but opens herself to so few, and is so cold and
general in her answers, that people soon find that the chief
application is to be made to her ministers and favorites, who, in their
turns, have an entire credit and full power with her.  She has laid
down the splendor of a court too much, and eats privately; so that,
except on Sundays, and a few hours twice or thrice a week, at night, in
the drawing-room, she appears so little that her court is, as it were,
abandoned."  Although Anne lived during the Augustan Age of English
literature, she had no literary capacity or taste.  Kneller's portrait
of the Queen gives her a face rather agreeable and intelligent than
otherwise--a round, full face, with ruddy complexion and dark-brown
hair.  A courtly biographer, commenting on this portrait, takes
occasion to observe that Anne "was so universally beloved that her
death was more sincerely lamented than that of perhaps any other
monarch who ever sat on the throne of these realms."  A curious comment
on that affection and devotion of the English people to Queen Anne is
supplied by the fact which Lord Stanhope mentions, that "the funds rose
considerably on the first tidings of her danger, and fell again on a
report of her recovery."

[Sidenote: 1714--Fighting for the Crown]

England watched with the greatest anxiety the latest days of Queen
Anne's life; not out of any deep concern for the Queen herself, but
simply because of the knowledge that with her death must come a crisis
and might come a revolution.  Who was to snatch the crown as it fell
from Queen Anne's dying head?  Over at Herrenhausen, in {3} Hanover,
was one claimant to the throne; flitting between Lorraine and St.
Germains was another.  Here, at home, in the Queen's very
council-chamber, round the Queen's dying bed, were the English heads of
the rival parties caballing against each other, some of them deceiving
Hanover, some of them deceiving James Stuart, and more than one, it
must be confessed, deceiving at the same moment Hanoverians and Stuarts
alike.  Anne had no children living; she had borne to her husband, the
feeble and colorless George of Denmark, a great many children--eighteen
or nineteen it is said--but most of them died in their very infancy,
and none lived to maturity.  No succession therefore could take place,
but only an accession, and at such a crisis in the history of England
any deviation from the direct line must bring peril with it.  At the
time when Queen Anne lay dying, it might have meant a new revolution
and another civil war.

While Anne lies on that which is soon to be her death-bed, let us take
a glance at the rival claimants of her crown, and the leading English
statesmen who were partisans on this side or on that, or who were still
hesitating about the side it would be, on the whole, most prudent and
profitable to choose.

The English Parliament had taken steps, immediately after the
Revolution of 1688, to prevent a restoration of the Stuart dynasty.
The Bill of Rights, passed in the first year of the reign of William
and Mary, declared that the crown of England should pass in the first
instance to the heirs of Mary, then to the Princess Anne, her sister,
and to the heirs of the Princess Anne, and after that to the heirs, if
any, of William, by any subsequent marriage.  Mary, however, died
childless; William was sinking into years and in miserable health,
apparently only waiting and anxious for death, and it was clear that he
would not marry again.  The only one of Anne's many children who
approached maturity, the Duke of Gloucester, died just after his
eleventh birthday.  The little duke was a pupil of Bishop Burnet, and
was a child of great promise.  {4} Readers of fiction will remember
that Henry Esmond, in Thackeray's novel, is described as having
obtained some distinction in his academical course, "his Latin poem on
the 'Death of the Duke of Gloucester,' Princess Anne of Denmark's son,
having gained him a medal and introduced him to the society of the
University wits."  After the death of this poor child it was thought
necessary that some new steps should be taken to cut off the chances of
the Stuarts.  The Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, excluded the sons
or successors of James the Second, and all other Catholic claimants,
from the throne of England, and entailed the crown on the Electress
Sophia of Hanover as the nearest Protestant heir, in case neither the
reigning king nor the Princess Anne should have issue.  The Electress
Sophia was the mother of George, afterwards the First of England.  She
seems to have had good-sense as well as talent; her close friend
Leibnitz once said of her that she was not only given to asking why,
but also wanted to know the why of the whys.  She was not very anxious
to see her son George made sovereign of England, and appeared to be
under the impression that his training and temper would not allow him
to govern with a due regard for the notions of constitutional liberty
which prevailed even then among Englishmen.  It even seems that Sophia
made the suggestion that James Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he has
since been called, would do well to become a Protestant, go in for
constitutional Government, and thus have a chance of the English
throne.  It is certain that she strongly objected to his being compared
with Perkin Warbeck, or called a bastard.  She accepted, however, the
position offered to her and her son by the Act of Settlement, and
appears to have become gradually reconciled to it, and even, as she
sank into years, is said to have expressed a hope many times that the
name of Queen of England might be inscribed upon her coffin.  She came
very near to the gratification of her wish.  She died in June, 1714,
being then in her eighty-fourth year--only a very few days before {5}
Queen Anne received her first warning of the near approach of death.
Her son George succeeded to her claim upon the crown of England.

[Sidenote: 1714--The House of Brunswick]

The reigning house of Hanover was one of those lucky families which
appear to have what may be called a gift of inheritance.  There are
some such houses among European sovereignties; whenever there is a
breach in the continuity of succession anywhere, one or other of them
is sure to come in for the inheritance.  George the Elector, who was
now waiting to become King of England as soon as the breath should be
out of Anne's body, belonged to the House of Guelf, or Welf, said to
have been founded by Guelf, the son of Isembert, a count of Altdorf,
and Irmintrude, sister of Charlemagne, early in the ninth century.  It
had two branches, which were united in the eleventh century by the
marriage of one of the Guelf ladies to Albert Azzo the Second, Lord of
Este and Marquis of Italy.  His son Guelf obtained the Bavarian
possessions of his wife's step-father, a Guelf of Bavaria.  One of his
descendants, called Henry the Lion, married Maud, daughter of Henry the
Second of England, and became the founder of the family of Brunswick.
War and imperial favor and imperial displeasure interfered during many
generations with the integrity of the Duchy of Brunswick, and the
Electorate of Hanover was made up for the most part out of territories
which Brunswick had once owned.  The Emperor Leopold constructed it
formally into an Electorate in 1692, with Ernest Augustus of
Brunswick-Lüneberg as its first Elector.  The George Louis who now, in
1714, is waiting to become King of England, was the son of Ernest
Augustus and of Sophia, youngest daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of
Bohemia, sister to Charles First of England.  Elizabeth had married
Frederick, the Elector-Palatine of the Rhine, and her life was crossed
and thwarted by the opening of the Thirty Years' War, and then by the
misfortunes of her brother Charles and his dynasty.  Elizabeth survived
the English troubles and saw the Restoration, and came to live in {6}
England, and to see her nephew, Charles the Second, reign as king.  She
barely saw this.  Two years after the Restoration she died in London.
Sophia was her twelfth child: she had thirteen in all.  One of Sophia's
elder brothers was Prince Rupert--that "Rupert of the Rhine" of whom
Macaulay's ballad says that "Rupert never comes but to conquer or to
die"--the Rupert whose daring and irresistible charges generally won
his half of the battle, only that the other half might be lost, and
that his success might be swallowed up in the ruin of his companions.
His headlong bravery was a misfortune rather than an advantage to his
cause, and there seems to have been one instance--that of the surrender
of Bristol--in which that bravery deserted him for the moment.  We see
him afterwards in the pages of Pepys, an uninteresting, prosaic,
pedantic figure, usefully employed in scientific experiments, and with
all the gilt washed off him by time and years and the commonplace wear
and tear of routine life.

[Sidenote: 1714--The "Princess of Ahlden"]

George inherited none of the accomplishments of his mother.  His father
was a man of some talent and force of character, but he cared nothing
for books or education of any kind, and George was allowed to revel in
ignorance.  He had no particular merit except a certain easy
good-nature, which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to
any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient.
His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to
profligacy.  He was married in the twenty-second year of his age,
against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil,
who was some six years younger.  The marriage was merely a political
one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of
Lüneberg.  George was attached to another girl; the princess is
supposed to have fixed her affections upon another man.  They were
married, however, on November 21, 1682, and during all her life Sophia
Dorothea had to put up with the neglect, the contempt, and afterwards
the cruelty of {7} her husband.  George's strongest taste was for ugly
women.  One of his favorites, Mademoiselle Schulemberg, maid of honor
to his mother, and who was afterwards made Duchess of Kendal, was
conspicuous, even in the unlovely Hanoverian court, for the awkwardness
of her long, gaunt, fleshless figure.  Another favorite of George's,
Madame Kilmansegge, afterwards made Countess of Darlington, represented
a different style of beauty.  She is described by Horace Walpole as
having "large, fierce, black eyes, rolling beneath lofty-arched
eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck
that overflowed and was not distinguishable from the lower part of her
body, and no portion of which was restrained by stays."

It would not be surprising if the neglected Sophia Dorothea should have
looked for love elsewhere, or at least should not have been strict
enough in repelling it when it offered itself.  Philip Christof
Königsmark, a Swedish soldier of fortune, was supposed to be her
favored lover.  He suffered for his amour, and it was said that his
death came by the special order--one version has it by the very
hand--of George the Elector, the owner of the ladies Schulemberg and
Kilmansegge.  Sophia Dorothea was banished for the rest of her life to
the Castle of Ahlden, on the river Aller.  In the old schloss of
Hanover the spot is still shown, outside the door of the Hall of
Knights, which tradition has fixed upon as the spot where the
assassination of Königsmark took place.

The Königsmarks were in their way a famous family.  The elder brother
was the Charles John Königsmark celebrated in an English State trial as
the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas
Thynne.  Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of Titus Oates, the
"Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade of
Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was betrothed to
Elizabeth, the child widow--she was only fifteen years old--of Lord
Ogle.  Königsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the courts of
Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at
Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with
Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of
obtaining her was to murder his rival.  The murder was done, and its
story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in
Westminster Abbey.  Königsmark's accomplices were executed, but
Königsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at
the siege of classic Argos.  The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign
field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos.  The elder Königsmark, dying
before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St.
Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death.  The
Königsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress of
Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous
Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand.  Later, like the fair
sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious
retirement, as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg.

[Sidenote: 1714--Wooden shoes and warming-pans]

George was born in Osnabrück, in May, 1660, and was therefore now in
his fifty-fifth year.  As his first qualification for the government of
England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence of
the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and
traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of
the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath
succeeding an Amurath.

When George became Elector, on the death of his father in 1698, he
showed, however, some capacity for improvement, under the influence of
the new responsibility imposed upon him by his station.  His private
life did not amend, but his public conduct acquired a certain solidity
and consistency which was not to have been expected from his previous
mode of living.  One of his merits was not likely to be by any means a
merit in the eyes of the English people.  He was, to do him justice,
deeply attached to his native country.  He had all the {9} love for
Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed.  The
ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole
conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be.  He
lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute
Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits
and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to
turn his thoughts to England.

The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward
Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his
enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when
they did not think it prudent to give him the title of king.  James was
the step-brother of Queen Anne.  He was the son of James the Second, by
James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena.
Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just passed
her fourteenth year.  Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike
Juliet she was poor.  She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and
therefore was especially acceptable to her husband.  She had four
children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for
ten years she had no child.  The _London Gazette_ surprised the world
one day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and
upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son.  It need hardly be told
now that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince.
The great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared,
that the alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen.  The story
was that a newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought
into the Queen's room in a warming-pan, and passed off as the son of
the Queen.  It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had
been instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the
enemies of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or
Petrelin.  The warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in
satirical literature and art for many generations after.  {10} A whole
school of caricature was heated into life, if we may use such an
expression, by this fabulous warming-pan.  Warming-pans were associated
with brass money and wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig
partisans, down to a day not very far remote from our own.  Mr. Jobson,
the vulgar lawyer in Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a
Catholic, about "King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our
immortal deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden shoes and
warming-pans."  "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans,"
retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his
wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at
present, Mr. Jobson."  There was not, of course, the slightest
foundation for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne.
Some little excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere
fact that there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be
present at the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to
make the report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one
whose opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at
the time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all.  At the
time, however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large
proportion of the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the
supposed warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the
supporters of the Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the
slightest chance whatever of a Stuart restoration.  This story of a
spurious heir to a throne repeats itself at various intervals of
history.  The child of Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed
by many Legitimist partisans to be supposititious.  In our own days
there were many intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the
unfortunate Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not
the son of the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her
sister, the Duchess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the
French {11} people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist
throne.

[Sidenote: 1714--The "Old Pretender"]

James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was
therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history
begins.  Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to
escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed
discrowned.  He had led an unhappy life--unhappy all the more because
of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it.  He is
described as tall, meagre, and melancholy.  Although not strikingly
like Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the
Stuart aspect.  Horace Walpole said of him many years after that,
"without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the
strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all."  The words
"fatality of air" describe very expressively that look of melancholy
which all the Stuart features wore when in repose.  The melancholy look
represented an underlying habitual mood of melancholy, or even
despondency, which a close observer may read in the character of the
"merry monarch" himself, for all his mirth and his dissipation, just as
well as in that of Charles the First or of James the Second.  The
profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it.
James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of
Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and
dissipation.  His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he
drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought.
He was always the slave of women.  Women knew all his secrets, and were
made acquainted with his projected political enterprises.  Sometimes
the fair favorite to whom he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled
all over Versailles or Paris of what she had heard, and in some
instances, perhaps, she even took her newly-acquired knowledge to the
English Ambassador and disposed of it for a consideration.  At this
time James Stuart is not yet married; but marriage made as little {12}
difference in his way of living as it had done in that of his elderly
political rival, George the Elector.  It is strange that James Stuart
should have made so faint an impression upon history and upon
literature.  Romance and poetry, which have done so much for his son,
"Bonnie Prince Charlie," have taken hardly any account of him.  He
figures in Thackeray's "Esmond," but the picture is not made very
distinct, even by that master of portraiture, and the merely frivolous
side of his character is presented with disproportionate prominence.
James Stuart had stronger qualities for good or evil than Thackeray
seems to have found in him.  Some of his contemporaries denied him the
credit of man's ordinary courage; he has even been accused of positive
cowardice; but there does not seem to be the slightest ground for such
an accusation.  Studied with the severest eye, his various enterprises,
and the manner in which he bore himself throughout them, would seem to
prove that he had courage enough for any undertaking.  Princes seldom
show any want of physical courage.  They are trained from their very
birth to regard themselves as always on parade; and even if they should
feel their hearts give way in presence of danger, they are not likely
to allow it to be seen.  It was not lack of personal bravery that
marred the chances of James Stuart.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's sympathies]

It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have
met with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that
James might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he
would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant.  It
was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by
statesmen in power--by Oxford and by Bolingbroke--that if he could not
actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one,
and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church.
James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any meanness so
ignoble and detestable.  His conduct in thus adhering to his
convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted
with that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a
mass!"  But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard
to his conversion.  Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him
to become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had
always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart.
Sully gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of
Henry's own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and
the turn of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith,
commenting shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself
more than once on the field of battle in the presence of danger.  Thus,
according to Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic,
would be only following the bent of his own natural inclinations.
However that may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by
changing his profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown,
and that James the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change,
lost his best chance of a throne.

What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession?  There
cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went.  There
is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas
Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and published
in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King.  It is called
on its title-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign of
Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Concerning the Danger of the Protestant
Succession."  Such an author, writing comparatively soon after the
events, and in a book dedicated to the reigning king, was not likely to
do any conscious injustice to the memory of Queen Anne, and was
especially likely to take a fair view of the influence which her
personal inclinations were calculated to have on the succession.  Dr.
Somerville declares with great justice that "mildness, timidity, and
anxiety were constitutional ingredients in the temper" of Queen Anne.
This very timidity, this very anxiety, {14} appears, according to Dr.
Somerville's judgment, to have worked favorably for the Hanoverian
succession.  [Sidenote: 1714--James the Third] The Queen herself, by
sentiment, and by what may be called a sort of superstition, leaned
much towards the Stuarts.  "The loss," says Dr. Somerville, "of all her
children bore the aspect of an angry Providence adjusting punishment to
the nature and quality of her offence."  Her offence, of course, was
the part she had taken in helping to dethrone her father.  "Wounded in
spirit, and prone to superstition, she naturally thought of the
restitution of the crown to her brother as the only atonement she could
make to the memory of her injured father."  This feeling might have
ripened into action with her but for that constitutional timidity and
anxiety of which Somerville speaks.  There would undoubtedly have been
dangers, obvious to even the bravest or the most reckless, in an
attempt just then to alter the succession; but Anne saw those dangers
"in the most terrific form, and recoiled with horror from the sight."
Moreover, she had a constitutional objection, as strong as that of
Queen Elizabeth herself, to the presence of an intended successor near
her throne.  "She trembled," says Somerville, "at the idea of the
presence of a successor, whoever he might be; and the residence of her
own brother in England was not less dreadful to her than that of the
electoral prince."  But it is probable that had she lived longer she
would have found herself constrained to put up with the presence either
of one claimant or the other.  Her ministers, whoever they might be,
would surely have seen the imperative necessity of bringing over to
England the man whom the Queen and they had determined to present to
the English people as the destined heir of the throne.  In such an
event as that, and most assuredly if men like Bolingbroke had been in
power, it may be taken for granted that the Queen would have preferred
her own brother, a Stuart, to the Electoral Prince of Hanover.  "What
the consequence might have been, if the Queen had survived," says
Somerville, "is merely a matter of conjecture; but we may {15}
pronounce, with some degree of assurance, that the Protestant interest
would have been exposed to more certain and to more imminent dangers
than ever had threatened it before at any period since the revolution."
This seems a reasonable and just assertion.  If Anne had lived much
longer, it is possible that England might have seen a James the Third.




{16}

CHAPTER II.

PARTIES AND LEADERS.

[Sidenote: 1714--Whig and Tory]

All the closing months of Queen Anne's reign were occupied by Whigs and
Tories, and indeed by Anne herself as well, in the invention and
conduct of intrigues about the succession.  The Queen herself, with the
grave opening before her, kept her fading eyes turned, not to the world
she was about to enter, but to the world she was about to leave.  She
was thinking much more about the future of her throne than about her
own soul and future state.  The Whigs were quite ready to maintain the
Hanoverian succession by force.  They did not expect to be able to
carry matters easily, and they were ready to encounter a civil war.
Their belief seems to have been that they and not their opponents would
have to strike the blow, and they had already summoned the Duke of
Marlborough from his retirement in Flanders to take the lead in their
movement.  Having Marlborough, they knew that they would have the army.
On the other hand, if Bolingbroke and the Tories really had any actual
hope of a restoration of the Stuarts, it is certain that up to the last
moment they had made no substantial preparations to accomplish their
object.

The Whigs and Tories divided between them whatever political force
there was in English society at this time.  Outside both parties lay a
considerable section of people who did not distinctly belong to the one
faction or the other, but were ready to incline now to this and now to
that, according as the conditions of the hour might inspire them.
Outside these again, and far outnumbering these and all others
combined, was the great mass of the English {17} people--hard-working,
much-suffering, poor, patient, and almost absolutely indifferent to
changes in governments and the humors and struggles of parties.  "These
wrangling jars of Whig and Tory," says Dean Swift, "are stale and old
as Troy-town story."  But if the principles were old, the titles of the
parties were new.  Steele, in 1710, published in the _Tatler_ a letter
from Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff, asking for "an account of
those two religious orders which have lately sprung up amongst you, the
Whigs and the Tories."  Steele declared that you could not come even
among women "but you find them divided into Whig and Tory."  It was
like the famous lawsuit in Abdera, alluded to by Lucian and amplified
by Wieland, concerning the ownership of the ass's shadow, on which all
the Abderites took sides, and every one was either a "Shadow" or an
"Ass."

Various explanations have been given of these titles Whig and Tory.
Titus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish
robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name
gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy
with the Catholic Duke of York.  The word "Whig" first arose during the
Cameronian rising, when it was applied to the Scotch Presbyterians, and
is derived by some from the whey which they habitually drank, and by
others from a word, "whiggam," used by the western Scottish drovers.

The Whigs and the Tories represent in the main not only two political
doctrines, but two different feelings in the human mind.  The natural
tendency of some men is to regard political liberty as of more
importance than political authority, and of other men to think that the
maintenance of authority is the first object to be secured, and that
only so much of individual liberty is to be conceded as will not
interfere with authority's strictest exercise.  Roughly speaking,
therefore, the Tories were for authority, and the Whigs for liberty.
The Tories naturally held to the principle of the monarchy and of the
State church; the Whigs {18} were inclined for the supremacy of
Parliament, and for something like an approach to religious equality.
[Sidenote: 1714--Political change] Up to this time at least the Tory
party still accepted the theory of the Divine origin of the king's
supremacy.  The Whigs were even then the advocates of a constitutional
system, and held that the people at large were the source of
monarchical power.  To the one set of men the sovereign was a divinely
appointed ruler; to the other he was the hereditary chief of the realm,
having the source of his authority in popular election.  The Tories, as
the Church party, disliked the Dissenters even more than they disliked
the Roman Catholics.  The Whigs were then even inclined to regard the
Church as a branch of the Civil Service--to adopt a much more modern
phrase--and they were in favor of extending freedom of worship to
Dissenters, and in a certain sense to Roman Catholics.  According to
Bishop Burnet, it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the distinction
between High-Church and Low-Church first marked itself out, and we find
almost as a natural necessity that the High-Churchmen were Tories, and
the Low-Churchmen were Whigs.  Then as now the chief strength of the
Tories was found in the country, and not in the large towns.  So far as
town populations were concerned, the Tories were proportionately
strongest where the borough was smallest.  The great bulk of the
agricultural population, so far as it had definite political feelings,
was distinctly Tory.  The strength of the Whigs lay in the
manufacturing towns and the great ports.  London was at that time much
stronger in its Liberal political sentiments than it has been more
recently.  The moneyed interest, the bankers, the merchants, were
attached to the Whig party.  Many peers and bishops were Whigs, but
they were chiefly the peers and bishops who owed their appointments to
William the Third.  The French envoy, D'Iberville, at this time
describes the Whigs as having at their command the best purses, the
best swords, the ablest heads, and the handsomest women.  The Tory
party was strong at the University of Oxford; the Whig party was {19}
in greater force at Cambridge.  Both Whigs and Tories, however, were in
a somewhat subdued condition of mind about the time that Anne's reign
was closing.  Neither party as a whole was inclined to push its
political principles to anything like a logical extreme.  Whigs and
Tories alike were practically satisfied with the form which the English
governing system had put on after the Revolution of 1688.  Neither
party was inclined for another revolution.  The civil war had carried
the Whig principle a little too far for the Whigs.  The Restoration had
brought a certain amount of scandal on sovereign authority and the
principle of Divine right.  The minds of men were settling down into
willingness for a compromise.  There were, of course, among the Tories
the extreme party, so pledged to the restoration of the Stuarts that
they would have moved heaven and earth, at all events they would have
convulsed England, for the sake of bringing them back.  These men
constituted what would now be called in the language of French politics
the Extreme Right of the Tory party; they would become of importance at
any hour when some actual movement was made from the outside to restore
the Stuarts.  Such a movement would of course have carried with it and
with them the great bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the
mean time, and until some such movement was made, the Jacobite section
of the Tories was not in a condition to be active or influential, and
was not a serious difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.

The Whigs had great advantages on their side.  They had a clear
principle to start with.  The constitutional errors and excesses of the
Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or
three main principles of civil and religious liberty.  The Whigs knew
what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the
Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories
set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land.  The
uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the
{20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes.  Many a
Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his own
again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they, had
in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion
end in a Stuart restoration.  But, on the other hand, the Whigs could
strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in
Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country
into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing their projects melt
away into visions and chimeras.  A great band of landed proprietors
formed the leaders of the Whigs.  Times have changed since then, and
the representatives of some of those great houses which then led the
Whig party have passed or glided insensibly into the ranks of the
Tories; but the main reason for this is because a Tory of our day
represents fairly enough, in certain political aspects, the Whig of the
days of Queen Anne.  What is called in American politics a new
departure has taken place in England since that time; the Radical party
has come into existence with political principles and watchwords quite
different even from those of the early Whigs.  Some of the Whig houses,
not many, have gone with the forward movement; some have remained
behind, and so lapsed almost insensibly into the Tory quarter.  But at
the close of Queen Anne's reign all the great leading Whigs stood well
together.  They understood better than the Tories did the necessity of
obtaining superior influence in the House of Commons.  They even
contrived at that time to secure the majority of the county
constituencies, while they had naturally the majority of the commercial
class on their side.  Then, as in later days, the vast wealth of the
Whig families was spent unstintingly, and it may be said unblushingly,
in securing the possession of the small constituencies, the
constituencies which were only to be had by liberal bribery.  Then, as
afterwards, there was perceptible in the Whig party a strange
combination of dignity and of meanness, of great principles and of
somewhat degraded practices.  They had high {21} purposes; they
recognized noble principles, and they held to them; they were for
political liberty as they then understood it, and they were for
religious equality--for such approach at least to religious equality as
had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England.
They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political
creed.  But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to
which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their
parliamentary strategy and political conduct.  They intrigued, they
bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they
made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to
carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal
could have used to secure the attainment of selfish and ignoble ends.
Their enemies had put one great advantage into their hands.  The
conduct of Bolingbroke and of Oxford during recent years had left the
Whigs the sole representatives of constitutional liberty.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anarchy or "Perkin"]

The two great political parties hated and denounced each other with a
ferocity hardly known before, and hardly possible in our later times.
The Whigs vituperated the Tories as rebels and traitors; the Tories
cried out against the Whigs as the enemies of religion and the
opponents of "the true Church of England."  Many a ballad of that time
described the Whigs as men whose object it was to destroy both mitre
and crown, to introduce anarchy once again, as they had done in the
days of Oliver Cromwell.  The Whig balladists retorted by describing
the Tories as men who were engaged in trying to bring in "Perkin" from
France, and prophesied the halter as a reward of their leading
statesmen.  In truth, the bitterness of that hour was very earnest;
most of the men on both sides meant what they said.  Either side, if it
had been in complete preponderance, would probably have had very little
scruple in disposing of its leading enemies by means of the halter or
the prison.  It was for the time not so much a struggle of political
parties as a {22} struggle of hostile armies.  The men were serious and
savage, because the crisis was serious and portentous.  The chances of
an hour might make a man a prime-minister or a prisoner.  Bolingbroke
soon after was in exile, and Walpole at the head of the administration.
The slightest chance, the merest accident, might have sent Walpole into
exile, and put Bolingbroke at the head of the State.

[Sidenote: 1714--John Churchill]

The eyes of the English public were at this moment turned in especial
to watch the movements of two men--the Duke of Marlborough and Lord
Bolingbroke.  Marlborough was beyond question the greatest soldier of
his time.  He had gone into exile when Queen Anne consented to degrade
him and to persecute him, and now he was on his way home, at the urgent
entreaty of the Whig leaders, in order to lend his powerful influence
to the Hanoverian cause.

The character of the Duke of Marlborough is one which ought to be
especially attractive to the authors of romance and the lovers of
strong, bold portrait-painting.  One peculiar difficulty, however, a
romancist would have in dealing with Marlborough--he could hardly
venture to paint Marlborough as nature and fortune made him.  The
romancist would find himself compelled to soften and to modify many of
the distinctive traits of Marlborough's character, in order that he
might not seem the mere inventor of a human paradox, in order that he
might not appear to be indulging in the fantastic and the impossible.
Pope has called Bacon "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," but
Bacon was not greater in his own path than Marlborough in his, and
Bacon's worst meannesses were nobility itself compared with some of
Marlborough's political offences.  Marlborough started in life with
almost every advantage that man could have--with genius, with boundless
courage, with personal beauty, with favoring friends.  From his early
youth he had been attached to James the Second and James the Second's
court.  One of Marlborough's {23} biographers even suggests that the
Duchess of York, James's first wife, was needlessly fond of young
Churchill.  The beautiful Duchess of Cleveland--she of whom Pepys said
"that everything she did became her"--was passionately in love with
Marlborough, and, according to some writers, gave him his first start
in life when she presented him with five thousand pounds, which
Marlborough, prudent then as ever, invested in an annuity of five
hundred a year.  Burnet said of him that "he knew the arts of living in
a court beyond any man in it; he caressed all people with a soft and
obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices."  His
only personal defect was in his voice, which was shrill and
disagreeable.  He was, through all his life, avaricious to the last
degree; he grasped at money wherever he could get it; he took money
from women as well as from men.  A familiar story of the time
represents another nobleman as having been mistaken for the Duke of
Marlborough by a mob, at a time when Marlborough was unpopular, and
extricating himself from the difficulty by telling the crowd he could
not possibly be the Duke of Marlborough, first, because he had only two
guineas in his pocket, and next, because he was perfectly ready to give
them away.  Marlborough had received the highest favors from James the
Second, but he quitted James in the hour of his misfortunes, only,
however, it should be said, to return secretly to his service at a time
when he was professing devotion to William the Third.  He betrayed each
side to the other.  In the same year, and almost in the same month, he
writes to the Elector at Hanover and to the Pretender in France,
pouring forth to each alike his protestations of devotion.  "I shall be
always ready to hazard my fortune and my life for your service," he
tells the Elector.  "I had rather have my hands cut off than do
anything prejudicial to King James's cause," he tells an agent of the
Stuarts.  James appears to have believed in Marlborough, and William,
while he made use of him, to have had no faith in him.  "The Duke of
Marlborough," William {24} said, "has the best talents for a general of
any man in England; but he is a vile man and I hate him, for though I
can profit by treasons I cannot bear the traitor."  William's saying
was strikingly like that one ascribed to Philip of Macedon.  Schomberg
spoke of Marlborough as "the first lieutenant-general whom I ever
remember to have deserted his colors."  Lord Granard, who was in the
camp of King James the Second on Salisbury Plain, told Dr. King, who
has recorded the story, that Churchill and some other colonels invited
Lord Granard to supper, and opened to him their design of deserting to
the Prince of Orange.  Granard not merely refused to enter into the
conspiracy, but went to the King and told him the whole story, advising
him to seize Marlborough and the other conspirators.  Perhaps if this
advice had been followed, King William would never have come to the
throne of England.  James, however, gave no credit to the story, and
took no trouble about it.  Next morning he found his mistake; but it
was then too late.  The truth of this story is corroborated by other
authorities, one of them being King James himself, who afterwards
stated that he had received information of Lord Churchill's designs,
and was recommended to seize his person, but that he unfortunately
neglected to avail himself of the advice.  "Speak of that no more,"
says Egmont, in Goethe's play; "I _was_ warned."

[Sidenote: 1714--Marlborough]

Swift said of Marlborough that "he is as covetous as hell, and
ambitious as the prince of it."  Marlborough was as ignorant as he was
avaricious.  Literary taste or instinct he must have had, because he
read with so much eagerness the historical plays of Shakespeare, and
indeed frankly owned that his only knowledge of English history was
taken from their scenes.  Even in that time of loose spelling his
spelling is remarkably loose.  He seems to spell without any particular
principle in the matter, seldom rendering the same word a second time
by the same combination of letters.  He was at one period of his life a
libertine of the loosest order, so far as morals were {25} concerned,
but of the shrewdest kind as regarded personal gain and advancement.
He would have loved any Lady Bellaston who presented herself, and who
could have rewarded him for his kindness.  He was not of the type of
Byron's "Don Juan," who declares that

  The prisoned eagle will not pair, nor I
  Serve a Sultana's sensual phantasy.

Marlborough would have served any phantasy for gain.  It has been said
of him that the reason for his being so successful with women as a
young man was that he took money of them.  Yet, as another striking
instance of the paradoxical nature of his character, he was intensely
devoted to his wife.  He was the true lover of Sarah Jennings, who
afterwards became Duchess of Marlborough.  A man of the most undaunted
courage in the presence of the enemy, he was his wife's obedient,
patient, timid slave.  He lived more absolutely under her control than
Belisarius under the government of his unscrupulous helpmate.  Sarah
Jennings was, in her way, almost as remarkable as her husband.  She was
a woman of great beauty.  Colley Gibber, in his "Apology," pays devoted
testimony to her charms.  He had by chance to attend on her in the
capacity of a sort of amateur lackey at an entertainment in Nottingham,
and he seems to have been completely dazzled by her loveliness.  "If so
clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect, struck
me into a regard that had something softer than the most profound
respect in it, I cannot see why I may not without offence remember it,
since beauty, like the sun, must sometimes lose its power to choose,
and shine into equal warmth the peasant and the courtier."  He quaintly
adds, "However presumptuous or impertinent these thoughts may have
appeared at my first entertaining them, why may I not hope that my
having kept them decently a secret for full fifty years may be now a
good round plea for their pardon?"  The imperious spirit which could
rule Churchill long dominated the feeble nature of Queen Anne.  But
{26} when once this domination was overthrown, Sarah Jennings had no
art to curb her temper into such show of respect and compliance as
might have won back her lost honors.  She met her humiliation with the
most childish bursts of passion; she did everything in her power to
annoy and insult the Queen who had passed from her haughty control.
She was always a keen hater; to the last day of her life she never
forgot her resentment towards all who had, or who she thought had,
injured her.  In long later years she got into unseemly lawsuits with
her own near relations.  But if one side of her character was harsh and
unlovely enough, it may be admitted that there was something not
unheroic about her unyielding spirit--something noble in the respect to
her husband's memory, which showed itself in the declaration that she
would not marry "the emperor of the world," after having been the wife
of John, Duke of Marlborough.

[Sidenote: 1714--Bolingbroke]

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was in his way as great a man as
the Duke of Marlborough.  At the time we are now describing he seemed
to have passed through a long, a varied, and a brilliant career, and
yet he had only arrived at the age when public men in England now begin
to be regarded as responsible politicians.  He was in his thirty-sixth
year.  The career that had prematurely begun was drawing to its
premature close.  He had climbed to his highest position; he is
Prime-minister of England, and has managed to get rid of his old
colleague and rival, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford.  Bolingbroke had
almost every gift and grace that nature and fortune could give.  Three
years before this Swift wrote to Stella, "I think Mr. St. John the
greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of
apprehension, good learning and an excellent taste; the greatest orator
in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature and good
manners, generous, and a despiser of money."  Yet, as in the fairy
story, the benign powers which had combined to endow him so richly had
withheld the one gift which might have made all the rest of {27}
surpassing value, and which being denied left them of little account.
If Bolingbroke had had principle he would have been one of the greatest
Englishmen of any time.  His utter want of morality in politics, as
well as in private life, proved fatal to him; he only climbed high in
order to fall the lower.  He was remarkable for profligacy even in that
heedless and profligate time.  Voltaire, in one of his letters, tells a
story of a famous London courtesan who exclaimed to some of her
companion nymphs on hearing that Bolingbroke had been made Secretary of
State, "Seven thousand guineas a year, girls, and all for us!"  Even if
the story be not true it is interesting and significant as an evidence
of the sort of impression which Bolingbroke had made upon his age.  It
was his glory to be vicious; he was proud of his orgies.  He liked to
be known as a man who could spend the whole night in a drunken revel,
and the afternoon in preparing some despatch on which the fortunes of
his country or the peace of the world might depend.  The sight of a
beautiful woman could turn him away for the time from the gravest
political purposes.  He was ready at such a moment to throw anything
over for the sake of the sudden love-chase which had come in his way.
He bragged of his amours, and boasted that he had never failed of
success with any woman who seemed to him worth pursuing.  Like Faust,
he loved to reel from desire to enjoyment, and from enjoyment back
again into desire.  Bolingbroke was the first of a great line of
parliamentary debaters who have made for themselves a distinct place in
English history, and whose rivals are not to be found in the history of
any other parliament.  It is difficult at this time to form any
adequate idea of Bolingbroke's style as a speaker or his capacity for
debate when compared with other great English parliamentary orators.
But so far as one may judge, we should be inclined to think that he
must have had Fox's readiness without Fox's redundancy and repetition;
and that he must have had the stately diction and the commanding style
of the younger Pitt, with a certain freshness and force which {28} the
younger Pitt did not always exhibit.  Bolingbroke's English prose style
is hardly surpassed by that of any other author, either before his time
or since.  It is supple, strong, and luminous; not redundant, but not
bare; ornamented where ornament is suitable and even useful, but
nowhere decorated with the purple rags of unnecessary and artificial
brilliancy.  Such a man, so gifted, must in any case have held a high
place among his contemporaries, and probably if Bolingbroke had
possessed the political and personal virtues of men like Burke and
Pitt, or even the political virtues of a man like Charles Fox, he would
have been remembered as the greatest of all English parliamentary
statesmen.  But, as we have already said, the one defect filled him
with faults.  The lack of principle gave him a lack of purpose, and
wanting purpose he persevered in no consistent political path.  Swift
has observed that Bolingbroke "had a great respect for the characters
of Alcibiades and Petronius, especially the latter, whom he would
gladly be thought to resemble."  He came nearer at his worst to
Petronius than at his best to Alcibiades.  Alcibiades, to do him
justice, admired and understood virtue in others, however small the
share of it he contrived to keep for himself.  It is impossible to read
that wonderful compound of dramatic humor and philosophic thought,
Plato's "Banquet," without being moved by the generous and impassioned
eulogy which Alcibiades, in the fulness of his heart and of his wine,
pours out upon the austere virtue of Socrates.  Such as Alcibiades is
there described we may suppose Alcibiades to have been, and no one who
has followed the career of Bolingbroke can believe it possible that he
ever could have felt any sincere admiration for virtue in man or woman,
or could have thought of it otherwise than as a thing to be sneered at
and despised.  The literary men, and more especially the poets of the
days of Bolingbroke, seem to have had as little scruple in their
compliments as a French _petit-maître_ might have in sounding the
praises of his mistress to his mistress's ears.  Pope talks of his
villa, where, "nobly {29} pensive, St. John sat and thought," and
declared that such only might

        Tread this sacred floor
  Who dare to love their country and be poor.

[Sidenote: 1714--Pope's praises]

It is hard to think of Bolingbroke, even in his more advanced years, as
"nobly pensive," sitting and thinking, and certainly neither
Bolingbroke nor any of Bolingbroke's closer political associates was
exactly the sort of man who would have dared "to love his country and
be poor."  In Bolingbroke's latest years we hear of him as amusing
himself by boasting to his second wife of his various successful
amours, until at last the lady, weary of the repetition, somewhat
contemptuously reminds him that however happy as a lover he may have
been once, his days of love were now over, and the less he said about
it the better.

Nor was Pope less extravagant in his praise to Harley than to St. John.
He says:

      If aught below the seats divine
  Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine;
  A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
  Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,
  The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
  The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.

These lines, it is right to remember, were addressed to Harley, not in
his power, but after his fall.  Even with that excuse for a friend's
overcharged eulogy, they read like a satire on Harley rather than like
his panegyric.  Caricature itself could not more broadly distort the
features of a human being than his poetic admirer has altered the
lineaments of Oxford.  Harley had been intriguing on both sides of the
field.  He professed devoted loyalty to the Queen and to her appointed
successor, and he was at the same time coquetting, to put it mildly,
with the Stuart family in France.  Nothing surprises a reader more than
the universal duplicity that seems to have prevailed in the days of
Anne and of the early Georges.  Falsehood appears to have been a
recognized diplomatic {30} and political art.  Statesmen, even of the
highest rank and reputation, made no concealment of the fact that
whenever occasion required they were ready to state the thing which was
not, either in private conversation or in public debate.  Nothing could
exceed or excuse the boundless duplicity of Marlborough, but it must be
owned that even William the Third told almost as many falsehoods to
Marlborough as Marlborough could have told to him.  At a time when
William detested Marlborough, he yet occasionally paid him in public
and in private the very highest compliments on his integrity and his
virtue.  Men were not then supposed or expected to speak the truth.  A
statesman might deceive a foreign minister or the Parliament of his own
country with as little risk to his reputation as a lady would have
undergone, in later days, who told a lie to the custom-house officer at
the frontier to save the piece of smuggled lace in her trunk.

[Sidenote: 1714--Harley]

If a man like William of Nassau could stoop to deceit and falsehood for
any political purpose, it is easy to understand that a man like Harley
would make free use of the same arts, and for personal objects as well.
Harley's political changes were so many and so rapid that they could
not possibly be explained by any theory consistent with sincerity.  It
was well said of him that "his humor is never to deal clearly or
openly, but always with reserve, if not dissimulation, and to love
tricks when not necessary, but from an inward satisfaction in
applauding his own cunning."  He entered Parliament in 1689, and in
1700 was chosen Speaker of the House of Commons.  At that time, and for
long after, it was not an uncommon thing that a man who had been
Speaker should afterwards become a Secretary of State, sitting in the
same House.  This was Harley's case: in 1704 he was made principal
Secretary of State.  In 1708 Harley resigned office, and immediately
after took the leadership of the Tory party.  In about two years he
overthrew the Whig administration, and became the head of a new
government, with the place of Lord High Treasurer, and the title of
Earl of Oxford.  {31} His craft seems only to have been that low kind
of artifice which enables an unscrupulous man to cajole his followers
and to stir up division among his enemies.  His word was not to be
relied upon by friend or enemy, and when he most affected a tone of
frankness or of candor he was least to be trusted.  As Lord Stanhope
well says of him "His slender and pliant intellect was well fitted to
crawl up to the heights of power through all the crooked mazes and
dirty by-paths of intrigue; but having once attained the pinnacle, its
smallness and meanness were exposed to all the world."  Even his
private life had not the virtues which one who reads some of the
exalted panegyrics paid to him by contemporary poets and others would
be apt to imagine.  He was fond of drink and fond of pleasure in a
small and secret way; his vices were as unlike the daring and brilliant
profligacy of his colleague and rival Bolingbroke as his intellect was
inferior to Bolingbroke's surpassing genius.  For all Pope's poetic
eulogy, the poet could say in prose of Lord Oxford that he was not a
very capable minister, and had a good deal of negligence into the
bargain.  "He used to send trifling verses from court to the Scriblerus
Club every day, and would come and talk idly with them almost every
night, even when his all was at stake."  Pope adds that Oxford "talked
of business in so confused a manner that you did not know what he was
about, and everything he went to tell you was in the epic way, for he
always began in the middle."  Swift calls him "the greatest
procrastinator in the world."  It is of Lord Oxford that the story is
originally told which has been told of so many statesmen here and in
America since his time.  Lord Oxford, according to Pope, invited Rowe,
the dramatic poet, to learn Spanish.  Rowe went to work, and studied
Spanish under the impression that some appointment at the Spanish court
would follow.  When he returned to Harley and told him he had
accomplished the task, Harley said, "Then, Mr. Rowe, I envy you the
pleasure of reading 'Don Quixote' in the original."  Pope asks, "Is not
that cruel?"  But {32} others have held that it was unintentional on
Lord Oxford's part, and merely one of his unthinking oddities.

[Sidenote: 1714--Walpole]

Another man, fifteen years younger than Harley, a school-fellow at Eton
of Bolingbroke, was rising slowly, surely, into prominence and power.
All the great part of his career is yet to come; but even already,
while men were talking of Marlborough and Bolingbroke, they found
themselves compelled to give a place in their thoughts to Robert
Walpole.  If Bolingbroke was the first, and perhaps the most brilliant,
of the great line of parliamentary debaters who have made debate a
moving power in English history, Walpole was the first of that line of
statesmen who, sprung from the class of the "Commoner," have become
leaders of the English Parliament.  In position and in influence,
although not in personal character or accomplishments, Walpole may be
described as the direct predecessor of Peel and Gladstone.  Just two
years before the death of William the Third, Walpole entered Parliament
for the first time.  He married, entered Parliament, and succeeded to
his father's estates in the same year, 1700.  Walpole was only
twenty-four years of age when he took his seat in the House of Commons
as member for Castle Rising in Norfolk.  He was a young country squire
of considerable fortune, and a thorough supporter of the Whig party.
Walpole came into Parliament at that happy time for men of his position
when the change was already taking place which marked the
representative assembly as the controlling power in the State.  The
Government as a direct ruling power was beginning to grow less and less
effective, and the House of Commons beginning to grow more and more
strong.  This change had begun to set in during the Restoration, and by
the time Walpole came to be known in Parliament it was becoming more
and more evident that the Ministers of State were in the future only to
be men intrusted with the duty of carrying out the will of the majority
in the House of Commons.  Before that majority every other power in the
State was ultimately to bend.  The man, therefore, {33} who could by
eloquence, genuine statesmanship, and force of character, or even by
mere tact, secure the adhesion of that majority, had become virtually
the ruler of the State.  But as will easily be seen, his rule even then
was something very different indeed from the rule of an arbitrary
minister.  He would have to satisfy, to convince, to conciliate the
majority.  A single false step, an hour's weakness of purpose, nay,
even a failure for which he was not himself accountable in home or
foreign policy, might deprive him of his influence over the majority,
and might reduce him to comparative insignificance.  Therefore, the
controlling power which a great minister acquired was held by virtue of
the most constant watchfulness, the most unsparing labor, energy, and
devotion, and also in a great measure by the favor of fortune and of
opportunity.

Walpole was a man eminently qualified to obtain influence over the
House of Commons, and to keep it up when he had once obtained it.  No
man could have promised less in the beginning.  That was an acute
observer who divined the genius of Cromwell under Cromwell's homely
exterior when he first came up to Parliament.  Almost as much acuteness
would have been needed to enable any one to see the future
Prime-minister of England and master of the House of Commons in the
plain, unpromising form, the homely, almost stolid countenance, the
ungainly movements and gestures of Walpole.  Walpole was as much of a
rustic as Lord Althorp in times nearer to our own acknowledged himself
to be.  Althorp said he ought to have been a grazier, and that it was
an odd chance which made him Prime-minister.  But the difference was
great.  Walpole had the gifts which make a man prime-minister, despite
his country gentleman or grazier-like qualities.  It was not chance,
but Walpole himself which raised him to the position he came to hold.
Walpole knew nothing and cared nothing about literature and art.  His
great passion was for hunting; his next love was for wine, and his
third for his dinner.  Without any natural gift of eloquence he became
a great debater.  {34} Nature, which seemed to have lavished all her
most luxurious gifts on Bolingbroke, appeared to have pinched and
starved Walpole.  Where Bolingbroke was richest Walpole was poorest;
Bolingbroke's genius required a frequent rein; Walpole's intellect
needed the perpetual spur.  Yet Walpole, with his lack of imagination,
of eloquence, of wit, of humor, and of culture, went farther and did
more than the brilliant Bolingbroke.  It was the old fable of the hare
and the tortoise over again; perhaps it should rather be called a new
version of the old fable.  The farther the hare goes in the wrong way
the more she goes astray, and thus many of Bolingbroke's most rapid
movements only helped the tortoise to get to the goal before him.  In
1708 Walpole, now recognized as an able debater, a clever tactician,
and, above all things, an excellent man of business, was appointed
Secretary at War.  He became at the same time leader of the House of
Commons.  He was one of the managers in the unfortunate impeachment of
the empty-headed High-Church preacher, Dr. Sacheverell.  He resigned
office with the other Whig ministers in 1710.  Harley coming into power
offered him a place in the new administration, which Walpole declined
to accept.  The Tories, reckless and ruthless in their majority,
expelled Walpole from the House in 1712 and imprisoned him in the
Tower.  The charge against him was one of corruption, a charge easily
made in those days against any minister, and which, if high moral
principles were to prevail, might probably have been as easily
sustained as it was made.  Walpole, however, was not worse than his
contemporaries; nor, even if he had been, would the contemporaries have
been inclined to treat his offences very seriously so long as they were
not inspired to act against him by partisan motives.  At the end of the
session he was released, and now, in the closing days of Anne's reign,
all eyes turned to him as a rising man and a certain bulwark of the new
dynasty.

[Sidenote: 1714--The Dean of St. Patrick's]

It would be impossible not to regard Jonathan Swift as one of the
politicians, one of the statesmen, of this age.  {35} Swift was a
politician in the highest sense, although he had seen little of the one
great political arena in which the battles of English parties were
fought out.  He has left it on record that he never heard either
Bolingbroke or Harley speak in Parliament or anywhere in public.  He
was at this time about forty-seven years of age, and had not yet
reached his highest point in politics or in literature.  The "Tale of a
Tub" had been written, but not "Gulliver's Travels;" the tract on "The
Conduct of the Allies," but not the "Drapier's Letters."  Even at this
time he was a power in political life; his was an influence with which
statesmen and even sovereigns had to reckon.  No pen ever served a
cause better than his had served, and was yet to serve, the interests
of the Tory party.  He was probably the greatest English pamphleteer at
a time when the pamphlet had to do all the work of the leading article
and most of the work of the platform.  His churchmen's gown sat
uneasily on him; he was like one of the fighting bishops of the Middle
Ages, with whom armor was the more congenial wear.  He had a fierce and
domineering temper, and indeed out of his strangely bright blue eyes
there was already beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light
of that _saeva indignatio_ which the inscription drawn up by his own
hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart.  The ominous light
at last broke out into the fire of insanity.  We shall meet Swift
again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence.  At
this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in
London trying, and without success, to bring about a reconciliation
between Bolingbroke and Harley; and, finding his efforts ineffectual,
and seeing that troubled times were near at hand, he has quietly
withdrawn to Berkshire.  Before leaving London he wrote the letter to
Lord Peterborough containing the remarkable words with which we have
opened this volume.  It is curious that Swift himself afterwards
ascribed to Harley the saying about the Queen's health and the heedless
{36} behavior of statesmen.  In his "Enquiry into the Behaviour of the
Queen's Last Ministry," dated June, 1715, he tells us that "about
Christmas, 1713," the Treasurer said to him "whenever anything ails the
Queen these people are out of their wits; and yet they are so
thoughtless that as soon as she is well they act as if she were
immortal."  To which Swift adds the following significant comment: "I
had sufficient reason, both before and since, to allow his observation
to be true, and that some share of it might with justice be applied to
himself."  It was at the house of a clergyman at Upper Letcomb, near
Wantage, in Berkshire, that Swift stayed for some time before returning
to his Irish home.  From Letcomb the reader will perhaps note with some
painful interest that Swift wrote to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, whom all
generations will know as Vanessa, a letter, in which he describes his
somewhat melancholy mode of life just then, tells her "this is the
first syllable I have wrote to anybody since you saw me," and adds that
"if this place were ten times worse, nothing shall make me return to
town while things are in the situation I left them."

[Sidenote: 1714--Addison]

Swift, in his heart, trusted neither Bolingbroke nor Harley.  It seems
clear that Lady Masham was under the impression that she had Swift as
her accomplice in the intrigue which finally turned Harley out of
office.  She writes to him while he is at Letcomb a letter which could
not have been written if she were not in that full conviction; and he
does not reply until the whole week's crisis is past and a new
condition of things arisen; and in the reply he commits himself to
nothing.  If he distrusted Bolingbroke he could not help admiring him.
Bolingbroke was the only man then near the court whose genius must not
have been rebuked by Swift.  But Swift must, for all his lavish praises
of Harley, have sometimes secretly despised the hesitating,
time-serving statesman, with whom indecision was a substitute for
prudence, and to be puzzled was to seem to deliberate.  That Harley
should have had the playing of a great political game {37} while Swift
could only look on, is one of the anomalies of history which Swift's
sardonic humor must have appreciated to the full.  Swift took his
revenge when he could by bullying his great official friends now and
then in the roughest fashion.  He knew that they feared him, and
flattered him because they feared him, and he was glad of it, and
hugged himself in the knowledge.  He knew even that at one time they
were uncertain of his fidelity, and took much pains by their praises
and their promises to keep him close at their side; and this, too,
amused him.  He was amused as a tyrant might be at the obvious efforts
of those around him to keep him in good-humor, or as a man conscious of
incipient madness might find malign delight in the anxiety of his
friends to fall in with all his moods and not to cross him in anything
he was pleased to say.

Joseph Addison had a political position and influence on the other side
of the controversy which entitle him to be ranked among the statesmen
of the day.  Only in the year before his tragedy of "Cato" had been
brought out, and it had created an altogether peculiar sensation.  Each
of the two great political parties seized upon the opportunity given by
Gate's pompous political virtue, and claimed him as the spokesman of
their cause.  The Whigs, of course, had the author's authority to
appropriate the applause of Cato, and the Whigs had endeavored to pack
the House in order to secure their claim.  But the Tories were equal to
the occasion.  They appeared in great numbers, Bolingbroke, then
Secretary of State, at their head.  When Cato lamented the extinguished
freedom of his country the Whigs were vociferous in their cheers, and
glared fiercely at the Tories; but when the austere Roman was made to
denounce Caesar and a perpetual dictatorship, the Tories professed to
regard this as a denunciation of Marlborough, and his demand to be made
commander-in-chief for life, and they gave back the cheering with
redoubled vehemence.  At last Bolingbroke's own genius suggested a
master-stroke.  He sent for the actor who played Cato's part, thanked
him in face of the {38} public, and presented him with a purse of gold
because of the service he had done in sustaining the cause of liberty
against the tyranny of a perpetual dictator.

Addison held many high political offices.  He was Secretary to a Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland more than once; he was made Secretary to the
"Regents," as they were called--the commissioners intrusted by George
the First with the task of administration previous to his arrival in
England.  He sat in Parliament; he was appointed Under-secretary of
State, and was soon to be for a while one of the principal Secretaries
of State.  The last number of his _Spectator_ was published at the
close of 1714.  This was indeed still a time when literary men might
hold high political office.  The deadening influence of the Georges had
not yet quite prevailed against letters and art.  Matthew Prior, about
whose poetry the present age troubles itself but little, sat in
Parliament, was employed in many of the most important diplomatic
negotiations of the day, and had not long before this time held the
office of Plenipotentiary in Paris.  Richard Steele not merely sat in
the House of Commons, but was considered of sufficient importance to
deserve the distinction of a formal expulsion from the House because of
certain political diatribes for which he was held responsible and which
the Commons chose to vote libellous.  At the time we are now describing
he had re-entered Parliament, and was still a brilliant penman on the
side of the Whigs.  His career as politician, literary man, and
practical dramatist combined, seems in some sort a foreshadowing of
that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  Gay was appointed Secretary to Lord
Clarendon on a diplomatic mission to Hanover.  Nicholas Rowe, the
author of the "Fair Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's
"Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State.  Rowe's
dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world.  We still
hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib
with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and
would not care even if they did know.




{39}

CHAPTER III.

"LOST FOR WANT OF SPIRIT."

[Sidenote: 1714--The Duke of Ormond]

When Bolingbroke found himself in full power he began at once to open the
way for some attempt at the restoration of the Stuart dynasty.  He put
influential Jacobites into important offices in England and Scotland; he
made the Duke of Ormond Warden of the Cinque Ports, that authority
covering exactly the stretch of coast at some point of which it might be
expected that James Stuart would land if he were to make an attempt for
the crown at all.  Ormond was a weak and vain man, but he was a man of
personal integrity.  He had been sent out to Flanders to succeed the
greatest commander of the age as captain-general of the allied armies
there, and he had naturally played a poor and even ridiculous part.  The
Jacobites in England still, however, held him in much honor, identified
his name, no one exactly knew why, with the cause of High-Church, and
elected him the hero and the leader of the movement for the restoration
of the exiled family.  Bolingbroke committed Scotland to the care of the
Earl of Mar, a Jacobite, a personal friend of James Stuart, and a votary
of High-Church.  It can hardly be supposed that in making such an
appointment Bolingbroke had not in his mind the possibility of a rising
of the Highland clans against the Hanoverian succession.  But it is none
the less evident that Bolingbroke was as usual thinking far more of
himself than of his party, and that his preparations were made not so
much with a view to restoring the Stuarts as with the object of securing
himself against any chance that might befall.

{40}

Had Bolingbroke been resolved in his heart to bring back the Stuarts, had
he been ready, as many other men were, to risk all in that cause, to
stand or fall by it, he might, so far as one can see, have been
successful.  It is not too much to say that on the whole the majority of
the English people were in favor of the Stuarts.  Certainly the majority
would have preferred a Stuart to the dreaded and disliked German prince
from Herrenhausen.  For many years the birthday of the Stuart prince had
been celebrated as openly and as enthusiastically in English cities as if
it were the birthday of the reigning sovereign.  James's adherents were
everywhere--in the court, in the camp, on the bench, in Parliament, in
the drawing-rooms, the coffee-houses, and the streets.  Bolingbroke had
only to present him at a critical moment, and say "Here is your king,"
and James Stuart would have been king.  Such a crisis came in France in
our own days.  There was a moment, after the fall of the Second Empire,
when the Count de Chambord had only to present himself in Versailles in
order to be accepted as King of France, not King of the French.  But the
Count de Chambord put away his chance deliberately; he would not consent
to give up the white flag of legitimacy and accept the tricolor.  He
acted on principle, knowing the forfeit of his decision.  The chances of
James Stuart were frittered away in half-heartedness, insincerity, and
folly.  While Bolingbroke and his confederates were caballing and
counselling, and paltering and drinking, the Whig statesmen were maturing
their plans, and when the moment came for action it found them ready to
act.

[Sidenote: 1714--The Council at Kensington]

The success was accomplished by a _coupe d'état_ on Friday, July 30,
1714.  The Queen was suddenly stricken with apoplexy.  A Privy Council
was to meet that morning at Kensington Palace.  The Privy Council meeting
was composed then, according to the principle which prevails still, only
of such councillors as had received a special summons.  In truth, the
meeting of the Privy Council {41} in Anne's time was like a Cabinet
meeting of our days, and was intended by those who convened it to be just
as strictly composed of official members.  But, on the other hand, there
was no law or rule forbidding any member of the Privy Council, whether
summoned or not, to present himself at the meeting.  Bolingbroke was in
his place, and so was the Duke of Ormond, and so were other Jacobite
peers.  The Duke of Shrewsbury had taken his seat, as he was entitled to
do, being one of the highest officers of State.  Shrewsbury was known to
be a loyal adherent of the Act of Settlement and the Hanoverian
Succession.  He was a remarkable man with a remarkable history.  His
father was the unfortunate Shrewsbury who was killed in a duel by the
Duke of Buckingham.  The duel arose out of the duke's open intrigue with
the Countess of Shrewsbury, and the story went at the time that the lady
herself, dressed as a page, held her lover's horse while he fought with
and killed her husband.  Charles Talbot, the son, was brought up a
Catholic, but in his twentieth year accepted the arguments of Tillotson
and became a Protestant.  He was Lord Chamberlain to James the Second,
but lost all faith in James, and went over to Holland to assist William
of Nassau with counsel and with money.  When William became King of
England he made Lord Shrewsbury a Privy Councillor and Secretary of
State, created him first marquis and afterwards duke, and called him, in
tribute to his great popularity, the King of Hearts.  He was for a short
time British Ambassador at the Court of France, and then Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland.  He had flickered a little between the Whigs and the Tories
at different periods of his career, and in 1710 he actually joined the
Tory party.  But it was well known to every one that if any question
should arise between the House of Hanover and the Stuarts, he would stand
firmly by the appointed succession.  He was a man of undoubted integrity
and great political sagacity; he had a handsome face, although he had
lost one of his eyes by an accident when riding, and {42} he had a
stately presence.  His gifts and graces were said to have so much
attracted the admiration of Queen Mary that if she had outlived the King
she would probably have married Shrewsbury.  The condition of the
political world around him had impressed him with so little reverence for
courts and cabinets, that he used to say if he had a son he would rather
bring him up a cobbler than a courtier, and a hangman than a statesman.
Bolingbroke once kindly said of him, "I never knew a man so formed to
please, and to gain upon the affections while challenging the esteem."

[Sidenote: 1714--The Dukes of Somerset and Argyll]

Before there was time to get to any of the business of the council the
doors were opened, and the Duke of Argyll and the Duke of Somerset
entered the room.  The Duke of Argyll, soldier, statesman, orator, shrewd
self-seeker, represented the Whigs of Scotland; the honest, proud,
pompous Duke of Somerset those of England.  The two intruders, as they
were assuredly regarded by the majority of those present, announced that
they had heard the news of the Queen's danger, and that they felt
themselves bound to hasten to the meeting of the council, although not
summoned thither, in order that they might be able to afford advice and
assistance.

The Duke of Somerset was in many respects the most powerful nobleman in
England.  But all his rank, his dignity, and his influence, could not
protect him against the ridicule and contempt which his feeble character,
his extravagant pride, and his grotesquely haughty demeanor, invariably
brought upon him.  He was probably the most ridiculous man of his time;
he had the pomp of an Eastern pasha without the grave dignity which
Eastern manners confer.  He was like the pasha of a burlesque or an
_opéra bouffe_.  His servants had to obey him by signs; he disdained to
give orders by voice.  His first wife was Elizabeth Percy, the virgin
widow of Lord Ogle and Tom Thynne of Longleat, the beloved of Charles
John Königsmark, the "Carrots" of Dean Swift.  While she was Duchess of
Somerset and Queen Anne's close friend, Swift, who {43} hated her, hinted
pretty broadly that she was privy to Königsmark's plot to murder Tom
Thynne, and the Duchess revenged herself by keeping the Dean out of the
bishopric of Hereford.  When she died, Somerset married Lady Charlotte
Finch, one of the "Black Funereal Finches," celebrated by Sir Charles
Hanbury Williams.  Once, when she tapped him on the shoulder with a fan,
he rebuked her angrily: "My first wife was a Percy, and she never took
such a liberty."  When he had occasion to travel, all the roads on or
near which he had to pass were scoured by a vanguard of outriders, whose
business it was to protect him, not merely from obstruction and delay,
but from the gaze of the vulgar herd who might be anxious to feast their
eyes upon his gracious person.  The statesmen of his own time, while they
made use of him, seem to have vied with each other in protestations of
their contempt for his abilities and his character.  Swift declared that
Somerset had not "a grain of sense of any kind."  Marlborough several
times professed an utter contempt for Somerset's abilities or discretion,
and was indignant at the idea that he ever could have made use of such a
man in any work requiring confidence or judgment.  Yet Somerset,
ridiculous as he was, came to be a personage of importance in the crisis
now impending over England.  He was, at all events, a man whose word
could be trusted, and who, when he promised to take a certain course,
would be sure to follow it.  That very pride which made him habitually
ridiculous raised him on great occasions above any suspicion of mercenary
or personal views in politics.  One of his contemporaries describes him
as "so humorsome, proud, and capricious, that he was rather a ministry
spoiler than a ministry maker."  In the present condition of things,
however, he could be made use of for the purpose of making one ministry
after spoiling another.  When he carried his great personal influence
over to the side of the Hanoverian accession, and joined with Argyll and
with Shrewsbury, it must have been evident, to men like Bolingbroke at
least, that the enterprises of the Jacobites {44} would require rare
good-fortune and marvellous energy to bring them to any success.

[Sidenote: 1714--The coup d'état]

Poetry and romance have shown to the world the most favorable side of the
character of John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, who was then at least as
powerful in Scotland as the Duke of Somerset in England.  Pope describes
him as

  Argyll, the State's whole thunder born to wield,
  And shake alike the senate and the field.

Scott has drawn a charming picture of him in the "Heart of Mid-Lothian"
as the patriotic Scotchman, whose heart must "be cold as death can make
it when it does not warm to the tartan"--the kind and generous protector
of Jeanie Deans.  Argyll was a man of many gifts.  He was a soldier, a
statesman, and an orator.  He had charged at Ramilies and Oudenarde, had
rallied a shrinking column at Malplaquet, and served in the sieges of
Ostend and Lille and Ghent.  His eloquence in the House of Lords is said
to have combined the freshness of youth, the strength of manhood, and the
wisdom of old age.  Lord Hervey, who is not given to praise, admits that
Argyll was "gallant, and a good officer, with very good parts, and much
more reading and knowledge than generally falls to the share of a man
educated a soldier, and born to so great a title and fortune."  But
Hervey also says that Argyll was "haughty, passionate, and peremptory,"
and it cannot be doubted that he was capable of almost any political
tergiversation, or even treachery, which could have served his purpose;
and his purpose was always his own personal interest.  He changed his
opinions with the most unscrupulous promptitude; he gave an opinion one
way and acted another way without hesitation, and without a blush.  He
was always equal to the emergency; he had the full courage of his
non-convictions.  He was the grandson of that Argyll whose last sleep
before his execution is the subject of Mr. Ward's well-known painting;
his great-grandfather, too, gave up his life on the scaffold.  He did not
want any of the courage of his ancestors; but he was {45} likely to take
care that his advancement should not be to the block or the gallows.  At
such a moment as this which we are now describing his adhesion and his
action were of inestimable value to the Hanoverian cause.

When these two great peers entered the council-chamber a moment of
perplexity and confusion followed.  Bolingbroke and Ormond had probably
not even yet a full understanding of the meaning of this dramatic
performance, and what consequences it was likely to insure.  While they
sat silent, according to some accounts, the Duke of Shrewsbury arose, and
gravely thanking the Whig peers for their courtesy in attending the
council, accepted their co-operation in the name of all the others
present.  They took their places at the council-table, and St. John and
Ormond must have begun to feel that all was over.  The intrusion of the
Whig peers was a daring and a significant step in itself, but when the
Duke of Shrewsbury welcomed their appearance and accepted their
co-operation, it was clear to the Jacobites that all was part of a
prearranged scheme, to which resistance would now be in vain.  The new
visitors to the council called for the reports of the royal physician,
and having received and read them, suggested that the Duke of Shrewsbury
should be recommended to the Queen as Lord High Treasurer.  St. John did
not venture to resist the proposal; he could only sit with as much
appearance of composure as he was enabled to maintain, and accept the
suggestion of his enemies.  A deputation of the peers, with the Duke of
Shrewsbury among them, at once sought and obtained an interview with the
dying Queen.  She gave the Lord High Treasurer's staff into Shrewsbury's
hand, and bade him, it is said, in that voice of singular sweetness and
melody which was almost her only charm, to use it for the good of her
people.

The office of Lord High Treasurer is now always put into what is called
commission; its functions are managed by several ministers, of whom the
First Lord of the Treasury is one, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer
{46} another.  In all recent times the First Lord of the Treasury has
usually been Prime-minister, and his office therefore corresponds fairly
enough with that which was called the office of Lord High Treasurer in
earlier days.  It was clear that when the Duke of Shrewsbury became Lord
High Treasurer at such a junction he would stand firmly by the Protestant
succession, and would oppose any kind of scheming in the cause of the
exiled Stuarts.

[Sidenote: 1714--Whigs in possession]

Some writers near to that time, and Mr. Lecky among more recent
historians, are of opinion that it was not either of the intruding dukes
who proposed that Shrewsbury should be appointed Treasurer.  Mr. Lecky is
even of opinion that it may have been Bolingbroke himself who made the
suggestion.  That seems to us extremely probable.  All accounts agree in
confirming the idea that Bolingbroke was taken utterly by surprise when
the great Whig dukes entered the council-chamber.  The moment he saw that
Shrewsbury welcomed them he probably made up his mind to the fact that an
entirely new condition of things had arisen, and that all his previous
calculations were upset.  He was not a man to remain long dumfounded by
any change in the state of affairs.  It would have been quite consistent
with his character and his general course of action if, when he saw the
meaning of the crisis, he had at once resolved to make the best of it and
to try to keep himself still at the head of affairs.  In that spirit
nothing is more likely than that he should have pushed himself to the
front once more, and proposed, as Lord High Treasurer, the man whom, but
for the sudden and overwhelming pressure brought to bear upon him, he
would have tried to keep out of all influence and power at such a moment.

The appointment of the Duke of Shrewsbury settled the question.  The
crisis was virtually over.  The Whig statesmen at once sent out summonses
to all the members of the Privy Council living anywhere near London.
That same afternoon another meeting of the council was held.  Somers
himself, the great Whig leader whose {47} services had made the party
illustrious in former reigns, and whose fame sheds a lustre on them even
to this hour--Somers, aged, infirm, decaying as he was in body and in
mind--hastened to attend the summons, and to lend his strength and his
authority to the measures on which his colleagues had determined.  The
council ordered the concentration of several regiments in and near
London.  They recalled troops from Ostend, and sent a fleet to sea.
General Stanhope, a soldier and statesman of whom we shall hear more, was
prepared, if necessary, to take possession of the Tower and clap the
leading Jacobites into it, to obtain possession of all the outports, and,
in short, to act as military dictator, authorized to anticipate
revolution and to keep the succession safe.  In a word, the fate of the
Stuarts was sealed.  Bolingbroke was checkmated; the Chevalier de St.
George would have put to sea in vain.  Marlborough was on his way to
England, and there was nothing to do but to wait till the breath was out
of Queen Anne's body, and proclaim George the Elector King of England.

The time of waiting was not long.  Anne sank into death on August 1,
1714, and the heralds proclaimed that "the high and mighty Prince George,
Elector of Brunswick and Luneburg, is, by the death of Queen Anne of
blessed memory, become our lawful and rightful liege lord, King of Great
Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith."  This "King of
France" was lucky enough not to come to his throne until the conclusion
of a long war against the King of France who lived in Versailles.  The
"Defender of the Faith" was just now making convenient arrangements that
his mistresses should follow him as speedily as possible when he should
have to take his unwilling way to his new dominions.

On August 3d Bolingbroke wrote a letter to Dean Swift, in which he says,
"The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday.
What a world this is, and how does fortune banter us!"  In other {48}
words, Bolingbroke tells Swift that full success seemed within his grasp
on Tuesday, and was suddenly torn away from him on Sunday.  But the most
characteristic part of the letter is a passage which throws a very blaze
of light over the unconquerable levity of the man.  "I have lost all by
the death of the Queen but my spirit; and, I protest to you, I feel that
increase upon me.  The Whigs are a pack of Jacobites; that shall be the
cry in a month, if you please."  No sooner is one web of intrigue swept
away than Bolingbroke sets to work to weave a new one on a different
plan.  Nothing can subdue those high animal spirits; nothing can physic
that selfishness; nothing can fix that levity to a recognition of the
realities of things.  Bolingbroke has not a word now about the cause of
the Stuarts; for the moment he cannot think of that.  His new scheme is
to make out that his enemies were, after all, the true Jacobites; he will
checkmate them that way--"in a month, if you please."  On the very same
day Mr. John Barber, the printer of some of Swift's pamphlets, afterwards
an Alderman and Lord Mayor, writes to Swift and tells him, speaking of
Bolingbroke, that "when my lord gave me the letter" (to be enclosed to
Swift) "he said he hoped you would come up and help to save the
constitution, which, with a little good management, might be kept in Tory
hands."  The chill, clear common-sense of Swift's answer might have
impressed even Bolingbroke, but did not.

[Sidenote: 1714--Simon Harcourt]

One among the Tories, indeed, would have had the courage to forestall the
Whigs and their proclamation.  This one man was a priest, and not a
soldier.  Atterbury, the eloquent Bishop of Rochester, came to
Bolingbroke, and urged him to proclaim King James at Charing Cross,
offering himself to head a procession in his lawn sleeves if Bolingbroke
would only act on his advice.  But for the moment Bolingbroke could only
complain of fortune's banter, and plan out new intrigues for the
restoration, not of the Stuarts, but of the Tory party--that is to say,
of {49} himself.  His refusal wrung from Atterbury the declaration that
the best cause in England was lost for want of spirit.

Parliament assembled, and on August 5th the Commons were summoned to the
Bar of the House of Lords, and the Lord Chancellor made a speech in the
name of the Lords of the Regency.  He told the Lords and Commons that the
Privy Council appointed by George, Elector of Hanover, had proclaimed
that prince as the lawful and rightful sovereign of these realms.  Both
Houses agreed to send addresses to the King, expressing their duty and
affection, and the House of Commons passed a bill granting to his Majesty
the same civil list as that which Queen Anne had enjoyed, but with
additional clauses for the payment of arrears due to the Hanoverian
troops who had been in the service of Great Britain.  The Lord
Chancellor, who had just addressed the House of Lords and the Commoners
standing at the Bar, was himself a remarkable illustration of the
politics and the principles of that age.  Simon Harcourt had been Lord
Chancellor in the later years of Queen Anne's life.  His appointment
ended with her death, but he was re-appointed by the Lords of the Regency
in the name of the new sovereign, and he was again sworn in as Lord
Chancellor on August 3, 1714, "in Court at his house aforesaid, Lincoln's
Inn Fields, _Anno Primo, Georgii Regis_."  He was one of the Lords
Justices by virtue of his office, and as such had already taken the oath
of allegiance to the new sovereign, and of abjuration to James.  Lord
Harcourt had been throughout his whole career not only a very devoted
Tory, but in later years a positive Jacobite.  He was a highly
accomplished speaker, a man of great culture, and a lawyer of
considerable, if not pre-eminent, attainments.  He was still
comparatively young for a public man of such position.  Born in 1660, he
entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1675, was admitted to the Inner
Temple in 1676, and called to the Bar in 1683.  He became member of
Parliament for Abingdon in 1690, and soon rose to great distinction in
the {50} House of Commons as well as at the Bar.  He conducted the
impeachment of the great Lord Somers, and was knighted and made
Solicitor-General by Anne in 1702.  He became Attorney-General shortly
after.  He conducted, in 1703, the prosecution of Defoe for his famous
satirical tract, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters."  Harcourt threw
himself into the prosecution with the fervor and the bitterness of a
sectary and a partisan.  He made a most vehement and envenomed speech
against Defoe; he endeavored to stir up every religious prejudice and
passion in favor of the prosecution.  Coke had scarcely shown more of the
animosity of a partisan in prosecuting Raleigh than Simon Harcourt did in
prosecuting Defoe.  In 1709-10 Harcourt was the leading counsel for
Sacheverell, and received the Great Seal in 1710, becoming, as the phrase
then was, "Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Great Britain."  A whole
year, wanting only a few days, passed before he was raised to the peerage
as Lord Harcourt.  He acted as Speaker of the House of Lords before he
became a peer and a member of the House, and even had on one occasion to
express on behalf of the Peers their thanks to Lord Peterborough for his
services in Spain.  In 1713 he became Lord Chancellor of England.  During
all this time he had been a most devoted adherent of the Stuarts, and
during the later period he was an open and avowed Jacobite.  He had
opposed strongly the oaths of abjuration which now, as Lord Chief
Justice, he had both taken and administered.  Almost his first
conspicuous act as a member of Parliament was to protest against the Bill
which required the oath Of abjuration of James and his descendants, and
he maintained consistently the same principles and the same policy till
the death of Queen Anne.  There can be no doubt that if just then any
movement had been made on behalf of the Stuarts, with the slightest
chance of success, Lord Chancellor Harcourt would have thrown himself
into it heart and soul.  Nevertheless, he took the oath of allegiance and
the oath of abjuration; he professed to be a loyal subject of the King,
{51} whose person and principles he despised and detested, and he swore
to abjure forever all adhesion to that dynasty which with all his heart
he would have striven, if he could, to restore to the throne of England.
Lord Campbell, in his "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," says of Harcourt,
"I do not consider his efforts to restore the exiled Stuarts morally
inconsistent with the engagements into which he had entered to the
existing Government; and although there were loud complaints against him
for at last sending in his adhesion to the House of Hanover, it should be
recollected that the cause of the Stuarts had then become desperate, and
that instead of betraying he did everything in his power to screen his
old associates."  The cause of the Stuarts had not become, even then, so
utterly desperate as to prevent many brave men from laying down their
lives for it.  Thirty years had to pass away before the last blow was
struck for that cause of the Stuarts which Harcourt by solemn oath
abjured forever.  Such credit as he is entitled to have, because he
protected rather than betrayed his old associates, we are free to give
him, and it stands a significant illustration of the political morality
of the time that such comparative credit is all that his enthusiastic
biographer ventures to claim for him.

[Sidenote: 1714--Lords and Commons]

The House of Lords had then two hundred and seven members, many of whom,
being Catholics, were not permitted to take any part in public business.
That number of Peers is about in just proportion to the population of
England as it was then when compared with the Peers and the population of
England at present.  In the House of Commons there were at the same time
five hundred and fifty-eight members.  England sent in five hundred and
thirteen, and Scotland, which had lately accepted the union, returned
forty-five.  It need hardly be said that at that time Ireland had her own
Parliament, and sent no members to Westminster.  A great number of the
county family names in the House of Commons were just the same as those
which we see at present.  The Stanhopes, the Lowthers, the Lawsons, the
Herberts, the Harcourts, {52} the Cowpers, the Fitzwilliams, the Cecils,
the Grevilles; all these, and many others, were represented in Parliament
then as they are represented in Parliament now.  Then, as more lately,
the small boroughs had the credit of returning, mostly of course through
family influence, men of eminence other than political, who happened to
sit in the House of Commons.  Steele sat for Stockbridge, in "Southampton
County," as Hampshire was then always called, Addison for Malmesbury,
Prior for East Grinstead.  There were no reports of the debates, nor
printed lists of the divisions.  Questions of foreign policy were
sometimes discussed with doors strictly closed against all strangers,
just as similar questions are occasionally, and not infrequently,
discussed in the Senate of the United States at present.  The pamphlet
supplied in some measure the place of the newspaper report and the
newspaper leading article.  Some twelve years later than this the
brilliant pen of Bolingbroke, who, if he had lived at a period nearer to
our own, might have been an unrivalled writer of leading articles, was
able to obtain for the series of pamphlets called "The Craftsman" a
circulation greater than that ever enjoyed by the _Spectator_.  Pulteney
co-operated with him for a time in the work.  Steele, as we have said,
had been expelled from the House of Commons for his pamphlet "The
Crisis."  The caricature which played so important a part in political
controversy all through the reigns of the Georges had just come into
recognized existence.  Countless caricatures of Bolingbroke, of Walpole,
of Shrewsbury, of Marlborough, began to fly about London.  Scurrilous
ballads were of course in great demand, nor was the supply inadequate to
the demand.

[Sidenote: 1714--Malbrouck de Retour]

One of the most successful of these compositions described the return of
the Duke of Marlborough to London.  On the very day of the Queen's death
Marlborough landed at Dover.  He came quickly on to London, and there,
according to the descriptions given by his admirers, he was received like
a restored sovereign returning to his throne.  A procession of two
hundred gentlemen on {53} horseback met him on the road to London, and
the procession was joined shortly after by a long train of carriages.  As
he entered London the enthusiasm deepened with every foot of the way; the
streets were lined with crowds of applauding admirers.  Marlborough's
carriage broke down near Temple Bar, and he had to exchange it for
another.  The little incident was only a new cause for demonstrations of
enthusiasm.  It was a fresh delight to see the hero more nearly than he
could be seen through his carriage-windows.  It was something to have
delayed him for a moment, and to have compelled him to stand among the
crowd of those who were pressing round to express their homage.  This was
the Whig description.  According to Tory accounts Marlborough was more
hissed than huzzaed, and at Temple Bar the hissing was loudest.  The work
of the historian would be comparatively easy if eye-witnesses could only
agree as to any, even the most important, facts.

Enthusiastic Whig pamphleteers called upon their countrymen to love and
honor their invincible hero, and declared that the wretch would be
esteemed a disgrace to humanity, and should be transmitted to posterity
with infamy, who would dare to use his tongue or pen against him.  Such
wretches, however, were found, and did not seem in the least to dread the
infamy which was promised them.  The scurrilous ballad of which we have
already spoken was by one Ned Ward, a publican and rhymester, and it
pictured the entry of the duke in verses after the fashion of Hudibras.
It depicted the procession as made up of

  Frightful troops of thin-jawed zealots,
  Curs'd enemies to kings and prelates;

and declared that those "champions of religious errors" made London seem

      As if the prince of terrors
  Was coming with his dismal train
  To plague the city once again.

The memory of what the Plague had done in London was still green enough
to give bitter force to this allusion.

{54}

Marlborough could have afforded to despise what Hotspur calls the
"metre-ballad-mongers," but his pride received a check and chill not
easily to be got over.  When fairly rid of his enthusiastic followers and
admirers he went to the House of Lords almost at once, and took the
oaths; but he did not remain there.  In truth, he soon found himself
bitterly disappointed; not with the people--they could not have been more
enthusiastic than they were--but with the new ruling power.  Immediately
after the death of the Queen, and even before the proclamation of the new
sovereign had taken place, the Hanoverian resident in London handed to
the Privy Council a letter from George, in George's own handwriting,
naming the men who were to act in combination with the seven great
officers of State as lords justices.  The power to make this nomination
was provided for George by the Regency Act.  This document contained the
names of eighteen of the principal Whig peers; the Duke of Shrewsbury,
the Duke of Somerset, and the Duke of Argyll were among them; so, too,
were Lords Cowper, Halifax, and Townshend.  It was noted with wonder that
the illustrious name of Somers did not appear on the list, nor did that
of Marlborough, nor that of Marlborough's son-in-law, Lord Sunderland.
It is likely that the omission of these names was only made in the first
instance because George and his advisers were somewhat afraid of his
getting into the hands of a sort of dictatorship--a dictatorship in
commission, as it might be called, made up of three or four influential
men.  The King afterwards hastened to show every attention to Marlborough
and Somers and Sunderland, and he soon restored Marlborough to all his
public offices.  But George seems to have had a profound and a very
well-justified distrust of Marlborough.  Though he honored him with marks
of respect and attention, though he restored him to the great position he
had held in the State, yet the King never allowed Marlborough to suppose
that he really had regained his former influence in court and political
life.  Marlborough was shelved, and he already knew it, and bitterly
complained of it.




{55}

CHAPTER IV.

THE KING COMES.

[Sidenote: 1714--Hanover]

"The old town of Hanover," says Thackeray, "must look still pretty much
as in the time when George Louis left it.  The gardens and pavilions of
Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old
Electress Sophia fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a
few weeks to the tomb James the Second's daughter, whose death made way
for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. . . .  You may see at
Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre in which the Platens danced and
performed masks and sang before the Elector and his sons.  There are
the very fauns and dryads of stone still glimmering through the
brandies, still grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in the
days when painted nymphs hung garlands round them, appeared under their
leafy arcades with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns, descended
from 'machines' in the guise of Diana or Minerva, and delivered immense
allegorical compliments to the princes returned home from the
campaign."  Herrenhausen, indeed, is changed but little since those
days of which Thackeray speaks.  But although not many years have
passed since Thackeray went to visit Hanover before delivering his
lectures on "The Four Georges," Hanover itself has undergone much
alteration.  If one of the Georges could now return to his ancestral
capital he would indeed be bewildered at the great new squares, the
rows of tall vast shops and warehouses, the spacious railway-station,
penetrated to every corner at night by the keen electric light.  But in
passing from Hanover to Herrenhausen one goes back, in a short drive,
from the {56} days of the Emperor William of Germany to the days of
George the Elector.  Herrenhausen, the favorite residence of the
Electors of Hanover, is but a short distance from the capital.
Thackeray speaks of it as an ugly place, and it certainly has not many
claims to the picturesque.  But it is full of a certain curious
half-melancholy interest, and well fitted to be the cradle and the home
of a decaying Hanoverian dynasty.  In its galleries one may spend many
an hour, not unprofitably, in studying the faces of all the men and
women who are famous, notorious, or infamous in connection with the
history of Hanover.  The story of that dynasty has more than one
episode not unlike that of the unfortunate Sophia Dorothea and
Königsmark, her lover.  A good many grim legends haunt the place and
give interest to some of the faces, otherwise insipid enough, which
look out of the heavy frames and the formal court-dresses of the
picture-gallery.

[Sidenote: 1714--The entry into London]

On the evening of August 5, 1714, four days after Queen Anne's death,
Lord Clarendon, the lately appointed English Minister at the Court of
Hanover, set out for the palace of Herrenhausen to bear to the new King
of Great Britain the tidings of Queen Anne's death.  About two o'clock
in the morning he entered the royal apartments of the ungenial and
sleepy George, and, kneeling, did homage to him as King of Great
Britain.  George took the announcement of his new rank without even a
semblance of gratification.  He had made up his mind to endure it, and
that was all.  He was too stolid, or lazy, or sincere to affect the
slightest personal interest in the news.  He lingered in Hanover as
long as he decently could, and sauntered for many a day through the
prim, dull, and orderly walks of Herrenhausen.  He behaved very much in
the fashion of the convict in Prior's poem, who, when the cart was
ready and the halter adjusted,

  Often took leave but seemed loath to depart.


August 31st had arrived before George began his journey to England.
But he did one or two good-natured things {57} before leaving Hanover;
he ordered the abolition of certain duties on provisions, and he had
the insolvent debtors throughout the Electorate discharged from
custody.  On September 5th he reached the Hague, and here another
stoppage took place.  The exertion of travelling from Hanover to the
Hague had been so great that George apparently required a respite from
September 5th until the 16th.  On the 16th he embarked, and reached
Greenwich two days after.  He was accompanied to England by his two
leading favorites--the ladies whose charms we have already described.
For many days after his arrival in London the King did little but
lament his exile from his beloved Herrenhausen, and tell every one he
met how cordially he disliked England, its people, and its ways.
Fortunately, perhaps, in this respect, for the popularity of his
Majesty, George's audience was necessarily limited.  He spoke no
English, and hardly any of those who surrounded him could speak German,
while some of his ministers did not even speak French.  Sir Robert
Walpole tried to get on with him by talking Latin.  Even the English
oysters George could not abide; he grumbled long at their queer taste,
their want of flavor, and it was some time before his devoted
attendants discovered that their monarch liked stale oysters with a
good strong rankness about them.  No time was lost, when this important
discovery had been made, in procuring oysters to the taste of the King,
and one of George's objections to the throne of England was easily
removed.

There was naturally great curiosity to see the King, and a writer of
the time gives an amusing account of the efforts made to obtain a sight
of him.  "A certain person has paid several guineas for the benefit of
Cheapside conduit, and another has almost given twenty years' purchase
for a shed in Stocks Market.  Some lay out great sums in shop-windows,
others sell lottery tickets to hire cobblers' stalls, and here and
there a vintner has received earnest for the use of his sign-post.
King Charles the Second's horse at the aforesaid market is to carry
double, {58} and his Majesty at Charing Cross is to ride between two
draymen.  Some have made interest to climb chimneys, and others to be
exalted to the airy station of a steeple."

[Sidenote: 1714--"Under which King?"]

The princely pageant which people were so eager to see lives still in a
print issued by "Tim. Jordan and Tho. Bakenwell at Ye Golden Lion in
Fleet Street."  We are thus gladdened by a sight of the splendid
procession winding its way through St. James's Park to St. James's
Palace.  There are musketeers and trumpeters on horseback; there are
courtly gentlemen on horse and afoot, and great lumbering, gilded,
gaudily-bedizened carriages with four and six steeds, and more
trumpeters, on foot this time, and pursuivants and heralds--George was
fond of heralds, and created two of his own, Hanover and
Gloucester--and then the royal carriage, with its eight prancing
horses, and the Elector of Hanover and King of England inside, with his
hand to his heart, and still more soldiers following, both horse and
foot, and, of course, a loyal populace everywhere waving their
three-cornered hats and huzzaing with all their might.

The day of the entry was not without its element of tragedy.  In the
crowd Colonel Chudleigh called Mr. Charles Aldworth, M.P. for New
Windsor, a Jacobite.  There was a quarrel, the gentlemen went to
Marylebone Fields, exchanged a few passes, and Mr. Aldworth was almost
immediately killed.  This was no great wonder, for we learn, in a
letter from Lord Berkeley of Stratton, preserved in the Wentworth
Papers, describing the duel, that Mr. Aldworth had such a weakness in
his arms from childhood that he could not stretch them out; a fact,
Lord Berkeley hints, by no means unknown to his adversary.

Horace Walpole has left a description of King George which is worth
citation.  "The person of the King," he says, "is as perfect in my
memory as if I saw him yesterday; it was that of an elderly man, rather
pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall, of an aspect
rather good than august, with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat
and breeches of snuff-colored cloth, with stockings of the {59} same
color, and a blue ribbon over all."  George was fond of heavy dining
and heavy drinking.  He often dined at Sir Robert Walpole's, at
Richmond Hill, where he used to drink so much punch that even the
Duchess of Kendal endeavored to restrain him, and received in return
some coarse admonition in German.  He was shy and reserved in general,
and he detested all the troublesome display of royalty.  He hated going
to the theatre in state, and he did not even care to show himself in
front of the royal box; he preferred to sit in another and less
conspicuous box with the Duchess of Kendal and Lady Walsingham.  On the
whole, it would seem as if the inclination of the English people for
the Hanoverian dynasty was about to be tried by the severest test that
fate could well ordain.  A dull, stolid, and profligate king, fond of
drink and of low conversation, without dignity of appearance or manner,
without sympathy of any kind with the English people and English ways,
and without the slightest knowledge of the English language, was
suddenly thrust upon the people and proclaimed their king.  Fortunately
for the Hanoverian dynasty, the English people, as a whole, had grown
into a mood of comparative indifference as to who should rule them so
long as they were let alone.  It was impossible that a strong feeling
of loyalty to any House should burn just then in the breast of the
great majority of the English people.  Those who were devoted to the
Stuarts and those who detested the Stuarts felt strongly on the subject
this way or that, and they would therefore admire or detest King George
according to their previously acquired political principles.  But to
the ordinary Englishman it only seemed that England had lately been
trying a variety of political systems and a variety of rulers; that one
seemed to succeed hardly better than the other; that so long as no
great breakdown in the system took place, it mattered little whether a
Stuart or a Brunswick was in temporary possession of the throne.
Within a comparatively short space of time the English Parliament had
deposed Charles the First; the Protectorate had been {60} tried under
Cromwell; the Restoration had been brought about by the adroitness of
Monk; James the Second, a Catholic, had come to the throne, and had
been driven off the throne by William the Third; William had
established a new dynasty and a new system, which was no sooner
established than it had to be succeeded by the introduction to the
throne of one of the daughters of the displaced House of Stuart.
England had not had time to become attached, or even reconciled, to any
of these succeeding rulers, and the English people in general--the
English people outside the circle of courts and Parliament and
politics--were well satisfied when George came to the throne to let any
one wear the crown who did not make himself and his system absolutely
intolerable to the nation.

[Sidenote: 1714--"A King and no King."]

The old-fashioned romantic principle of personal loyalty, unconditional
loyalty--the loyalty of Divine right--was already languishing unto
death.  It was now seen for the last time in effective contrast with
what we may call the modern principle of loyalty.  The modern principle
of loyalty to a sovereign is that which, having decided in favor of
monarchical government and of an hereditary succession, resolves to
abide by that choice, and for the sake of the principle and of the
country to pay all respect and homage to the person of the chosen
ruler.  But the loyalty which still clung to the fading fortunes of the
Stuarts was very different from this, and came into direct contrast
with the feelings shown by the majority of the people of England
towards the House of Hanover.  Though faults and weaknesses beyond
number, weaknesses which were even worse than actual faults, tainted
the character and corroded the moral fibre of every successive Stuart
prince, the devotees of personal loyalty still clung with sentiment and
with passion to the surviving representatives of the fallen dynasty.
Poets and balladists, singers in the streets and singers on the
mountain-side, were, even in these early days of George the First,
inspired with songs of loyal homage in favor of the son of James the
Second.  Men {61} and women in thousands, not only among the wild
romantic hills of Scotland, but in prosaic North of England towns, and
yet more prosaic London streets and alleys, were ready, if the occasion
offered, to die for the Stuart cause.  Despite the evidence of their
own senses, men and women would still endow any representative of the
Stuarts with all the virtues and talents and graces that might become
an ideal prince of romance.  No one thought in this way of the
successors of William the Third.  No one had had any particular
admiration for Queen Anne, either as a sovereign or as a woman; nobody
pretended to feel any thrill of sentimental emotion towards portly,
stolid, sensual George the First.  About the King, personally, hardly
anybody cared anything.  The mass of the English people who accepted
him and adhered to him did so because they understood that he
represented a certain quiet homely principle in politics which would
secure tranquillity and stability to the country.  They did not ask of
him that he should be noble or gifted or dignified, or even virtuous.
They asked of him two things in especial: first, that he would maintain
a steady system of government; and next, that he would in general let
the country alone.  This is the feeling which must be taken into
account if we would understand how it came to pass that the English
people so contentedly accepted a sovereign like George the First.  The
explanation is not to be found merely in the fact that the Stuarts, as
a race, had discredited themselves hopelessly with the moral sentiment
of the people of England.  The very worst of the Stuarts, Charles the
Second, was not any worse as regards moral character than George the
First, or than some of the Georges who followed him.  In education and
in mental capacity he was far superior to any of the Georges.  There
were many qualities in Charles the Second which, if his fatal love of
ease and of amusement could have been kept under control, might have
made him a successful sovereign, and which, were he in private life,
would undoubtedly have made him an {62} eminent man.  But the truth is
that the old feeling of blind unconditional homage to the sovereign was
dying out; it was dying of inanition and old age and natural decay.
Other and stronger forces in political thought were coming up to jostle
it aside, even before its death-hour, and to occupy its place.  A king
was to be in England, for the future, a respected and honored chief
magistrate appointed for life and to hereditary office.  This new
condition of things influenced the feelings and conduct of hundreds of
thousands of persons who were not themselves conscious of the change.
This was one great reason why George the First was so easily accepted
by the country.  The king was in future to be a business king, and not
a king of sentiment and romance.




{63}

CHAPTER V.

WHAT THE KING CAME TO.

[Sidenote: 1714--Estimate of population]

The population of these islands at the close of the reign of Queen Anne
was probably not more than one-fifth of its present amount.  It is not
easy to arrive at a precise knowledge with regard to the number of the
inhabitants of England at that time, because there was no census taken
until 1801.  We have, therefore, to be content with calculations
founded on the number of houses that paid certain taxes, and on the
register of deaths.  This is of course not a very exact way of getting
at the result, but it enables us to form a tolerably fair general
estimate.  According to these calculations, then, the population of
England and Wales together was something like five millions and a half;
the population of Ireland at the same time appears to have been about
two millions; that of Scotland little more than one.  But the
distribution of the population of these countries was very different
then from that of the present day.  Now the great cities and towns form
the numerical strength of England and Scotland at least, but at that
time the agricultural districts had a much larger proportion of the
population than the towns could boast of.  London was then considered a
vast and enormous city, but it was only a hamlet when compared with the
London which we know.  Even then it absorbed more than one-tenth of the
whole population of England and Wales.  At the beginning of the reign
of King George the First, London had a population of about seven
hundred thousand, and it is a fact worthy of notice, that rapidly as
the {64} population of England has grown between that time and this,
the growth of the metropolis has been even greater in proportion.  The
City and Westminster were, at the beginning of George's reign, and for
long after, two distinct and separate towns; between them still lay
many wide spaces on which men were only beginning to build houses.
Fashion was already moving westward in the metropolis, obeying that
curious impulse which seems to prevail in all modern cities, and which
makes the West End as eagerly sought after in Paris, in Edinburgh, and
in New York, as in London.  The life of London centred in St. Paul's
and the Exchange; that of Westminster in the Court and the Houses of
Parliament.  All around the old Houses of Parliament were lanes,
squares, streets, and gate-ways covering the wide spaces and broad
thoroughfares with which we are familiar.  Between Parliament Buildings
and the two churches of St. Peter and St. Margaret ran a narrow,
densely crowded street, known as St. Margaret's Lane.  The spot where
Parliament Street now opens into Bridge Street was part of an
uninterrupted row of houses running down to the water-gate by the
river.  The market-house of the old Woollen Market stood just where
Westminster Bridge begins.  The Parliament Houses themselves are as
much changed as their surroundings.  St. Stephen's Gallery now occupies
the site of St. Stephen's Chapel, where the Commons used to sit.
Westminster Hall had rows of little shops or booths ranged all along
each wall inside; they had been there for generations, and they
certainly did not add either to the beauty or the safety of the ancient
hall.  In the early part of the seventeenth century some of them took
fire and came near to laying in ashes one of the oldest occupied
buildings in the world.  Luckily, however, the fire was put out with
slight damage, but the dangerous little shops were suffered to remain
then and for long after.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old London]

The Lesser London of that day lives for us in contemporary engravings,
in the pages of the _Spectator_ and the {65} _Tatler_, in the poems of
Swift and Pope, in the pictures of Hogarth.  Hogarth's men and women
belong indeed to a later generation than the generation which
Bolingbroke dazzled, and Marlborough deceived, and Arbuthnot satirized,
and Steele made merry over.  But it is only the men and women who are
different; the background remains the same.  New actors have taken the
parts; the costumes are somewhat altered, but the scenes are scarcely
changed.  There may be a steeple more or a sign-board less in the
streets that Hogarth drew than there were when Addison walked them, but
practically they are the same, and remained the same for a still later
generation.  Maps of the time show us how curiously small London was.
There is open country to the north, just beyond Bloomsbury Square;
Sadler's Wells is out in the country, so is St. Pancras, so is
Tottenham Court, so is Marylebone.  At the east Stepney lies far away,
a distant hamlet.  Beyond Hanover Square to the west stretch fields
again, where Tyburn Road became the road to Oxford.  There is very
little of London south of the river.

The best part of the political and social life of this small London was
practically lived in the still smaller area of St. James's, a term
which generally includes rather more than is contained within the
strict limits of St. James's parish.  If some Jacobite gentleman or
loyal Hanoverian courtier of the year 1714 could revisit to-day the
scenes in which he schemed and quarrelled, he would find himself among
the familiar names of strangely unfamiliar places.  St. James's Park
indeed has not altered out of all recognition since the days when Duke
Belair and my Lady Betty and my Lady Rattle walked the Mall between the
hours of twelve and two, and quoted from Congreve about laughing at the
great world and the small.  There were avenues of trees then as now.
Instead of the ornamental water ran a long canal, populous with ducks,
which joined a pond called--no one knows why--Rosamund's Pond.  This
pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy lovers--"the sylvan
deities and rural {66} powers of the place, sacred and inviolable to
love, often heard lovers' vows repeated by its streams and echoes"--and
a convenient water for unhappy lovers to drown themselves in, if we may
credit the _Tatler_.  St. James's Palace and Marlborough House on its
right are scarcely changed; but to the left only Lord Godolphin's house
lay between it and the pleasant park where the deer wandered.  Farther
off, where Buckingham Palace now is, was Buckingham House.  It was then
a stately country mansion on the road to Chelsea, with semicircular
wings and a sweep of iron railings enclosing a spacious court, where a
fountain played round a Triton driving his sea-horses.  On the roof
stood statues of Mercury, Liberty, Secrecy, and Equity, and across the
front ran an inscription in great gold letters, "_Sic Siti Laetantur
Lares_." The household gods might well delight in so fair a spot and in
the music of that "little wilderness full of blackbirds and
nightingales," which the bowl-playing Duke who built the house lovingly
describes to his friend Shrewsbury.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old London]

Most of the streets in the St. James's region bear the names they bore
when King George first came to London.  But it is only in name that
they are unchanged.  The street of streets, St. James's Street, is
metamorphosed indeed since the days when grotesque signs swung
overhead, and great gilt carriages lumbered up and down from the park,
and the chairs of modish ladies crowded up the narrow thoroughfares.
Splendid warriors, fresh from Flanders or the Rhine, clinked their
courtly swords against the posts; red-coated country gentlemen jostled
their wondering way through the crowd; and the Whig and Tory beaux,
with ruffles and rapiers, powder and perfume, haunted the coffee-houses
of their factions.  Not a house of the old street remains as it was
then; not one of the panelled rooms in which minuets were danced by
candle-light to the jingle of harpsichord and tinkle of spinet, where
wits planned pamphlets and pointed epigrams, where statesmen schemed
the overthrow of {67} ministries and even of dynasties, where flushed
youth punted away its fortunes or drank away its senses, and staggered
out, perhaps, through the little crowd of chairmen and link-boys
clustered at the door, to extinguish its foolish flame in a duel at
Leicester Fields.  All that world is gone; only the name of the street
remains, as full in its way of memories and associations as the S. P.
Q. R. at the head of a municipal proclamation in modern Rome.

The streets off St. James's Street, too, retain their ancient names,
and nothing more--King Street, Ryder Street, York Street, Jermyn
Street, the spelling of which seems to have puzzled last century
writers greatly, for they wrote it "Jermyn," "Germain," "Germaine," and
even "Germin."  St. James's Church, Wren's handiwork, is all that
remains from the age of Anne, with "the steeple," says Strype, fondly,
"lately finished with a fine spire, which adds much splendor to this
end of the town, and also serves as a landmark."  Perhaps it sometimes
served as a landmark to Richard Steele, reeling happily to the home in
"Berry" Street, where his beloved Prue awaited him.  St. James's Square
has gone through many metamorphoses since it was first built in 1665,
and called the Piazza.  In 1714 there was a rectangular enclosure in
the centre, with four passages at the sides, through which the public
could come and go as they pleased.  In a later generation the
inhabitants railed the enclosure round, and set in the middle an oval
basin of water, large enough to have a boat upon it.  In old engravings
we see people gravely punting about on the quaint little pond.  The
fulness of time filled in the pond, and set up King William the Third
instead in the middle of a grassy circle.  It would take too long to
enumerate all the changes that our Georgian gentleman would find in the
London of his day.  Some few, however, are especially worth recording.
He would seek in vain for the "Pikadilly" he knew, with its stately
houses and fair gardens.  It was almost a country road to the left of
St. James's Street, between the Green Park and Hyde Park, {68} with
meadows and the distant hills beyond.  Going eastward he would find
that a Henrietta Street and a King Street still led into Covent Garden;
but the Covent Garden of his time was an open place, with a column and
a sun-dial in the middle.  Handsome dwellings for persons of repute and
quality stood on the north side over those arcades which were fondly
supposed by Inigo Jones, who laid out the spot, to resemble the Piazza
in Venice.  Inigo Jones built the church, too, which is to be seen in
the "Morning" plate of Hogarth's "Four Times of the Day."  This church
was destroyed by fire in 1795, and was rebuilt in its present form by
Hardwick.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's London]

Charing Cross was still a narrow spot where three streets met; what is
now Trafalgar Square was covered with houses and the royal mews.  St.
Martin's Church was not built by Gibbs for a dozen years later, in
1726.  Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable neighborhoods; Mrs.
Theresa Cornelys's house of entertainment, of which we hear so much
from the writers of the time of Anne, was considered to be most
fashionably situated; ambassadors and peers dwelt in Gerrard Street;
Bolingbroke lived in Golden Square.  Traces of former splendor still
linger about these decayed neighborhoods; paintings by Sir James
Thornhill, Hogarth's master and father-in-law, and elaborate marble
mantel-pieces, with Corinthian columns and entablatures, still adorn
the interiors of some of these houses; bits of quaint Queen Anne
architecture and finely wrought iron railings still lend an air of
faded gentility to some of the dingy exteriors.  Parts of London that
are now fashionable had not then come into existence.  Grosvenor Square
was only begun in 1716, and it was not until 1725 that the new quarter
was sufficiently advanced for its creator, Sir Richard Grosvenor, to
summon his intending tenants to a "splendid entertainment," at which
the new streets and squares were solemnly named.

Though we of to-day have seen a good deal of what are called Anne and
Georgian houses, of red brick, {69} curiously gabled, springing up in
all directions, we must not suppose that the London of 1714 was chiefly
composed of such cheerful buildings.  Wren and Vanbrugh would be indeed
surprised if they could see the strange works that are now done, if not
in their name, at least in the name of the age for which they built
their heavy, plain, solid houses.  We can learn easily enough from
contemporary engravings what the principal London streets and squares
were like when George the Elector became George the King.  There are
not many remains now of Anne's London, but Queen Anne's Gate, some few
houses in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, and here and there a house in the
City preserve the ordinary architecture of the age of Anne.
Marlborough House bears witness to what it did in the way of more
pretentious buildings.

The insides of these houses were scarcely less like the "Queen Anne
revival" of our time than the outsides.  The rooms were, as a rule,
sparingly furnished.  There would be a centre-table, some chairs, a
settee, a few pictures, a mirror, possibly a spinet or musical
instrument of some kind, some shelves, perhaps, for displaying the
Chinese and Japanese porcelain which every one loved, and, of course,
heavy window-curtains.  Smaller tables were used for the incessant
tea-drinking.  Large screens kept off the too frequent draughts.
Handsomely wrought stoves and andirons stood in the wide fireplaces.
The rooms themselves were lofty; the walls of the better kind
wainscoted and carved, and the ceilings painted in allegorical designs.
Wall-papers had only begun to come into use within the last few years
of Anne's reign; windows were long and narrow, and small panes were a
necessity, as glass-makers had not yet attained the art of casting
large sheets of glass.  The stairs were exceedingly straight; it was
mentioned as a recommendation to new houses that two persons could go
up-stairs abreast.  The rents would seem curiously low to Londoners of
our time; houses could be got in Pall Mall for two hundred a year, and
in good parts of the town for thirty, forty, and {70} fifty pounds a
year.  Lady Wentworth, in 1705, describes a house in Golden Square,
with gardens, stables, and coach-house, the rent of which was only
threescore pounds a year.  Pretty riverside houses let at from five to
ten pounds a year.  Lodgings would seem cheap now, though they were not
held so then, for Swift complains of paying eight shillings a week,
when he lodged in Bury Street, for a dining-room and bedroom on the
first floor.

[Sidenote: 1714--"Not without danger walk these streets"]

There was no general numbering of houses in 1714; that movement of
civilization did not take place until 1764.  Places were known by their
signs, or their vicinity to a sign.  "Blue Boars," "Black Swans," and
"Red Lions" were in every street, and people lived at the "Red Bodice,"
or over against the "Pestle."  The _Tatler_ tells a story of a young
man seeking a house in Barbican for a whole day through a mistake in a
sign, whose legend read, "This is the Beer," instead of "This is the
Bear."  Another tried to get into a house at Stocks Market, under the
impression that he was at his own lodgings at Charing Cross, being
misled by the fact that there was a statue of the King on horseback in
each place.  Signs were usually very large, and jutted so far out from
the houses that in narrow streets they frequently touched one another.
As it was the fashion to have them carefully painted, carved, gilded,
and supported by branches of wrought iron, they were often very costly,
some being estimated as worth more than a hundred guineas.

The ill-paved streets were too often littered with the refuse which
careless householders, reckless of fines, flung into the open way.  In
wet weather the rain roared along the kennel, converting all the
accumulated filth of the thoroughfare into loathsome mud.  The
gutter-spouts, which then projected from every house, did not always
cast their cataracts clear of the pavement, but sometimes soaked the
unlucky passer-by who had not kept close to the wall.  Umbrellas were
the exclusive privilege of women; men never thought of carrying them.
Those whose business or pleasure called them abroad in rainy {71}
weather, and who did not own carriages, might hire one of the eight
hundred two-horsed hackney carriages; jolting, uncomfortable machines,
with perforated tin sashes instead of window-glasses, and grumbling,
ever-dissatisfied drivers.  There were very few sedan chairs; these
were still a comparative novelty for general use, and their bearers
were much abused for their drunkenness, clumsiness, and incivility.

The streets were always crowded.  Coaches, chairs, wheelbarrows, fops,
chimney-sweeps, porters bearing huge burdens, bullies swaggering with
great swords, bailiffs chasing some impecunious poet, cutpurses,
funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from
some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in
helpless and apparently inextricable confusion.  The general
bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street
cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders,
broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched
representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to
"remember the poor prisoners."  The thoroughfares, however, would have
been in still worse condition but for the fact that so much of the
passenger traffic of the metropolis was done by water and not by land.
The wherries on the Thames were as frequent as the gondolas on the
canals of Venice.  Across the river, down the river, up the river,
passengers hurried incessantly in the swift little boats that plied for
hire, and were rowed by one man with a pair of sculls, or two men with
oars.  Despite the numbers of the river steamers at present, and the
crowds who take advantage of them, it may well be doubted whether so
large a proportion of the passenger traffic of London is borne by the
river in the days of Queen Victoria as there was in the days of Queen
Anne.

Darkness and danger ruled the roads at night with all the horrors of
the Rome of Juvenal.  Oil lamps flickered freely in some of the better
streets, but even these were not lit so long as any suggestion of
twilight served for {72} an excuse to delay the illumination.  When the
moon shone they were not lit at all.  Link-boys drove a busy trade in
lighting belated wanderers to their homes, and saving them from the
perils of places where the pavement was taken up or where open sewers
yawned.  Precaution was needful, for pitfalls of the kind were not
always marked by warning lanterns.  Footpads roamed about, and worse
than footpads.  The fear of the Mohocks had not yet faded from civic
memories, and there were still wild young men enough to rush through
the streets, wrenching off knockers, insulting quiet people, and
defying the watch.  Indeed the watch were, as a rule, as unwilling to
interfere with dangerous revellers as were the billmen of Messina, and
seem to have been little better than thieves or Mohocks themselves.
They are freely accused of being ever ready to levy black-mail upon
those who walked abroad at night by raising ingenious accusations of
insobriety and insisting upon being bought off, or conveying their
victim to the round-house.

[Sidenote: 1714--Clubs]

The Fleet Ditch, which is almost as much of a myth to our generation as
the stream of black Cocytus itself, was an unsavory reality still in
the London which George the First entered.  It was a tributary of the
Thames, which, rising somewhere among the gentle hills of Hampstead,
sought out the river and found it at Blackfriars.  At one time it was
used for the conveyance of coals into the city, and colliers of
moderate size used to ascend it for a short distance.  But towards the
end of Anne's reign, and indeed for long before, it had become a mere
trickling puddle, discharging its filth and refuse and sewage into the
river, and poisoning the air around it.

May Fair was still, and for many years later, celebrated in the now
fashionable quarter which bears its name.  The fair lasted for six
weeks, and left about six months' demoralization behind it.  "Smock
races"--that is to say, races run by young women for a prize of a laced
chemise, the competitors sometimes being attired only in their
smocks--were still to be seen in Pall Mall and {73} various other
places.  This popular amusement was kept up in London until 1733, and
lingered in country places to a much later time.  Bartholomew Fair was
scarcely less popular, or less renowned for its specialty of roast
sucking-pig, than in the days when Ben Jonson's Master Little-Wit, and
his wife Win-the-Fight, made acquaintance with its wild humors.  There
is a colored print of about this time which gives a sufficiently vivid
presentment of the fair.  At Lee and Harper's booth the tragedy of
"Judith and Holofernes" is announced by a great glaring, painted cloth,
while the platform is occupied by a gentleman in Roman armor and a lady
in Eastern attire, who are no doubt the principal characters of the
play.  A gaudy Harlequin and his brother Scaramouch invite the
attention of the passers-by.  In another booth rope-dancing of men and
women is offered to the less tragically minded, and in yet another the
world-renowned Faux displays the announcement of his conjuring marvels.
A peep-show of the siege of Gibraltar allures the patriotic.
Toy-shops, presided over by attractive damsels, lure the light-hearted,
and the light-fingered too, for many an intelligent pickpocket seizes
the opportunity to rifle the pocket of some too occupied customer.
There is a revolving swing, and go-carts are drawn by dogs for the
delight of children.  Hucksters go about selling gin, aniseed, and
fruits, and large booths offer meat, cider, punch, and skittles.  The
place is thronged with visitors and beggars.  A portly figure in a
scarlet coat and wearing an order is said to be no less a person than
Sir Robert Walpole, who is rumored to have occasionally honored the
fair with his presence.

Few of the clubs that play so important a part in the history of
last-century London had come into existence in 1714.  The most famous
of them either were not yet founded, or lived only as coffee or
chocolate houses.  There had been literary associations like the
"Scriblerus" Club, which was started by Swift, and was finally
dissolved by the quarrels of Oxford and Bolingbroke.  The {74}
"Saturday" and "Brothers" Clubs had been political societies, at both
of which Swift was all powerful, but they, too, were no more.  The
"Kit-Kat" Club, of mystic origin and enigmatic name, with all its
loyalty to Hanover and all its memories of bright toasts, of Steele,
Addison, and Godfrey Kneller, had passed away in 1709, and met no more
in Shire Lane, off Fleet Street, or at the "Upper Flask" Inn at
Hampstead.  It had not lived in vain, according to Walpole, who
declared that its patriots had saved the country.  Within its rooms the
evil-omened Lord Mohun had broken the gilded emblem of the crown off
his chair.  Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, who was secretary to the
club, querulously insisted that the man who would do that would cut a
man's throat, and Lord Mohun's fatal career fully justified Tonson's
judgment.  If the Kit-Kat patriots had saved the country, the Tory
patriots of the October Club were no less prepared to do the same.  The
October Club came first into importance in the latest years of Anne,
although it had existed since the last decade of the seventeenth
century.  The stout Tory squires met together in the "Bell" Tavern, in
narrow, dirty King Street, Westminster, to drink October ale, under
Dahl's portrait of Queen Anne, and to trouble with their fierce,
uncompromising Jacobitism the fluctuating purposes of Harley and the
crafty counsels of St. John.  The genius of Swift tempered their hot
zeal with the cool air of his "advice."  Then the wilder spirits
seceded, and formed the March Club, which retained all the angry
Jacobinism of the parent body, but lost all its importance.  There were
wilder associations, like the Hell-fire Club, which, under the
presidency of the Duke of Wharton, was distinguished for the desperate
attempts it made to justify its name.  But it was, like its president,
short lived and soon forgotten.  There are fantastic rumors of a
Calves' Head Club, organized in mockery of all kings, and especially of
the royal martyrs.  It was said by obscure pamphleteers to be founded
by John Milton; but whether the body ever had any real existence seems
now to be uncertain.

{75}

[Sidenote: 1714--Coffee-houses]

Next to the clubs came the "mug-houses."  The mug-houses were political
associations of a humbler order, where men met together to drink beer
and denounce the Whigs or Tories, according to their convictions.  But
at this time the coffee-houses occupied the most important position in
social life.  There were a great many of them, each with some special
association which still keeps it in men's memories.  At Garraway's, in
Change Alley, tea was first retailed at the high prices which then made
tea a luxury.  The "Rainbow," in Fleet Street, the second coffee-house
opened in London, is mentioned in the _Spectator_; the first was
Bowman's, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill.  Lloyd's, in Lombard
Street, was dear to Steele and Addison.  At Don Saltero's, by the river
at Chelsea, Mr. Salter exhibited his collection of curiosities and
delighted himself, and no one else, by playing the fiddle.  At the
"Smyrna" Prior and Swift were wont to receive their acquaintances.
From the "St. James's," the last house but one on the south-west corner
of St. James's Street, the _Tatler_ dated its foreign and domestic
news, and conferred fame on its waiter, Mr. Kidney, "who has long
conversed with and filled tea for the most consummate politicians."  It
was the head-quarters of Whigs and officers of the Guards; letters from
Stella were left here for Swift, and here in later years originated
Goldsmith's "Retaliation."  Will's, at the north corner of Russell
Street and Bow Street, famous for its memories of Dryden and for the
_Tatler's_ dramatic criticisms, had ceased to exist in 1714.  Its place
was taken by Button's, at the other side of Russell Street, started by
Addison in 1712.  Here, later, was the lion-head letter-box for the
_Guardian_, designed by Hogarth.  At Child's, in St. Paul's
Church-yard, the _Spectator_ often smoked a pipe.  Sir Roger de
Coverley was beloved at Squire's, near Gray's Inn Gate.  Slaughter's,
in St. Martin's Lane, was often honored by the presence first of
Dryden, and then of Pope.  Serle's, near Lincoln's Inn, was cherished
by the law.  At the "Grecian," in Devereux Court, Strand, learned men
met and {76} quarrelled; a fatal duel was once fought in consequence of
an argument there over the accent on a Greek word.  At the "Grecian,"
too, Steele amused himself by putting the action of Homer's "Iliad"
into an exact journal and planning his "Temple of Fame."  From White's
chocolate-house, which afterwards became the famous club, came Mr.
Isaac Bickerstaff's "Accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and
Entertainment."  The "Cocoa Tree" was the Tory coffee-house, in St.
James's Street.  Ozinda's chocolate-house, next to St. James's Palace,
was also a Tory resort, and its owner was arrested in 1715 for supposed
complicity in Jacobite conspiracy.

[Sidenote: 1714--Humors of the time]

To these coffee and chocolate houses came all the wit and all the
fashion of London.  Men of letters and statesmen, men of the robe and
men of the sword, lawyers, dandies, poets, and philosophers, met there
to discuss politics, literature, scandal, and the play.  There were
often very strange figures among the motley crowd behind the
red-curtained windows of a St. James's coffee-house.  The gentleman who
made himself so agreeable to the bar-maid or who chatted so affably
about the conduct of the allies or the latest news from Sweden, might
meet you again later on if your road lay at all outside town, and
imperiously request you to stand and deliver.  But of all the varied
assembly the strangest figures must have been the beaux and exquisites,
in all their various degrees of "dappers," "fops," "smart fellows,"
"pretty fellows," and "very pretty fellows."  They made a brave show in
many-colored splendor of attire, heavily scented with orange-flower
water, civet-violet, or musk, with large falbala periwigs, or long,
powdered duvilliers, with snuff-boxes and perspective glasses
perpetually in their hands, and dragon or right Jamree canes, curiously
clouded and amber headed, dangling by a blue ribbon from the wrist or
the coat-button.  The staff was as essential to an early Georgian
gentleman as to an Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the
cane-carrying custom incurred the frequent attacks of the satirists.
Cane-bearers are made to declare {77} that the knocking of the cane
upon the shoe, leaning one leg upon it, or whistling with it in the
mouth, were such reliefs to them in conversation that they did not know
how to be good company without it.  Some of these young men appear to
have affected effeminacy, like an Agathon or a Henri Trois.  Steele has
put it on record that he heard some, who set up to be pretty fellows,
calling to one another at White's or the St. James's by the names of
"Betty," "Nelly," and so forth.

Servants play almost as important parts as their masters in the humors
of the time.  Rich people were always surrounded by a throng of
servants.  First came the valet de chambre, who was expected to know a
little of everything, from shaving and wig-making to skill in country
sports, and had as much experience in all town matters as a servant out
of Terence or Moličre.  Last came the negro slave, who waited on my
lord or my lady, with the silver collar of servitude about his neck.

Servants wore fine clothes and aped fine manners.  The footmen of the
Lords and Commons held mimic parliament while waiting for their masters
at Westminster, parodying with elaborate care the proceedings of both
Houses.  They imitated their masters in other ways, too, taking their
titles after the fashion made famous by Gil Blas and his fellow valets,
and familiar by the farce of "High Life Below Stairs."  The writer of
the _Patriot_ of Thursday, August 19, 1714, satirizes misplaced
ambition by "A discourse which I overheard not many evenings ago as I
went with a friend of mine into Hyde Park.  We found, as usual, a great
number of gentlemen's servants at the park gate, and my friend, being
unacquainted with the saucy custom of those fellows to usurp their
masters' titles, was very much surprised to hear a lusty rogue tell one
of his companions who inquired after his fellow-servant that his Grace
had his head broke by the cook-maid for making a sop in the pan."
Presently after another assured the company of the illness of my lord
bishop.  "The information had doubtless continued had {78} not a fellow
in a blue livery alarmed the rest with the news that Sir Edward and the
marquis were at fisticuffs about a game at chuck, and that the
brigadier had challenged the major-general to a bout at cudgels."

[Sidenote: 1714--Principal towns]

It is only fair, after enumerating so many of the eccentricities and
discomforts of early Georgian London, to mention one proof of
civilization of which Londoners were able to boast.  London had a
penny-post, of which it was not unreasonably proud.  This penny-post is
thus described in Strype's edition of Stow's "Survey of London."  "For
a further convenience to the inhabitants of this city and parts
adjacent, for about ten miles compass, another post, and that a
foot-post, commonly called the penny-post, was erected, and though at
first set up by a private hand, yet, bring of such considerable amount,
is since taken into the post-office and made a branch of it.  And in
this all letters and parcels not exceeding a pound weight, and also any
sum of money not above 10 pounds or parcel of 10 pounds value is safely
conveyed, and at the charge of a penny, to all parts of the city and
suburbs, and but a penny more at the delivery to most towns within ten
miles of London, and to some towns at a farther distance.  And for the
better management of this office there are in London and Westminster
six general post-offices . . . at all which there constantly
attend . . . officers to receive letters and parcels from the several
places appointed to take them in, there being a place or receiving
house for the receipt thereof in most streets, with a table hung at the
door or shop-window, in which is printed in great letters 'Penny-post
Letters and Parcels are taken in Here.'  And at those houses they have
letter-carriers to call every hour. . . .  All the day long they are
employed, some in going their walks to bring in, and others to carry
out."

The next town in population to London was Bristol, and Bristol had then
only one-seventeenth of London's population.  The growth of the
manufacturing industry, which has created such a cluster of great towns
in the North of England, had hardly begun to show itself when {79}
George the First came to the throne.  Bristol was not only the most
populous place after London at this time, but it was the great English
seaport.  It had held this rank for centuries.  Even at the time when
"Tom Jones" was written, many years after the accession of George the
First, the Bristol Alderman filled the same place in popular
imagination that is now assigned to the Alderman of London.  Fielding
attributes to the Bristol Alderman that fine appreciation of the
qualities of turtle soup with which more modern humorists have endowed
his metropolitan fellow.

Liverpool was hardly thought of in the early Georgian days.  It was
only made into a separate parish a few years before George came to the
throne, and its first dock was opened in 1709.  Manchester was
comparatively obscure and unimportant, and had not yet made its first
export of cotton goods.  At this time Norwich, famous for its worsted
and woollen works and its fuller's earth, surpassed it in business
importance.  By the middle of the century the population of Bristol is
said to have exceeded ninety thousand; Norwich, to have had more than
fifty-six thousand; Manchester, about forty-five thousand; Newcastle,
forty thousand; and Birmingham, about thirty thousand; while Liverpool
had swelled to about thirty thousand, and ranked as the third port in
the country.  York was the chief city of the Northern Counties; Exeter,
the capital of the West.  Shrewsbury was of some account in the region
towards the Welsh frontier.  Worcester, Derby, Nottingham, and
Canterbury were places of note.  Bath had not come into its fashion and
its fame as yet.  Its first pump-room had been built only a few years
before George entered England.  The strength of England now, if we
leave London out of consideration, lies in the north, and goes no
farther southward than a line which would include Birmingham.  In the
early days of the Georges this was just the part of England which was
of least importance, whether as regards manufacturing energy or
political power.

{80}

Ireland just then was quiet.  It had sunk into a quietude something
like that of the grave.  Civil war had swept over the country; a
succession of civil wars indeed had plagued it.  There was a time just
before the outbreak of the parliamentary struggle against Charles the
First when, according to Clarendon, Ireland was becoming a highly
prosperous country, growing vigorously in trade, manufacture, letters,
and arts, and beginning to be, as he puts it, "a jewel of great lustre
in the royal diadem."  But civil war and religious persecution had
blighted this rising prosperity, and for the evils coming from
political proscription and religious persecution the statesmen of the
time could think of no remedy but new proscription and fresh
persecution.  Roman Catholics were excluded from the legislature, from
municipal corporations, and from the liberal professions; they were not
allowed to teach or be taught by Catholics; they were not permitted to
keep arms; the trade and navigation of Ireland were put under ruinous
restrictions and disabilities.  In the reign of Anne new acts had been
passed by the Irish Parliament, and sanctioned by the Crown "to prevent
the further growth of Popery."  Some of these later measures introduced
not a few of the very harshest conditions of the penal code against
Catholics.  The Irish Parliament at that time was merely in fact what
has since been called the British garrison; it consisted of the
conquerors and the settlers.  The Irish people had no more to do with
it, except in the way of suffering under it, than the slaves in Georgia
thirty years ago had to do with the Congress at Washington.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old Dublin]

Dublin has perhaps changed less than London since 1714, but it has
changed greatly notwithstanding.  The Irish Parliament was already
established in College Green, but not in the familiar building which it
afterwards occupied.  It met in Chichester House, which had been built
as a hospital by Sir George Carew at the close of the sixteenth
century.  From him it passed into the possession of Sir Arthur
Chichester, an English soldier of {81} fortune, who had distinguished
himself in France under Henry the Fourth, and who afterwards came to
Ireland and played an active part in the plantation of Ulster.  It was
not until 1728 that Chichester House was pulled down and the new
building erected on its site.  Trinity College, of course, stood on
College Green, so did two other stately dwellings, Charlemont House and
Clancarty House, both of which have long since passed away.  There were
several book-shops on the Green as well, and a great many taverns and
coffee-shops.  The statue of King William the Third had been set up in
1701.  The collegians professed great indignation at the manner in
which the statue turned its back to the college gates, and the effigy
was the object of many indignities, for which the students sometimes
got into grave trouble with the authorities.

St. Patrick's Well was one of the great features of Dublin in the early
part of the last century.  It stood in the narrow way by Trinity
College, the name of which had not long been altered from Patrick's
Well Lane to Nassau Street.  The change had been made in compliment to
a bust of William the Third, which adorned the front of one of the
houses, but for long after the place was much more associated with the
well than with the House of Orange.  The waters of the well were
popularly supposed to have wonderful curative and health-giving
properties, and it was much used.  It dried up suddenly in 1729, and
gave Swift the opportunity of writing some fiercely indignant national
verses.  But the water was restored to it in 1731, and it still exists
in peaceful, half-forgotten obscurity in the College grounds.

Dawson Street, off Nassau Street, had only newly come into existence.
It was called after Joshua Dawson, who had just built for himself a
handsome mansion with gardens round it.  He sold the house in 1715 to
the Dublin Corporation, to be used as a Mansion House for their Lord
Mayors.  Where Molesworth and Kildare Streets now stand there was at
this time a great piece of waste {82} land called Molesworth Fields.
Chapelizod, now a sufficiently populous suburb, was then the little
village of Chappell Isoud, said to be so called from that Belle Isoud,
daughter of King Anguish of Ireland, who was beloved by Tristram.  The
General Post-office in Sycamore Alley had for Postmaster-general Isaac
Manley, who was a friend of Swift.  Manley incurred the Dean's
resentment in 1718 by opening letters addressed to him.  The postal
arrangements were, as may be imagined, miserably defective.  Owing to
the carelessness of postmasters, the idleness of post-boys, bad horses,
and sometimes the want of horses, much time was lost and letters
constantly miscarried.

[Sidenote: 1714--Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Belfast]

The amusements of Dublin were those of London on a small scale.  Dublin
was as fond of its coffee-houses as London itself.  Lucas's, in Cork
Street, was the favorite resort of beaux, gamesters, and bullies.  Here
Talbot Edgeworth, Miss Edgeworth's ancestor, whom Swift called the
"prince of puppies," displayed his follies, his fine dresses, and his
handsome face, and believed himself to be the terror of men and the
adoration of women, till he died mad in the Dublin Bridewell.  The yard
behind Lucas's was the theatre of numerous duels, which were generally
witnessed from the windows by all the company who happened to be
present.  These took care that the laws of honorable combat were
observed.  Close at hand was the "Swan" Tavern, in Swan Alley, a
district devoted chiefly to gambling-houses.  On Cork Hill was the
cock-pit royal, where gentlemen and ruffians mingled together to
witness and wager on the sport.  Cork Hill was not a pleasant place at
night.  Pedestrians were often insulted and roughly treated by the
chairmen hanging about Lucas's and the "Eagle" Tavern.  Even the
waiters of these establishments sometimes amused themselves by pouring
pailfuls of foul water upon the aggrieved passer-by.  It is not
surprising, therefore, to find that an Irish edition of the Hell-fire
Club was set up at the "Eagle" in 1735.  The roughness of the time
found its way into {83} the theatre in Smock Lane, which was the scene
of frequent political riots.  Dublin had its Pasquin or Marforio in an
oaken image, known as the "Wooden Man," which had stood on the southern
side of Essex Street, not far from Eustace Street, since the end of the
seventeenth century.

Cork, Limerick, Waterford, and Belfast were the only considerable towns
in Ireland after the Irish capital.  Not many years had passed since
Cork was besieged by Marlborough himself, and taken from King James.
The Duke of Grafton, one of the sons of Charles the Second, was killed
then in a little street or lane, which still commemorates the fact by
its name.  The same year that saw Marlborough besieging Cork saw
Limerick invested by the forces of King William, under William's own
command.  The Irish general, Sarsfield, held out so gallantly that
William had to give up the attempt, and it was not until the following
year, and after the cause of James had gone down everywhere else, that
Sarsfield consented to accept the terms, most honorable to him, of the
famous Treaty of Limerick.  There was but little feeling in Ireland in
favor of the Chevalier at the time of Queen Anne's death.  Any sympathy
with the Stuart cause that still lingered was sentimental merely, and
even as such hardly existed among the great mass of the people.  To
these, indeed, the change of masters could matter but little; they had
had enough of the Stuarts, and the conduct of James the Second during
his Irish campaign had made his name and his memory despised.  Rightly
or wrongly he was charged with cowardice--he who in his early days had
heard his bravery in action praised by the great Turenne--and the
charge was fatal to him in the minds of the Irish people.  The penal
laws of Anne's days were not excused because of any strong Jacobite
sympathies or active Jacobite schemes in Ireland.

The Union between England and Scotland was only seven years old when
George came to the throne of these kingdoms, and already an attempt had
been made by a {84} powerful party in Scotland to obtain its repeal.
The union was unquestionably accomplished by Lord Somers and other
English statesmen, with the object of securing the succession much
rather than the national interests of the Scottish people.  It was for
a long time detested in Scotland.  The manner of its accomplishment,
mainly by bribery and threats, made it more odious.  Yet it was based
on principles which secured the dearest interests of Scotland and
respected the religious opinions of the population.  Scottish law,
Scottish systems, and the Scotch Church were left without interference,
and constitutional security was given for the maintenance of the
Presbyterian Establishment.  In plain words, the Union admitted and
maintained the rights and the claims of the great majority of the
Scotch people, and therefore, when the first heat of dislike to it had
gone out, Scotland began to find that she could be old Scotland still,
even when combined in one constitutional system with England.  She soon
accepted cordially the conditions which opened new ways to her
industrial and trading energy, and did not practically interfere with
her true national independence.

[Sidenote: 1714--Life in Edinburgh]

Edinburgh was then, and remained for generations to come, much the same
as it appeared when Mary Stuart first visited it.  Historians like
Brantôme, and poets like Ronsard, lamented for their fair princess
exiled in a savage land.  But the daughter of the House of Lorraine
might well have been content with the curious beauty of her new
capital.  Even now, more than three centuries since Mary Stuart landed
in Scotland, and more than a century and a half since her descendant
raised the standard of rebellion against the Elector of Hanover,
Edinburgh Old Town retains more of its antique characteristics than
either of the capitals of the sister kingdoms.  It is true that the
Northern Athens has followed the example of its Greek original in
shifting the scene of its social life.  The Attic Athens of to-day
occupies a different site from that of the city of Pericles.  New
Edinburgh {85} has reared itself on the other bank of that chasm where
once the North River flowed, and where now the trains run.  Edinburgh,
however, more fortunate than the city of Cecrops, while founding a new
town has not lost the old.  But at the time of the Hanoverian
accession, and for generations later, not a house of the new town had
been built.  Edinburgh was still a walled city, with many gates or
"ports," occupying the same ground that she had covered in the reign of
James the Third, along the ridge between the gray Castle on the height
at the west and haunted Holyrood in the plain at the east.  All along
this ridge rose the huge buildings, "lands," as they were called,
stretching from peak to peak like a mountain-range--five, six,
sometimes ten stories high--pierced with innumerable windows, crowned
with jagged, fantastic roofs and gables, and as crowded with life as
the "Insulae" of Imperial Rome.  Over all rose the graceful pinnacle of
St. Giles's Church, around whose base the booths of goldsmiths and
other craftsmen clustered.  The great main street of this old town was,
and is, the Canongate, with its hundred or so of narrow closes or wynds
running off from it at right angles.  The houses in these closes were
as tall as the rest, though the space across the street was often not
more than four or five feet wide.  The Canongate was Edinburgh in the
early days of the last century far more than St. James's Street was
London.  Its high houses, with their wooden panellings, with the old
armorial devices on their doors, and their common stair climbing from
story to story outside, have seen the whole panorama of Scottish
history pass by.

Life cannot have been very comfortable in Edinburgh.  There were no
open spaces or squares in the royalty, with the exception of the
Parliamentary close.  The houses were so well and strongly built that
the city was seldom troubled by fire, but they were poor inside, with
low, dark rooms.  We find, in consequence, that houses inhabited by the
gentry in the early part of the eighteenth century were considered
almost too bad for very humble {86} folk at its close, and the success
of the new town was assured from the day when its first
foundation-stone was laid.  But if not very comfortable, life was quiet
and simple.  People generally dined at one or two o'clock in Edinburgh
when George the First was king.  Shopkeepers closed their shops when
they dined, and opened them again for business when the meal was over.
There was very little luxury; wine was seldom seen on the tables of the
middle classes, and few people kept carriages.  There were not many
amusements; friends met at each other's houses to take tea at five
o'clock, and perhaps to listen to a little music; for the Edinburghers
were fond of music, and an annual concert which was established early
in the century lingered on till within three years of its close.  But
this simplicity was not immortal, and we hear sad complaints as the
century grows old concerning the decadence of manners made manifest in
the luxurious practice of dining as late as four or five, the freer use
of wine, and other signs of over-civilization.

[Sidenote: 1714--Lowland agriculture]

Glasgow, in the Clyde valley, ranked next to Edinburgh in importance
among Scotch towns.  More than twenty years later than the time of
which we treat, the author of a pamphlet called "Memoirs of the Times"
could write, "Glasgow is become the third trading city in the island."
But in 1714 the future of its commercial prosperity, founded upon its
trade with the West Indies and the American colonies, had scarcely
dawned.  The Scotch merchants had not yet been able, from want of
capital, and, it was said, the jealousy of the English merchants, to
make much use of the privileges conferred upon them by the union, and
Glasgow was on the wrong side of the island for sharing in Scotland's
slight Continental trade.  Still, Glasgow was fairly thriving, thanks
to the inland navigation of the Clyde.  Some of its streets were broad;
many of its houses substantial, and even stately.  Its pride was the
great minster of St. Mungo's, "a solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that
will stand as lang as the warld keep hands and gunpowther aff it," to
quote the {87} enthusiastic words of Andrew Fairservice.  The streets
were often thronged with the wild Highlanders from the hills, who came
down as heavily and as variously armed as a modern Albanian chieftain,
to trade in small cattle and shaggy ponies.

At this time the average Englishman knew little about the Lowlands and
nothing about the Highlands of Scotland.  The Londoner of the age of
Anne would have looked upon any traveller who had made his way through
the Highlands of Scotland with much the same curiosity as his
descendants, a generation or two later, regarded Bruce when he returned
from Abyssinia, and would probably have received most of his statements
with a politer but not less profound disbelief.  It was cited, as a
proof of the immense popularity of the _Spectator_, that despite all
the difficulties of intercommunication it found its way into Scotland.
George the First had passed away, and George the Second was reigning in
his stead, before any Englishman was found foolhardy enough to explore
the Scottish Highlands, and lucky enough to escape unhurt, and publish
an account of his experiences, and put on record his disgust at the
monstrous deformity of the Highland scenery.  But the Londoner in 1714
was scarcely better informed about the Scotch Lowlands.  What he could
learn was not of a nature to impress him very profoundly.  Scotland
then, and for some time to come, was very far behind England in many
things; most of all, in everything connected with agriculture.  In the
villages the people dwelt in rude but fairly comfortable cottages, made
chiefly of straw-mixed clay, and straw-thatched.  Wearing clothes that
were usually home-spun, home-woven, and home-tailored; living
principally, if not entirely, on the produce of his own farm, the
Lowland farmer passed a life of curious independence and isolation.  To
plough his land, with its strange measurements of "ox-gate,"
"ploughgate," and "davoch," he had clumsy wooden ploughs, the very
shape of which is now almost a tradition, but which were certainly at
least as primitive in {88} construction as the plough Ulysses guided in
his farm at Ithaca.  Wheeled vehicles of any kind, carts or
wheelbarrows, were rarities.  A parish possessed of a couple of carts
was considered well provided for.  Even where carts were known, they
were of little use, they were so wretchedly constructed, and the few
roads that did exist were totally unfit for wheeled traffic.  Roads
were as rare in Scotland then as they are to-day in Peloponnesus.  An
enterprising Aberdeenshire gentleman, Sir Archibald Grant, of Monymusk,
is deservedly distinguished for the interest he took in road-making
about the time of the Hanoverian accession.  Some years later statute
labor did a little--a very little--towards improving the public roads,
but it was not until after the rebellion of 1745, when the Government
took the matter in hand, that anything really efficient was done.  A
number of good roads were then made, chiefly by military labor, and
received in popular language the special title of the King's highways.
But in the early part of the century there was little use for carts,
even of the clumsiest kind.  Such carriage as was necessary was
accomplished by strings of horses tethered in Indian file, like the
lines of camels in the East, and laden with sacks or baskets.  The
cultivation of the soil was poor; "the surface was generally
unenclosed; oats and barley the chief grain products; wheat little
cultivated; little hay made for winter; the horses then feeding chiefly
on straw and oats."  "The arable land ran in narrow slips," with "stony
wastes between, like the moraines of a glacier."  The hay meadow was an
undrained marsh, where rank grasses, mingled with rushes and other
aquatic plants, yielded a coarse fodder.  About the time when George
the First became King of England, Lord Haddington introduced the sowing
of clover and other grass seeds.  Some ten years earlier an
Englishwoman, Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Earl of Peterborough,
and wife of the Duke of Gordon, introduced into her husband's estates
English ploughs, English ploughmen, the system of fallowing up to that
time {89} unknown in Scotland, planted moors, sowed foreign grasses,
and showed the Morayshire farmers how to make hay.

[Sidenote: 1714--Famines in Scotland]

As a natural result of the primitive and incomplete agriculture, dearth
of food was frequent, and even severe famine, in all its horrors of
starvation and death, not uncommon.  When George the First came to the
throne the century was not old enough for the living generation of
Scotchmen to forget the ghastly seven years that had brought the
seventeenth century to its close--seven empty ears blasted with
east-wind.  So many died of hunger that, in the grim words of one who
lived through that time, "the living were wearied with the burying of
the dead."  The plague of hunger took away all natural and relative
affections, "so that husbands had not sympathy for their wives, nor
wives for their husbands; parents for their children, nor children for
their parents."  The saddest proof of the extent of the suffering is
shown in the irreligious despair which seized upon the sufferers.
Scotland then, as now, was strongly marked for its piety, but want made
men defiant of heaven, prepared, like her who counselled the man of Uz,
to curse God and die by the roadside.  Warned by no dream of thin and
ill-favored kine, the Pharaohs of Westminster had passed an Act,
enforced while the famine was well begun, against the importation of
meal into Scotland.  At the sorest of the famine, the importation of
meal from Ireland was permitted, and exportation of grain from Scotland
prohibited.  But, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the
famine had but just subsided, a Government commission ordered that all
loads of grain brought from Ireland into the West of Scotland should be
staved and sunk.

The empire over which King George came to rule was as yet in a growing,
almost a fluid condition.  In North America, England had, by one form
of settlement or another, New York, but lately captured; New Jersey,
the New England States, such as they then were, Virginia--an old
possession--Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania--settled {90} by
William Penn, whose death was now very near.

Louisiana had just been taken possession of by the French.  The city of
New Orleans was not yet built.  The French held the greater part of
what was then known of Canada; Jamaica, Barbadoes, and other West
Indian islands were in England's ownership.  The great East Indian
Empire was only in its very earliest germ; its full development was not
yet foreseen by statesman, thinker, or dreamer.  The English flag had
only begun to float from the Rock of Gibraltar.




{91}

CHAPTER VI.

OXFORD'S FALL; BOLINGBROKE'S FLIGHT.

[Sidenote: 1714--Formation of King George's Cabinet]

King George did not make the slightest concealment of his intentions
with regard to the political complexion of his future government.  He
did not attempt or pretend to conciliate the Tories, and, on the other
hand, he was determined not to be a puppet in the hands of a "Junto" of
illustrious Whigs.  He therefore formed a cabinet, composed
exclusively, or almost exclusively, of pure Whigs; but he composed it
of Whigs who at that time were only rising men in the political world.
He was going to govern on Whig principles, but he was not going to be
himself governed by another "Junto" of senior Whig statesmen, like that
which had been so powerful in the reign of William the Third.  He acted
with that shrewd, hard common-sense which was an attribute of his
family, and which often served instead of genius or enlightenment or
intelligence, or even experience.  A man of infinitely higher capacity
than George might have found himself puzzled as to his proper policy
under conditions entirely new and unfamiliar; but George acted as if
the conditions were familiar to him, and set about governing England as
he would have set about managing his household in Hanover; and he
somehow hit upon the course which, under all the circumstances, was the
best he could have followed.  It is not easy to see how he could have
acted otherwise with safety to himself.  It would have been idle to try
to conciliate the Tories.  The more active spirits among the Tories
were, in point of fact, conspirators on behalf of the Stuart cause.
The {92} colorless Tories were not men whose influence or force of
character would have been of much use to the king in endeavoring to
bring about a reconciliation between the two great parties in the
State.  The civil war was not over, or nearly over, yet, and there were
still to come some moments of crisis, when it seemed doubtful whether,
after all, the cause supposed to be fallen might not successfully lift
its head again.  As the words of Scott's spirited ballad put it, before
the Stuart crown was to go down, "there are heads to be broke."  For
George the First to attempt to form a Coalition Cabinet of Whigs and
Tories at such a time would have been about as wild a scheme as for M.
Thiers to have formed a Coalition Cabinet of Republicans and of
Bonapartists, while Napoleon the Third was yet living at Chiselhurst.

[Sidenote: 1714--The Treaty of Utrecht]

The Tories had been much discredited in the eyes of the country by the
Peace of Utrecht.  The long War of the Succession had been allowed to
end without securing to England and to Europe the one purpose with
which it was undertaken by the allies.  It was a war to decide whether
a French prince, a grandson of Louis the Fourteenth, and whose
accession seemed to threaten a future union of Spain with France,
should or should not be allowed to ascend the throne of Spain.  The end
of the war left the French prince on the throne of Spain.  Yet even
this fact would not in itself have been very distressing or alarming to
the English people, however it might have pained others of the allied
States.  The English people probably would never have drawn a sword
against France in this quarrel if it had not been for the rash act of
Louis the Fourteenth in recognizing the chevalier, James Stuart, as
King of England on the death of his father, James the Second.  But
England felt bitterly that the Peace of Utrecht left France and Louis
not only unpunished, but actually rewarded.  All the campaigns, the
victories, the sacrifices, the genius of Marlborough, the heroism of
his soldiers, had ended in nothing.  Peace was secured at any price.
It was not that {93} the people of England did not want to have a peace
made at the time.  On the contrary, most Englishmen were thoroughly
tired of the war, and felt but little interest in the main objects for
which it had been originally undertaken.  Most Englishmen would have
agreed to the very terms which were contained in the Treaty,
disadvantageous as these conditions were in many points.  But they were
ashamed of the manner in which the Treaty had been brought about, more
than of the Treaty itself.  France lost little or nothing by the
arrangement; she sacrificed no territory, and was left with practically
the same frontier which she had secured for herself twenty years
before.  Spain had to give up her possessions in Italy and the Low
countries.  The Dutch got very little to make up to them for their
troubles and losses, but they could do nothing for themselves, and the
English statesmen were determined not to continue the war.  Yet, on the
whole, these terms were not altogether unsatisfactory to the people of
England.  The war was becoming an insufferable burden.  The National
Debt was swollen to a size which alarmed at that time and almost
horrified many persons, and there seemed no chance whatever of the
expulsion of Philip, the French prince, from Spain.  All these
considerations had much influence over the public mind, and possibly
would of themselves have entirely borne down the arguments of those who
contended that an opportunity was now come to England of bringing
France, so long her principal enemy and greatest danger, completely to
her feet.  Marlborough's victories had, indeed, made it easy to march
to Paris, and dictate there such terms of peace as would keep France
powerless for generations to come.  But the English people were
disgusted by the manner in which the Treaty of Utrecht had been brought
about.  In order to secure that arrangement it was absolutely necessary
to destroy the authority of Marlborough, and the Tory statesmen set
about this work with the most shameless and undisguised pertinacity.
Through the influence {94} of Mrs. Masham, a cousin of the Duchess of
Marlborough, introduced by the Duchess herself to the Queen, the Tory
statesmen contrived to get the Whig ministry dismissed, and a ministry
formed under Harley and Bolingbroke.  These statesmen opened secret
negotiations with France.  They were determined to bring about a peace
by any sort of arrangement.  They betrayed England's allies by entering
into secret negotiations with the enemy, in express violation of the
conditions of the alliance; they sacrificed the Catalonian populations
of Northern Spain in the most shameless manner.  The Catalans had been
encouraged to rise against the French prince, and England had promised
in return to protect them, and to secure them the restoration of all
their ancient liberties.  In making the peace the Catalans were wholly
forgotten.  The best excuse that can be made for the Tory ministers is
to suppose that they positively and actually did forget all about the
Catalans.  Anyhow, the Catalans were left at the mercy of the new King
of Spain, and were treated after the severest fashion of the time in
dealing with conquered but obstinate rebels.

[Sidenote: 1714--Degradation of Marlborough]

In order to make such a peace it was necessary to remove Marlborough.
Some accusations were pressed against him to secure his removal.  He
was charged with having taken perquisites from the contractors who were
supplying the army with bread, and with having deducted two and one
half per cent. from the pay which England allowed to the foreign troops
in her service.  Marlborough's defence would not have been considered
satisfactory in our day; and indeed it is impossible to think of any
such accusation being made, or any such defence being needed, in times
like ours.  Imagination can hardly conceive the possibility of such
charges being seriously made against the Duke of Wellington, for
example, or the Duke of Wellington condescending to plead custom and
usage in reply to them.  But in Marlborough's day things were very
different, and Marlborough was able {95} to show that, as regarded some
of the accusations, he had only done what was customary among men in
his position, and what he had full authority for doing; and, as
regarded others, that he had applied the sums he got to the business of
the State as secret service money, and had not made any personal
profit.  He did not, indeed, produce any accounts; but, assuming his
defence to be well founded, it is quite possible that the keeping of
accounts might have been an undesirable and inconvenient practice.  At
all events it was certain that Marlborough had not done any worse than
other statesmen of the time, in civil as well as in military service,
had been in the habit of doing; and considering all the conditions of
the period, the defence which he set up ought to have been satisfactory
to every one.  It probably would have satisfied his enemies but that
they were determined to get rid of him.  They were, indeed, compelled
to get rid of him in order to make their secret treaty with France, and
they succeeded.  Marlborough was dismissed from all his employments,
and went for a time into exile.  The English people, therefore, saw
that peace had been made by the sacrifice of the greatest English
commander who, up to that time, had ever taken the field in their
service.  The treaty had been obtained by the most shameless intrigues
to bring about the downfall of this great soldier.  No matter how
desirable in itself the peace might be, no matter how reasonable the
conditions on which it was based, yet it became a national disgrace
when secured by means like these.  Nor was this all: the Tory statesmen
finding it imperative for their purpose to have a majority in the House
of Lords, as well as in the House of Commons, prevailed upon the Queen
to stretch her royal prerogative to the extent of making twelve peers.
All these new peers were Tories; one of them was Mr. Masham, husband of
the woman who had assisted so efficiently in the degradation of the
Duke of Marlborough.  When they first appeared in the House of Lords, a
Whig statesman ironically asked them {96} whether they proposed to vote
separately or by their foreman?

[Sidenote: 1714--The new Ministry]

Never, perhaps, has a mean and treacherous policy like that which
brought about the Treaty of Utrecht had so splendid a literary defence
set up for it.  Swift, with the guidance of Bolingbroke, and put up,
indeed, to the work by Bolingbroke, devoted the best of his powers to
defame Marlborough, and to justify the conduct of the Tory ministry.
No matter how clear one's own opinions on the question may be, it is
impossible, even at this distance of time, to study the writings of
Swift on this subject without finding our convictions sometimes shaken.
The biting satire, which seems only like cool common-sense and justice
taking their keenest tone; the masterly array, or perhaps we should
rather say disarray, of facts, dates, and arguments; the bold
assumptions which, by their very case and confidence, bear down the
reader's knowledge and judgment; the clear, unadorned style, made for
convincing and conquering--all these qualities, and others too, unite
with almost matchless force to make the worse seem the better cause.
It is true that the mind of the reader is never impressed by Swift's
vindication of the Tories, as it is always impressed by Burke's
denunciation of the French Revolution.  Swift does not make one see, as
Burke does, that the whole soul and conscience of the author are in his
work.  Swift is evidently the advocate retained to conduct the case;
Burke is the man of impassioned conviction, speaking out because he
cannot keep silent.  Still, we have all of us been sometimes made to
question our own judgment, and almost to repudiate our own previously
formed impressions as to facts, by the skill of some great advocate in
a court of law; and it is skill of this kind, and of the very highest
order, that we have to recognize in Swift's efforts to justify the
policy of the Treaty of Utrecht.  To make out any case it was necessary
to endeavor to lower Marlborough in the estimation of the English
people, just as it was necessary to destroy his power in order to get
the ground open for the {97} arrangement of the treaty.  Swift set
himself to this task with a malignity equal to his genius.  Arbuthnot,
hardly inferior as a satirist to Swift, wrote a "History of John Bull,"
to hold up Marlborough and Marlborough's wife to ridicule and to
hatred.  He depicted the great soldier as a low and roguish attorney,
who was deluding his clients into the carrying on of a long and costly
lawsuit for the mere sake of putting money into his own pocket.  He
lampooned England's allies as well as England's great general; he
described the Dutch, whom the Tory ministers had shamefully betrayed,
as self-seeking and perfidious traitors, for whose protection we were
sacrificing all, until we found out that they were secretly juggling
with our enemies for our destruction.  No stronger argument could be
found to condemn the conduct of the Tory ministers than the mere fact
that Swift and Arbuthnot failed to secure their acquittal at the bar of
public opinion.  All the attacks on Marlborough were inspired by
Bolingbroke, and it has only to be added that Marlborough had been
Bolingbroke's first and best benefactor.

The King appointed Lord Townshend his Secretary of State.  The office
was then regarded as that of First Lord of the Treasury is now; it
carried with it the authority of Prime-minister.  James Stanhope was
Second Secretary.  Walpole was at first put in the subordinate office
of Paymaster-general, without a seat in the Cabinet; a place in
Administration which at a later period was assigned to no less a man
than Edmund Burke.  Walpole's political capacity soon, however, made it
evident that he was fitted for higher office, and we shall find that he
does not remain long at the post of Paymaster-general.  The Duke of
Shrewsbury had resigned both his offices: that of Lord Treasurer, and
that of Viceroy of Ireland.  Lord Sunderland accepted the Irish
Viceroyalty, and the Lord Treasurership was put into commission, and
from that time was heard of no more.  Next to Walpole himself, the most
notable man in the administration--the man, that is to say, who became
best known to the world afterwards--was {98} Pulteney, now Walpole's
devoted friend, before long to be his bitter and unrelenting enemy.
Pulteney, just now, is still a very young man, only in his thirty-third
year; but he is the hereditary representative of good Whig principles,
and has already distinguished himself in the House of Commons as a
skilful and fearless advocate of his political faith; he is a keen and
clever pamphleteer; in later days, if he had lived then, he would
doubtless have been a writer of leading articles in newspapers.  His
style is polished and penetrating, like that of an epigrammatist.  He
has travelled much for that time, and is what was then called an
elegant scholar.  The eloquent and silver-tongued Lord Cowper was
restored to the office of Lord Chancellor, which he had already held
under Queen Anne, and by virtue of which he had presided at the
impeachment of Sacheverell.  When Cowper was made Lord Keeper of the
Great Seal by Anne in 1705, he was in the forty-first year of his age,
but looked very much younger.  He wore his own hair at that time, an
unusual thing in Anne's days, and this added to his juvenile
appearance.  The Queen insisted that he must have his hair cut off and
must wear a heavy wig; otherwise, she said, the world would think she
had given the seals to a boy.  Cowper was a prudent, cautious, clever
man, whose abilities made a considerable impression upon his own time,
but have carried his memory only in a faint and feeble way on to ours.
He was a fine speaker, so far as style and manner went, and he had a
charming voice.  Chesterfield said of him that the ears and the eyes
gave him up the hearts and understandings of the audience.  The Duke of
Argyll became Commander-in-chief for Scotland.  In Ireland, Sir
Constantine Phipps was removed from the office of Chancellor, on the
ground of his Jacobite opinions; and it is a curious fact, worth noting
as a sign of the times, that the University of Oxford unanimously
agreed to confer on him an honorary degree almost immediately after--on
the day, in fact, of the King's coronation.

{99}

[Sidenote: 1714--Lord Townshend]

Lord Townshend, the Prime-minister, as we may call him, was not a man
of any conspicuous ability.  He belonged to that class of competent,
capable, trustworthy Englishmen who discharge satisfactorily the duties
of any office to which they are called in the ordinary course of their
lives.  Such a man as Townshend would have made a respectable Lord
Mayor or a satisfactory Chairman of Quarter Sessions, if fortune had
appointed him to no higher functions.  He might have changed places
probably with an average Lord Mayor or Chairman of Quarter Sessions
without any particular effect being wrought on English history.  Men of
this stamp have nothing but official rank in common with the statesmen
Prime-ministers--the Walpoles and Peels and Palmerstons; or with the
men of genius--the Pitts and Disraelis and Gladstones.  Lord Townshend
had performed the regular functions of a statesman in training at that
time.  He had been an Envoy Extraordinary, and had made treaties.  He
was a brother-in-law of Walpole.  Just now Walpole and he are friends
as well as connections; the time came when Walpole and he were destined
to quarrel; and then Townshend conducted himself with remarkable
forbearance, self-restraint, and dignity.  He was an honest and
respectable man, blunt of speech, and of rugged, homespun intelligence,
about whom, since his day, the world is little concerned.  Such name as
he had is almost absorbed in the more brilliant reputation of his
grandson--the spoiled child of the House of Commons, as Burke called
him--that Charles Townshend of the famous "Champagne Speech;" the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, of whom we shall hear a good deal later
on, and who, by the sheer force of animal spirits, feather-headed
talents, and ignorance, became, in a certain perverted sense, the
father of American Independence.

The Second Secretary of State, James, afterwards Earl, Stanhope, was a
man of very different mould.  Stanhope was one of the few Englishmen
who have held high position in arms and politics.  He had been a
brilliant {100} soldier; had fought in Flanders and Spain; had
distinguished himself at Barcelona, even under a commander like
Peterborough, whose daring spirit rendered it hard for any subaltern to
shine in rivalry; had been himself raised to command, and kept on
winning victories until his military genius found itself overcrowed by
that of the great French captain, the Duke de Vendôme.  His soldier's
career came to a premature close, as indeed his whole mortal career did
not very long after the time at which we have now arrived.  Stanhope
was a man of scholarly education, almost a scholar; he had abilities
above the common; he had indomitable energy, and was as daring and
resolute in the council as in the field.  He had a domineering mind,
was outspoken and haughty, trampling over other men's opinions as a
charge of cavalry treads down the grasses of the field it traverses.
He made enemies, and did not heed their enmity.  He was single-minded,
and, what was not very common in that day, he was free from any love of
money or taint of personal greed.  He does not rank high either among
statesmen or soldiers, but as statesman and soldier together he has
made for himself a distinct and a peculiar place.  His career will
always be remembered without effort by the readers of English history.

[Sidenote: 1714--Coronation of the King]

A new Privy Council was formed which included the name of Marlborough.
The Duchess of Marlborough urged her husband not to accept this office
of barren honor.  It is said that the one only occasion on which
Marlborough had ventured to act against the dictation of his wife was
when he thus placed himself again at the disposal of the King.  He
never ceased to regret that he had not followed her advice in this
instance as in others.  His proud heart soon burned within him when he
found that he was appreciated, understood, and put aside; mocked with a
semblance of power, humiliated under the pretext of doing him honor.

Much more humiliating, much more ominous, however, was the reception
awaiting Oxford and Bolingbroke.  From the moment of his arrival, the
King showed himself {101} determined to take no friendly notice of the
great Tories.  Oxford found it most difficult even to get audience of
his Majesty.  The morning after the King's arrival, Oxford was allowed,
after much pressure and many entreaties, to wait upon the Sovereign,
and to kiss his hand.  He was received in chilling silence.  Truly, it
was not likely that much conversation would take place, seeing that
George spoke no English and Oxford spoke no German.  But there was
something in the King's demeanor towards him, as well as in the mere
fact that no words were exchanged, which must have told Oxford that his
enemies were in triumph over him, and were determined to bring about
his doom.  Even before George had landed in England he had sent
directions that Bolingbroke should be removed from his place of
Secretary of State.  On the last day of August this order was executed
in a manner which made it seem especially premature, and even
ignominious.  The Privy Council, as it stood, was then dissolved, and
the new Council appointed, which consisted of only thirty-three
members.  Somers was one of this new Council, but in name alone; his
growing years, his increasing infirmities, and the flickering decay of
his once great intellect, allowed him but little chance of ever again
taking an active part in the affairs of the State.  Marlborough was
named a member of it, as we have seen.  The Lords Justices ordered that
all despatches addressed to the Secretary of State should be brought to
them.  Bolingbroke himself had to wait at the door of the Council
Chamber with his despatch-box, to receive the commands of his new
masters.

France, tired of war, recognized the new King of England.  The
coronation of the King took place on October 20th; Bolingbroke and
Oxford were both present.  We learn from some of the journals of the
day that it had rained on the previous afternoon, and that many of the
Jacobites promised themselves that the rain would continue to the next
day, and so retard, if only for a few hours, the hateful ceremony.  But
their hopes of foul weather {102} were disappointed.  The rain did not
keep on, and the coronation took place successfully in London; not,
however, without some Jacobite disturbances in Bristol, Birmingham,
Norwich, and other places.

[Sidenote: 1714--Flight of Bolingbroke]

The Government soon after issued a proclamation dissolving the existing
Parliament, and another summoning a new one.  The latter called on all
the electors of the kingdom, in consequence of the evil designs of men
disaffected to the King, "to have a particular regard to such as showed
a firmness to the Protestant Succession when it was in danger."  The
appeal was clearly unconstitutional, according to our ideas, but it was
made, probably, in answer to James Stuart's manifesto a few weeks
before, in which the Pretender reasserted his claims to the throne, and
declared that he had only waited until the death "of the Princess, our
sister, of whose good intentions towards us we could not for some time
past well doubt."

The general elections showed an overwhelming majority for the Whigs.
The not unnatural fluctuations of public opinion at such a time are
effectively illustrated by the sudden and complete manner in which the
majority was transferred, now to this side, now to that.  Just at this
moment, and indeed for long after, the Whigs had it all their own way.
Only a few years ago their fortunes had seemed to have sunk to zero,
and now they had mounted again to the zenith.  The King opened
Parliament in person; the Speech was read for him by the Lord
Chancellor, for the very good reason that George could not pronounce
English.  That Speech declared that the established Constitution,
Church and State, should be the rule of his Government.  The debate on
the Address was remarkable.  In the House of Lords the Address
contained the words, "To recover the reputation of this kingdom."
Bolingbroke made his last speech in Parliament.  He objected to these
words, and proposed an amendment, with an eloquence and an energy
worthy of his best days, and with a front as seemingly fearless as
though his fortunes were at the full.  He contended that to talk of
{103} "recovering" the reputation of the kingdom was to cast a stigma
on the glory of the late reign.  He proposed to substitute the word
"maintain" for the word "recover."  His amendment was defeated by
sixty-six votes to thirty-three: exactly two to one.  In the House of
Commons the Address, which was moved by Walpole, contained words still
more significant.  The Address spoke of the Pretender's attempts "to
stir up your Majesty's subjects to rebellion," declared that his hopes
"were built upon the measures that had been taken for some time past in
Great Britain," and added: "It shall be our business to trace out those
measures whereon he placed his hopes, and to bring the authors of them
to condign punishment."  These words were the first distinct intimation
given by the Ministers that they intended to call their predecessors to
account.  Stanhope stated their resolve still more explicitly in the
course of the debate.  Bolingbroke sat and heard it announced that he
and his late colleague were to be impeached for high-treason.  He put
on an appearance of serenity and philosophic boldness for a time, but
in his heart he had already taken fright.  For a few days he went about
in public, showing himself ostentatiously, with all the manner of a man
who is happy in his unwonted ease, and is only anxious for relaxation
and amusement.  He professed to be rejoiced by his release from office,
and those of his friends who wished to please him offered him their
formal congratulations on his promotion to a retirement that placed him
above the petty struggles and cares of political life.  He visited
Drury Lane Theatre on March 26, 1715, went about among his friends,
chatted, flirted, paid compliments, received compliments, arranged to
attend another performance at the same theatre the following evening.
That same night he disguised himself as a serving-man, slipped quietly
down to Dover, escaped from thence to Calais, and went hurriedly on to
Paris, ready to place himself and his talents and his influence--such
as it might be--at the service of the Stuarts.

There seems good reason to believe that the Duke of {104} Marlborough,
by a master-stroke of treachery, avenged himself on Bolingbroke at this
crisis in Bolingbroke's fortunes, and decided the flight to Paris.
Bolingbroke sought out Marlborough, and appealing to the memories of
their old friendship, begged for advice and assistance.  Marlborough
professed the utmost concern for Bolingbroke, and gave him to
understand that it was agreed upon between the Ministers of the Crown
and the Dutch Government that Bolingbroke was to be brought to the
scaffold.  Marlborough pretended to have certain knowledge of this, and
he told Bolingbroke that his only chance was in flight.  Bolingbroke
fled, and thereby seemed to admit in advance all the accusations of his
enemies and to abandon his friends to their mercy.  One of
Bolingbroke's biographers appears to consider that on the whole this
was well done by Marlborough, and that it was only a fair retaliation
on Bolingbroke.  In any case, it is clear that Bolingbroke acted in
strict consistency with the principles on which he had moulded his
public and private life; he consulted for himself first of all.  It may
have been necessary for his own safety that he should fly from the
threatening storm, It is certain that he had bitter and unrelenting
enemies.  These would not have spared him if they could have made out a
case against him.  No one but Bolingbroke himself could know to the
full how much of a case there was against him.  But his flight, if it
saved himself, might have been fatal to those who were in league with
him for the return of the Stuarts.  If he had stood firm, it is
probable that his enemies would not have been able to prevail any
further against him than they were able to prevail in his absence
against Harley, whom his flight so seriously compromised.  Nobody needs
to be told that the one last hope for conspirators whose plans are
being discovered is for all in the plot to stand together or all to fly
together.  Bolingbroke does not seem to have given his associates any
chance of considering the position and making up their minds.

[Sidenote: 1715--The Committee of Secrecy]

A committee of secrecy was struck.  It was composed {105} of twenty-one
members, and the hearts of Bolingbroke's friends may well have sunk
within them as they studied the names upon its roll.  Many of its
members were conscientious Whigs--Whigs of conviction, eaten up with
the zeal of their house, like James Stanhope himself, and Spencer
Cowper and Lord Coningsby and young Lord Finch and Pulteney, now in his
period of full devotion to Walpole.  There were Whig lawyers, like
Lechmere; there were steady, obtuse Whigs, like Edward Wortley Montagu,
husband of the brilliant and beautiful woman whom Pope first loved and
then hated.  There was Aislabie, then Treasurer of the Navy, afterwards
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to disgrace at the bursting of
the South Sea Bubble, and who would at any time have elected to go with
the strongest, and loved to tread the path lighted by his own
impressions as to his own interests.  Thomas Pitt, grandfather to the
great Chatham, the "Governor Pitt" of Madras, whose diamonds were
objects of admiration to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was a member of the
committee; and so was Sir Richard Onslow, afterwards speaker of the
House of Commons, and uncle of the much more celebrated "Speaker
Onslow."  From none of these men could Bolingbroke have much favor to
expect.  Those who were honest and unselfish would be ill-disposed
towards him because of their honesty and unselfishness; those who were
not exactly honest and certainly not unselfish, would, by reason of
their character, probably be only too anxious to help the winning party
to get rid of him.  But the names that must have showed most formidable
in the eyes of Bolingbroke and his friends were those of Robert Walpole
and Richard Hampden.  Two years before this time the persistent enmity
of Bolingbroke had sent Walpole to the Tower, branded with the charge
of corruption and expelled from the House of Commons.  Now things are
changed indeed.  Walpole is chairman of the committee, and "Hast thou
found me, oh, mine enemy?"  St. John had threatened Hampden, who was a
lineal descendant of the {106} Hampden of the Civil War, with the
Tower, for daring to censure the Ministry of the day, and was only
deterred from carrying out his threat by prudent counsellors, who
showed him that Hampden would be only too proud to share Walpole's
imprisonment.  These were men not likely to forget or to forgive such
injuries.

At first the Tories seem scarcely to have believed that the Whigs would
push their policy to extremities.  The eccentric Jacobite Shippen
publicly scoffed at the committee, and declared in the Mouse of Commons
that its investigations would vanish into smoke.  Such confidence was
quickly and rudely shattered.  June 9th saw a memorable scene.  On that
day Robert Walpole, as chairman of the Committee of Secrecy, rose and
told the House of Commons that he had to present a report, but that he
was commanded by the committee to move in the first instance that a
warrant be issued by the Speaker to apprehend several persons who
should be named by him, and that meantime no member be permitted to
leave the House.  Thereupon the lobbies were cleared of all strangers,
and the Sergeant-at-arms stood at the door in order to prevent any
member from going out.  Then Walpole named Mr. Matthew Prior, Mr.
Thomas Harley, and other persons, and the Speaker issued his warrant
for their arrest.  Mr. Prior was arrested at once; Mr. Harley a few
hours afterwards.

[Sidenote: 1715--"Most contagious treason"]

Prior was the poet, the friend and correspondent of Bolingbroke.  He
had been much engaged in the negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht,
and had at one time actually held the rank of English Envoy.  He had
but lately returned from Paris; had arrived in London just before
Bolingbroke's flight.  Thomas Harley, cousin of Lord Oxford, had also
been concerned in the negotiations in a less formal and more underhand
sort of way.  When the arrests had been ordered, Walpole informed the
House that the Committee of Secrecy had agreed upon their report, and
had commanded him to submit it to the House of Commons.  The report,
which Walpole himself, as {107} chairman of the committee, had drawn
up, was a document of great length; it occupied many hours in the
reading.  But the time could not have seemed tedious to those who
listened.  The report was an indictment and a State paper combined.  It
arrayed with the utmost skill all the evidences and arguments, all the
facts and all the passages of correspondence, necessary to make out a
case against the accused statesmen.  It carried with it, beyond
question, the complete historical condemnation of Oxford and
Bolingbroke in all that related to the Treaty of Utrecht.  Never was it
more conclusively established for the historian that Ministers of State
had used the basest means to bring about the basest objects.  It was
made clear as light that the national interests and the national honor
had been sacrificed for partisan and for personal purposes.  Objects in
themselves criminal for statesmen to aim at had been sought by means
which would have been shameful even if employed for justifiable ends.
Had Bolingbroke and Oxford been endeavoring to save the State by the
arts which they employed to sacrifice it, their conduct would have
called for the condemnation of all honest men.  But as regards the
transactions with James Stuart there was ample ground shown for
suspicion, there was good reason to conjecture or to infer, but there
was no positive evidence of intended treason.  A historian reading over
the report would in all probability come to the conclusion that Oxford
and Bolingbroke had been plotting with James Stuart, but he would not
see in it satisfactory grounds for an impeachment.  No jury would
convict on such evidence; no jury probably would even leave the box for
the purpose of considering their verdict.  In the course of the events
that were soon to follow it was placed beyond any doubt that
Bolingbroke and Oxford had all along been trying to arrange for the
return of the Stuarts.  They were not driven to throw themselves in
despair into the Stuart cause by reason of harsh proceedings taken
against them by their enemies in England; they had been "pipe-laying,"
to use an expressive {108} American word, for the Stuart restoration
during all the closing years of Queen Anne's reign.  The reader must
decide for himself as to the degree of moral or political guilt
involved in such transactions.  It has to be remembered that nearly
half--some still say more than half--of the population of these
countries was in favor of such a restoration, and that Anne herself
unquestionably leaned to the same view.  What is certain is that Oxford
and Bolingbroke were planning for it.  But what seems equally clear is
that the report of the Secret Committee did not contain satisfactory
evidence on which to sustain a charge of treason.  Swift is not a
trustworthy witness on these subjects, but he is quite right when he
says that the allegations were "more proper materials to furnish out a
pamphlet than an impeachment."

[Sidenote: 1715--"An intricate impeach is this!"]

Bolingbroke's friends must have felt deeply grieved at his flight when
they heard the statement of the case against him.  Even as regards the
Treaty of Utrecht, it seems questionable whether the historical
conviction assuredly obtained against him by the contents of the report
would, in the existing condition of politics and parties, have been
followed by any sort of judicial conviction, whether in a court of law
or a trial by Parliament.

The day after the reading of the report gave Walpole his long-desired
revenge; he impeached Bolingbroke of high-treason.  There was a dead
silence in the House when he had finished.  Then two of Bolingbroke's
friends, Mr. Hungerford and General Ross, mustered up courage to speak
a few words for their lost leader.  The star of the morning, the Tory
Lucifer, had fallen indeed!  Lord Coningsby got up and made a clever
little set speech.  Walpole had impeached the hand, and Lord Coningsby
impeached the head; Walpole had impeached the clerk, and Coningsby
impeached the justice; Walpole had impeached the scholar, and Coningsby
impeached the master.  This head, this justice, this master, was, of
course, the Lord Oxford.  As a piece of dramatic declamation {109}
Coningsby's impeachment was telling enough; as a historical
presentation of the case against the two men it was absurd.  Through
all Anne's later years Oxford had been nothing and Bolingbroke
everything.  On the very eve of the Queen's death Bolingbroke had
secured his triumph over his former friend by driving Oxford out of all
office.  Had Oxford been first impeached, and the speech of Lord
Coningsby been aimed at Bolingbroke, it would have been strikingly
appropriate; as it was, it became meaningless rhetoric.  Next day
Oxford went to the House of Lords, and tried to appear cool and
unconcerned, but, according to a contemporary account, "finding that
most members avoided sitting near him, and that even the Earl Powlet
was shy of exchanging a few words with him, he was dashed out of
countenance, and retired out of the House."

Impeachments were now the order of the day.  The loyal Whigs of the
Commons were incessantly passing between the Upper House and the Lower
with articles of impeachment, and still further articles when the first
were not found to be strong enough for the purpose.  Stanhope impeached
the Duke of Ormond; Aislabie impeached Lord Strafford--not of
high-treason, but of high crimes and misdemeanors; Strafford was
accused of being not only "the tool of a Frenchified ministry," but the
adviser of most pernicious measures.  Strafford's part in the
negotiations had not been one of any considerable importance.  He had
been sent as English Plenipotentiary to the Congress at Utrecht.
Associated with him as Second Plenipotentiary was Dr. John Robinson,
then Bishop of Bristol, and more lately made Bishop of London, the
churchman on whom the office of the Privy Seal had been conferred by
Harley, to the great anger of the Whigs.  It was said that Strafford,
in his high and mighty way, had refused flatly to accept a mere poet
like Prior for his official colleague.  Strafford had, in reality,
little or nothing to do with the making of the Treaty.  The
negotiations were carried on between Bolingbroke and {110} the Marquis
de Torcy, French Secretary of State and nephew of the great Colbert;
and when these wanted agents they employed men more clever and less
pompous than Strafford.  Aislabie, in bringing on his motion, drew a
curious distinction between Strafford and Strafford's official
colleague.  "The good and pious Prelate," he said, had been only a
cipher, and "seemed to have been put at the head of that negotiation
only to palliate the iniquity of it under the sacredness of his
character."  He was glad, therefore, that nothing could be charged upon
the Bishop, and complacently observed that the course taken with regard
to Dr. Robinson, who was not to be impeached, "ought to convince the
world that the Church was not in danger."  There was some wisdom as
well as wit in a remark made thereupon by a member of the House in
opposing the motion--"the Bishop, it seems, is to have the benefit of
clergy."

[Sidenote: 1715--Ormond's hesitation]

The motions for the impeachment of Bolingbroke and Oxford were carried
without a division.  This fact, however, would be little indication as
to the result of an impeachment after a long trial, and after the minds
of men had cooled down on both sides; when Whigs had grown less
passionate in their hate, and Tories had recovered their courage to
sustain their friends.  Even at the moment the impeachment of the Duke
of Ormond was a matter of far greater difficulty.  Ormond had many
friends, even among the most genuine supporters of the Hanoverian
succession.  He was the idol of the High-Church party; at all events,
of the High-Church mob.  Had he acted with anything like a steady
resolve he would, in all probability, have escaped even impeachment.
To some of the most serious charges against him, his refusal, for
instance, to attack the French while the secret negotiations for the
Treaty of Utrecht were going on, he could fairly have pleaded that he
had acted only as a soldier taking positive instructions and carrying
them out.  His clear and obvious policy would have been to take the
quiet stand of a man conscious of innocence, and {111} therefore not
afraid of the scrutiny of any committee or the judgment of any tribunal.

But Ormond hesitated.  Ormond was always hesitating.  Many of his
influential supporters urged him to seek an audience of the King at
once, and to profess to George his unfailing and incorruptible loyalty.
Had he taken such a course it is not at all unlikely that the King
might have caused the measures against him to be abandoned.  Ormond's
friends, indeed, were full of hope that they could, in any case, induce
the Ministry not to persevere in the proceedings against him.  On the
other hand, he was urged to join in an insurrection in the West of
England, towards which, beyond doubt, he had already himself taken some
steps.  The less cautious of his friends assured him that his
appearance in the West would be welcomed with open arms, and would
bring a vast number of adherents round him, and that a powerful blow
could be struck at once against the Hanoverian succession.  Ormond,
however, took neither the one course nor the other.  To do him justice,
he was far too honorable for the utter perfidy of the first course, and
it is doing him no injustice to say that he was too feeble for the
daring enterprise of the second.  It is believed that Ormond had an
interview with Oxford before his flight, and that he urged Oxford to
attempt an escape in terms not unlike those with which William the
Silent, in Goethe's play, endeavors to persuade Egmont not to remain in
the power of Philip the Second.  Then Ormond himself fled to France.
He lived there for thirty years after.  He led a pleasant, easy,
harmless life, and was completely forgotten in England for years and
years before his death.  More than twenty years after his flight he is
described by vivacious Mary Wortley Montagu as "one who seems to have
forgotten every part of his past life, and to be of no party."  He was
a weak man, with only a very faint outline of a character; but he was
more honorable and consistent than was common with the men of his time.
When he had once taken up a cause or a principle he held to it.  {112}
He was the very opposite to Bolingbroke.  Bolingbroke was genius and
force without principle.  Ormond had principle without genius or force.

[Sidenote: 1715--Oxford committed to the Tower]

Two, then, of the great accused peers were beyond the reach of the
House of Lords.  Oxford alone remained.  On July 9, 1715, articles of
impeachment were brought up against him.  The impeachment does not seem
to have been very substantial in its character.  The great majority of
its articles referred to the conduct of Oxford with regard to the
Treaty of Utrecht.  One article accused him of having abused his
influence over her Majesty by prevailing upon her to exercise "in the
most unprecedented and dangerous manner" her prerogative by the
creation of twelve Peers in December, 1711.  A motion that Oxford be
committed to the Tower was made, and on this motion he spoke a few
words which were at once ingenious and dignified.  He asserted his
innocence of any treasonable practice or thought, and declared that
what he had done was done in obedience to the positive orders of the
Queen.  He asked the House what might not happen if Ministers of State,
acting on the immediate commands of their sovereign, were afterwards to
be made accountable for their proceedings.  Then in a few words he
commended his cause to the justice of his brother peers, and took leave
of the House of Lords, as he put it, "perhaps forever."  Such an
impeachment would have been impossible in more recent days.  If Oxford
had been accused of treasonable dealings with the Stuarts, and if
evidence could have been brought home to him, there indeed might have
been a reasonable ground for impeachment.  But there was no sufficient
evidence for any such purpose, and to impeach a statesman simply
because he had taken a political course which was afterwards
disapproved by the nation, and which was discredited by results, was
simply to say that any failure in the policy of a Minister of the Crown
might make him liable to impeachment when his enemies came into power.
The Peace of Utrecht, bad as it was, had been condoned, or rather {113}
approved of, by two successive Parliaments.  Shrewsbury, who was now in
high favor, had been actively concerned in its promotion.  It was a
question of compromise altogether, on which politicians were entitled
to form the strongest opinions.  No doubt the enemies of the Tory party
had ample ground for condemning and denouncing the Peace.  But the part
which a statesman had taken in bringing about the Peace could not,
according to our modern ideas, form any just ground of ministerial
impeachment.  Much more reasonably might the statesmen of a later day
have been impeached who, by their blundering and obstinacy, brought
about the armed resistance and the final independence of the North
American colonies.  It is curious, in our eyes, to find Oxford
defending his conduct on the ground that he had simply obeyed the
positive orders of his sovereign.  The minister would run more risk of
impeachment, in our days, who declared that he had acted in some great
public crisis simply in obedience to his sovereign's orders, than if he
were to stand accountable for the greatest errors, the grossest
blunders, committed on the judgment and on the responsibility of
himself and his colleagues.

Oxford was committed to the Tower, whither he went escorted by an
immense popular procession of his admirers, who cheered vociferously
for him and for High-Church together.  He may now be said to drop out
of our history altogether.  He was destined to linger in long
confinement, almost like one forgotten by friends and enemies.  We
shall have to tell afterwards how he petitioned for a trial, and was
brought to trial, and in what fashion he came to be acquitted by his
peers.  The remainder of his life he passed in happy quietude among his
books and curious manuscripts; the books and manuscripts which formed
the original stock of the Harleian Library, afterwards completed by his
son.  Harley lived until 1724, and was not an old man even then--only
sixty-three.  It is not necessary that in this work we should concern
ourselves much more about him.  Despite all the {114} praises of his
friends, some of them men of the highest intellectual gifts, like Swift
and Pope, there does not seem to have been any great quality,
intellectual or moral, in Harley.  He had a narrow and feeble mind; he
was incapable of taking a large view of anything; he was selfish and
deceitful; although it has to be said that sometimes that which men
called deceit in him was but a lack of the capacity to look straight
before him and make up his mind.  He often led astray those who acted
with him merely because his own confusion of intellect and want of
defined purpose were leading himself astray.  Perhaps the most
dignified passage in his life was that which showed him calmly awaiting
the worst in London, when men like Bolingbroke and Ormond had chosen to
seek safety in flight.  Yet even the course which he took in this
instance seems to have been rather the result of indecision than of
independent self-sufficing courage and resolve.  He does not appear to
have been able to decide upon anything until the time had passed when
movement of any kind would have availed, and so he remained where he
was.  Many a man has gained credit for courage, and has seemed to
surround himself with dignity, because at a moment of alarm, when
others did this or that, he was unable quite to make up his mind as to
what he ought to do, and so did nothing, and let the world go by.

[Sidenote: 1715--Sir Henry St. John]

On September 17, Norroy, King at Arms, came solemnly down to the House
of Lords and razed the names of Ormond and of Bolingbroke from the roll
of peers.  Bolingbroke had some consolation of a sham kind.  He had
wished and schemed to be Earl of Bolingbroke before his fall, and now
his new king, James of St. Germains, had given him the patent of
enhanced nobility.  If he ceased to be a viscount in the eyes of
English peers and of English heralds, he was still an earl in the
Pretender's court.  Bolingbroke had too keen a sense of humor not to be
painfully aware of the irony of the situation.  Nor was he likely to
find much satisfaction in the peerage {115} which the Government had
just conferred upon his father, Sir Henry St. John, by creating him
Baron of Battersea and Viscount St. John.  Sir Henry St. John was an
idle, careless _roué_, a haunter of St. James's coffee-houses, living
in the manner and in the memories of the Restoration, listlessly
indifferent to all parties, leaning, perhaps, a little to the Whigs.
He had no manner of sympathy with his son or appreciation of his
genius.  When the son was made a peer the father only said, "Well,
Harry, I thought thee would be hanged, but now I see thee wilt be
beheaded."  The father himself was once very near being hanged.  In his
wild youth he had killed a man in a quarrel, and was tried for murder
and condemned to death, and then pardoned by the King, Charles II., in
consideration, it is said, of a liberal money-payment to the merry
monarch and his yet more merry mistresses.




{116}

CHAPTER VII.

THE WHITE COCKADE.

[Sidenote: 1715--Bolingbroke at St. Germains]

When Bolingbroke got to Paris he did not immediately attach himself to
the service of James.  Even then and there he still appears to have
been undecided.  In the modern American phrase, he "sat on the fence"
for a while.  Probably, if he had seen even then a chance of returning
with safety to England, if the impeachments had not been going on, and
if any manner of overture had been made to him from London, he would
forthwith have dropped the Jacobite cause, and returned to profess his
loyalty to the reigning English sovereign.  After a while, however,
seeing that there was no chance for him at home, he went openly into
the cause of the Stuarts, and accepted the office of Secretary of State
to James.  It must have been a trying position for a man of
Bolingbroke's genius and ambition when he found himself thus compelled
to put up with an empty office at a sham court.  Bolingbroke's desire
was to play on a great stage, with a vast admiring audience.  He loved
the heat and passion of debate; he enjoyed his own rhetorical triumphs.
He must have been chilled and cramped indeed in a situation which
allowed him no opportunity of displaying his most splendid and genuine
qualities, while it constantly called on him for the exercise of the
very qualities which he had least at hand.  Nature had never meant him
for a conspirator, or even for a subtle political intriguer; nor,
indeed, had Nature ever intended him to be the adherent of a lost
cause.  All that could have made a position like his tolerable to a man
of his peculiar capacity would have been faith in the cause--that faith
which would have {117} prevented him from seeing any but its noble and
exalted qualities, and would have made him forget himself in its hopes,
its perils, its triumphs, and its disasters.  On the contrary, it would
seem that Bolingbroke found it difficult to take the Stuart cause
seriously, even when he was himself playing the part of its leading
statesman.  A critical observer writes from Paris in the early part of
the year 1716, saying that he believed Bolingbroke's chief fault was
"that he could not play his part with a grave enough face; he could not
help laughing now and then at such kings and queens."  Meantime,
Bolingbroke amused himself in his moments of recreation after his old
fashion, he indulged in amour after amour, intrigue after intrigue.
Lord Chesterfield said of him, that "though nobody spoke and wrote
better upon philosophy than Lord Bolingbroke, no man in the world had
less share of philosophy than himself.  The least trifle, such as the
overroasting of a leg of mutton, would strangely disturb and ruffle his
temper."  On the other hand, a glance from a pretty woman, or a glimpse
of her ankle, would send all Bolingbroke's political combinations and
philosophical speculations flying into the air, and convert him in a
moment from the statesman or the philosopher into the merest _petit
maître_, macaroni, and gallant.

Louis the Fourteenth refused to give open assistance to the cause of
the Stuarts, but he was willing enough to lend any help that he could
in private to Bolingbroke and to them.  His death was the first severe
blow to the cause which Bolingbroke now represented.  Louis the
Fourteenth was, according to Bolingbroke himself, the best friend James
then had.  "When I engaged," says Bolingbroke, "in this business, my
principal dependence was on his personal character; my hopes sank as he
declined, and died when he expired."  The Regent, Duke of Orleans, was
a man who, with all his coarse and unrestricted dissipation, had some
political capacity and even statesmanship.  He saw that the Stuart was
a sinking, the Hanoverian a rising cause.  Even when the two seemed
{118} most nearly balanced it yet appeared to Orleans, if we may quote
a phrase more often used in our days than in his, that the one cause
was only half alive, but the other was half dead.  Orleans, moreover,
had a good deal of that feeling which was more strongly marked still in
a Duke of Orleans of a later day.  He had a liking for England and for
English ways; he was, indeed, rather inclined to affect the political
manners of an English statesman.  He therefore leaned to the side of
the Government established in England; and, at the urgent request of
the English Ambassador in Paris, he acted with some energy in
preventing the sailing of vessels intended for the uses of an
expedition to the English coast.

[Sidenote: 1715--"Mischief, thou art afoot."]

James Stuart seemed as if he were determined still further to imperil
the chances of his family, and to embarrass his adherents.  The right
moment for a movement in his favor had been allowed to pass away, and
now, with characteristic blundering and ill fortune, he seized upon the
most unsuitable time that could possibly have been employed for such an
attempt.  Something might have been done, perhaps, a temporary
alteration in the dynasty might have been obtained, if energy and
decision had been shown in that momentous interval when Queen Anne lay
dying.  But when that time had been allowed to pass, the clear policy
of the Pretender was to permit the fears of Englishmen to go to sleep
for a while, to endeavor to reorganize his plans and his party; to wait
until a certain reaction should set in, a reaction very likely to come
about because of the apparent incapacity and the unattractive character
of George the First, and then at some timely hour, with well-matured
preparations, to strike an energetic blow.  George the First was only a
year on the throne when the adherents of James got up a miserable
attempt at an insurrection.

There were three conditions under which, and under which alone, an
insurrection just then would have had a reasonable chance of success.
These conditions were fully recognized and understood by the Jacobite
leaders {119} in England, Scotland, and France.  The first was that a
rising should take place at once in England and in Scotland, the second
that the Chevalier in person should take the field, and the third that
France should give positive assistance to the enterprise.  The Jacobite
cause was strong in the south-western counties of England, and there
the influence of the Duke of Ormond was strong likewise.  The general
arrangement, therefore, in the minds of the Jacobite chiefs was that
James Stuart should make his appearance in Scotland, that at the same
moment the Duke of Ormond should raise the standard of revolt in some
of the south-western counties, and that France should assist the
expedition with men, money, and arms.  When James, acting against the
advice of his best counsellors, resolved on striking a blow at once,
two of the necessary conditions were clearly wanting.  France was not
willing to give any actual assistance, and Ormond was not ready to
raise the standard of rebellion in England.

Ormond's sudden appearance in Paris struck dismay into the hearts of
the Jacobite counsellors, men and women, there.  It had been distinctly
understood that he was to remain in England, and that, if threatened
with arrest, he was to hasten to one of the western counties, where he
and his friends were strong, and strike a sudden blow.  He was to seize
Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and other towns, and set the Stuart flag
flying all over that part of England.  When he appeared in France, a
mere solitary fugitive, all men of sense saw that the game was up.
Bolingbroke at once sent through safe hands a clear statement of the
condition of things, to be laid before Lord Mar.  Bolingbroke's object
was to restrain Mar from any movement in the altered state of affairs.
The letter, however, came too late.  Mar had already made his movement
towards the Highlands: there was no stopping the enterprise then; the
rebellion had taken fire.  James was determined more than ever to go.
His arguments were the arguments of mere desperation.  "I cannot but
{120} see," he wrote to Bolingbroke, "that affairs grow daily worse and
worse by delays, and that, as the business is now more difficult than
it was six months ago, so these difficulties will, in all human
appearance, rather increase than diminish.  Violent diseases must have
violent remedies, and to use none has, in some cases, the same effect
as to use bad ones."  Indeed, it was impossible that the Chevalier
himself or the Duke of Ormond could hold back.  Both had personal
courage quite enough for such an attempt.  On the 28th of October James
Stuart, after many delays, set out in disguise, and travelled westward
to St. Malo.  Ormond sailed from the coast of Normandy to that of
Devonshire, but found there no sign of any arrangement for a rising.
His plans had long been known to the English Government, and measures
had been taken to frustrate them.  In that little Jacobite Parliament
sitting in Paris, which Bolingbroke spoke of with such contempt, and
from which, as he puts it, "no sex was excluded," there was hardly any
secret made of the projects they were carrying on.  Before the sudden
appearance of Ormond in Paris they had counted, with the utmost
confidence, on a full success, and were already talking of the
Restoration as if it were an accomplished fact.  Every word they
uttered which it was of the least importance for the British Government
to hear was instantly made known to Lord Stair, the new English
Ambassador--a resolute and capable man, a brilliant soldier, an astute
and bold diplomatist, equal to any craft, ready for any emergency,
charming to all, dear to his friends, very formidable to his enemies.
Ormond found that, as he had let the favorable moment slip when he fled
from England to France, there was now no means whatever of recalling
the lost opportunity.  He returned to Brittany, and there he found the
Chevalier preparing to start for Scotland.  After various goings and
comings the Chevalier was at last enabled to embark at Dunkirk in a
small vessel, with a few guns and half a dozen Jacobite officers to
attend him, and he made for the Scottish coast.

{121}

[Sidenote: 1715--The camp in Hyde Park]

About the same time, and as if in obedience to some word of command
from France, there was a general and almost simultaneous outburst of
Jacobite demonstration in England, amounting in most places to riot.
In London, and all over England, so far as one can judge, the popular
feeling appears to have been rather with the Jacobites than against
them.  Stout Jacobites toasted a mysterious person called Job, who had
no connection with the prophet, but whose name contained the initial
letters of James, Ormond, and Bolingbroke; and "Kit" was no less
popular, because it stood for "King James III.," while the mysterious
symbolism of the "Three B's" implied "Best Born Briton," and so the
Chevalier de St. George.  The Chevalier's birthday--the 10th of
June--was celebrated with wild outbursts of enthusiasm in several
places.  Stuart-loving Oxford in especial made a brave show of its
white roses.  The Loyalists, who endeavored to do a similar honor to
the birthday of King George, were often violently assailed by mobs.  In
many places the windows of houses whose inmates refused to illuminate
in honor of the Chevalier were broken; William the Third was burned in
effigy in various parts of London, and in many towns throughout the
country.  So serious at one period did the revulsion of Jacobite
feeling appear to be, that it was thought necessary to form a camp in
Hyde Park, and to bring together a large body of troops there.  The
Life Guards and Horse Grenadiers, three battalions of the Foot Guards,
the Duke of Argyll's regiment, and several pieces of cannon were
established in the camp.  By a curious coincidence the troops were
reviewed by King George, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of
Marlborough, on the 25th of August, 1715, the very day on which, as we
shall presently see, the Highland clans set up the standard of the
Stuarts at Braemar, in Scotland.  The camp had a certain amount of
practical advantage in it, independently of its supposed political
necessity--it made Hyde Park safe at night.  Before the camp was
established, and after it was broken up, the Park appears to {122} have
been little better than Bagshot Heath or Hounslow Heath.  It was the
favorite parade-ground of highway robbers and murderers.  The soldiers
themselves were occasionally suspected of playing the part of
highwaymen.  "A man in those days," says Scott, "might have all the
external appearance of a gentleman, and yet turn out to be a
highwayman;" and "the profession of the polite and accomplished
adventurer who nicked you out of your money at White's, or bowled you
out of it at Marylebone, was often united with that of the professed
ruffian who, on Bagshot Heath or Finchley Common, commanded his brother
beau to stand and deliver."  "Robbers--a fertile and alarming
theme--filled up every vacancy, and the names of the Golden Farmer, the
Flying Highwayman, Jack Needham, and other Beggars' Opera heroes, were
familiar in our mouths as household words."  The revulsion of Jacobite
feeling actually showed itself sometimes among the soldiers in the
camp.  Accounts published at the time tell us of men having been
flogged and shot for wearing Jacobite emblems in their caps.  Perhaps
in mentioning this Hyde Park camp it may not be inappropriate to notice
the fact that General Macartney, who had figured in a terrible tragedy
in the Park two or three years before, returned to England, and
obtained the favor of George by bringing over six thousand soldiers
from Holland to assist the King.  General Macartney was the man who had
acted as second to Lord Mohun in the fatal duel in Hyde Park on the
15th of November, 1712, when both Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton were
killed.  Macartney escaped to Holland, and was charged by the Duke of
Hamilton's second with having stabbed the Duke through the heart while
Colonel Hamilton was endeavoring to raise him from the ground.
Macartney came back and took his trial, but was only found guilty of
manslaughter--that is to say, found guilty of having taken part in the
duel, and escaped without punishment.  Probably Macartney, and
Hamilton, and Mohun, and the Duke are best remembered in our time
because of the {123} effect which that fatal meeting had upon the
fortunes of Beatrix Esmond.

[Sidenote: 1715--John Erskine of Mar]

The insurrection had already broken out in Scotland.  John Erskine,
eleventh Earl of Mar, set himself up as lieutenant-general in the cause
of the Chevalier.  Lord Mar was a man of much courage and some
capacity.  He had held high office under Queen Anne.  One of the
biographers of that period describes Mar as a devoted adherent of the
Stuarts.  His career is indeed a fair illustration of the sort of thing
which then sometimes passed for devoted adherence to a cause.  When
King George reached England he dismissed Mar from office, suspecting
him of sympathy with the Jacobite movement.  Mar had expected something
of the kind, and had written an obsequious and a grovelling letter to
George, in which he spoke of the king's "happy accession," professed
unbounded devotion to the house of Hanover, and promised that "You
shall ever find in me as faithful a subject as ever any king had."  The
new king, however, declined to trust to the faithfulness of this
subject; and a year after the faithful subject had returned to his
Jacobite convictions, and was gathering the Highland clans in James
Stuart's name.

The clans were got together at Braemar.  The white cockade was mounted
there by clan after clan, the Macintoshes being the first to display it
as the emblem of the Stuart cause.  Inverness was seized.  King James
was proclaimed at several places, notably at Dundee, by Graham, the
brother of "conquering Graham," Bonnie Dundee, the fearless, cruel,
clever Claverhouse who fell at Killiecrankie.  Perth was secured.  The
force under Mar's leadership grow greater every day.  He had begun with
a handful of men.  He had now a little army.  He had set up his
standard almost at hap-hazard at Braemar, and now nearly all the
country north of the Tay was in the hands of the Jacobites.

The Duke of Argyll was put in command of the royal forces, and arrived
in Scotland in the middle of September 1716.  He hastened to the camp,
which had been got {124} together somehow at Stirling.  He came there
almost literally alone.  He brought no soldiers with him.  He found few
soldiers there to receive him.  Under his command he had altogether
about a thousand foot and half as many dragoons, the latter consisting
in great measure of the famous and excellent Scots Grays.  His prospect
looked indeed very doubtful.  He could expect little or no assistance
from his own clan.  They had work enough to do in guarding against a
possible attack from some of the followers of Lord Mar.  Glasgow,
Dumfries, and other towns were likewise in imminent danger from some of
the Highland clans, and were kept in a continual agony of apprehension.
It seemed likely enough that Argyll might soon be surrounded at
Stirling.  If Mar had only made a forward movement it is impossible to
say what degree of success he might not have accomplished.  It seems
almost marvellous, when we look back and survey the state of things, to
see what a miserable force the Government had to rely upon.  In the
whole country they had only about eight thousand men.  They had more
men abroad than at home, and in the critical condition of things which
still prevailed upon the Continent, it did not seem clear that they
could, except in the very last extremity, bring home many of the men
whom they kept abroad.  Of that little force of eight thousand soldiers
they did not venture to send a considerable proportion up to the North.
They had, perhaps, good reason.  They did not know yet where the
serious blow was to be struck for the Stuart cause.  Many of George's
counsellors still looked upon the movement in Scotland as something
merely in the nature of a feint.  They believed that the real blow
would yet be struck by Ormond in the West of England.

[Sidenote: 1715--Sheriffmuir]

But the evil fortune which hung over the Stuart cause in all its later
days clung to it now.  There was no conceivable reason why Mar should
not have marched southward.  The forces of the King were few in number,
and were not well placed for the purpose of making any considerable
resistance.  But in an enterprise like that of {125} Mar all depends
upon rapidity of movement.  What we may call the ultimate resources of
the country were in the hands of the King and his adherents.  Every
day's delay enabled them to grow stronger.  Every day's delay beyond a
certain time discouraged and weakened the invaders.  Mar might, at one
critical moment, have swept Argyll's exhausted troops before him, but
he was feeble and timorous; he dallied; he let the time pass; he
allowed Argyll to get away without making an effort to attack him.  It
was then that one of the Gordon clan broke into that memorable
exclamation, "Oh for one hour of Dundee!"--the exclamation which Byron
has paraphrased in the line,

  Oh, for one hour of blind old Dandolo!


Certainly one hour of Dundee might, at more than one crisis in this
melancholy struggle, have secured for the time the cause of the
Stuarts, and won for James at least a temporary occupation of the
throne of his ancestors.  Mar's little force remained motionless long
enough to allow the Duke of Argyll to get sufficient strength to make
an attack upon it at Sheriffmuir.  Sheriffmuir was not much of a
victory.  Each side, in fact, claimed the conqueror's honor.  Mar was
not annihilated, nor Argyll driven back.  The Duke of Argyll probably
lost more of his men, but, on the other hand, he captured many guns and
standards, and he re-appeared on the same field the next day, while Mar
showed there no more.  Tested in the only practical way, it is clear
that the Duke of Argyll had the better of it.  Lord Mar wanted to do
something, and was prevented from doing it at a time when to him
everything depended on advance and on success.  The Duke of Argyll
successfully interposed between Mar and his object, and therefore was
clearly the victor.

It is on record that no small share of Mar's ill-success was due to the
action, or rather the inaction, of the famous Highland outlaw, Rob Roy.
He and his clan had joined Mar's standard, but his sympathies seem to
have been with Argyll.  He had an unusually large body of {126} men
under his command, for many of the clan Macpherson had been committed
to his leadership, in consequence of the old age of their chief; but at
a critical moment he refused to lead his men to the charge, and stood
on a hill with his followers unconcernedly surveying the fight.  It is
said that had he kept faith he could have turned the fortunes of the
day.

[Sidenote: 1715--"If he will die like a prince"]

Argyll and the cause he represented could afford to wait, and Mar could
not.  The insurrection already began to melt.  James Stuart himself
made his appearance in Scotland.  He was characteristically late for
Sheriffmuir, and when he did throw himself into the field he seemed
unable to take any decisive step, or even to come to any clear
decision.  He did not succeed in making himself popular, even for the
moment, among his followers in Scotland.  The occasion was one in which
gallant bearing and kingly demeanor would have gone for much, and
indeed it is not at all impossible that a leader of a different stamp
from James might even then have so inspired the Highland clansmen, and
so made use of his opportunity, as to overwhelm Argyll and the
Hanoverian forces, and turn the whole crisis to his favor.  But James
was peculiarly unsuited to an enterprise of the kind.  He had graceful
manners, a mild, serene temper, and great power of application to work.
His personal courage was undoubted, and he was willing enough to risk
his own life on any chance; but he had none of the spirit of a
commander.  He was sometimes weak and sometimes obstinate.  His very
appearance was not in his favor among the Highland men, to whom he had
previously been unknown.  He was tall and thin, with pale face, and
eyes that wanted fire and expression.  His words were few, his behavior
always sedate and somewhat depressed.  Here, among the Scottish
clansmen on the verge of rebellion, he seemed utterly borne down by the
greatness of the enterprise.  He was wholly unable to infuse anything
like spirit or hope into his followers.  On the contrary, his
appearance among them, when he did show {127} himself, had a
dispiriting and a depressing effect on almost every mind.  Those who
remember the manner and demeanor of the late Louis Napoleon, Emperor of
the French, the silent shyness, the appearance of almost constant
depression, which were characteristic of that sovereign, will, we
think, be easily able to form a clear idea of the effect that James
Stuart produced among his followers in Scotland.  He did not care to
see the soldiers exercise, and handle their arms; he avoided going
among them as much as possible.  The men at last began to feel a
mistrust of his courage--the one great quality which he certainly did
not lack.  A feeling of something like contempt began to spread abroad.
"Can he speak at all?" some of the soldiers asked.  He was all ice; his
very kindness was freezing.  A man like Dundee called to such an
enterprise would have set the clans of Scotland aflame with enthusiasm.
James Stuart was only a chilling and a dissolving influence.  His more
immediate military counsellors were like himself, and their only policy
seemed to be one of postponement and delay.  They advised him against
action of every kind.  The clansmen grew impatient.  At Perth, one
devoted Highland chief actually suggested that James should be taken
away by force from his advisers, and brought among men who were ready
to fight.  "If he is willing to die like a prince," said this man, "he
will find there are ten thousand gentlemen in Scotland who are willing
to die with him."  If James had followed the bent of his own
disposition, he might even then have died like a prince, or gone on to
a throne.  His opponents were as little inclined for action as his own
immediate advisers.  The Duke of Argyll himself delayed making an
advance until peremptory orders were sent to him from London.  So long,
and with so little excuse, did he delay, that statesmen in London
suspected, not unreasonably, that Argyll was still willing to give
James Stuart a chance, or was not yet quite certain whether the cause
of the Stuarts was wholly lost.  It is characteristic of the time that
so long as there seemed any possibility of James {128} redeeming his
crown Argyll's own colleagues suspected that Argyll was not willing to
put himself personally in the way.  At last, however, the peremptory
order came that Argyll must advance upon Perth.  The moment the advance
became apparent, the counsellors of James Stuart insisted on a retreat.
On a day of ill omen to the Stuart cause, the 30th of January, 1716,
the anniversary of the day when Charles the First was executed, the
retreat from Perth was resolved on.  That retreat was the end of the
enterprise.  Many Jacobites had already made up their minds that the
struggle was over, that there was nothing better to be done than to
disperse before the advancing troops of King George, that the sooner
the forces of James Stuart melted away, and James Stuart himself got
back to France, the better.  James Stuart went back to France, and the
clansmen returned to their homes.  Some of the Roman Catholic gentlemen
rose in Northumberland, and endeavored to form a junction with a
portion of Mar's force which had come southward to meet them.  The
English Jacobites, however, were defeated at Preston, and compelled to
surrender.  After a voyage of five days in a small vessel, James
succeeded in reaching Gravelines safely on the 8th of February, 1716.
His whole expedition had not occupied him more than six weeks.

[Sidenote: 1715--Marlborough's counsels]

It was believed at the time that the counsels of the Duke of
Marlborough were mainly instrumental in bringing about the prompt
suppression of the rebellion.  Marlborough's advice was asked with
regard to the military movements and dispositions to be made, and the
belief of the day was that it was his counsel, and the manner in which
the Government followed it out, which led to the utter overthrow of
James Stuart and the dispersion of his followers.  Marlborough is said
to have actually told in advance the very time at which, if his advice
were followed, the rebellion could be put down.  Nothing is more likely
than that Marlborough's advice should have been sought and should have
been given.  It would not in the {129} least degree militate against
the truth of the story that the outbreak took place so soon after
Marlborough had been professing the most devoted attachment to the
cause of the Stuarts, and had declared, as we have said already, that
he would rather cut off his right hand than do anything to injure the
claims of the Chevalier St. George.  But it would not seem that any
advice Marlborough might have given was followed out very strictly in
the measures taken to put down the rebellion.  We may be sure that
Marlborough's would have been military counsel worthy of the greatest
commander of his age.  But in the measures taken to put down the
rebellion we can see nothing but incapacity, vacillation, and even
timidity.  An energetic man in Argyll's position, seeing how James
Stuart halted and fluctuated, must have made up his mind at once that a
rapid and bold movement would finish the rebellion, and we find no such
movement made, until at last the most peremptory orders from London
compelled Argyll at all hazards to advance.  If then Marlborough gave
his advice in London, which is very likely, it would seem that, for
some reason or other, the advice was not followed by the commanders in
the field.  The whole story reminds one of the belief long entertained
in France, and which we suppose has some votaries there still, that the
great success of the Duke of Wellington, in the latter part of the war
against Napoleon, was due to the military counsels of Dumouriez, then
an exile in London.

There was a plan for the capture of Edinburgh Castle, which, like other
Stuart enterprises, would have been a great thing if it had only
succeeded.  Edinburgh Castle was then full of arms, stores, and money.
Some eighty of the Jacobites, chiefly Highlanders, contrived a
well-laid scheme by which to get possession of the Castle.  They
managed by bribes and promises to win over three soldiers in the Castle
itself.  The arrangement was that these men were to be furnished with
ladders of a peculiar construction suited to the purpose, which, at a
certain hour of the night, they were to lower down the Castle rock on
the {130} north side--the side looking on the Prince Street of our day.
By these ladders the assailants were quietly to ascend, and then
overpower the little garrison, and possess themselves of the Castle.
When the stroke had been done, they were to fire three cannon, and men
stationed on the opposite coast of Fife were thereupon to light a
beacon; and the flash of that light would be the signal for other
beacons from hill to hill to bear the news to Mar--as the lights along
the Argive hills carried the tale of Troy's fall to Argos.  The plan
was an utter failure.  It broke down in two places.  One of the
conspirators told his brother; the brother told his wife; the lady took
alarm, and sent an anonymous letter disclosing the whole plot to the
Lord Justice Clerk.  Yet even then, had the conspirators been in time,
their plan might have succeeded; for the anonymous letter did not reach
its destination till an hour after the time appointed to make the
attempt on the Castle.  But the conspirators were not punctual.  Some
of them were in a tavern in Edinburgh, drinking to the success of their
enterprise.  Every one in the neighborhood seems to have known what
their enterprise was, to have had some sympathy with it, to have talked
freely about it.  Eighteen of these heroes kept up their conviviality
in the tavern till long after the appointed time.  The hostess of the
place was heard to say that they were powdering their hair to go to the
attack on the Castle.  "A strange sort of powder," Lord Stanhope
remarks, "to provide on such an occasion."  Lord Stanhope evidently
takes the hostess's words in a literal sense, and believes that the
lady really meant to say that the jovial conspirators were actually
powdering their locks as if for a ball.  We may assume that the hostess
spoke as Hamlet did, "tropically."  Whether she did or not--whether
they were really adorning their locks, or simply draining the
flagon--the result was all the same.  They came too late; the plot was
discovered; the sympathizing soldiers from the Castle were already
under arrest.  The conspirators had to disperse and fly; a few of them
were arrested; {131} their neighbors were only too willing to help them
to escape.  It cannot be doubted that there was sympathy enough in
Edinburgh to have made their plan the beginning of a complete
success--if it had only itself been allowed to succeed.  But the
disclosure to the lady, and the powder for the hair, brought all to
nothing.  The whole story might almost be said to be an allegorical
illustration of the fortunes of the Stuarts.  The pint and the
petticoat always came in the way of a success to that cause.

[Sidenote: 1715--Bolingbroke's dismissal]

When James reached Gravelines, he hurried on to St. Germains.  There,
the next morning, Bolingbroke came to see him.  Bolingbroke, to do him
justice, had done all in his power to dissuade James from making his
fatal expedition at such a time, and under such untoward circumstances.
He had shown judgment, prudence, and, in the true sense, courage.  He
had shown himself a statesman.  He might very well have met James in
the mood and with the remonstrances of the counsellors who, after the
event, are able to say, "I told you so."  But Bolingbroke appears to
have had more discretion and more manliness.  He advised James to
withdraw once again from the dominions of the King, and take refuge in
Lorraine.  Bolingbroke knew well, by this time, that there was not the
slightest chance of any open assistance from the French Court; and even
that the French Court would be only too ready to throw James over, and
sacrifice him, if, by doing so, they could strengthen the bonds of good
feeling between France and England.  James professed to take
Bolingbroke's counsel in very friendly fashion, and parted from
Bolingbroke with many expressions of confidence and affection.  Yet it
is certain that at this time he had made up his mind not to see
Bolingbroke any more.  He went for a time to a house near Versailles, a
kind of headquarters of intriguing political women, and thence
immediately despatched a letter to Bolingbroke, relieving him of all
his duties as Secretary of State.  Bolingbroke affects to have taken
his dismissal very composedly, but it cannot be doubted that his heart
burned within him at what he, {132} doubtless, believed to be the
ingratitude of the prince for whom he had done and sacrificed so much.
For Bolingbroke had that unlucky gift of fancy which enables a man to
see himself, and his own doings, and his own merits, in whatever light
is most gratifying to his personal vanity.  He had, in truth, never
risked nor sacrificed anything for the sake of James or the Stuart
cause.  He never had the least idea of risking or sacrificing anything
for that cause, or for any other.  It was only when his fortunes in
England became desperate, when impeachment, and, as he believed, a
scaffold threatened him, when he had no apparent alternative left but
to join the Pretender or stay at home and lose all--it was only then
that he took any decided step as an adherent of the cause of the
Stuarts.  We cannot doubt that James Stuart knew to the full the part
that Bolingbroke had played.  He knew that he owed Bolingbroke no
favor, and that he could have no confidence in him.  Still, it remains
to the present hour a mystery why James should then, and in that
manner, have got rid of Bolingbroke forever.  Bolingbroke himself does
not appear to have known the cause of his dismissal.  It may be that
James had grown tired of the whole fruitless struggle, and was glad to
get rid of a minister whose restless energy and genius would always
have kept political intrigue alive, and political enterprises going.
Or it may be that just then there had fallen into James's hands some
new and recent evidences of Bolingbroke's willingness to treat, on
occasion, with either side.  However this may be, James made up his
mind to dismiss his great follower, and Bolingbroke at once made up his
mind to endeavor to ingratiate himself into the favor of the House of
Hanover, and to secure his restoration to London society.  Almost at
the very moment of his dismissal he made application to some of his
friends in London to endeavor to obtain for him a permission to return.

[Sidenote: 1715--"Banished Bolingbroke repeats himself"]

We do not absolutely say a farewell to Bolingbroke now and here, as he
stands dismissed from the service of {133} the Stuarts and disqualified
for the service of the Hanoverians.  Nearly forty years of life were
yet before him, but his work as a statesman was done.  Never again had
his genius a chance of shining in the service of a throne.  The
master-politician of the age was out of employment forever.  We do not
know if history anywhere supplies such another example of a great
political career snapped off so suddenly at its midst, hardly even at
its midst, and never put together again.  Bolingbroke re-appeared again
and again in England.  He even took more than once a certain kind of
part in politics--that is in pamphleteering; he tried to be the
inspiration and the guiding-star of Pulteney and other rising men who
had come, for one reason or another, to detest Walpole.  But even these
soon began to find Bolingbroke rather more of a hinderance than a help,
and were glad to shake him off and be rid of him.  He becomes
everything by turns; plays at cool philosophy and philosophic retreat;
is always assuring the world in tones of highly suspicious eagerness
that he is done forever with it and its works and pomps; and he is
always yearning and striving to get back to the works and pomps again.
He plays at farming, actually puts on countrified manners, and dines
ostentatiously off homely farmer-like fare, to the amusement of some of
his friends.  He undertakes to settle the whole question of religion,
of this world and the next, including the entire code of human ethics;
and at the same time he is very fond of expatiating to young men
concerning the most effective ways for the seduction of women, the
course to be followed with a lady of quality, the different course in
dealing with an actress, the policy of a long siege, and the policy of
an attack by storm.  He marries again and gets money with his wife, a
French _marquise_, once beautiful, somewhat older than himself, and
seems to be fond of her and happy with her, and discourses to her as to
others about the variety of his successful amours.  Through long, long
years his shadow, his ghost, for in the political sense it is {134}
nothing else, keeps revisiting the glimpses of the moon in England.
For all the influence he is destined to have on the realities of
political life, he might as well be already lying in that tomb in the
old church on the edge of the Thames at Battersea where his strangely
brilliant, strangely blighted career is to come to an end at last.




{135}

CHAPTER VIII.

AFTER THE REBELLION.

[Sidenote: 1715--Conflicts of parties]

All this time the Jacobite demonstrations were still going on in London
and in various parts of England with as much energy as ever.  Green
boughs and oak apples were worn, and even flaunted, about the streets, by
groups of persons on May 29th, the anniversary of Charles the Second's
restoration.  We read of the riots in London, of Whigs of the "Loyal
Society" going about with little warming-pans as emblems of their
hostility to the Stuart cause, and being met by other mobs bearing white
roses as badges of the Stuart cause.  There was a continual battle of
pamphleteers and of ballad-writers.  "High-Church and Ormond!" were
shouted for and sung on one side of the political field, and the "Pope
and Perkin," that is to say, James Stuart, were as liberally denounced on
the other.  The scandals about King George's mistresses were freely
alluded to in the Jacobite songs.  The public of all parties seem to have
very cordially detested the ill-favored ladies whom George had brought
over from Hanover.  The coarsest and grossest abuse was poured forth in
ballads and in pamphlets against the King's favorites and courtiers, and
was sung and shouted day and night in the public streets.

Then, and for long after, these public streets were battle-grounds on
which Whigs and Tories, Hanoverians and Jacobites, fought out their
quarrel.  Men carried turnips in their hats in mockery of the German
elector who had threatened to make St. James's Park a turnip-field, and
were prepared to fight lustily for their bucolic emblem.  Women fanned
the strife, wore white roses for the King {136} over the water, or Sweet
William in compliment to the "immortal memory" of William of Nassau.
Sometimes even women were roughly treated.  On one occasion we read of a
serving-girl, who had made known the hiding-place of a Jacobite, being
attacked and nearly murdered by a Jacobite mob, and rescued by some Whig
gentlemen.  On another occasion a Whig gentleman seeing a young lady in
the street with a white rose in her bosom, jumped from his coach, tore
out the disloyal blossom, lashed the young lady with his whip, and handed
her over to a gang of Whigs, who would have stripped and scourged her but
for the timely appearance of some Jacobite gentry, by whom she was
carried home in safety.  The "Flying Post" warns all "he-Jacobites" and
"she-Jacobites" that if they are not careful they will meet with more
severe treatment than hitherto, and then alludes to some pretty severe
treatment the poor "she-Jacobites" had already received.

[Sidenote: 1715--"All for our rightful King"]

To do the King and his family justice, they behaved with courage and
composure through this long season of popular excitement.  They went
everywhere as they pleased, braving the dangers that certainly existed.
Once a man named Moor spat in the face of the Princess of Wales as she
was going through the streets, and he was scourged till he cried "God
bless King George!"  In 1718 a youth named Sheppard was hanged for
planning King George's death.  This led a Hanoverian fanatic named Bowes
to suggest to the ministry that in return he should go to Italy and kill
King James.  His proffer of political retaliation only resulted in his
being shut up as a madman.  At last the temper of the times and the
frequent threats of assassination compelled the King to take more care of
himself.  Though he walked in Kensington Gardens every day, the gardens
were first searched, and then carefully watched by soldiers.

When the rebellion was over, the Government found they had a large number
of prisoners on their hands, many of them of high rank.  Several officers
taken on {137} the field had already been treated as deserters and shot,
after a trial by drum-head court-martial.  Some of the prisoners of
higher rank were brought into London in a manner like that of captives
dragged along in an old Roman triumph, or like that of actual convicts
taken to Tyburn.  They were marched in procession from Highgate through
London, each man sitting on a horse, having his arms tied with cords
behind his back, the horses led by soldiers, with a military escort
drumming and fifing a march of triumph.  The men of noble rank were
confined in the Tower; others, many of them men of position, such as Mr.
Thomas Forster, a Northumberland gentleman, and member for his county,
were thrust into Newgate, whose horrors have been so well described in
Scott's "Rob Roy."  The Rev. Robert Patten, who had been a conspicuous
Jacobite, played a Titus Oates part in betraying his companions, and his
name figures for King's evidence incessantly in the political trials.
When he tired of treachery he retired to the obscurity of his parish of
Allendale, in Northumberland, and gave the world his history of the
rebellion in which he had played so base a part.

Among the chief prisoners were Lord Widdrington, the Earl of Nithisdale,
the Earl of Wintoun, the Earl of Carnwath, the Earl of Derwentwater,
Viscount Kenmure, and Lord Nairn.  These noblemen were impeached before
the House of Lords, and all, except Lord Wintoun, pleaded guilty, and
prayed for the mercy of the King.  Every effort was made to obtain a
pardon for some of the condemned noblemen.  Women of rank and beauty
implored the King's mercy.  Audacious attempts were made to bribe the
ministers.  Some eminent members of the Whig party in the House of
Commons spoke up manfully and courageously in favor of a policy of mercy.
It is something pleasant to recollect that Sir Richard Steele, who had
got into Parliament again, was conspicuous among these.  In the House of
Lords the friends of the condemned men succeeded in carrying, despite the
strong {138} resistance of the Government, a motion for an address to the
King, beseeching him to extend mercy to the noblemen in prison.  Walpole
himself had spoken very harshly in the House of Commons, and condemned in
unmeasured terms those of his party--the Whig party--who could be so
unworthy as, without blushing, to open their mouths in favor of rebels
and parricides, and he had carried an adjournment of the House of Commons
from the 22d of February to the 1st of March, in order to prevent any
further petitions in favor of the rebel lords from being presented before
the day fixed for their execution.  One of these petitions, it is worth
while recollecting, was presented by the kindly hand and supported by the
manly voice of Sir Richard Steele.  The ministers returned a merely
formal answer on the King's behalf to the address, but they thought it
wise to recommend a respite to be given to Lord Nairn, the Earl of
Carnwath, and Lord Widdrington; and in order to get rid of any further
appeals for mercy, they resolved that the execution of Lord Nithisdale,
Lord Derwentwater, and Lord Kenmure should take place the very next day.
Lord Nithisdale, however, was lucky enough to make his escape, somewhat
after the fashion in which Lavalette, at a much later date, contrived to
get out of prison, by the courage, devotion, and ingenuity of his wife.
It is a curious fact that most of the contemporaries of Nithisdale who
tell the story of his escape have represented his mother, and not his
wife, as the woman who took his place in prison, and to whose energy and
adroitness he owed his life.  Smollett is one of those who give this
version as if there were no doubt about it.  Lord Stanhope, in the first
edition of his "History of England, from the Peace of Utrecht to the
Peace of Versailles," accepted the story on authorities which seemed so
trustworthy.  Lord Stanhope knew that many modern writers had described
the escape as being effected by Lord Nithisdale's wife, but he assumed
that "the name of the wife was substituted in later tradition as being
more romantic."  A letter from Lady Nithisdale herself, {139} written to
her sister, settles the whole question, and of course Lord Stanhope
immediately adopted this genuine version.  Lady Nithisdale tells how at
first she endeavored to present a petition to the King.  The first day
she heard that the King was to go to the drawing-room, she dressed
herself in black, as if in mourning, and had a lady to accompany her,
because she did not know the King personally, and might have mistaken
some other man for him.  This lady and another came with her, and the
three remained in the room between the King's apartments and the
drawing-room.  When George was passing through, "I threw myself at his
feet, and told him in French that I was the unfortunate Countess of
Nithisdale. . . .  Perceiving that he wanted to go off without receiving
my petition, I caught hold of the skirt of his coat that he might stop
and hear me.  He endeavored to escape out of my hands, but I kept such
strong hold that he dragged me upon my knees from the middle of the room
to the very door of the drawing-room."  One of the attendants of the King
caught the unfortunate lady round the waist, while another dragged the
King's coat-skirt out of her hands.  "The petition, which I had
endeavored to thrust into his pocket, fell down in the scuffle, and I
almost fainted away through grief and disappointment."  Seldom, perhaps,
in the history of royalty is there a description of so ungracious,
unkingly, and even brutal reception of a petition presented by a
distracted wife praying for a pardon to her husband.

[Sidenote: 1716--This most constant wife]

Then Lady Nithisdale determined to effect her husband's escape.  She
communicated her design to a Mrs. Mills, and took another lady with her
also.  This lady was of tall and slender make, and she carried under her
own riding-hood one that Lady Nithisdale had prepared for Mrs. Mills, as
Mrs. Mills was to lend hers to Lord Nithisdale, so that in going out he
might be taken for her.  Mrs. Mills was also "not only of the same
height, but nearly of the same size as my lord."  On their arrival at the
Tower, Mrs. Morgan was allowed to go in with {140} Lady Nithisdale.
[Sidenote: 1716--Lord Nithisdale's escape] Only one at a time could be
introduced by the lady.  She left the riding-hood and other things behind
her.  Then Lady Nithisdale went downstairs to meet Mrs. Mills, who held
her handkerchief to her face, "as was very natural for a woman to do when
she was going to bid her last farewell to a friend on the eve of his
execution.  I had indeed desired her to do it, that my lord might go out
in the same manner."  Mrs. Mills's eyebrows were a light color, and Lord
Nithisdale's were dark and thick.  "So," says Lady Nithisdale, "I had
prepared some paint of the color of hers to disguise his with.  I also
bought an artificial head-dress of the same color as hers, and I painted
his face with white, and his cheeks with rouge to hide his long beard,
which he had not time to shave.  All this provision I had before left in
the Tower.  The poor guards, whom my slight liberality the day before had
endeared me to, let me go quietly with my company, and were not so
strictly on the watch as they usually had been, and the more so as they
were persuaded, from what I had told them the day before, that the
prisoners would obtain their pardon."  Then Mrs. Mills was taken into the
room with Lord Nithisdale, and rather ostentatiously led by Lady
Nithisdale past several sentinels, and through a group of soldiers, and
of the guards' wives and daughters.  When she got into Lord Nithisdale's
presence she took off her riding-hood, and put on that which Mrs. Morgan
had brought for her.  Then Lady Nithisdale dismissed her, and took care
that she should not go out weeping as she had come in, in order, of
course, that Lord Nithisdale, when he wont out, "might the better pass
for the lady who came in crying and afflicted."  When Mrs. Mills was
gone, Lady Nithisdale dressed up her husband "in all my petticoats
excepting one."  Then she found that it was growing dark, and was afraid
that the light of the candles might betray her.  She therefore went out,
leading the disguised nobleman by the hand, he holding his handkerchief
pressed to his eyes, as Mrs. Mills had done when she came in.  The {141}
guards opened the doors, and Lady Nithisdale went down-stairs with him.
"As soon as he had cleared the door I made him walk before me for fear
the sentinels should take notice of his walk."  Some friends received
Lord Nithisdale, and conducted him to a place of security.  Lady
Nithisdale went back to her husband's prison, and "When I was in the room
I talked to him as if he had been really present, and answered my own
questions in my lord's voice as nearly as I could imitate it.  I walked
up and down, as if we were conversing together, till I thought they had
time enough to clear themselves of the guards.  I then thought proper to
make off also.  I opened the door, and stood half in it, that those in
the outward chamber might hear what I said, but held it so close that
they could not look in.  I bid my lord a formal farewell for that night,"
and she added some words about the petition for his pardon, and told him,
"I flattered myself that I should bring favorable news."  Then she closed
the door with some force behind her, and "I said to the servant as I
passed by"--who was ignorant of the whole transaction--"that he need not
carry any candles to his master till my lord sent for him, as he desired
to finish some prayers first.  I went down-stairs and called a coach, as
there were several on the stand.  I drove home to my lodgings."  Soon
after Lady Nithisdale was taken to the place of security where her
husband was remaining.  They took refuge at the Venetian ambassador's two
or three days after.  Lord Nithisdale put on a livery, and went in the
retinue of the ambassador to Dover.  The ambassador, it should be said,
knew nothing about the matter, but his coach-and-six went to Dover to
meet his brother; and it was one of the servants of the embassy who acted
in combination with Lord and Lady Nithisdale.  A small vessel was hired
at Dover, and Lord Nithisdale escaped to Calais, where his wife shortly
after joined him.  It is said by nearly all contemporary writers that
King George, when he heard of the escape, took it very good-humoredly,
and even {142} expressed entire satisfaction with it.  Lady Nithisdale
does not seem to have believed this story of George's generosity.  The
statement made to her was that "when the news was brought to the King, he
flew into an excess of passion and said he was betrayed, for it could not
have been done without some confederacy.  He instantly despatched two
persons to the Tower to see that the other prisoners were well secured."

[Sidenote: 1716--Anti-Catholic legislation]

Lord Derwentwater and Lord Kenmure were executed on Tower Hill on the
24th of February.  The young and gallant Derwentwater declared on the
scaffold that he withdrew his plea of guilty, and that he acknowledged no
one but James Stuart as his king.  Kenmure, too, protested his repentance
at having, even formally, pleaded guilty, and declared that he died with
a prayer for James Stuart.  Lord Wintoun was not tried until the next
month.  He was a poor and feeble creature, hardly sound in his mind.
"Not perfect in his intellectuals," a writer in a journal of the day
observed of him.  He was found guilty, but afterwards succeeded in making
his escape from the Tower.  Like Lord Nithisdale, he made his way to the
Continent; and, like Lord Nithisdale, he died long after at Rome.

Humbler Jacobites could escape too.  Forster escaped from Newgate through
the aid of a clever servant, and got off to France, while the angry Whigs
hinted at connivance on the part of persons in high places.  The
redoubted Brigadier Mackintosh, who figures in descriptions of the time
as a "beetle-browed, gray-eyed" man of sixty, speaking "broad Scotch,"
succeeded in escaping, together with his son and seven others, in a rush
of prisoners from the Newgate press-yard.  Mr. Charles Radcliffe had an
even stranger escape; for one day, growing tired, as well he might, of
prison life, he simply walked out of Newgate under the eyes of his
jailers, in the easy disguise of a morning suit and a brown tie-wig.
Once some Jacobite prisoners, who were being sent to the West Indian
plantations, rose against the crew, seized the ship, steered it to
France, and quietly settled down {143} there.  Later still some prisoners
got out even more easily.  Brigadier Mackintosh's brother was discharged
from Newgate on his own prayer, and on showing that "he was very old, and
altogether friendless."

Immediately after the execution of the rebel noblemen the ministry set to
work to take some steps which might render political intrigue and
conspiracy less dangerous in the future.  One idea which especially
commended itself to the statesmen of that time was to make the laws more
rigorous against Roman Catholics.  Law and popular feeling were already
strongly set against the Catholics.  On the death of Queen Anne, officers
in the army, when informing their companies of the accession of the
Elector of Hanover, carried their loyal and religious enthusiasm so far
as to call upon any of their hearers who might be Catholics to fall
forthwith out of the ranks.  The writers who supported the Hanoverian
succession, and were in the service of the Whig ministry, were not
ashamed to declare that the ceremony of the Paternoster would infallibly
cure a stranger of the spleen, and that any man in his senses would find
excellent comedy in the recital of an Ave Mary.  "How common it is," says
the writer of the _Patriot_, "to find a wretch of this persuasion to be
deluded to such a degree that he shall imagine himself engaged in the
solemnity of devotion, while in reality he is exceeding the fopperies of
a Jack-pudding!"  So great was the distrust of Catholics that it was
often the practice to seize upon the horses of Catholic gentlemen in
order to impede them in the risings which they were always supposed to be
meditating.  But the condition of the Catholics in England was not bad
enough to content the ministry.  An Act was passed, in fact what would
now be called "rushed," through Parliament, to "strengthen the Protestant
interest in Great Britain," by making more severe "the laws now in being
against Papists," and by providing a more effective and exemplary
punishment for persons who, being Papists, should venture to enlist in
the service of his Majesty.

{144}

The spirit of political freedom, as we now understand it, had not yet
even begun to glimmer upon the counsels of statesmen.  The idea had not
yet arisen in the minds of Englishmen--even of men as able as
Walpole--that liberty meant anything more than liberty for the expression
of one's own opinions, and for the carrying into action of one's own
policy.  Those who were in power immediately made it their business to
strengthen their own hands, and to prevent as far as possible the growth
of opinions, the expression of ideas, unfavorable to themselves.  Yet at
such a time there were not wanting advocates of the administration to
write that it was "indeed the peculiar happiness and glory of an
Englishman that he must first quit these kingdoms before he can
experimentally know the want of public liberty."  Most people, even
still, read history by the light of ideas which prevailed up to the close
of George the First's reign.  We are all ready enough to admit that in
our time it would not be a free system which suppressed or prevented the
expression of other men's opinions, or which attached any manner of penal
consequence to the profession of one creed or the adhesion to one party.
But most of us are, nevertheless, ready enough to describe one period of
English history, the reign perhaps of one sovereign, as a period of
religious liberty, and another season, or reign, as a time when liberty
was suppressed.  Some Englishmen talk with enthusiasm of the spirit of
Elizabeth's reign, or the spirit of the reign of William the Third, and
condemn in unmeasured terms the spirit which influenced James the Second,
and which would no doubt have influenced James the Second's son if he had
come to the throne.  But any one who will put aside for the moment his
own particular opinions will see that in both cases the guiding principle
was exactly the same.  Never were there greater acts of political and
religious intolerance committed than during the reign of Elizabeth and
during the reign of William the Third.  The truth is that the modern idea
of constitutional and political liberty did not {145} exist among English
statesmen even so recently as the reign of William the Third.  At the
period with which we are now dealing it would not have occurred to any
statesman that there could be a wiser course to take than to follow up
the suppression of the insurrection of 1715 by making more stringent than
ever the laws already in existence against the religion to which most of
the rebels belonged.

[Sidenote: 1716--The Triennial Bill]

The Government made another change of a different kind, and for which
there was better political justification.  They passed a measure altering
the period of the duration of parliaments.  At this time the limit of the
existence of a parliament was three years.  An Act was passed in 1641
directing that Parliament should meet once at least in every three years.
This Act was repealed in 1664.  Another, and a different kind of
Triennial Parliament Bill, passed in 1694.  This Act declared that no
parliament should last for a longer period than three years.  But the
system of short parliaments had not apparently been found to work with
much satisfaction.  The impression that a House of Commons with so
limited a period of life before it would be more anxious to conciliate
the confidence and respect of the constituencies had not been justified
in practice.  Indeed, the constituencies themselves at that time were not
sufficiently awake to the meaning and the value of Parliamentary
representation to think of keeping any effective control over those whom
they sent to speak for them in Parliament.  Bribery and corruption were
as rife and as extravagant under the triennial system as ever they had
been before, or as they ever were since.  But no doubt the immediate
object of repealing the Triennial Bill was to obtain a better chance for
the new condition of things by giving it a certain time to work in
security.  If the new dynasty was to have any chance of success at all,
it was necessary that ministers should not have to come almost
immediately before the country again.

Shippen in the Commons and Atterbury in the Lords {146} were among the
most strenuous opponents of the new measure.  Both staunch Jacobites,
they had everything to gain just then by frequent appeals to the country.
Shippen urged that it was unconstitutional in a Parliament elected for
three years to elect itself for seven years without an appeal to the
constituencies.  Steele defended the Bill on the ground that all the
mischiefs which could be brought under the Septennial Act could be
perpetrated under the Triennial, but that the good which might be
compassed under the Septennial could not be hoped for under the
Triennial.  Not a few persons in both Houses seemed to be of one mind
with the bewildered Bishop of London, who declared that he did not know
which way to vote, for "he was confounded between dangers and
inconveniences on one side and destruction on the other."  It is not out
of place to mention here that when a Bill was unsuccessfully brought in
nearly twenty years after for the Repeal of the Septennial Act, many of
those who had voted in favor of parliaments of seven years in 1716 voted
the other way, while opponents in 1716 were turned into allies in 1734.

[Sidenote: 1716--Death of Lord Somers]

The system of short parliaments has ardent admirers in our own day.
"Annual Parliaments" formed one of the points of the People's Charter.
Many who would not accept the Chartist idea of annual parliaments would
still regard as one of the articles of the true creed of Liberalism the
principle of the triennial parliament.  But even if that creed were true
in the politics of the present day, it would not have been true in the
early days of King George.  One of the great constitutional changes which
the times were then making, and which Walpole welcomed and helped to
carry out, was the change which gave to the House of Commons the real
ruling power in the Constitution.  No representative chamber could then
have held its own against the House of Lords, or the Court, or the Court
and the House of Lords combined, if it had been subject to the necessity
of frequent re-elections.  Short parliaments have even in our own days
been made {147} in Europe the most effective weapons of despotic power.
No test more trying can be found for a party of men sincerely anxious to
maintain constitutional rights at a season of danger than to subject them
to frequent and close electoral struggles.  Much more important in the
historical and constitutional sense was it at the opening of King
George's reign that the House of Commons should be strengthened than that
any particular party should have unlimited opportunities of trying its
chances at a general election.  It mattered little, when once the
position of the representative body had been made secure, whether George
or James sat on the throne.  With the representative body an
inconsiderable factor in the State system, Brunswick would soon have been
as unconstitutional as Stuart.

One of the last acts of the life of Lord Somers was to express to Lord
Townshend his approval of the principle of the Septennial Bill.  He did
not live to see it actually passed into law.  He was but sixty-six years
old at the time of his death.  Disease and not age had weakened his fine
intellect, and had kept him for many years from playing any important
part in the affairs of the State.  The day when Somers died was the very
day when the Septennial Bill passed its third reading in the House of
Commons.  It had come down from the House of Lords, and had to go back to
that House, in consequence of some alterations made in the Commons.
Somers lived just long enough to be assured of its safety.  Born in 1650,
the son of a Worcester attorney, he had won for himself the proudest
honors of the law, and had written his name high up in the roll of
English statesmen.  Steele wrote of him that he was "as much admired for
his universal knowledge of men and things as for his eloquence, courage,
and integrity in the exerting of such extraordinary talents."  The
_Spectator_, in dedicating its earliest papers to him, spoke of him as
one who brought into the service of his sovereign the arts and policies
of ancient Greece and Rome, and praised him for a certain dignity in
{148} himself which made him appear as great in private life as in the
most important offices he had borne.  It was in allusion to Somers,
indeed, that Swift said Bolingbroke wanted for success "a small infusion
of the alderman."  This was a sneer at Somers, as well as a sort of
rebuke to Bolingbroke.  If the "small infusion of the alderman" was
another term for order and method in public business, then it may be
freely admitted by his greatest admirers that Somers had more of the
alderman in his nature than Bolingbroke.  Perhaps the only thing, except
great capacity, which he had in common with Bolingbroke was an ungoverned
admiration of the charms of women.  His fame was first established by the
ability with which he conducted his part of the defence of the seven
bishops in James the Second's reign.  His consistent devotion to the Whig
party, and his just and almost prescient appreciation of the true
principles of that party, set him in sharp contrast to other statesmen of
the time--to men like Marlborough and Shrewsbury and Bolingbroke.  His is
a noble figure, even in its decay, and the historian of such a time parts
from him with regret, feeling that the average of public manhood and
virtue is lowered when Somers is gone.

[Sidenote: 1716--Mary Wortley Montagu]

While Jacobites were lingering in prison and dying on Tower Hill, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu was writing from abroad imperishable letters to her
friends.  We may turn away from politics for a moment to observe her and
her career.  Mr. Wortley Montagu had been appointed Ambassador to
Constantinople, and had set out for his post, accompanied by the witty
and beautiful wife for whom he cared so little.  Ever since he first met
her and presented her with a copy of "Quintus Curtius," in honor of her
Latinity, and some original verses of his own, in earnest of his
admiration, he had been an exacting, impatient lover.  After his marriage
he seems to have grown absolutely indifferent to her, leaving her alone
for months together while he remained in town, and pleading as his excuse
his Parliamentary duties.  {149} She who, on the contrary, had made no
unreasonable display of affection for the lover, appears to have become
deeply attached to the husband, and to have been bitterly pained by his
careless indifference, an indifference which at last, and it would appear
most unwillingly, she learned to return.  When this life had been lived
for a year or two Queen Anne died, and with Walpole's accession to power
Mr. Wortley got office, and brought his beautiful wife up from Yorkshire
to be the wonder and admiration of the English Court and the Hanoverian
monarch.  For two bright years Lady Mary shone like a star in the
brilliant constellation of women, of wits, of politicians, and men of
letters, who thronged St. James's Palace and peopled St. James's parish.
Then came the Constantinople embassy.  Lady Mary had always a longing for
foreign travel, and now that her desires were gratified she enjoyed
herself with all the delight of a child and all the intelligence of a
gifted woman.  Travel was a rare pleasure for women then.  A young
English gentleman made the grand tour, and brought back, if he were
foolish, nothing better than a few receipts for strange dishes, and some
newer notions of vice than he had set out with; if he were wise he became
"possessed of the tongues," and bore home spoils of voyage in the shape
of Titians and Correggios and Raphaels--genuine or the reverse--to stock
a picture-gallery in the family mansion.  But women very seldom travelled
much in those days.  Certainly no man or woman could then write of
travels as Mary Wortley Montagu could and did.  We may well imagine the
delight with which Mistress Skerret and Lady Rich and the Countess of
Bristol, languid Lord Hervey's mother, and adoring Mr. Pope received
these marvellous letters, which were destined to rank with the epistles
of the younger Pliny and of Madame de Sévigné.  Mr. Pope--whose
translation of the "Odyssey" had not yet made its appearance--may well
have thought that Ulysses himself had not seen men and cities to greater
advantage than the beautiful wanderer whom he was destined first {150} to
love and then to hate.  As we read her letters we seem to live with her
in the great, gay, gloomy life of Vienna, to hear once more the foolish
squabbles of Ratisbon society as to who should and should not be styled
Excellency, and to smile at the loyal crowds of English thronging the
wretched inns of Hanover.  But the fidelity of her descriptions may best
be judged from her accounts of life in Constantinople.  The Vienna of
to-day is very different from the ill-built, high-storied city of Maria
Theresa; but the condition of Constantinople has scarcely changed with
the century and a half that has gone by since Lady Mary was English
Ambassadress there.  She seems, indeed, to have seen the heads upon the
famous monument of bronze twisted serpents in the Hippodrome; and perhaps
she did, for Spon and Wheler's sketch of it in 1675 gives it with the
triple heads still perfect, though these serpent heads, and all traces of
them, have long since disappeared.  In Constantinople Lady Mary first
became acquainted with that principle of inoculation for the small-pox
which she so enthusiastically advocated, which she introduced into
England in spite of so much hostility and disfavor, and which, now
accepted by almost all the civilized world, is still wrangled fiercely
over in England.

[Sidenote: 1716--Lady Mary's career]

Perhaps we may anticipate by some half-century to tell of Lady Mary's
further career.  She came back to London again, and shone as brilliantly
as before, and was made love to by Pope, and laughed at her lover, and
was savagely scourged by him in return with whips of stinging and
shameful satire.  One can understand better the story of the daughters of
Lycambes hanging themselves under the pain of the iambics of Archilochus
when one reads the merciless cruelty with which the great English
satirist treated the woman he had loved.  When Lady Mary grew old she
went away abroad to live, without any opposition on her husband's part.
They parted with mutual indifference and mutual esteem.  She lived for
many years in Italy, chiefly in Venice.  Then she came back to London for
a short time to live in lodgings off Hanover Square, and be the curiosity
of the town; and then she died.  Lady Mary always had a dread of growing
old; and she grew old and ill-favored, as Horace Walpole was spiteful
enough to put on record.  When Pope was laughed at by the beauty, he
might have said to her in the words that Clarendon used to the fair
Castlemaine, "Woman, you will grow old," and have felt that in those
words he had almost repaid the bitterness of her scorn.  Horace Walpole
indeed avenged the offended poet, long dead and famous, when he wrote
thus of Lady Mary: "Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze
any one that never heard her name.  She wears a foul mob that does not
cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an
old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas
petticoat.  Her face . . . partly covered . . . with white paint, which
for cheapness she has bought so coarse that you would not use it to wash
a chimney."  Such is one of the latest portraits of the woman who had
been a poet's idol and the cherished beauty of a Court.  Lady Mary, who
had outlived her husband, left an exemplary daughter, who married Lord
Bute, and a most unexemplary son, to whom she bequeathed one guinea, and
who spent the greater part of his life drifting about the East, and
acquiring all kinds of strange and useless knowledge.




{152}

CHAPTER IX.

"MALICE DOMESTIC.--FOREIGN LEVY."

[Sidenote: 1716--Visit to Hanover]

Some of the earlier letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are written
from Hanover, and give a lively description of the crowded state of
that capital in the autumn of 1716.  Hanover was crowded in this
unusual way because King George was there at the time, and his presence
was the occasion for a great gathering of diplomatic functionaries and
statesmen, and politicians of all orders.  Some had political missions,
open and avowed; some had missions of still greater political
importance, which, however, were not formally avowed, and were for the
most part conducted in secret.  A turning-point had been reached in the
affairs of Europe, and the King's visit to Hanover was an appropriate
occasion for the preliminary steps to certain new arrangements that had
become inevitable.  Even before the King's visit to his dear Hanover
the English Government had been paving the way for some of these new
combinations and alliances.  The very day after the royal coronation,
Stanhope had gone on a mission to Vienna which had something to do with
the arrangements subsequently made.

It would, however, be paying too high a compliment to the patriotic
energy of the King to suppose that he had gone to Hanover for the sake
of promoting arrangements calculated to be of advantage to England.
Let us do justice to George's sincerity: he never pretended to any
particular concern for English interests when they were not bound up
with the interests of Hanover.  But he had long been pining for a sight
of Hanover.  He had now been away from his beloved Herrenhausen for
nearly two {153} years, and he was consumed by an unconquerable
homesickness.  That his absence might be inconvenient to his newly
acquired country or to his ministers had no weight in his mind to
counterbalance the desire of walking once more in the prim Herrenhausen
avenues and looking over the level Hanoverian fields, or treading the
corridors of the old Schloss, where the ancestral Guelphs had revelled,
and where the ghost of Königsmark might well be supposed to wander.
The Act for restraining the King from going out of the kingdom was
repealed in May, 1716.  The Prince of Wales was to be appointed
temporary ruler in the King's absence.  This appointment was the only
obstacle that George admitted to his journey.  In the Hanover family,
father had hated son, and son father with traditional persistence.
George was animated by the sourest jealousy of his son.  One reason, if
there had been no other, for this animosity was that the young man was
well known to have some sympathy for the sufferings of his mother, the
unhappy Sophia Dorothea, imprisoned in Ahlden, and he had at least once
made an unsuccessful effort to see her.  Since George came to England
he persisted in regarding his eldest son as a rival for popular favor,
and this feeling was naturally kept alive by the enemies of the House
of Hanover.  To this detested son George had now to intrust the care of
his kingdom, or else abandon his visit to dear Herrenhausen.  The
struggle was severe, but patriotic affection triumphed over paternal
hatred.  The Prince was named not indeed Regent, but Guardian of the
Realm and Lieutenant, with as many restrictions upon his authority as
the King was able or was allowed to impose, and on July 9th George set
out for Hanover, accompanied by Secretary Stanhope.  He was not long
absent from England, however.  On November 14th he came back again.
Loyalists issued prints of the monarch waited upon by angels, and
accompanied by flattering verses addressed to the "Presedent of ye
Loyall Mug Houses."  But the devotion of the mug-houses could not make
George personally popular, or diminish the {154} general dislike to his
German ministers, his German mistresses, and the horde of hungry
foreigners--the Hanoverian rats, as Squire Western would have called
them--who came over with him to England, seeking for place and pension,
or pension without place.

[Sidenote: 1716--Philip of Orleans]

The Thames was frozen over in the winter of this year, 1716, and London
made very merry over the event.  The ice was covered with booths for
the sale of all sorts of wares, and with small coffee-houses and
chop-houses.  Wrestling-rings were formed in one part; in another, an
ox was roasted whole.  People played at push-pin, skated, or drove
about on ice-boats brave with flags.  Coaches moved slowly up and down
the highway of barges and wherries, and hawkers cried their wares
lustily in the new field that winter had offered them.  All the banks
of the river--and especially such places as the Temple Gardens--were
crowded with curious throngs surveying the animated and unusual scene.

During George's absence from England he and his ministers had made some
new and important arrangements in the policy of Europe.  From this time
forth--indeed, from the reign of Queen Anne--England was
destined--doomed, perhaps--to have a regular part in the politics of
the Continent.  Before that time she had often been drawn into them, or
had plunged enterprisingly or recklessly into them, but from the date
of the accession of the House of Hanover England was as closely and
constantly mixed up in the political affairs of the Continent as
Austria or France.  In the opening years of George's reign, France, the
Empire--Austria, that is to say, for the Holy Roman Empire had come to
be merely Austria--and Spain were the important Continental Powers.
Russia was only coming up; the genius of Peter the Great was beginning
to make her way for her.  Italy was as yet only a geographical
expression--a place divided among minor kings and princes, who in
politics sometimes bowed to the Pope's authority, and sometimes evaded
or disregarded it.  The power of Turkey was {155} broken, never to be
made strong again; the republic of Venice was already beginning to
"sink like a sea-weed into whence she rose."  The position of Spain was
peculiar.  Spain had for a long time been depressed and weak and
disregarded.  For many years it was thought that she was going down
with Turkey and Venice--that the star of her fate had declined forever.
Suddenly, however, she began to raise her head above the horizon again,
and to threaten the peace of the Continent.  The peace of the Continent
could not now be threatened without menace to the peace of England, for
George's Hanoverian dominions were sure to be imperilled by European
disturbance, and George would take good care that Hanover did not
suffer while England had armies to move and money to spend.  The
English Government found it necessary to look out for allies.

France was under the rule of a remarkable man.  Philip, Duke of Orleans
and Regent of the kingdom, ought to have been a statesman of the
Byzantine Empire.  He was steeped to the lips in profligacy; he had no
moral sense whatever, unless that which was supplied by the so-called
code of honor.  His intrigues, his carouses, his debaucheries, his
hordes of mistresses, gave scandal even in that time of prodigal
license.  But he had a cool head, a daring spirit, and an intellect
capable of accepting new and original ideas.  He must be called a
statesman; and, despite the vulgarity of some of his vices, he has to
be called a gentleman as well.  He could be trusted; he would keep his
word once given.  Other statesmen could treat with him, and not fear
that he would break a promise or betray a confidence.  How rare such
qualities were at that day among the politicians of any country the
readers of the annals of Queen Anne do not need to be told.  The
Regent's principal adviser at this time was a man quite as immoral, and
also quite as able, as himself--the Abbé Dubois, afterwards Cardinal
and Prime-minister.  Dubois had a profound knowledge of foreign
affairs, and he thoroughly understood the ways of men.  {156} He had
fought his way from humble rank to a great position in Church and
State.  He had trained his every faculty--and all his faculties were
well worth the training--to the business of statecraft and of
diplomatic intrigue.  It is somewhat curious to note that the three
ablest politicians in Europe at that day were churchmen: Swift in
England, Dubois in France, and Alberoni--of whom we shall presently
have to speak--in Spain.  The quick and unclouded intelligence of the
Regent--unclouded despite his days and nights of debauchery--saw that
the cause of the Stuarts was gone.  While that cause had hope he was
willing to give it a chance, and he would naturally have welcomed its
success; but he had taken good care during its late and vain effort not
to embroil himself in any quarrel, or even any misunderstanding, with
England on its account; and now that that poor struggle was over for
the time, he believed that it would be for his interest to come to an
understanding with King George.

[Sidenote: 1716--Dubois]

The idea of such an understanding originated with the Regent himself.
There has been some discussion among English historians as to the title
of Townshend or of Stanhope to be considered its author.  Whether
Townshend or Stanhope first accepted the suggestion does not seem a
matter of much consequence.  It is clear that the overture was made by
the Regent.  While King George and his minister Stanhope were in
Hanover, the Regent sent Dubois on various pretexts to places where he
might have an opportunity of coming to an understanding with both.
Dubois had lived in England, and had made the personal acquaintance of
Stanhope there.  What could be more natural than that the Regent, who
was a lover of art, should ask Dubois to visit the Hague, for the
purpose of buying some books and pictures, about the time that the
English minister was known to be in the neighborhood?  And how could
old acquaintances like Stanhope and Dubois, thus brought into close
proximity, fail to take advantage of the opportunity, and to {157} have
many a quiet, informal meeting?  What more natural than that Dubois
should afterwards go to Hanover to visit his friend Stanhope there, and
that he should live in Stanhope's house?  The account which the lively
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gives of the manner in which Hanover was then
crowded would of itself explain the necessity for Dubois availing
himself of Stanhope's hospitality, and for Stanhope's offer of it.  The
Portuguese ambassador, Lady Mary says, thought himself very happy to be
the temporary possessor of "two wretched parlors in an inn."  Dubois
and Stanhope had many talks, and the result was an arrangement which
could be accepted by the King and the Regent.

The foreign policy of the Whigs had for its object the maintenance of
peace on the European continent by a close observance of the conditions
laid down in the Treaty of Utrecht.  The settlement made under that
treaty was, however, very unsatisfactory to Spain.  The new Spanish
king, Philip of Anjou, had formally renounced his own rights of
succession to the throne of France, and had given up the Italian
provinces which formerly belonged to the Spanish Crown.  But, as in
most such instances at that time, an ambitious European sovereign had
no sooner accepted conditions which appeared to him in any wise
unsatisfactory, than he went to work to endeavor to set them aside, or
get out of them somehow.  Philip's whole mind was turned to the object
of getting back again all that he had given up.  This would not have
seemed an easy task, even to a man of the stamp of Charles the Fifth.
It would almost appear that any attempt in such a direction must bring
Europe in arms against Spain.  The Regent Duke of Orleans stood next in
succession to the French throne, in consequence of Philip's
renunciation of his rights by virtue of the Treaty of Utrecht.  The
Italian provinces which had once been Spain's were now handed over to
Austria, and Austria would of course be resolute in their defence.
King Philip was not the man to confront the difficulties of a situation
of this kind {158} by his own unaided powers of mind.  He was very far
indeed from being a Charles the Fifth.  He was not even a Philip the
Second.  But he had for his minister a man as richly endowed with
statesmanship and courage as he himself was wanting in those qualities.
[Sidenote: 1716--Alberoni] Giulio Alberoni, an Italian born at
Piacenza, in 1664, was at one time appointed agent of the Duke of Parma
at the Court of Spain, and in this position acquired very soon the
favor of Philip.  Alberoni was of the most humble origin.  His father
was a gardener, and he himself a poor village priest.  He rose,
however, both in diplomacy and in the Church, having worked his way up
to the favor of the Duke of Parma, to work still further on to the
complete favor of Philip the Fifth.  The first marked success in his
upward career was made when he contrived to commend himself to the Duc
de Vendôme, the greatest French commander of his day.  The Duke of
Parma had occasion to deal with Vendôme, and sent the Bishop of Parma
to confer with him.  The Duc de Vendôme was a man who affected
roughness and brutality of manners, and made it his pride to set all
rules of decency at defiance.  Peter the Great, Potemkin, Suwarrow,
would have seemed men of ultra-refinement when compared with him.  His
manner of receiving the bishop was such that the bishop quitted his
presence abruptly and without saying a word, and returning to Parma,
told his master that no consideration on earth should induce him ever
to approach the brutal French soldier again.  Alberoni was beginning to
rise at this time.  He offered to undertake the mission, feeling sure
that not even Vendôme could disconcert him.  He was intrusted with the
task of renewing the negotiations, and he obtained admission to the
presence of Vendôme.  Every reader remembers the story in the "Arabian
Nights" of that brother of the talkative barber who threw himself into
the spirit of the rich Barmecide's humor, and by outdoing him in the
practical joke secured forever his favor and his friendship.  Alberoni
acted on this principle at his first meeting with Vendôme.  {159} He
outbuffooned even Vendôme's buffoonery.  The story will not bear minute
explanation, but Alberoni soon satisfied Vendôme that he had to do with
a man after his own heart, what Elizabethan writers would have called a
"mad wag" indeed, and Vendôme gave him his confidence.

Alberoni was made prime-minister by Philip in 1716, and cardinal by the
Court of Rome shortly after.  The ambition of Alberoni was in the first
instance to recover to Spain her lost Italian provinces, and to raise
Spain once more to the commanding position she had held when Charles
the Fifth abdicated the crown.  Alberoni's policy, indeed, was a
mistake as regarded the strength and the prosperity of Spain.  Spain's
Italian and Flemish provinces were of no manner of advantage to her.
They were sources of weakness, because they constantly laid Spain open
to an attack from any enemy who had the advantage of being able to
choose his battle-ground for himself so long as Spain had outlying
provinces scattered over the Continent.  Indeed, it is made clear, from
the testimony of many observers, that Spain was rapidly recovering her
domestic prosperity from the moment when she lost those provinces, and
when the continual strain to which they exposed her finances was
stopped.  At that epoch of Europe's political development, however, the
idea had hardly occurred to any statesman that national greatness could
come about in any other way than by the annexing or the recovery of
territory.  Alberoni intrigued against the Regent, and was particularly
anxious to injure the Emperor.  He was well inclined to enter into
negotiations, and even into an alliance, with England.  He lent his
help when first he took office to bring to a satisfactory conclusion
some arrangements for a commercial treaty between England and Spain.
This treaty gave back to British subjects whatever advantages in trade
they had enjoyed under the Austrian kings of Spain, and contained what
we should now call a most favored nation clause, providing that no
British subjects should be {160} exposed to higher duties than were
paid by Spaniards.  Alberoni cautiously refrained from giving any
encouragement to the Stuarts, and always professed to the British
minister the strongest esteem and friendship for King George.  Stanhope
himself had known Alberoni formerly in Spain, and had from the first
formed a very high opinion of his abilities.  He now opened a
correspondence with the cardinal, expressing a strong wish for a
sincere and lasting friendship between England and Spain; and this
correspondence was kept up for some time in so friendly and
confidential a manner that very little was left for the regular
accredited minister from Spain at the Court of King George to do.

[Sidenote: 1714-1718--The Triple Alliance]

Alberoni, however, was somewhat too vain and impatient.  He had brought
over Sweden to his side, partly because he found Charles the Twelfth in
a bad humor on account of the cession to Hanover of certain Swedish
territories by the King of Denmark, who had clutched them while the
warlike Charles was away in Turkey.  The cession of those places
brought Hanover to the sea, and was of importance thus to Hanover and
to England alike.  George the Elector was in his petty way an ambitious
Hanoverian prince, however little interest he had in English affairs.
He had always been anxious to get possession of the districts of Bremen
and Verden, which had been handed over to Sweden at the Peace of
Westphalia.  Reckless enterprise had carried Charles the
Twelfth--"Swedish Charles," with "a frame of adamant, a soul of fire,"
whom no dangers frighted, and no labors tired, the "unconquered lord of
pleasure and of pain"--too far in the rush of his chivalrous madness.
His vaulting ambition had overleaped itself, and fallen on the other
side; and after his defeat at Pultowa, all his enemies, some of whom he
had scared into inaction before, turned upon him as the nations of
Europe turned upon Napoleon the First after Moscow.  Charles had gone
into Turkey and taken refuge there, and it seemed as if he had fallen
never to rise again.  In his absence the King of Denmark {161} seized
Schleswig-Holstein, Bremen, and Verden.  At the close of 1714 Charles
suddenly roused himself from depression and appeared at the town of
Stralsund, almost as much to the alarm of Europe as Napoleon had caused
when he left Elba and landed on the southern shore of France.  The King
of Denmark shuddered at the prospect of a struggle with Charles, and in
order to secure some part of his spoils he entered into a treaty with
the Elector of Hanover, by virtue of which he handed over Bremen and
Verden to George, on condition that George should pay him a handsome
sum of money, and join him in resisting Sweden.

Nothing could be less justifiable, or indeed more nefarious, than these
arrangements.  They were discreditable to George the First, and they
were disgraceful to the King of Denmark.  Yet the general policy of
that time seems to have approved of the whole transaction, and regarded
it merely as a good stroke of business for Hanover and for England.
Alberoni, having secured the help of Sweden, got together great forces
both by sea and by land, and prepared for a reconquest of the lost
Italian provinces.  He occupied Sardinia, and made an attempt on
Sicily.  But this was going a little too far and too fast.  Alberoni
frightened the great States of Europe into activity against him.
England, France, and Holland formed a triple alliance, the basis of
which was that the House of Hanover should be guaranteed in England,
and the House of Orleans in France, should the young King, Louis the
Fifteenth, die without issue.  Not long after, the triple alliance was
expanded into a quadruple alliance, the Emperor of Germany becoming one
of its members.  An English fleet appeared in the Straits of Messina,
and a sea-fight took place in which the Spaniards lost almost all their
vessels.  Alberoni tried to get up another fleet under the Duke of
Ormond for the purpose of making a landing in Scotland, with a view to
a great Jacobite rising.  But the seas and skies seem always to have
been fatal to Spanish projects against England, and {162} the
expedition under Ormond was as much of a failure as the far greater
expedition under Alexander of Parma.  The fleet was wrecked in the Bay
of Biscay.  The French were invading the northern provinces of Spain,
and the King of Spain was compelled not only to get rid of Alberoni,
but to renounce once more any claim to the French throne, and to
abandon his attempts on Sardinia and Sicily.  Another danger was
removed from England by the death of Charles the Twelfth.  "A petty
fortress and a dubious hand" brought about the end of him who had,
"like the wind's blast, never-resting, homeless," stormed so long
across war-convulsed Europe, and "left that name at which the world
grew pale to point a moral or adorn a tale."  Charles the Twelfth had
just entered into an alliance with Peter the Great for an enterprise to
destroy the House of Hanover and restore the Stuarts, when the
memorable bullet at the siege of Frederickshald, in Norway, brought his
strange career to a close in December, 1718.  A junction between such
men as Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great might indeed have had
matter in it.  Peter was probably the greatest sovereign born to a
throne in modern Europe.  An alliance between Peter's profound sagacity
and indomitable perseverance, and Charles's unbounded courage and
military skill, might have been ominous for any cause against which it
was aimed.  The good-fortune which from first to last seems on the
whole to have attended the House of Hanover, and followed it even in
spite of itself, was with it when the bullet from an unknown hand
struck down Charles the Twelfth.

[Sidenote: 1715-1718--Futility of the Triple Alliance]

These international arrangements have for us now very little real
interest.  They were entirely artificial and temporary.  Nothing came
of them that could long endure or make any real change in the relations
of the European States.  They had hardly anything to do with the
interests of the various peoples over whose heads and without whose
knowledge or concern they were made.  It was still firmly believed that
two or three diplomatists, meeting in {163} a half-clandestine way in a
minister's closet or a lady's drawing-room, could come to agreements
which would bind down nations and rule political movements.  The first
real upheaving of any genuine force, national or personal, in European
life tore through all their meshes in a moment.  Frederick the Great,
soon after, is to compel Europe to reconstruct her scheme of political
arrangements; later yet, the French Revolution is to clear the ground
more thoroughly and violently still.  The triple alliance, concocted by
the Regent and Stanhope and Dubois, had not the slightest permanent
effect on the general condition of Europe.  It was a clever and an
original idea of the Regent to think of bringing England and France,
these old hereditary enemies, into a permanent alliance, and it was
right of Stanhope to enter into the spirit of the enterprise; but the
actual conditions of England and France, did not allow of an abiding
friendship.  The national interest, as it was then understood, of the
one State was in antagonism to the national interest of the other.  Nor
could France and England combined have kept down the growth of other
European States then rising into importance and beginning to cast their
shadows far in front of them.  It seems only amusing to us now to read
of King George's directions to his minister--"To crush the Czar
immediately, to secure his ships, and even to seize his person."  The
courageous and dull old King had not the faintest perception of the
part which either the Czar or the Czar's country was destined to play
in the history of Europe.  At present we are all inclined, and with
some reason, to think that French statesmen, as a rule, are wanting in
a knowledge of foreign politics--in an appreciation of the relative
proportions of one force and another in the affairs of Europe outside
France.  But in the days of George the First French statesmen were much
more accomplished in the knowledge of foreign politics than the
statesmen of England.  There was not, probably, in George's
administration any man who had anything like the knowledge of the {164}
affairs of foreign countries which was possessed by Dubois.  But it had
not yet occurred to the mind of Dubois, or the Regent, or anybody else,
that the relations of one State to another, or one people to another,
are anything more than the arrangements which various sets of
diplomatic agents think fit to make among themselves and to consign to
the formality of a treaty.

[Sidenote: 1717--Walpole bides his time]

The interest we have now in all these "understandings," engagements,
and so-called alliances is personal rather than national.  So far as
England is concerned, they led to a squabble and a split in George's
administration.  It would hardly be worth while to go into a minute
history of the quarrel between Townshend and Stanhope, Sunderland and
Walpole.  Sunderland, a man of great ability and ambition, had never
been satisfied with the place he held in the King's administration, and
the disputes which sprang up out of the negotiations for the triple
alliance gave him an opportunity of exerting his influence against some
of his colleagues.  Fresh occasion for intrigue, jealousy, and anger
was given by the desire of the King to remain during the winter in
Hanover, and his fear, on the other hand, that his son--the Prince who
was at the head of affairs in his absence--was forming a party against
him, and was caballing with some of the members of the Government.
Sunderland acted on the King's narrow and petty fears.  He distinctly
accused Townshend and Walpole of a secret understanding with the Prince
and the Duke of Argyll against the Sovereign's interests.  The result
of all this was that the King dismissed Lord Townshend, and that
Walpole insisted on resigning office.  The King, to do him justice,
would gladly have kept Walpole in his service, but Walpole would not
stay.  It is clear that Walpole was glad of the opportunity of getting
out of the ministry.  He professed to be deeply touched by the
earnestness of the King's remonstrances.  He was moved, it is stated,
to tears.  At all events, he got very successfully through the ceremony
of tear-shedding.  But although he wept, he did not {165} soften.  His
purpose remained fixed.  He went out of office, and, to all intents and
purposes, passed straightway into opposition.  Stanhope became First
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For a long time it must have been apparent to every one that Walpole
was the coming minister.  Walpole himself must have felt satisfied on
the point; but he was probably well content to admit to himself that
his time had not yet come.  Walpole was not a great man.  He wanted the
moral qualities which are indispensable to greatness.  He was almost as
much wanting in them as Bolingbroke himself.  But if his genius was far
less brilliant than that of Bolingbroke, he was amply furnished with
patience and steadiness.  He could wait.  He did not devise half a
dozen plans for one particular object, and fly from one to the other
when the moment for action was approaching, and end by rejecting them
all when the moment for action had arrived.  He made up his mind to a
certain course, and he held to it; if its chance did not come to-day,
it might come to-morrow.  He had no belief in men's sincerity--or
women's either.  There seems reason to believe that the famous saying
ascribed to him, about every man having his price, was not used by him
in that unlimited sense; that he only spoke of "these men"--of certain
men--and said that every one of them had his price.  But he always
acted as if the description he gave of "these men" might safely be
extended to all men.  He had a coarse, licentious nature.  He enjoyed
the company of loose women.  He loved obscene talk; not merely did he
love it, but he indulged in and encouraged it for practical purposes of
his own; he thought it useful at men's dinner-parties, because it gave
even the dullest man a subject on which he could find something to say.
One could not call Walpole a patriot in the higher sense; he wanted
altogether that fine fibre in his nature, that exalted, half-poetic
feeling, that faculty of imagination which quickens practical and
prosaic objects with the spirit of the ideal, and which are {166}
needed to make a man a patriot in the noblest meaning of the word.  But
he loved his country in his own heavy, practical, matter-of-fact sort
of way, and that was just the sort of way which at the time happened to
be most useful to England.  Let it be said, too, in justice to Walpole,
that the most poetic and lyrical nature would have found little subject
for enthusiasm in the England of Walpole's earlier political career.
It was not exactly the age for a Philip Sidney or for a Milton.
England's home and foreign policy had for years been singularly
ignoble.  At home it had been a conflict of mean intrigues; abroad, a
policy of selfish alliances and base compromises and surrenders.  The
splendid military genius of Marlborough only shone as it did as if to
throw into more cruel light the infamy of the intrigues and plots to
which it was often sacrificed.  No man could be enthusiastic about
Queen Anne or George the First.  The statesmen who professed the utmost
ardor for the Stuart cause were ready to sell it at a moment's notice,
to secure their own personal position; most of those who grovelled
before King George were known to have been in treaty, up to the last,
with his rival.  [Sidenote: 1717--Economist statesmen] We may excuse
Walpole if, under such conditions, he took a prosaic view of the state
of things, and made his patriotism a very practical sort of service to
his country.  It was, as we have said, precisely the sort of service
England just then stood most in need of.  Walpole applied himself to
secure for his country peace and retrenchment.  He did not, indeed,
maintain a sacred principle of peace; he had no sacred principle about
anything.  We shall see more lately that he did not scruple, for party
reasons, to lend himself to a wanton and useless war, well knowing it
was wanton and useless; but his general policy was one of peace, and so
long as he had his own way there would have been no waste of England's
resources on foreign battle-fields.  He despised war, and the trade of
war, in his heart.  To him war showed only in its vulgar, practical,
and repulsive features; the soldier was a man who got paid for the
{167} trade of killing.  Walpole might be likened to a shrewd and
sensible steward who is sincerely anxious to manage his master's estate
with order and economy, and who, for that very reason, is willing to
indulge his master's vices and to sanction his prodigalities to a
certain extent, knowing that if he attempts to draw the purse-strings
too closely an open rupture will be the result, and then some steward
will come in who has no taste for saving, and who will let everything
go to rack and ruin.  He was the first of the long line of English
ministers who professed to regard economy as one of the great objects
of statesmanship.  He established securely the principle that to make
the two ends meet was one of the first duties of patriotism.  He
founded, if we may use such an expression, the dynasty of statesmen to
which Pitt and Peel and Gladstone belong.  The change in our
constitutional ways which set up that new dynasty was of infinitely
greater importance to England than the change which settled the
Brunswicks in the place of the Stuarts.




{168}

CHAPTER X.

HOME AFFAIRS.

[Sidenote: 1717--Oxford's impeachment]

Meanwhile the public seemed to have forgotten all about Lord Oxford.
"Harley, the nation's great support," as Swift had called him, had been
nearly two years in the Tower, and the nation did not seem to miss its
great support, or to care anything about him.  In May, 1717, Lord
Oxford sent a petition to the House of Lords, complaining of the
hardship and injustice of this unaccountable delay in his impeachment,
and the House of Lords began at last to put on an appearance of
activity.  The Commons, too, revived and enlarged their secret
committee, of which it will be remembered that Walpole was the
chairman.  Times, however, had changed.  Walpole was not in the
administration, and felt no anxiety to assist the ministry in any way.
He purposely absented himself from the sittings, and a new chairman had
to be chosen.  Probably Walpole had always known well enough that there
was not evidence to sustain a charge of high-treason against his former
rival; perhaps, now that the rival was down in the dust, never to rise
again, he did not care to press for his punishment.  At all events, he
made it clear that he felt no interest in the impeachment of Lord
Oxford.  The friends of the ruined minister had recourse to an
ingenious artifice.  June 24, 1717, had been appointed for the opening
of the proceedings.  Westminster Hall, lately the scene of the
impeachment of Somers, and soon to be the scene of the impeachment of
Warren Hastings, was of course the place where Oxford had to come
forward and meet his accusers.  The King, the Prince and the Princess
of Wales were seated in the {169} Hall; most of the foreign ambassadors
and ministers were spectators.  The imposing formalities and artificial
terrors of such a ceremonial were kept up.  Lord Oxford had been
brought from the Tower to Westminster by water.  He was now led
bareheaded up to the bar by the Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower, having
the axe borne before him, its edge turned away from him as yet,
symbolic of the doom that might await the prisoner, but to which he had
not yet been declared responsible.  When the reading of the articles of
impeachment and other opening passages of the trial had been gone
through, Lord Harcourt, Oxford's friend, interposed, and announced that
he had a motion to make.  In order to hear his motion, the Peers had to
withdraw to their own House.  There Lord Harcourt moved that the House
should dispose of the two articles of impeachment for high-treason
before going into any of the evidence to support the charges for high
crimes and misdemeanors.  The argument for this course of proceeding
was plausible.  If Oxford were convicted of high-treason he would have
to forfeit his life; and in such case, where would be the use of
convicting him of a minor offence?  The plan on which the Commons
proposed to act, that of taking all the evidence in order of time, no
matter to which charge it had reference, before coming to any
conclusion, might, as Lord Harcourt put it, "draw the trial into
prodigious length," and absolutely to no purpose.  Should the accused
be found guilty of high-treason he must suffer death, and there would
be an end of the whole business.  Should he be acquitted of the graver
charge, he might then be impeached on the lighter accusation; and what
harm would have been done or time lost?  The motion was carried by a
majority of eighty-eight to fifty-six.

Now it is hardly possible to suppose that the Peers who voted in the
majority did not know very well that the Commons would not, and could
not, submit to have their mode of conducting an impeachment, which it
was their business to manage, thus altered at the sudden {170}
dictation of the other chamber.  The House of Commons was growing in
importance every day; the House of Lords was proportionately losing its
influence.  The Commons determined that they would conduct the
impeachment in their own way or not at all.  Doubtless some of them,
most of them, were glad to be well out of the whole affair.  July 1st
was fixed for the renewal of the proceedings.  Some fruitless
conferences between Lords and Commons wasted two days, and on the
evening of July 3d the Lords sat in Westminster Hall, and invited by
proclamation the accusers of Oxford to appear.  No manager came forward
to conduct the impeachment on the part of the Commons.  The Peers sat
for a quarter of an hour, as if waiting for a prosecutor, well knowing
that none was coming.  A solemn farce was played.  The Peers went back
to their chamber, and there a motion was made acquitting "Robert, Earl
of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," on the ground that no charge had been
maintained against him.  A crowd without hailed the adoption of the
motion with cheers.  Oxford was released from the Tower, and nothing
more was ever heard of his impeachment.  The Duke of Marlborough was
furious with rage at Oxford's escape, and the duchess is described as
"almost distracted that she could not obtain her revenge."  Magnanimity
was not a characteristic virtue of the early days of the Georges.

[Sidenote: 1718--Disabilities of dissenters]

This was what has sometimes been called the honorable acquittal of
Oxford.  An English judge once spoke humorously of a prisoner having
been "honorably acquitted on a flaw in the indictment."  Harley's was
like this: it was not an acquittal, and it was not honorable to the man
impeached, the House that forebore to press the impeachment, or the
House that contrived his escape from trial.  Oxford had been committed
to the Tower and impeached for reasons that had little to do with his
guilt or innocence, or with true public policy; he was released from
prison and relieved from further proceedings in just the same way.
There was not evidence against {171} him on which he could be convicted
of high-treason, and this was well known to his enemies when they first
consigned him to the Tower.  But there could not be the slightest moral
doubt on the mind of any man that Oxford had intrigued with the
Stuarts, and had endeavored to procure their restoration, and that he
had done this even since his committal to the Tower.  His guilt,
whatever it was, had been increased by him, and not diminished, since
the beginning of the proceedings taken against him.  But he had only
done what most other statesmen of that day had been doing, or would
have done if they had seen advantage in it.  He was not more guilty
than some of his bitterest opponents, the Duke of Marlborough among
others.  All but the very bitterest opponents were glad to be done with
the whole business.  It must have come to a more or less farcical end
sooner or later, and sensible men were of opinion that the sooner the
better.  Of Harley, "Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer," as his titles
ran, we shall not hear any more; we have already foreshadowed the
remainder of his life and his death.  This short account of his sham
impeachment is introduced here merely as a part of the historic
continuity of the narrative.  History has few characters less
interesting than that of Oxford.  He held a position of greatness
without being great; he fell, and even his fall could not invest him
with tragic dignity.

On December 13, 1718, Lord Stanhope, who had been raised to the
peerage, first as Viscount and then as Earl Stanhope, introduced into
the House of Lords a measure ingeniously entitled "A Bill for
Strengthening the Protestant Interest in these Kingdoms."  The title of
the Bill was strictly appropriate according to our present ideas, and
according to the ideas of enlightened men in Stanhope's days also; but
it must at first have misled some of Stanhope's audience.  Most
Churchmen are now ready to admit that the interests of the Church of
England are strengthened by every measure which tends to secure
religious equality; but most Churchmen were not quite so {172} sure of
this in the reign of George the First.  The Bill brought in by Stanhope
was really a measure intended to relieve Dissenters from some of the
penalties and disabilities imposed on them in the reign of Queen Anne.

[Sidenote: 1719--Catholic emancipation foreshadowed]

The second reading of the Bill was the occasion of a long and animated
debate.  Several noble lords appealed to the opinion of the bishops,
and the bishops spoke in answer to the appeal.  The Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, the Bishop of
Bristol, the Bishop of Rochester (Atterbury), the Bishop of Chester,
and other prelates, spoke against the Bill.  The Bishop of Bangor, the
Bishop of Gloucester, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Norwich, and
the Bishop of Peterborough spoke in its favor.  The Bishop of
Peterborough's was a strenuous and an eloquent argument in favor of the
principle of the Bill.  "The words 'Church' and 'Church's danger,'"
said the Bishop of Peterborough, "had often been made use of to carry
on sinister designs; and then these words made a mighty noise in the
mouth of silly women and children;" but in his opinion the Church,
which he defined to be a scriptural institution upon a legal
establishment, was founded upon a rock, and "could not be in danger as
long as we enjoyed the light of the Gospel and our excellent
constitution."  The argument would have been perfect if the eloquent
bishop had only left out the proviso about "our excellent
constitution;" for the opponents of the measure were contending, as was
but natural, that the Bill, if passed into law, would not leave to the
Church the constitutional protection which it had previously enjoyed.

The Bill passed the House of Lords on December 23d, and was sent down
to the Commons next day.  It was read there a first time at once, was
read a second time after a debate of some nine hours, and was passed
without amendment by a majority of 221 against 170 on January 10, 1719.
The test majority, however, by which the Bill had been decisively
carried, on the motion to go into committee, was but small--243 against
202--and this {173} majority was mainly due to the vote of the Scottish
members.  Stanhope, it is well known, would have made the measure more
liberal than it was, and was dissuaded from this intention by
Sunderland, who insisted that if it were too liberal it would not pass
the House of Commons.  The result seems to prove that Sunderland was
right.  Walpole spoke against the Bill, limited as its concessions
were.  It would be interesting to know what sort of argument a man of
Walpole's principles could have offered against a measure embodying the
very spirit and sense of Whig policy.  Unfortunately we have no means
of knowing.  The galleries of the House of Commons were rigidly closed
against strangers on the day of the debate, and all we are allowed to
hear concerning Walpole's part in the discussion is that "Mr. Robert
Walpole made a warm speech, chiefly levelled against a great man in the
present administration."  There is something characteristic of Walpole
in this.  He was never very particular about principle, or even about
seeming consistency; but still, when opposing a measure which he might
have been expected to support, he would have probably found it more
expedient, as well as more agreeable, to confine himself chiefly to the
task of attacking some "great man in the present administration."

It ought to be said of Stanhope that he was distinctly in advance of
his age as regarded the recognition of the principle of religious
equality.  He was not only anxious to put the Protestant Dissenters as
much as possible on a level with Churchmen in all the privileges of
citizenship, but he was even strongly in favor of mitigating the
severity of the laws against the Roman Catholics.  In his "History of
England, from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles," Lord
Stanhope, the descendant of the minister whose career and character
have done so much honor to a name and a family, claims for him the
credit of having put on paper a scheme "not undeserving of attention as
the earliest germ of Roman Catholic emancipation."  Stanhope's life was
too soon and too {174} suddenly cut short to allow him to push forward
his scheme to anything like a practical position, and it is not
probable that he could in any case have done much with it at such a
time.  Still, though fate cut short the life, it ought not to cut short
the praise.

[Sidenote: 1719--The Peerage Bill]

The Peerage Bill raised a question of some constitutional importance.
The principal object of this measure, which was introduced on February
28, 1719, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Somerset, and was
believed to have Lord Sunderland for its actual author, was to limit
the prerogative of the Crown in the creation of English peerages to a
number not exceeding six, in addition to those already existing.
According to the provisions of the Bill, the Crown might still create
new Peers on the extinction of old titles for want of male heirs; but
with this exception the power of adding new peerages would be limited
to the number of six.  It was also proposed that, instead of the
sixteen elective Peers from Scotland, twenty-five hereditary Peers
should be created.  This part of the Bill was that which at the time
gave rise to most of the debate, in the House of Lords at least; but
the really important constitutional question was that which involved
the limitation of the privilege of the Sovereign.  The Sovereign
himself sent a special message to the House of Lords, informing them
that "he has so much at heart the settling the Peerage of the whole
kingdom upon such a foundation as may secure the freedom and
constitution of Parliament in all future ages, that he is willing that
his prerogative stand not in the way of so great and necessary a work."
The ostensible motive for the proposed legislation was to get rid of
difficulties caused by the over-increase of the numbers of the peerage
since the union of England and Scotland; the real object was to guard
against such a _coup-d'état_ as that accomplished in Anne's later days
by the creation of the twelve Peers, of whom Mrs. Masham's husband was
one.  Nothing could be more generous and liberal, it might have been
thought, than the expressed willingness of the {175} King to surrender
a part of his prerogative.  This very readiness, however, expressed as
it was by anticipation, and before the measure had yet made any
progress, set a great many persons in and out of Parliament thinking.
A vehement dispute soon sprang up, in which the pamphleteer, as usual,
bore an important part.  Addison, in one of his latest political and
literary efforts, defended the proposed change.  He described his
pamphlet as the work of an "Old Whig."  It was written as a reply to a
pamphlet by Steele condemning the Bill, and signed "A Plebeian."
Reply, retort, and rejoinder followed in more and more heated and
personal style.  The excitement created caused the measure to be
dropped for the session, but it was brought in again in the session
following, and it passed through all its stages in the Lords without
trouble and with much rapidity.

When it came down to the House of Commons, however, a very different
fate awaited it.  Walpole assailed it with powerful eloquence and with
unanswerable argument.  The true nature of the scheme now came out.  It
would have simply rendered the representative chamber powerless against
a majority of the chamber which did not represent.  This will be
readily apparent to any one who considers the subject for a moment by
the light of our more modern experience.  A majority of the House of
Commons, representing, it may be, a vast majority of the people, agree
to a certain measure.  It goes up to the House of Lords, and is
rejected there.  What means in the end have the Commons, who represent
the nation, of giving effect to the wishes of the nation?  They have
none but the privilege of the Crown to create, under the advice of
ministers, a sufficient number of new Peers to outvote the opponents of
the measure.  No alternative but revolution and civil war would be left
if this were taken away.  It is true that the power might be again
abused by the Sovereign, as it was abused in Anne's days on the advice
of the Tories; but we know that, as a matter of fact, it is hardly ever
abused--hardly ever even used.  {176} Why is it hardly ever used?  For
the good reason that all men know it is existing, and can be used
should the need arise.  Even were it to be misused, the misuse would
happen under responsible ministers, who could be challenged to answer
for it, and who would have to make good their defence.  But if the
House of Lords were made supreme over the House of Commons in every
instance, by abolishing the unlimited prerogative which alone keeps it
in check, who could then be held responsible for abuse--and before
whom?  Who could call the House of Lords to account?  Before what
tribunal could it be summoned to answer?  The Peers are now independent
of the people, and would then be also independent of the Crown.  There
is hardly a great political reform known to modern England which, if
the Peerage Bill had become law, would not have been absolutely
rejected or else carried by a popular revolution.

[Sidenote: 1720--The Irish House of Lords]

Walpole attacked the Bill on every side.  Such legislation, he
insisted, "would in time bring back the Commons into the state of
servile dependency they were in when they wore the badges of the
Lords."  It would, he contended, take away "one of the most powerful
incentives to virtue, . . . since there would be no coming to honor but
through the winding-sheet of an old decrepit lord and the grave of an
extinct noble family."  Walpole knew well his public and his time.  He
dwelt most strongly on this last consideration--that the Bill if passed
into law would shut the gates of the Peerage against deserving
Commoners.  He asked indignantly how the House of Lords could expect
the Commons to give their concurrence to a measure "by which they and
their posterities are to be excluded from the Peerage."  The commoner
who, after this way of putting the matter, assented to the Bill, must
either have been an unambitious bachelor, or have been blessed in a
singularly unambitious wife.  Steele, who, as we have seen, had fought
gallantly against the Bill with his pen, now made a very effective
speech against it.  He showed that the {177} measure would, alter the
whole constitutional position of the House of Lords, whether as a
legislative chamber or a court of appeal.  "The restraint of the Peers
to a certain number will make the most powerful of them have all the
rest under their direction, . . . and judges so made by the blind order
of birth will be capable of no other way of decision."  The
prerogative, as Steele put it very clearly, "can do no hurt when
ministers do their duty; but a settled number of Peers may abuse their
power when no man is answerable for them, or can call them to account
for their encroachments."  The Bill was rejected by a majority of 269
votes against 177.

In March, 1720, was passed an Act with a pompous and even portentous
title: it was called "An Act for the better securing the Dependency of
the Kingdom of Ireland upon the Crown of Great Britain."  The preamble
recited that "attempts have been lately made to shake off the
subjection of Ireland unto and dependence upon the Imperial Crown of
this realm, which will be of dangerous consequence to Great Britain and
Ireland."  The reader would naturally assume that some fresh designs of
the Stuarts had been discovered, having for their theatre the Catholic
provinces of Ireland.  Was James Stuart about to land at Kinsale?  Had
Alberoni got hold of the Irish Catholics?  Was Atterbury plotting with
Swift for an armed insurrection in Munster and Connaught?  No; nothing
of the kind was expected.  The preamble of the alarming Act went on to
set forth that the House of Lords in Ireland had lately, "against law,
assumed to themselves a power and jurisdiction to examine, correct, and
amend the judgments and decrees of the courts of justice in the kingdom
of Ireland;" and this alleged trespass of the Irish House of Lords was
the whole cause of the new measure.  The Act declared that the Irish
House of Lords had no jurisdiction "to judge of, affirm, or reverse any
judgment, sentence, or decree given or made in any court within the
said kingdom."  This was an enactment of the most serious {178} moment
in a constitutional sense.  It made the Parliament of Ireland
subordinate to the Parliament of England; it reduced the Irish House of
Lords from a position in Ireland equal to that of the House of Lords in
England, down to the level of a mere provincial assembly.  The occasion
of the passing of this Act was the decision given by the Irish House of
Lords in the celebrated cause of Sherlock against Annesley.  It is not
necessary for us to go into the story of the case at any length.  It
was a question of disputed property.  The defendant had obtained a
decree in the Irish Court of Exchequer, which decree was reversed on an
appeal to the Irish House of Lords.  The defendant appealed to the
English House of Lords, who confirmed the judgment of the Irish Court
of Exchequer, and ordered him to be put in possession of the disputed
property.  The Irish House of Lords stood by their authority, and
actually ordered the Irish Barons of Exchequer to be taken into custody
by Black Rod for having offended against the privileges of the Peers
and the rights and liberties of Ireland.  The Act was passed to settle
the question and reduce the Irish House of Lords to submission and
subordinate rank.  It was settled merely, of course, by the strength of
a majority in the English Parliament.  The Duke of Leeds recorded a
sensible and a manly protest against the vote of the majority of his
brother Peers.  One or two of the reasons he gives for his protest are
worth reading even now.  The eleventh reason is, "Because it is the
glory of the English laws and the blessing attending Englishmen, that
they have justice administered at their doors, and not to be drawn, as
formerly, to Rome by appeals;" "and by this order the people of Ireland
must be drawn from Ireland hither whensoever they receive any injustice
from the Chancery there, by which means poor men must be trampled on,
as not being able to come over to seek for justice."  The thirteenth
reason is still more concise: "Because this taking away the
jurisdiction of the Lords' House in Ireland may be a means to {179}
disquiet the Lords there and disappoint the King's affairs."

[Sidenote: 1718--Death of William Penn]

The protest, it need hardly be said, received little or no attention.
More than sixty years after, when England was perplexed in foreign and
colonial troubles, the spirit of the protest walked abroad and animated
Grattan and the Irish Volunteers.  But in 1720 the Parliament at
Westminster was free to do as it pleased with the Parliament in Dublin.
To the vast majority of the Irish people it might have been a matter of
absolute indifference which Parliament reigned supreme; they had as
little to expect from Dublin as from Westminster.  The Irish Parliament
was quite as ready to promote legislation for the further persecution
of Catholics as any English Parliament could be.  The Parliament in
Dublin was merely an assembly of English and Protestant colonists.  Yet
it is worthy of remark, that, then and after, the sympathies of the
people, when they had any means of showing them, went with the Irish
Parliament simply because of the name it bore.  It was, at all events,
the so-called Parliament of Ireland; it represented, at least in name,
the authority of the Irish people.  So long as it existed there was
some recognition of the fact that Ireland was something more than a
merely conquered country, held by the title of the sword, and governed
by arbitrary proclamation, secret warrant, and drum-head court-martial.

Death had been busy among eminent men for some few years.  The Duke of
Shrewsbury, the "king of hearts," the statesman whose appointment as
Lord Treasurer secured the throne of Great Britain for the Hanoverian
family, died on February 18, 1717.  William Penn, the founder of the
great American State of Pennyslvania, closed his long active and
fruitful life in 1718.  We have here only to record his death; the
history of his deeds belongs to an earlier time.  Controversy has now
quite ceased to busy itself about his noble character, and his life of
splendid unostentatious beneficence.  His name, which without his
consent and against his wishes was {180} made part of the name of the
State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its
history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow.  Of his famous
treaty with the Indians nothing, perhaps, was ever better said than the
comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and
white men which was never sworn to and never broken.  Addison died,
still comparatively young, on June 17, 1719.  He had reached the
highest point of his political career but a short time before, when, on
one of the changes of office between Stanhope and Sunderland, he became
one of the principal secretaries of State.  His health, however, was
breaking down, and he never had indeed the slightest gift or taste for
political life.  "Pity," said Mrs. Manley, the authoress of "The New
Atlantis," speaking of Addison, "that politics and sordid interest
should have carried him out of the road of Helicon and snatched him
from the embraces of the Muses."  But it seems quite unjust to ascribe
Addison's divergence into political ways to any sordid interest.  He
had political friends who loved him, and he went with them into
politics as he might have travelled in company with them, and for the
sake of their company, although caring nothing for travel himself.  No
man was better aware of his incapacity for the real business of public
life.  Addison had himself pointed out all the objections to his
political advancement before that advancement was pressed upon him.  He
was not a statesman; he was not an administrator; he could not do any
genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk;
he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost
as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still.  His whole
public career was at best but a harmless mistake.  It has done no harm
to his literary fame.  The world has almost forgotten it.  Even lovers
of Addison might have to be reminded now that the creator of Sir Roger
de Coverley was once a diplomatic agent and a secretary of State, {181}
and a member of the House of Commons.  Some of the essays which Addison
contributed to the _Spectator_ are like enough to outlive the system of
government by party, and perhaps even the whole system of
representative government.  Sir Roger de Coverley will not be forgotten
until men forget Parson Adams and Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas, and for
that matter, Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.

[Sidenote: 1720--The King and the Prince reconciled]

For some time things were looking well at home and abroad.  The policy
of the Government appeared to have been completely successful on the
Continent.  The confederations that had been threatening England were
dissolved or broken up; the Jacobite conspiracies seemed to have been
made hopeless and powerless.  The friendship established between
England and the Regent of France had to all seeming robbed the Stuarts
of their last chance.  James the Chevalier had no longer a home on
French soil.  Paris could not any more be the head-quarters of his
organization and the scene of his mock Court.  The Regent had kept his
promises to the English Government.  It was well known that, so far
from encouraging or permitting the designs of the exiled family against
England, he would do all in his power to frustrate them; as, indeed, he
had an opportunity of doing not long after.  Never before, perhaps
never since, was there so cordial an understanding between England and
France.  Never could there have been a time when such an understanding
was of greater importance to England.

At home the prospect seemed equally bright.  Walpole had contrived to
ingratiate himself more and more with the Prince of Wales, and had
become his confidential adviser.  Acting on his counsel, the Prince
made his submission to the King; and acting on Stanhope's counsel, the
King accepted it.  The Sovereign and his heir had a meeting and were
reconciled; for the time, at least.  Walpole consented to join the
administration, content for the present to fill the humble place of
paymaster to the forces, without a seat in the Cabinet.  He returned,
in {182} fact, to the ministerial position which he had first occupied,
and from which he had been promoted, and must have seemed to himself
somewhat in the position of a boy who, after having got high in his
class, has got down very low again, and is well content to mount up a
step or two from the humblest position.  Walpole knew what he was
doing, and must have been quite satisfied in his own mind that he was
not likely to remain very long paymaster to the forces, although he
could not, by any possibility, have anticipated the strange succession
of events by which he was destined soon to be left without a rival.
For the present he was in the administration, but he took little part
in its actual work.  He did not even appear to have any real concern in
it.  He spent as much of his time as he could at Houghton, his pleasant
country-seat in Norfolk.  Townshend, too, had been induced to join the
administration.  To him was assigned the position of president of the
council.

Thus there appeared to be a truce to quarrels, and to enmities abroad
and at home.  There was no dispute with any of the great Continental
powers; there was no dread of the Stuarts.  Ministerial rivalries had
been reduced to concordance and quiet; the traditional quarrel between
the Sovereign and the heir-apparent had been composed.  It might have
been thought that a time of peace and national prosperity had been
assured.  In the history of nations, however, we commonly find that
nothing more certainly bodes unsettlement than a general conviction
that everything is settled forever.




{183}

CHAPTER XI.

"THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES."

[Sidenote: 1718-1719--The Mississippi Scheme]

One of the comedies of Ben Jonson gives some vivid and humorous
illustrations of the mania for projects, speculations, patents, and
monopolies that at his time had taken possession of the minds of
Englishmen.  There is an enterprising person who declares that he can
coin money out of cobwebs, raise wool upon egg-shells, and make grass
grow out of marrow-bones.  He has a project "for the recovery of drowned
land," a scheme for a new patent for the dressing of dog-skins for
gloves, a plan for the bottling of ale, a device for making wine out of
blackberries, and various other schemes cut and dry for what would now be
called floating companies to make money.  The civilized world is visited
with this epidemic of project and speculation from time to time.  In the
reign of George the First such a mania attacked England much more
fiercely than it had done even in the days of Ben Jonson.  It came to us
this time from France.  The close of a great war is always a tempting and
a favorable time for such enterprises.  Finances are out of order; a
season of spurious commercial activity has come to an end; new resources
are to be sought for somehow; and man must change to be other than he is
when he wholly ceases to believe in financial miracle-working.  There is
an air of plausibility about most of the new projects; and, indeed, like
the scheme told of in Ben Jonson for the recovery of drowned lands, the
enterprise is usually something within human power to accomplish, if only
human skill could make it pay.  The exchequer of France had been brought
into a condition of something very like {184} bankruptcy by the long and
wasting war; and a projector was found who promised to supply the
deficiency as boldly and as liberally as Mephistopheles does in the
second part of "Faust."  John Law, a Scotchman, and unquestionably a man
of great ability and financial skill, had settled in France in
consequence of having fought a duel and killed his man in his own
country.  [Sidenote: 1710-1720--The South Sea Company] Law set up a
company which was to have a monopoly of the trade of the whole
Mississippi region in North America, and on condition of the monopoly was
to pay off the national debt of France.  A scheme of the kind within due
limitations would have been reasonable enough, so far as the working of
the Mississippi region was concerned; but Law went on extending and
extending the scope of its supposed operations, until it might almost as
well have attempted to fold in the orb of the earth.  The shares in his
company went up with a sudden bound.  He had the patronage of the Regent
and of all the Court circle.  Gambling in shares became the fashion, the
passion of Paris, and, indeed, of all France.  Shares bought one day were
sold at an immense advance the next, or even the same day.  Men and women
nearly bankrupt in purse before, suddenly found themselves in possession
of large sums of money, for which they had to all appearance run no risk
and made no sacrifice whatever.  Princes and tradesmen, duchesses and
seamstresses and harlots, clamored, intrigued, and battled for shares.
The offices in the Rue Quincampoix, a street then inhabited by bankers,
stock-brokers, and exchange agents, were besieged all day long with
crowds of eager competitors for shares.  The street was choked with fine
equipages, until it was found absolutely necessary to close it against
all horses and carriages.  All the rank and fashion of Paris flung itself
into this game of speculation.  Every one has heard the story of the
hunchback who made a little fortune by the letting of his hump as a desk
on which impatient speculators might scribble their applications for
shares.  A French novelist, M. Paul Feval, has made good use of {185}
this story, and London still remembers to what a brilliant dramatic
account it was turned by Mr. Fechter.  Law was the most powerful and the
most courted man of his day.  In his youth he had been a gallant and a
free liver, a man of dress and fashion and intrigue, who delighted in
scandalous entanglements with women.  The fashion and beauty of Paris was
for the hour at his feet.  Think of a brilliant gallant who could make
one rich in a moment!  The mother of the Regent described in a coarse and
pungent sentence the sort of homage which Parisian ladies would have been
willing to pay to Law if he had so desired.  St. Simon, the mere
_littérateur_ and diplomatist, kept his head almost alone, and was not to
be dazzled.  Since the fable of Midas, he said, he had not heard of any
one having the power to turn all he touched into gold, and he did not
believe that virtue was given to M. Law.  There is no doubt that Law was
a man of great ability as a financier, and that his scheme in the
beginning had promise in it.  It was, as Burke has said of the scheme and
its author, the public enthusiasm, and not Law himself, which chose to
build on the base of his scheme a structure which it could not bear.  It
does not seem by any means certain that a project quite as wild might not
be launched in London or Paris at the present day, and find almost as
great a temporary success, and blaze, like Law's, the comet of a season.
While the season lasted the comet blazed with a light that filled the
social sky.

Law was for the time the most powerful man in France.  A momentary
whisper that he was out of health sent the funds down, and eclipsed the
gayety of nations.  He was admitted into the Regent's privy council, and
made Controller-general of the finances of France.  The result was
inevitable; there was as yet nothing behind the promises and the shares
of the Mississippi Company.  If finance could have gone on forever
promise-crammed, things would have been all right.  But you cannot feed
capons so, as Hamlet tells us; and you cannot long feed {186}
shareholders so.  Law's scheme suddenly collapsed one day, and brought
ruin on hundreds of thousands in France.  While, however, it was still
afloat in air, its gaudy colors dazzled the eyes of the South Sea Company
in England.

[Sidenote: 1710-1720--The bubble swells]

At the north-west end of Threadneedle Street, within view of the remains
of Richard the Third's Palace of Crosby, stands a solid red-brick
building, substantial, respectable, business-like, dignified with the
dignity of some century and a half of existence.  Time has softened and
deepened its ruddy hue to a mellow, rich tone, contrasting pleasantly
with the white copings and facings of its windows, and suggesting
agreeably something of the smooth brown cloth and neat white linen of a
well-to-do city gentleman of the last century.  Yet that solemn, massive,
prosperous-looking building is the enduring monument of one of the most
gigantic shams on record--a sham and swindle that was the prolific parent
of a whole brood of shams and swindles; for that building, with honesty
and credit and mercantile honor written in its every line and angle, is
all that remains of the South Sea House.  It is a melancholy place--the
Hall of the Kings at Karnak is hardly more melancholy or more
ghost-haunted.  Not that the house has now that "desolation something
like Balclutha's" which Charles Lamb attributed to it more than half a
century ago.  The place has changed greatly since Elia the Italian and
Elia the Englishman were fellow-clerks at the South Sea House.  Those
dusty maps of Mexico, "dim as dreams," have long been taken away.  The
company itself, having outlived alike its fame and its infamy, lingering
inappropriately like some guest that "hath outstayed his welcome time,"
was wound up at last within the memory of living men.  The stately
gate-way no longer opens upon the "grave court, with cloisters and
pillars," where South Sea stock so often changed hands.  The cloisters
and pillars have gone; the court has been converted into a hall of a sort
of exchange, where merchants daily meet.  The days of the desolation of
the South Sea House are as much a thing of its past as {187} its earlier
splendor.  Its corridors are now crowded with offices occupied by
merchants of every nationality, from Scotland to Greece, and by companies
connected with every portion of the globe.  Only at night, on Saturday
afternoons, and during the still peace of a City Sabbath, do the noise of
men and the stir of business cease in the South Sea House.  Yet,
nevertheless, when one thinks of all that has happened there, of the
dreams and hopes and miseries of which it was the begetter, it remains
one of the most melancholy temples to folly that man has yet erected.

The South Sea Company had been established in 1710 by Harley himself, and
was going along quietly and soberly enough for the time; but the example
of the Mississippi Company was too strong for it.  The South Sea Company,
too, made to itself waxen wings, and prepared to fly above the clouds.
The directors offered to relieve the State of its debt on condition of
obtaining a monopoly of the South Sea trade.  The nation was to take
shares in the company in the first instance, and to deal with the
company, for its commercial and other wares, in the second; and by means
of the exclusive dealing in shares and in products it was to pay off the
National Debt.  In other words, three men, all having nothing, and
heavily in debt, were to go into exclusive dealings with each other, and
were thus to make fortunes, discharge their liabilities, and live in
luxury for the rest of their days.  Stated thus, the proposition looks
marvellously absurd.  But it is not, in its essential conditions, more
absurd than many a financial project which floats successfully for a
time.  Money-making, the hardest and most practical of all occupations,
the task which can soonest be tested by results, is the business of all
others in which men are most easily led astray, most greedy to be led
astray.  Sydney Smith speaks of a certain French lady whose whole nature
cried out for her seduction.  There are seasons when the whole nature of
man seems to cry out for his financial seduction.  The South Sea project
expanded and inflated as the {188} Mississippi Scheme had done.  Its
temporary success turned the heads of the whole population.

[Sidenote: 1720--The bank competes]

Hundreds of schemes, still more wild, sprang into sudden existence.  Some
of the projects then put forward, and believed in, surpass in senseless
extravagance anything satirized by Ben Jonson.  So wild was the passion
for new enterprises, that it seemed as if, at one time, anybody had only
to announce any scheme, however preposterous, in order to find people
competing for shares in it.  The only condition of things in our own time
that could be compared with this epoch of insane speculation is the
railway mania of 1846, when, for a brief season, George Hudson was king,
and set up his hat in the market-place, and all England bowed down in
homage to it.  But the epidemic of speculation in the reign of the
railway king was comparatively harmless and reasonable when compared with
the midsummer madness of the South Sea scheme.

The South Sea scheme was brought before the notice of the House of
Commons in 1720.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer was Mr. Aislabie.  We
have already seen Mr. Aislabie as one of the secret committee who
recommended the impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke.  How well he was
fitted for his office will appear from the fact that he was altogether
taken in by the project, and by the financial arguments of those who
brought it forward.  Sunderland and Stanhope were taken in likewise--but
there was nothing very surprising in that.  A statesman of those days did
not profess to understand anything about finance or economics, unless
these subjects happened to belong to his department; and the statesman
was exceptional who could honestly profess to understand them even when
they did.  Walpole, however, was a minister of a different order.  He was
the first of the line of statesmen-financiers.  He saw through the
bubble, and endeavored to make others see as clearly as he did himself.
Walpole assailed the project in a pamphlet, and opposed it strenuously in
his place in Parliament.  He was {189} not at that time a minister of the
Crown; perhaps, if he had been, the South Sea Bill might never have been
presented to Parliament; but the nation and the Parliament were off their
heads just then.  The caricaturists and the authors of lampoon verses
positively found out the South Sea scheme before the financiers and men
of the city.

On January 22, 1720, the House of Commons, sitting in what was then
termed a Grand Committee, or what would now be called Committee of the
whole House, took into consideration a proposal of the South Sea Company
towards the redemption of the public debts.  The proposal set forth that,
"the Corporation of the Governor and Company of Merchants of Great
Britain, trading to the South Sea and other parts of America, and for
encouraging the fishery, having under their consideration how they may be
most serviceable to his Majesty and his Government, and to show their
zeal and readiness to concur in the great and honorable design of
reducing the national debts," do "humbly apprehend that if the public
debts and annuities mentioned in the annexed estimate were taken into and
made part of the capital stock of the said Company, it would greatly
contribute to that most desirable end."  The Company then set forth the
conditions under which they proposed to convert themselves into an agency
for paying off the national debt, and making a profit for themselves.

The proposal fell somewhat short of the general expectation, which looked
for nothing less than a sort of financial philosopher's stone.  Besides,
the Bank of England was willing to compete with the South Sea Company.
If the Company could coin money out of cobwebs, why should not the Bank
be able to accomplish the same feat?  The friends of the Bank reminded
the House of Commons of the great services which that corporation had
rendered to the Government in the most difficult times, and urged, with
much show of justice, that if any advantage was to be made by public
bargains, the Bank should be preferred before a Company that had never
{190} done anything for the nation.  Well might Aislabie, the unfortunate
Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose shame and ruin we shall soon come to
tell of, exclaim in the speech which he made when defending himself for
the second time before the House of Lords, that "the spirit of bubbling
had prevailed so universally that the very Bank became a bubble--and this
not by chance or necessity, or from any engagement to raise money for the
public service, but from the same spirit that actuated Temple Mills or
Caraway's Fishery."  In plain truth, as poor Aislabie pointed out, the
Bank started a scheme in imitation of the South Sea Company, and the
House of Commons gave time for its proper development.  The Bank offered
its scheme on February 1st, and by that time the South Sea Company had
seen their way to mend their hand and submit more attractive proposals.
Then the Bank, not to be out-rivalled, soon made a second proposal as
well.  The House took the rival propositions into consideration.  Walpole
was the chief advocate of the Bank.  No doubt he had come to the
reasonable conclusion that if there could be any hope of success for such
a scheme, it would be found in the Bank of England rather than in the
South Sea Company.  Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made
himself the champion of the Company, and assured the House that its
propositions were of far greater advantage to the country than those of
the Bank.  Under his persuasive influence the House agreed to accept the
tender, as we may call it, of the Company, and the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Mr. Secretary Craggs, and others, were ordered to prepare and
bring in a bill to give legislative sanction to the scheme.

[Sidenote: 1720--The Bill passed]

The bill passed the Commons and went up to the House of Lords.  To the
credit of the Peers it has to be said that they received it more
doubtfully, and were slower to admit the certainty of its blessings than
the members of the representative chamber had been.  Lord North and Gray
condemned it as not only making way for, but {191} actually countenancing
and authorizing "the fraudulent and pernicious practice of
stock-jobbing."  The Duke of Wharton declared that "the artificial and
prodigious rise of the South Sea stock was a dangerous bait, which might
decoy many unwary people to their ruin, and allure them, by a false
prospect of gain, to part with what they had got by their labor and
industry to purchase imaginary riches."  Lord Cowper said that the bill,
"like the Trojan horse, was ushered in and received with great pomp and
acclamations of joy, but was contrived for treachery and destruction."
Lord Sunderland, however, spoke warmly in favor of the bill, and
contended that "they who countenanced the scheme of the South Sea Company
had nothing in their view but the easing the nation of part of that heavy
load of debt it labored under;" and argued that the scheme would enable
the directors of the Company at once to pay off the debt, and to secure
large dividends to their share-holders.  The Lords decided on admitting
the South Sea Company's Trojan horse.  Eighty-three votes were in favor
of the bill, and only seventeen against it.  The bill was read a third
time on April 7th, and received the Royal assent on June 11th.  The
King's speech, delivered that day at the close of the session, declared
that "the good foundation you have prepared this session for the payment
of the national debts, and the discharge of a great part of them without
the least violation of the public faith, will, I hope, strengthen more
and more the union I desire to see among all my subjects, and make our
friendship yet more valuable to all foreign Powers."

The immediate result of the Parliamentary authority thus given to what
was purely a bubble scheme was to bring upon the Legislature a perfect
deluge of petitions from all manner of projectors.  Patents and
monopolies were sought for the carrying on of fisheries in Greenland and
various other regions; for the growth, manufacture and sale of hemp,
flax, and cotton; for the making of sail-cloth; for a general insurance
against fire; for the {192} planting and rearing of madder to be used by
dyers; for the preparing and curing of Virginia tobacco for snuff, and
making it into the same within all his Majesty's dominions.  Schemes such
as these were comparatively reasonable; but there were others of a
different kind.  Petitions were gravely submitted to Parliament praying
for patents to be granted to the projectors of enterprises for trading in
hair; for the universal supply of funerals to all parts of Great Britain;
for insuring and increasing children's fortunes; for insuring masters and
mistresses against losses from the carelessness or misconduct of
servants; for insuring against thefts and robberies; for extracting
silver from lead; for the transmutation of silver into malleable fine
metal; for buying and fitting out ships to suppress pirates; for a wheel
for perpetual motion, and--with which project, perhaps, we may close our
list of specimens--"for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage,
but nobody to know what it is."  Of course some of these projects were
mere vulgar swindles.  Even in that season of marvellous projection it is
not to be supposed that the inventors of the last-mentioned scheme had
any serious belief in its efficacy.  The author of the project for the
perpetual-motion wheel was, we take it, a sincere personage and
enthusiast.  His scheme has been coming up again and again before the
world since his time; and we have known good men who would have staked
all they held dear in life upon the possibility of its realization.  But
the would-be patentee of the undertaking of great advantage, nobody to
know what it is, was a man of a different order.  He understood human
nature in certain of its moods.  He knew that there are men and women who
can be got to believe in anything which holds out the promise of quick
and easy gain.  If he found a few dozen greedy and selfish fools to help
his project with a little money, that would, no doubt, be the full
attainment of his ends.  Probably he was successful.  The very boldness
of his avowal of secrecy would have a charm for many.  One day would be
enough for him--the {193} the day when he sent in his demand for a
patent.  The bare demand would bring him dupes.

[Sidenote: 1720--The bubble bursts]

The first great blow struck at the South Sea Company came from the South
Sea Company itself.  Several bubble companies began to imitate the
financial system which the more favored institution had set up.  The
South Sea Company put in motion certain legal proceedings against some of
the offenders.  The South Sea Company had the support and countenance of
the high legal authorities, and found no difficulty in obtaining
injunctions against the other associations, directing them not to go
beyond the strict legal privileges secured to them by their charters of
incorporation.  Among the undertakings thus admonished were the English
Copper Company and the Welsh Copper and Lead Company.  His Royal Highness
the Prince of Wales happened to be a governor of the English Copper
Company, and the Lords-justices were polite enough to send the Prince a
message expressing the great regret they felt at having to declare
illegal an enterprise with which he was connected.  The Prince, not to be
outdone in politeness, received the admonition, we are told, "very
graciously," and sent on his part a message to the Company requesting
them to accept his resignation, and to elect some one else a governor in
his place.  The proceedings which the South Sea Company had set on foot
against their audacious rivals and imitators had, however, the
inconvenient effect of directing too much of public attention to the
principles upon which they conducted their own business.  Confidence
began to waver, to be shaken, to give way altogether; and when people ask
whether a speculation is a bubble, the bubble, if it is one, is already
burst.

The whole basis of Law's system, and of the South Sea Company's schemes
as well, was the principle that the prosperity of a nation is increased
in proportion to the quantity of money in circulation; and that as no
State can have gold enough for all its commercial transactions,
paper-money may be issued to an unlimited extent, and {194} its full
value maintained without its being convertible at pleasure into hard
cash.  This supposed principle has been proved again and again to be a
mere fallacy and paradox; but it always finds enthusiastic believers who
have plausible arguments in its support.  It appears, indeed, to have a
singular fascination for some persons in all times and communities.  It
might seem an obvious truism that under no possible conditions can people
in general be got to give as much for a promise to pay as for a certain
and instant payment; and yet this truism would have to be proved a
falsehood in order to establish a basis for such a project as that of
Law.  Even were the basis to be established, the project would then have
to be worked fairly and honestly out, which was not done either in the
case of the Mississippi Company or of the South Sea Company.  If each had
been founded on a true financial principle, each was worked in a false
and fraudulent way.  At its best the South Sea Company in its later
development would have been a bubble.  Worked as it actually was, it
proved to be a swindle.  A committee of secrecy was appointed by the
House of Commons to inquire into the condition of the Company.  The
committee found that false and fictitious entries had been made in the
Company's books; that leaves had been torn out; that some books had been
destroyed altogether, and that others had been carried off and secreted.
The vulgar arts of the card-sharper and the thimble-rigger had been
prodigally employed to avert detection and ruin by the directors of a
Company which was promoted and protected by ministers of State and by the
favorites of the King.

[Sidenote: 1720--Houghton]

Some idea of the wide-spread nature of the disaster which was inflicted
by the wreck of the Company may be formed from a rapid glance at some of
the petitions for redress and relief which were presented to the House of
Commons.  We find among them petitions from the counties of Hertford,
Dorset, Essex, Buckingham, Derby; the cities of Bristol, Exeter, Lincoln;
the boroughs of Oakhampton, Amersham, Bedford, Chipping Wycombe, {195}
Abingdon, Sudbury, East Retford, Evesham, Newark-upon-Trent, Newbury, and
many other places.  We have purposely omitted to take account of any of
the London communities.  The wildest excitement prevailed; and it is
characteristic of the time to note that the national calamity--for it was
no less--aroused fresh hopes in the minds of the Jacobites.  Such a
calamity, such a scandal, it was thought, could not but bring shame and
ruin upon the Whig ministers, and through them discredit on the Sovereign
and the Court.  It was believed, it was hoped, that Sunderland would be
found to be implicated in the swindle.  Why should not such a crisis,
such a humiliation to the Whigs, be the occasion of a new and a more
successful attempt on the part of the Jacobites?  The King was again in
Hanover.  He was summoned home in hot haste.  On December 8, 1720, the
two Houses of Parliament were assembled to hear the reading of the Royal
speech proroguing the session; and in the speech the King was made to
express his concern "for the unhappy turn of affairs which has so much
affected the public credit at home," and to recommend most earnestly to
the House of Commons "that you consider of the most effectual and speedy
methods to restore the national credit, and fix it upon a lasting
foundation."  "You will, I doubt not," the speech went on to say, "be
assisted in so commendable and necessary a work by every man that loves
his country."  A week or so before the Royal speech was read, on November
30, 1720, Charles Edward, eldest son of James Stuart, was born at Rome.
The undaunted mettle of Atterbury came into fresh and vigorous activity
with the birth of the Stuart heir, and the apparently imminent ruin of
the Whig ministers.

Robert Walpole had been spending some time peacefully at his country
place, Houghton, in Norfolk.  Hunting, bull-baiting, and drinking were
the principal amusements with which Walpole entertained his guests there.
Sometimes the guests were persons of royal rank (Walpole once entertained
the Grand Duke of Tuscany); {196} sometimes the throng of his visitors
and his neighbors to the hunting-field could only be compared, says a
letter written at the time, to an army in its march.  Walpole never lost
sight, however, of what was going on in the metropolis.  He used to send
a trusty Norfolk man as his express-messenger to run all the way on foot
from Houghton to London, and carry letters for him to confidential
friends, and bring him back the answers.  When he found how badly things
were going in London on the bursting of the South Sea bubble, he hastened
up to town.  His presence was sadly needed there.  It is not without
interest to think of James Stuart in Rome, and Walpole in Houghton, both
keeping their eyes fixed on the gradual exposure of the South Sea
swindle, and both alike hoping to find their account in the national
calamity.  All the advantage was with the statesman and not with the
Prince.  The English people of all opinions and creeds were tolerably
well assured that if any one could help them out of the difficulty
Walpole could; and it required the faith of the most devoted Jacobite to
make any man of business believe that the return of the exiled Stuarts
could do much to keep off national bankruptcy.  Walpole had waited long.
His time was now come at last.

[Sidenote: 1720--The Craggses]

Walpole had kept his head cool during the days when the Company was
soaring to the skies; he kept his head equally cool when it came down
with a crash.  "He had never," he said in the House of Commons, "approved
of the South Sea scheme, and was sensible it had done a great deal of
mischief; but, since it could not be undone, he thought it the duty of
all good men to give their helping hand towards retrieving it; and with
this view he had already bestowed some thoughts on a proposal to restore
public credit, which at the proper time he would submit to the wisdom of
the House."  Walpole had made money by the South Sea scheme.  The sound
knowledge of the principles of finance, which enabled him to see that the
enterprise thus conducted could not pay, in the end {197} enabled him
also to see that it could pay up to a certain point; and when that point
had been reached he quietly sold out and saved his gains.  The King's
mistresses and their relatives also made good profit out of the
transactions.  The Prince of Wales was a gainer by some of the season's
speculations.  But when the crash came, the ruin was wide-spread; it
amounted to the proportions of a national calamity.  The ruling classes
raged and stormed against the vile conspirators who had disappointed them
in their expectations of coining money out of cobwebs.  The Lords and
Commons held inquiries, passed resolutions, demanded impeachments.  It
was soon made manifest beyond all doubt that members of the Government
had been scandalously implicated in the worst parts of the fraudulent
speculations.  Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was only
too clearly shown to be one of the leading delinquents.  Mr. Craggs, the
father, Postmaster-general, and James Craggs, the son, Secretary of
State, were likewise involved.  Both were remarkable men.  The father had
begun life as a common barber, and partly by capacity and partly by the
thrift that follows fawning, had made his way up in the world until he
reached the height from which he was suddenly and so ignominiously to
fall.  It was hardly worth the trouble thus to toil and push and climb,
only to tumble down with such shame and ruin.  Craggs the father had had
great transfers of South Sea stock made to him for which he never paid.
Craggs the son, the Secretary of State, had acted as the go-between in
the transactions of the Company with the King's mistresses, whereby the
influence of these ladies was purchased for a handsome consideration.
Charles Stanhope, one of the Secretaries to the Treasury and cousin of
the Minister, was shown to have received large value in the stock of the
Company for which he never paid.  The most ghastly ruin fell on some of
these men.  Craggs the younger died suddenly on the very day when the
report incriminating him was read in the House of Commons.  Craggs the
father poisoned himself a few {198} days afterwards.  Pope wrote an
epitaph on the son, in which he described him as--

  "Statesman, yet friend of truth; of soul sincere,
  In action faithful and in honor clear;
  Who broke no promise, served no private end,
  Who gained no title, and who lost no friend."


Epitaphs seem to have been genuine tributes of personal friendship in
those days; they had no reference to merit or to truth.  One's friend had
every virtue because he was one's friend.  Secret committees might
condemn, Parliament might degrade, juries might convict, impartial
history might stigmatize, but one's friend remained one's friend all the
same; and if one had the gift of verse, was to be held up to the
admiration of time and eternity in a glorifying epitaph.  We have fallen
on more prosaic days now; the living admirer of a modern Craggs would
leave his epitaph unwritten if he could not make facts and feelings fit
better in together.

[Sidenote: 1721--Death of Stanhope]

A better and more eminent man than Aislabie or either Craggs lost his
life in consequence of the South Sea calamity.  No one had accused, or
even suspected, Lord Stanhope of any share in the financial swindle.
Even the fact that his cousin was one of those accused of guilty
complicity with it did not induce any one to believe that the Minister of
State had any share in the guilt.  Yet Stanhope was one of the first
victims of the crisis.  The Duke of Wharton, son of the late Minister,
had just come of age.  He was already renowned as a brilliant, audacious
profligate.  He was president of the Hell-fire Club; he and some of his
comrades were the nightly terror of London streets.  Wharton thought fit
to make himself the champion of public purity in the debates on the South
Sea Company's ruin.  He attacked the Ministers fiercely; he attacked
Stanhope in especial.  Stanhope replied to him with far greater warmth
than the weight of any attack from Wharton would seem to have called for.
Excited beyond measure, Stanhope burst a blood-vessel in his {199} anger.
He was carried home, and he died the next day--February 5, 1721.  His
life had been pure and noble.  He was a sincere lover of his country; a
brave and often a successful soldier; a statesman of high purpose if not
of the most commanding talents.  His career as a soldier was brought to a
close when he had to capitulate to that master of war and profligacy, the
Duke de Vendôme; an encounter of a different kind with another brilliant
profligate robbed him of his life.

The House of Commons promptly passed a series of resolutions declaring
"John Aislabie, Esquire, a Member of this House, then Chancellor of the
Exchequer and one of the Commissioners of his Majesty's Treasury," guilty
of "most notorious, dangerous, and infamous corruption," and ordering his
expulsion from the House and his committal as a prisoner to the Tower.
This resolution was carried without a dissentient word.  The House of
Commons went on next to consider that part of the report which applied to
Lord Sunderland, and a motion was made declaring that "after the
proposals of the South Sea Company were accepted by this House, and a
bill ordered to be brought in thereupon, and before such bill passed,
50,000 pounds of the capital stock of the South Sea Company was taken in
by Robert Knight, late cashier of the said Company, for the use and upon
the account of diaries, Earl of Sunderland, a Lord of Parliament and
First Commissioner of the Treasury, without any valuable consideration
paid, or sufficient security given, for payment for or acceptance of the
same."

Sunderland had too many friends, however, and too much influence to be
dealt with as if he were Aislabie.  A fierce debate sprang up.  The
evidence against him was not by any means so clear as in the case of
Aislabie.  There was room for a doubt as to Sunderland's personal
knowledge of all that had been done in his name.  His influence and power
secured him the full benefit of the doubt.  The motion implicating him
was rejected by a majority of 233 votes against 172, "which, however,"
{200} says a contemporary account, "occasioned various reasonings and
reflections."  Charles Stanhope, too, was lucky enough to get off, on a
division, by a very narrow majority.

[Sidenote: 1721--An interview with James Stuart]

A letter from an English traveller at Rome to his father, bearing date
May 6, 1721, and privately printed this year (1884) for the first time,
under the auspices of the Clarendon Society of Edinburgh, gives an
interesting account of the reception of the writer, an English
Protestant, by James Stuart and his wife.  That part of the letter which
is of present interest to us tells of the remarks made by James on the
subject of the South Sea catastrophe.  James spoke of the investigations
of the secret committee, from which he had no great hopes; for, he said,
the authors of the calamity "would find means to be above the common
course of justice."  "Some may imagine," continued he, "that these
calamities are not displeasing to me, because they may in some measure
turn to my advantage.  I renounce all such unworthy thoughts.  The love
of my country is the first principle of my worldly wishes, and my heart
bleeds to see so brave and honest a people distressed and misled by a few
wicked men, and plunged into miseries almost irretrievable."
"Thereupon," says the writer of the letter, "he rose briskly from his
chair, and expressed his concern with fire in his eyes."

Exiled sovereigns are in the habit of expressing concern for their
country with fire in their eyes; they are also in the habit of regarding
their own return to power as the one sole means of relieving the country
from its distress.  The English gentleman who describes this scene
represents himself as not to be outdone in patriotism of his own even by
the exiled Prince.  "I could not disavow much of what he said; yet I own
I was piqued at it, for very often compassionate terms from the mouth of
an adverse party are grating.  It appeared to me so on this occasion;
therefore I replied, 'It's true, sir, that our affairs in England lie at
present under many hardships by the South Sea's mismanagement; but it is
a constant {201} maxim with us Protestants to undergo a great deal for
the security of our religion, which we could not depend upon under a
Romish Government.'"  This speech, not over-polite, the Prince took in
good part, and entered upon an argument so skilfully, "that I am
apprehensive I should become half a Jacobite if I should continue
following these discourses any longer."  "Therefore," says the writer, "I
will give you my word I will enter no more upon arguments of this kind
with him."  The Prince and his visitor were perhaps both playing a part
to some extent, and the whole discourse was probably a good deal less
theatric in style than the English traveller has reported.  But there can
be no doubt that the letter fairly illustrates the spirit in which the
leading Jacobites watched over the financial troubles in England, and the
new hopes with which they were inspired--hopes destined to be translated
into new action before very long.  Nor can it be denied that the speech
of the English visitor correctly represented the feeling which was
growing stronger day after day in the minds of prudent people at home in
England.  The time was coming--had almost come--when a political
disturbance or a financial panic in these kingdoms was to be accounted
sufficient occasion for a change of Ministers, but not for a revolution.




{202}

CHAPTER XII.

AFTER THE STORM.

[Sidenote: 1721--South Sea victims]

Swift wrote more than one poem on the South Sea mania.  That which was
written in 1721, and is called "South Sea," is a wonder of wit and
wisdom.  It shows the hollowness of the scheme in some new, odd, and
striking light in every metaphor and every verse.  "A guinea," Swift
reminds his readers, "will not pass at market for a farthing more,
shown through a multiplying glass, than what it always did before."

  "So cast it in the Southern Seas,
    And view it through a jobber's bill,
  Put on what spectacles you please,
    Your guinea's but a guinea still."


Other poets had not as much prudence and sound sense as Swift.  Pope
put some of his money, a good deal of it, into South Sea stock,
contrary to the earnest advice of Atterbury, and lost it.  Swift
reflected faithfully the temper of the time in savage verses, which
call out for the punishment by death of the fraudulent directors of the
Company.  Antaeus, Swift tells us, was always restored to fresh
strength as often as he touched the earth; Hercules subdued him at last
by holding him up in the air and strangling him there.  Suspended a
while in the air, according to the same principle, our directors, he
admonishes the country, will be properly tamed and dealt with.  Many
public enemies of the directors gave themselves credit for moderation
and humanity on the ground that they would not have the culprits
tortured to death, but merely executed in the ordinary way.

Walpole set himself first of all to restore public credit.  {203} His
object was not so much the punishment of fraudulent directors as the
tranquillizing of the public mind and the subsidence of national panic.
He proposed one measure in the first instance to accomplish this end;
but that not being sufficiently comprehensive, he introduced another
bill, which was finally adopted by both Houses of Parliament.  Briefly
described, this scheme so adjusted the financial affairs of the South
Sea Company that five millions of the seven which the directors had
agreed to pay the public were remitted; the encumbrances to the Company
were cleared off to a certain extent by the confiscation of the estates
of the fraudulent directors; the credit of the Company's bonds was
maintained; thirty-three pounds six shillings and eightpence per cent.
were divided among the proprietors, and two millions were reserved
towards the liquidation of the national debt.  The Company was
therefore put into a position to carry out its various public
engagements, and the panic was soon over.  Many of the proprietors of
the Company complained bitterly of the manner in which they had been
treated by Walpole.  The lobbies of the House of Commons and all the
adjacent places were crowded by proprietors of the short annuities and
other redeemable popular deeds; men and women who, as the contemporary
accounts tell us, "in a rude and insolent manner demanded justice of
the members as they went into the House," and put into their hands a
paper with the words written on it, "Pray do justice to the annuitants
who lent their money on Parliamentary security."  "The noisy
multitude," we are told, "were particularly rude to Mr. Comptroller,
tearing part of his coat as he passed by."  The Speaker of the House
was informed that a crowd of people had got together in a riotous and
tumultuous manner in the lobbies and passages, and he ordered "that the
Justices of the Peace for the City of Westminster do immediately attend
this House and bring the constables with them."  While the justices and
the constables were being sent for, Sir John Ward was {204} presenting
to the House a petition from the proprietors of the redeemable funds,
setting forth that they had lent their money to the South Sea Company
on Parliamentary security; that they had been unwarily drawn into
subscribing for the shares in the Company by the artifices of the
directors; and they prayed that they might be heard by themselves or
their counsel against Walpole's measure--the bill "for making several
provisions to restore the public credit, which suffers by the frauds
and mismanagement of the late South Sea directors and others."  Walpole
opposed the petition, and said he did not see how the petitioners could
be relieved, seeing that the resolutions, in pursuance of which his
bill was brought in, had been approved by the King and council, and by
a great majority of the House.  Walpole, therefore, moved that the
debate be adjourned, in order to get rid of the matter.  The motion was
carried by seventy-eight voices against twenty-nine.  By this time four
Justices for the City of Westminster had arrived, and were brought to
the bar of the House.  The Speaker informed them that there was a great
crowd of riotous people in the lobbies and passages, and that he was
commanded by the House to direct them to go and disperse the crowd, and
take care to prevent similar riots in the future.  The four justices,
attended by five or six constables, desired the petitioners to clear
the lobbies, and when they refused to do so, caused a proclamation
against rioters to be twice read, warning them at the same time that if
they remained until the third reading, they would have to incur the
penalties of the Act.  What the penalties of the Act were, and what the
four justices and five or six constables could have done with the
petitioners if the petitioners had refused to listen to reason, do not
seem very clear.  The petitioners, however, did listen to reason, and
dispersed before the fatal third reading of the proclamation.  But they
did not disperse without giving the House of Commons and the justices a
piece of their mind.  Many exclaimed that they had come as peaceable
citizens and {205} subjects to represent their grievances, and had not
expected to be used like a mob and scoundrels; and others, as they went
out, shouted to the members of Parliament, "You first pick our pockets,
and then send us to jail for complaining."

[Sidenote: 1721--Relief measures]

The Bill went up to the House of Lords on Monday, August 7th, and the
Lords agreed to it without an amendment.  On Thursday, August 10th,
Parliament was prorogued.  The Lord Chancellor read the King's speech.
"The common calamity," said his Majesty, "occasioned by the wicked
execution of the South Sea scheme, was become so very great before your
meeting that the providing proper remedies for it was very difficult.
But it is a great comfort to me to observe that public credit now
begins to recover, which gives me the greatest hopes that it will be
entirely restored when all the provisions you have made for that end
shall be duly put in execution."  The speech went on to tell of his
Majesty's "great compassion for the sufferings of the innocent, and a
just indignation against the guilty;" and added that the King had
readily given his assent "to such bills as you have presented to me for
punishing the authors of our late misfortunes, and for obtaining the
restitution and satisfaction due to those who have been injured by them
in such manner as you judged proper."  Certainly there was no lack of
severity in the punishment inflicted on the fraudulent directors.
Their estates were confiscated with such rigor that some of them were
reduced to miserable poverty.  They were disqualified from ever holding
any public place or office whatever, and from ever having a seat in
Parliament.  Yet, severely as they were punished, the outcry of the
public at the time was that they had been let off far too easily.
Walpole was denounced because he did not carry their punishment much
farther.  There was even a ridiculous report spread abroad that he had
defended Sunderland and screened the directors from the most ignoble
and sordid motives, and that he had been handsomely paid for his
compromise with crime.  {206} Nothing would have satisfied some of the
sufferers by the South Sea scheme short of the execution of its
principal directors.  Even the scaffold, however, could hardly have
dealt more stern and summary justice on the criminals--as some of them
undoubtedly were--than did the actual course of events.  When the storm
cleared away, Aislabie was ruined; Craggs, the Postmaster-general, was
dead; Craggs, the Secretary of State, was dead; Lord Stanhope, who was
really innocent--was really unsuspected of any share in the crimes of
the fraudulent directors--was dead also; Sunderland was no longer a
Minister of State, and the shadow of death was already on him.  It was
not merely the bursting of a bubble, it was the bursting of a shell--it
mutilated or killed those who stood around and near.

[Sidenote: 1722--Sunderland's antipathy to Walpole]

By the time of the new elections--for Parliament had now nearly run its
course--public tranquillity was entirely restored.  Parliament was
dissolved in March, 1722, and the new elections left Walpole and his
friends in power, with an immense majority at their back.  Long before
the new Parliament had time to assemble, Lord Sunderland suddenly died
of heart disease.  On April 19, 1722, his death took place, and it was
so unexpected that a wild outcry was raised by some of his friends, who
insisted that his enemies had poisoned him.  The medical examination
proved, however, that Sunderland's disease was one which might at any
moment of excitement have brought on his death.  Nearly all the leading
public men who, innocent or guilty, had been mixed up with the evil
schemes of the South Sea Company were now in the grave.

The field seemed now clear and open to Walpole.  The death of
Sunderland, following so soon on that of Stanhope, had left him
apparently without a rival.  Sunderland had been to the last a
political, and even a personal, enemy of Walpole.  Although Walpole had
gone so far to protect Sunderland against the House of Commons and
against public opinion, with regard to his share in {207} the South Sea
Company's transactions, Sunderland could not forgive Walpole because
Walpole was rising higher in the State--because he was, in fact, the
greater man.  Though Sunderland was compelled by public opinion to
resign office, he had contrived, up to the hour of his death, to
maintain his influence over the mind of King George.  Fortunately for
George, the King had too much clear, robust good-sense not to recognize
the priceless worth of Walpole's advice and Walpole's services.
Sunderland tried one ingenious artifice to get rid of Walpole.  He
suggested to George that Walpole's merits required some special and
permanent recognition, and he recommended that the King should create
Walpole Postmaster-general for life.  Such an office, indeed, would
have brought Walpole an ample revenue, supposing he stood in need of
money, which he did not, but it would have disqualified him forever for
a seat in Parliament.  Perhaps no better illustration of Sunderland's
narrow intellect and utter lack of judgment could be found than the
supposition that this shallow trick could succeed, and that the
greatest administrator of his time could be thus quietly withdrawn from
Parliamentary life and from the higher work of the State, and shelved
in perpetuity as a Postmaster-general.  King George was not to be taken
in after this fashion.  He asked Sunderland whether Walpole wished for
such an office, or was acquainted with Sunderland's intention to make
the suggestion.  Sunderland had to answer both questions in the
negative.  "Then," said the King, "pray do not make him any such offer,
or say anything about it to him.  I had to part with him once, much
against my will, and so long as he is willing to serve me I will never
part with him again."  This incident shows that, if Sunderland had
lived, he would have plotted against Walpole to the end, and would have
stood in Walpole's way to the best of his power, and with all the
unforgiving hostility of the narrow-minded and selfish man who has had
services rendered him for which he ought to feel grateful but cannot.

{208}

[Sidenote: 1721-1722--Marlborough's closing days]

A far greater man than Sunderland was soon to pass away.

  "From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow."

These are the famous words in which Johnson depicts the miserable decay
of a great spirit, and points anew the melancholy moral of the vanity
of human wishes.  Hardly a line in the poetry of our language is better
known or more often quoted.  Where did Johnson get the idea that
Marlborough had sunk into dotage before his death?  There is not the
slightest foundation for such a belief.  All that we know of
Marlborough's closing days tells us the contrary.  Nothing in
Marlborough's life, not even his serene disregard of dangers and
difficulties, not even his victories, became him like to the leaving of
it.  No great man ever sank more gracefully, more gently, with a calmer
spirit, down to his rest.  We get some charming pictures of
Marlborough's closing days.  Death had given him warning by repeated
paralytic strokes.  On November 27, 1721, he was seen for the last time
in the House of Lords.  He was not, however, quite near his death even
then.  He used to spend his time at Blenheim, or at his lodge in
Windsor.  To the last he was fond of riding and driving and the fresh
country air.  In-doors he loved to be surrounded by his granddaughters
and their young friends, and to join in games of cards and other
amusements with them.  They used to get up private theatricals to
gratify the gentle old warrior.  We hear of a version of Dryden's "All
for Love" being thus performed.  The Duchess of Marlborough had cut out
of the play its unseemly passages, and even its too amorous
expressions--the reader will probably think there was not much left of
the piece when this work of purification had been accomplished--and she
would not allow any embracing to be performed.  The gentleman who
played Mark Antony wore a sword which had been presented to Marlborough
by the Emperor.  The part of the high-priest was played by a pretty
girl, a friend of Marlborough's granddaughters, and she wore as {209}
high-priest's robe what seems to have been a lady's night-dress,
gorgeously embroidered with special devices for the occasion.  A
prologue, written by Dr. Hoadly, was read, in which the glories of the
great Duke's career were glowingly recounted.  Some painter, it seems
to us, might make a pretty picture of this: the great hall in Blenheim
turned into a theatre, the handsome young men and pretty girls enacting
their chastened parts, the fading old hero looking at the scene with
pleased and kindly eyes, and the imperious, loving old Duchess turning
her devoted gaze on him.

So fades, so languishes, grows dim, and dies the conqueror of Blenheim,
the greatest soldier England ever had since the days when kings ceased
to be as a matter of right her chiefs in command.  In the early days of
June, 1722, Marlborough was stricken by another paralytic seizure, and
this was his last.  He was in full possession of his senses to the end,
perfectly conscious and calm.  He knew that he was dying; he had
prayers read to him; he conveyed in many tender ways his feelings of
affection for his wife, and of hope for his own future.  At four in the
morning of June 16th his life ebbed quietly away.  He was in his
seventy-second year when he died.  None of the great deeds of his life
belong to this history; none of that life's worst offences have much to
do with it.  Marlborough's career seems to us absolutely faultless in
two of its aspects; as a commander and as a husband we can only give
him praise.  He was probably a greater commander than even the Duke of
Wellington.  If he never had to encounter a Napoleon, he had to meet
and triumph over difficulties which never came in Wellington's way.  It
was not Wellington's fate to have to strive against political treachery
of the basest kind on the part of English Ministers of State.
Wellington's enemies were all in the field arrayed against him;
Marlborough had to fight the foreign enemy on the battle-field, and to
struggle meanwhile against the persistent treachery of the still more
formidable enemy {210} at home in the council-chamber of his own
sovereign.  Perhaps, indeed, Wellington's nature would not have
permitted him to succeed under such difficulties.  Wellington could
hardly have met craft with craft, and, it must be added, falsehood with
falsehood, as Marlborough did.  We have said in this book already that
even for that age of double-dealing Marlborough was a surprising
double-dealer, and there were many passages in his career which are
evidences of an astounding capacity for deceit.  "He was a great man,"
said his enemy, Lord Peterborough, "and I have forgotten his faults."
Historians would gladly do the same if they could; would surely dwell
with much more delight on the virtues and the greatness than on the
defects.  The English people were generous to Marlborough, and in the
way which, it has to be confessed, was most welcome to him.  But if a
very treasure-house of gold could not have satisfied his love of money,
let it be added that the national treasure-house itself, were it poured
out at his feet, could not have overpaid the services which he had
rendered to his country.

Marlborough left no son to inherit his honors and his fortune.  His
titles and estates descended to his eldest daughter, the Countess of
Godolphin.  She died without leaving a son, and the titles and estates
passed over to the Earl of Sunderland, the son and heir of
Marlborough's second daughter, at that time long dead.  From the day
when the victor of Blenheim died, there has been no Duke of Marlborough
distinguished in anything but the name.  Not one of the world's great
soldiers, it would seem, was destined to have a great soldier for a
son.  From great statesman fathers sometimes spring great statesman
sons; but Alexander, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Charles the Twelfth,
Alexander Farnese, Clive, Marlborough, Frederick, Napoleon, Wellington,
Washington, left to the world no heir of their greatness.




{211}

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BANISHMENT OF ATTERBURY.

[Sidenote: 1722--Funeral of Marlborough]

On Thursday, August 9, 1722, the "pompous solemnity" of Marlborough's
funeral took place.  The great procession went from the Duke's house in
St. James's Park, through St. James's and the Upper Park to Hyde Park
Corner, and thence through Piccadilly, St. James's Street, Pall Mall,
Charing Cross, and King Street to Westminster Abbey.  A small army of
soldiers guarded the remains of the greatest warrior of his age; a whole
heralds' college clustered about the lofty funeral banner on which all
the arms of the Churchills were quartered.  Marlborough's friends and
admirers, his old brothers-in-arms, the companions of his victories,
followed his coffin, and listened while Garter King-at-Arms, bending over
the open grave, said: "Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of
this transitory life unto His mercy the most high, most mighty, and most
noble prince, John Churchill, Duke and Earl of Marlborough."

In Applebee's _Weekly Journal_ for Saturday, August 11th, two days after
the funeral, we are told that the Duchess of Marlborough, in honor of the
memory of her life-long lover, had offered a prize of five hundred pounds
for a Latin epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb, and that "several
poets have already taken to their lofty studies to contend for the prize."

At Marlborough's funeral we see for the last time in high public estate
one of the few Englishmen of the day who could properly be named in the
same breath with Marlborough.  This was Francis Atterbury, the eloquent
and daring Bishop of Rochester.  Atterbury came up to {212} town for the
purpose of officiating at the funeral of the great Duke.  On July 30,
1722, he wrote from the country to his friend Pope, announcing his visit
to London.  "I go to-morrow," Atterbury writes, "to the Deanery, and I
believe I shall stay there till I have said dust to dust, and shut up
this last scene of pompous vanity."  Atterbury does not seem to have been
profoundly impressed with the religious solemnity of the occasion.  His
was not a very reverential spirit.  There was as little of the temper of
pious sanctity in Atterbury as in Swift himself.  The allusion to the
last scene of pompous vanity might have had another significance, as well
as that which Atterbury meant to give to it.  Amid the pomp in which
Marlborough's career went out, the career of Atterbury went out as well,
although in a different way, and not closed sublimely by death.  After
the funeral, Atterbury went to the Deanery at Westminster--he was Dean of
Westminster as well as Bishop of Rochester--and there, on August 24th,
the day but one after the scene of pompous vanity, he was arrested by the
Under-Secretary of State, accompanied by two officers of justice, and was
brought, along with all papers of his which the officers could seize,
before the Privy Council.  He underwent an examination, as the result of
which he was committed to the Tower, on a charge of having been concerned
in a treasonable conspiracy to dethrone the King, and to bring back the
House of Stuart.  In the Tower he was left to languish for many a long
day before it was found convenient to bring him to trial.

[Sidenote: 1722--The King's speech]

England was startled by the disclosures which followed Atterbury's
arrest.  On Tuesday, October 9, 1722, the sixth Parliament of Great
Britain--the sixth, that is to say, since the union with Scotland--met at
Westminster.  The House of Commons, on the motion of Mr. Pulteney,
elected Mr. Spencer Compton their Speaker, and on the next day but one,
October 11th, the Royal speech was read.  The King was present in person,
but the speech was read by the Lord Chancellor, for the good reason which
we {213} have already mentioned that his Majesty the King of England
could not speak the English language.  The speech opened with a startling
announcement.  "My Lords and Gentlemen"--so ran the words of the
Sovereign--"I am concerned to find myself obliged, at the opening of this
Parliament, to acquaint you that a dangerous conspiracy has been for some
time formed, and is still carrying on, against my person and government,
in favor of a Popish pretender."  "Some of the conspirators," the speech
went on to say, "have been taken up and secured, and endeavors are used
for the apprehending others."  When the speech was read, and the King had
left the House, the Duke of Grafton, then Lord-lieutenant of Ireland,
brought in a bill for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, and empowering
the Government to secure and detain "such persons as his Majesty shall
suspect are conspiring against his person and government, for the space
of one year."  The motion to read the Bill a second time in the same
sitting was strenuously resisted by a considerable minority of the Peers.
A warm debate took place, and in the end the second reading was carried
by a majority of sixty-seven against twenty-four.  The debate was renewed
upon the other stages of the Bill, which were taken in rapid succession.
The proposal of the Government was, of course, carried in the end, but it
met with a resistance in the House of Lords which certainly would not
have been offered to such a proposal by any member of the hereditary
chamber in our day.  Some of the recorded protests of dissentient peers
read more like the utterances of modern Radicals than those of
influential members of the House of Lords.  The strongest objection made
to the proposal was that the utmost term for which the Constitution had
previously been suspended was six months, and that the measure to suspend
it for a year would become an authority for suspending it at some future
time for two years, or three years, or any term which might please the
ministers in power.  On Monday, October 15th, the Bill was brought down
to the Commons, and was read {214} a first time on the motion of Walpole.
The Bill was passed in the Commons, not, indeed, without opposition, but
with an opposition much less strenuous and influential than that which
had been offered to it in the House of Lords.  On October 17th it was
announced to Parliament that Dr. Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, the
Lord North and Grey, and the Earl of Orrery, had been committed to the
Tower on a charge of high-treason.  A few days after, a similar
announcement was made about the arrest and committal of the Duke of
Norfolk.

[Sidenote: 1722--Proclamation of James]

By far the most important of the persons committed for trial was the
Bishop of Rochester.  Francis Atterbury may rank among the most
conspicuous public men of his time.  He stands only just beneath
Marlborough and Bolingbroke and Walpole.  Steele, in his sixty-sixth
_Tatler_, pays a high tribute to Atterbury: "He has so much regard to his
congregation that he commits to memory what he has to say to them, and
has so soft and graceful a behavior that it must attract your attention.
His person, it is to be confessed, is no slight recommendation; but he is
to be highly commended for not losing that advantage, and adding to a
propriety of speech which might pass the criticism of Longinus, an action
which would have been approved by Demosthenes.  He has a peculiar force
in his way, and has many of his audience who could not be intelligent
hearers of his discourse were there not explanation as well as grace in
his action.  This art of his is used with the most exact and honest
skill; he never attempts your passions until he has convinced your
reason; all the objections which he can form are laid open and dispersed
before he uses the least vehemence in his sermon; but when he thinks he
has your head he very soon wins your heart, and never pretends to show
the beauty of holiness until he hath convinced you of the truth of it."

Atterbury had, however, among his many gifts a dangerous gift of
political intrigue.  Like Swift and Dubois and Alberoni, he was at least
as much statesman as churchman.  {215} He had mixed himself up in various
intrigues--some of them could hardly be called conspiracies--for the
restoration of the Stuarts, and when at last something like a new
conspiracy was planned, it was not likely that he would be left out of
it.  He had courage enough for any such scheme.  There was no great
difficulty in finding out the new plot which King George mentioned in his
speech to Parliament; for James Stuart had revealed it himself by a
proclamation which he caused to be circulated among his supposed
adherents in England, renewing in the boldest terms his claim to the
crown of England.  A sort of junto of Jacobites appears to have been
established in England to make arrangements for a new attempt on the part
of James; the noblemen whom King George had arrested were understood to
be among its leading members.  Atterbury was charged with having taken a
prominent if not, indeed, a foremost part in the conspiracy.  The Duke of
Norfolk, Lord North and Grey, and Lord Orrery were afterwards discharged
for want of evidence to convict them.  The arrest of a number of humbler
conspirators led to the discovery of a correspondence asserted to have
been carried on between Atterbury and the adherents of James Stuart in
France and Italy.

Both Houses of Parliament began by voting addresses of loyalty and
gratitude to the King, and by resolving that the proclamation entitled
"Declaration of James the Third, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
to all his loving subjects of the three nations," and signed "James Rex,"
was "a false, insolent, and traitorous libel," and should be burned by
the hands of the common hangman, under the direction of the sheriffs of
London.  This important ceremonial was duly carried out at the Royal
Exchange.  Then the House of Commons voted, "that towards raising the
supply, and reimbursing to the public the great expenses occasioned by
the late rebellions and disorders, the sum of one hundred thousand pounds
be raised and levied upon the real and personal estates of {216} all
Papists, Popish recusants, or persons educated in the Popish religion, or
whose parents are Papists, or who shall profess the Popish religion, in
lieu of all forfeitures already incurred for or upon account of their
recusancy."  This singular method of infusing loyalty into the Roman
Catholics of England was not allowed to be adopted without serious and
powerful resistance in the House of Commons.  The idea was not to devise
a new penalty for the Catholics, but to put in actual operation the terms
of a former penalty pronounced against them in Elizabeth's time, and not
then pressed into execution.  This fact was dwelt upon with much emphasis
by the advocates of the penal motion.  Why talk of religious persecution?
they asked.  This is not religious persecution; it is only putting in
force an edict passed in a former reign to punish Roman Catholics for
political rebellion.  This way of putting the case seems only to make the
character of the policy more clear and less justifiable.  The Catholics
of King George's time were to be mulcted indiscriminately because the
Catholics of Queen Elizabeth's time had been declared liable to such a
penalty.  The Master of the Rolls, to his great credit, strongly opposed
the resolution.  Walpole supported it with all the weight of his argument
and his influence.  The plot was evidently a Popish plot, he contended,
and although he was not prepared to accuse any English Catholic in
particular of taking part in it, yet there could be no doubt that Papists
in general were well-wishers to it, and that some of them had contributed
large sums towards it.  Why, then, should they not be made to reimburse
some part of the expense to which they and the friends of the Pretender
had put the nation?  The resolution, after it had been reported from
committee, was only carried in the whole House by 188 votes against 172.
[Sidenote: 1723--Lord Cowper's opposition] The resolution was embodied in
a bill, and the Bill, when it went up to the House of Lords, was opposed
there by several of the Peers, and especially by Lord Cowper, the
"silver-tongued Cowper," who had {217} been so distinguished a Lord
Chancellor under Anne, and under George himself.  Lord Cowper's was an
eloquent and a powerful speech.  It tore to pieces the wretched web of
flimsy sophistry by which the supporters of the Bill endeavored to make
out that it was not a measure of religious persecution.  Indeed, there
were some of these who insisted that, so far from being a measure of
persecution, it was a measure of relief.  Our readers will, no doubt, be
curious to know how this bold position was sustained.  In this wise: the
penalties prescribed for the Catholics in Elizabeth's reign were much
greater in amount than those which the Bill proposed to inflict on the
Catholics of King George's time; therefore the Bill was an indulgence and
not a persecution--a mitigation of penalty, not a punishment.  Let us
reduce the argument to plain figures.  A Catholic in the reign of
Elizabeth is declared liable to a penalty of twenty pounds, but out of
considerations of humanity or justice the penalty is not enforced.  The
descendant and heir of that same Catholic in the reign of George the
First is fined fifteen pounds, and the fine is exacted.  He complains,
and he is told, "You have no right to complain; you ought to be grateful;
the original fine ordained was twenty pounds; you have been let off five
pounds--you have been favored by an act of indulgence, not victimized by
an act of persecution."  Lord Cowper had not much trouble in disposing of
arguments of this kind, but his speech took a wider range, and is indeed
a masterly exposure of the whole principle on which the measure was
founded.  On May 22, 1723, sixty-nine peers voted for the third reading
of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it.  Lord Cowper, with twenty other
peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to
a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen
into complete disuse.  The recorded protests of dissentient peers form,
we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of
them, {218} a careful study.  Lord Cowper's protest was the last public
act of his useful and honorable career.  He died on the 10th of October
in the same year, 1723.  Some of his enemies explained his action on the
anti-Papist Bill by the assertion that he was a Jacobite at heart.  Even
if he had been, the fact would hardly have made his conduct less
creditable and spirited.  Many a man who was a Jacobite at heart would
have supported a measure for the punishment of Roman Catholics if only to
save himself from the suspicion of sympathy with the lost cause.

[Sidenote: 1723--Charges against Atterbury]

This, however, was but an episode in the story of the Jacobite plot and
the measures taken to punish those who were engaged in it.  Committees of
secrecy were appointed by Parliament to inquire into the evidence and
examine witnesses.

Meantime both Houses of Parliament kept voting address after address to
the Crown at each new stage of the proceedings, and as each fresh
evidence of the conspiracy was laid before them.  The King must have
grown rather weary of finding new words of gratitude, and the Houses of
Parliament, one would think, must have grown tired of inventing new
phrases of loyalty and fresh expressions of horror at the wickedness of
the Jacobites.  The horror was not quite genuine on the part of some who
thus proclaimed it.  Many of those who voted the addresses would gladly
have welcomed a restoration of the Stuarts.  Not the most devoted
adherent of King George could really have felt any surprise at the
persistent efforts of the Jacobite partisans.  Eight years before this it
was a mere toss-up whether Stuart or Hanover should succeed, and even
still it was not quite certain whether, if the machinery of the modern
_plebiscite_ could have been put into operation in England, the majority
would not have been found in sympathy with Atterbury.  It is almost
certain that if the _plebiscite_ could have been taken in Ireland and
Scotland also, a majority of voices would have voted James Stuart to the
throne.

{219}

It was resolved to proceed against Atterbury by a Bill of Pains and
Penalties to be brought into Parliament.  The evidence against him was
certainly not such as any criminal court would have held to justify a
conviction.  A young barrister named Christopher Layer was arrested and
examined, so were a nonjuring minister named Kelly, an Irish Catholic
priest called Neynoe, and a man named Plunkett, also from Ireland.  The
charge against Atterbury was founded on the statements obtained or
extorted from these men.  It should be said that Layer gave evidence
which actually seemed to impugn Lord Cowper himself as a member of a club
of disaffected persons; and when Lord Cowper indignantly repudiated the
charge and demanded an inquiry, the Government declared inquiry
absolutely unnecessary, as everybody was well assured of his innocence.
The Government, however, declined to follow Lord Cowper in his not
unreasonable assumption that the whole story was unworthy of explicit
credence when it included such a false statement.  The case against
Atterbury rested on the declaration of some of the arrested men that the
bishop had carried on a correspondence with James Stuart, Lord Mar, and
General Dillon (an Irish Catholic soldier, who after the capitulation of
Limerick, had entered the French service), through the instrumentality of
Kelly, who acted as his secretary and amanuensis for that purpose.  It
was a case of circumstantial evidence altogether.  The impartial reader
of history now will feel well satisfied on two points: first, that
Atterbury was engaged in the plot; and second, that the evidence brought
against him was not nearly strong enough to sustain a conviction.  It was
the case of Bolingbroke and Harley over again.  We know now that the men
had done the things charged against them, but the evidence then relied
upon was utterly inadequate to sustain the charge.

A "Dialogue in Verse between a Whig and a Tory" was written by Swift in
the year 1723, "concerning the horrid plot discovered by Harlequin, the
Bishop of {220} Rochester's French Dog."  The Whig tells the Tory that
the dog--

  "His name is Harlequin, I wot,
  And that's a name in every plot"--

was generously

  "Resolved to save the British nation,
  Though French by birth and education;
  His correspondence plainly dated
  Was all deciphered and translated;
  His answers were exceeding pretty,
  Before the secret wise committee;
  Confessed as plain as he could bark,
  Then with his fore-foot set his mark."


[Sidenote: 1723-1731--Atterbury's sentence]

There was more than mere fooling in the lines.  The dog Harlequin was
made to bear important evidence against the Bishop of Rochester.
Atterbury had never resigned himself to the Hanoverian dynasty.  He did
not believe it would last, and he openly declaimed against it.  He did
more than this, however: he engaged in conspiracies for the restoration
of James Stuart.  Horace Walpole says of him that he was simply a
Jacobite priest.  He was a Jacobite priest who would gladly, if he could,
have been a Jacobite soldier, and had given ample evidence of courage
equal to such a part.  He had been engaged in a long correspondence with
Jacobite conspirators at home and abroad.  The correspondence was carried
on in cipher, and of course under feigned names.  Atterbury appears to
have been described now as Mr. Illington, and now as Mr. Jones.
Atterbury refused to make any defence before the House of Commons, but he
appeared before the House of Lords on May 6, 1723, and defended himself,
and made strong and eloquent protestation of his innocence.  One of the
witnesses whom he called in his defence was his friend Pope, who could
only give evidence as to the manner in which the bishop had passed his
time when staying in the poet's house.  Christopher Layer, Atterbury's
associate in the general charge of conspiracy, was a young barrister of
good family, a remarkably handsome, {221} graceful, and accomplished man.
One charge against him was that he had formed a plan to murder the King
and carry off the Prince of Wales; but the statements made against Layer
must be taken with liberal allowance for the extravagance of loyal
passion, panic, and exaggeration.  Layer had escaped and was recaptured,
was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.  He was hanged at Tyburn
on March 15, 1723; he met his death with calm courage.  His body was
quartered and his head was set on Temple Bar, from which it was presently
blown down by the wind.  Some one picked up the head and sold it to a
surgeon.  Neynoe, another of the accused men, contrived to escape from
custody, got to the river, endeavored to swim across it, and was drowned
in the attempt.

The charges made against Atterbury had therefore sometimes to rest upon
inferences drawn from confessions, or portions of confessions, averred to
have dropped or been drawn from men whose lips were now closed by death.
Those who defended Atterbury dwelt strongly on this fact, as was but
natural.  It is curious to notice how often in the debates of the Lords
on the Bill of Pains and Penalties one noble peer accuses another of
secret sympathy with Jacobite schemes.  As regards Atterbury, the whole
question was whether he was really the person described in the
correspondence now as Jones and now as Illington.  There might have been
no evidence which even a "secret, wise" committee of that day would have
cared to accept but for the fact that the bishop's wife had received, or
was to have received, from France a present of a dog called Harlequin,
and that there was mention in the correspondence about poor Mr. Illington
being in grief for the loss of his dog Harlequin.  This allusion put the
committee of secrecy on the track.  The bishop's wife had lately died,
and it would seem from the correspondence that Illington's wife had died
about the same time.  Clearly, if it were once assumed that Illington and
Atterbury were one and the same person, there was ample ground for
suspicion, and even for a general belief that the story told {222} was
true in the main.  The evidence was enough for Parliament at that time,
and the Bill passed the House of Lords on May 16th by a majority of
eighty-three votes to forty-three.  Atterbury was deprived of all his
offices and dignities, declared to be forever incapable of holding any
place or exercising any authority within the King's dominions, and
condemned to perpetual banishment.  He went to France in the first
instance with his daughter and her husband.  It so happened that
Bolingbroke had just at that time obtained a sort of conditional pardon
from the King; obtained it mainly by bribing the Duchess of Kendal.  The
two Jacobites crossed each other on the way, one going into exile, the
other returning from it.  "I am exchanged," was Atterbury's remark.  "The
nation," said Pope afterwards, "is afraid of being overrun with genius,
and cannot regain one great man but at the expense of another."  So far
as this history is concerned we part with Atterbury here.  He lived
abroad until 1731, and after his death his remains were brought back and
privately laid in Westminster Abbey.

[Sidenote: 1723--Tom Tempest and Jack Sneaker]

We have directed attention to the freedom and frequency of the
accusations of Jacobitism made by one peer against another during the
debates on Atterbury's case.  The fact is worthy of note, if only to show
how uncertain, even still, was the foundation of the throne of Brunswick,
and how wide-spread the sympathy with the lost cause was supposed to be.
When Bolingbroke was allowed to return to England, some of Swift's
friends instantly fancied that he must have purchased his permission by
telling some tale against the dean himself, among others, and long after
this time we find Swift defending himself against the rumored accusation
of a share in Jacobite conspiracy.  The condition of the public mind is
well pictured in a description of two imaginary politicians in one of the
successors to the _Tatler_.  "Tom Tempest" is described as a steady
friend to the House of Stuart.  He can recount the prodigies that have
appeared in the sky, and the calamities that have afflicted the {223}
nation every year from the Revolution, and is of opinion that if the
exiled family had continued to reign, there would neither have been worms
in our ships nor caterpillars in our trees.  He firmly believes that King
William burned Whitehall that he might steal the furniture, and that
Tillotson died an atheist.  Of Queen Anne he speaks with more tenderness;
owns that she meant well, and can tell by whom she was poisoned.  Tom has
always some new promise that we shall see in another month the rightful
monarch on the throne.  "Jack Sneaker," on the other hand, is a devoted
adherent to the present establishment.  He has known those who saw the
bed in which the Pretender was conveyed in a warming-pan.  He often
rejoices that this nation was not enslaved by the Irish.  He believes
that King William never lost a battle, and that if he had lived one year
longer he would have conquered France.  Yet amid all this satisfaction he
is hourly disturbed by dread of Popery; wonders that stricter laws are
not made against the Papists, and is sometimes afraid that they are busy
with French gold among our bishops and judges.




{224}

CHAPTER XIV.

WALPOLE IN POWER AS WELL AS OFFICE.

[Sidenote: 1723--Walpole's Administration]

Walpole was now Prime-minister.  The King wished to reward him for his
services by conferring a peerage on him, but this honor Walpole
steadily declined.  One of his biographers says that his refusal "at
first appears extraordinary."  It ought not to appear extraordinary at
first or at last.  Walpole knew that the sceptre of government in
England had passed to the House of Commons.  He would have been unwise
and inconsistent indeed if at his time of life he had consented to
renounce the influence and the power which a seat in that House gave
him for the comparative insignificance and obscurity of a seat in the
House of Lords.  He accepted a title for his eldest son, who was made
Baron Walpole, but for himself he preferred to keep to the field in
which he had won his name, and where he could make his influence and
power felt all over the land.

We may anticipate the course of events, and say at once that hardly
ever before in the history of English political life, and hardly ever
since Walpole's time, has a minister had so long a run of power.  His
long administration, as Mr. Green well says, is almost without a
history.  It is almost without a history, that is to say, in the
ordinary sense of the word.  For the most part, the steady movement of
England's progress remains, during long years and years, undisturbed by
any event of great dramatic interest at home or abroad.  But the period
of Walpole's long and successful administration was none the less a
period of the highest importance in English {225} history.  It was a
time of almost uninterrupted national development in the right
direction, and almost unbroken national prosperity.  The foreign policy
of Walpole was, on the whole, no less sound and just than his policy at
home.  His first ambition was to keep England out of wars with foreign
Powers.  Yet his was not the ambition which some later statesmen,
especially, for example, Mr. Bright, have owned--the ambition to keep
England free of any foreign policy whatever.  Such an ambition was not
Walpole's, and such an ambition at Walpole's time it would have been
all but impossible to realize.  Walpole knew well that there was no way
of keeping England out of foreign wars at that season of political
growth but by securing for her a commanding influence in Continental
affairs.  Such influence he set himself to establish, and he succeeded
in establishing it by friendly and satisfactory alliances with France
and other Powers.  Turning back for a moment into the political affairs
of a year or two previous, we may remark that one of the consequences
of the Mississippi scheme, and the reign of Mr. Law in France, had been
the recall of Lord Stair from the French Court, to which he was
accredited as English ambassador.  Lord Stair quarrelled with Law when
Law was all-powerful; and in order to propitiate the financial
dictator, it was found convenient to recall Stair from Paris.  England
had been well served by him as her ambassador at the French Court.  We
have already said something of Lord Stair--his ability, courage, and
dexterity, his winning ways, and his fearless spirit.  John Dalrymple,
second Earl of Stair, was one of the remarkable men of his time.  He
was a scholar and an orator, a soldier and a diplomatist.  He had
fought with conspicuous bravery and skill under William the Third and
under Marlborough.  He appears to have combined a daring that looked
like recklessness with a cool calculation which made it prudence.  On
Marlborough's fall, Lord Stair fell with him.  He was deprived of all
his public offices, and was plunged into a condition of {226} something
like poverty.  When George the First came to the throne, Stair was
taken into favor again, and as a special tribute to his diplomatic
capacity was sent to represent England at the Court of France.  There
he displayed consummate sagacity, foresight, and firmness.  He
contrived to make himself acquainted beforehand with everything the
Jacobites were doing.  This, as may be seen by Bolingbroke's
complaints, was easy enough at one time; but the adherents of James
Stuart began after a while to learn prudence, and some of their
enterprises were conducted up to a certain point with much craft and
caution.  Lord Stair, however, always contrived to get the information
he wanted.  Some of the arts by which he accomplished his purposes were
not, perhaps, such as a great diplomatist of our time would have cared
to practise.  He bribed with liberal hand; he kept persons of all kinds
in his pay; he bribed French officials, and even French ministers; he
got to know all that was done in the most secret councils of the State.
He used to go about the capital in disguise in order to find out what
people were saying in the wine-shops and coffee-houses.  Often, after
he had entertained a brilliant company of guests at a state dinner, he
would make some excuse to his friends for quitting them abruptly; say
that he had received despatches which required his instant attention,
leave the company to be entertained by his wife, withdraw to his study,
there quietly change his clothes, and then wander out on one of his
nightly visitations of taverns and coffee-houses.  He paid court to
great ladies, flattered them, allowed them to win money at cards from
him, and even made love to them, for the sake of getting some political
secrets out of them.  He had a noble and stately presence, a handsome
face, and charming manners.  He is said to have been the most polite
and well-bred man of his time.  It is of him the story is told about
the test of good-breeding which the King of France applied and
acknowledged.  Louis the Fourteenth had heard it said that Stair was
the best-bred man of his day.  The {227} King invited Stair to drive
out with him.  As they were about to enter the carriage the King signed
to the English ambassador to go first.  Stair bowed and entered the
carriage.  "The world is right about Lord Stair," said the King; "I
never before saw a man who would not have troubled me with excuses and
ceremony."

[Sidenote: 1723--Spain]

The French Government naturally feared that the recall of Lord Stair
might be marked by a change in the friendly disposition of England.
This fear became greater on the death of Stanhope.  The English
Government, however, took steps to reassure the Regent of France.
Townshend himself wrote at once to Cardinal Dubois, promising to
maintain as before a cordial friendship with the French Government.
Walpole was entirely imbued with the instincts of such a policy.  The
chief disturbing influence in Continental politics arose from the
anxiety of Spain to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and, in fact, to get
back again all that had been taken from her by the Treaty of Utrecht.
The territorial and other arrangements which concluded with the Treaty
of Utrecht made themselves the central point of all the foreign policy
of that time: these States were concerned to maintain the treaty; those
were eager to break through its bonds.  It holds in the politics of
that day the place which was held by the Treaty of Vienna at a later
period.  There is always much of the hypocritical about the manner in
which treaties of that highly artificial nature are made.  No State
really intends to hold by them any longer than she finds that they
serve her own interests.  If they are imposed upon a State and are
injurious to her, that State never means to submit to them any longer
than she is actually under compulsion.  New means and impulses to break
away from such bonds are given to those inclined that way, in the fact
that the arrangements are usually made without the slightest concern
for the populations of the countries concerned, but only for dynastic
or other political considerations.  The pride of the Spanish people was
so much hurt by some of the conditions of the Treaty {228} of Utrecht
that a Spanish sovereign or minister would always be popular who could
point to his people a way to escape from its bonds or to rend them in
pieces.  Spain, therefore, was always looking out for new alliances.
She saw at one time a fresh chance for trying her policy, and she held
out every inducement in her power to the Emperor Charles the Sixth and
to Russia to enter into a combination against France and England.  The
Emperor was without a son, and, in consequence, had issued his famous
Pragmatic Sanction, providing that his hereditary dominions in Austria,
Hungary, and Bohemia should descend to his daughter Maria Theresa.  The
great Powers of Europe had not as yet seen fit to guarantee, or even
recognize, this succession.  Spain held out the temptation to the
Emperor of her own guarantee to the Pragmatic Sanction and of several
important concessions in the matter of trade and commerce to Austria,
on consideration that the Emperor should assist Spain to recover her
lost territory.  Catherine, the wife of Peter the Great, was now
governing Russia, and was entering into secret negotiations with Spain
and with the Emperor.  Townshend and Walpole understood all that was
going on, and succeeded in making a defensive treaty between England,
France, and Prussia.  Prussia, to be sure, did not long hold to the
treaty, and her withdrawal gave a new stimulus to the machinations of
the Emperor and of Philip of Spain, and in 1727 Philip actually
ventured to lay siege to Gibraltar.  England, France, and Holland,
however, held firmly together; the Russian Empress suddenly died, the
Emperor Charles was not inclined to risk much, and Spain finally had to
come to terms with England and her allies.

[Sidenote: 1721--Anticipations of free-trade]

These troubles might have proved serious but for the determined policy
of Townshend and of Walpole.  We have not thought it necessary to weary
our readers with the details of this little running fire of dispute
which was kept up for some years between England and Spain.  We saw in
an earlier chapter how the quarrel began, and what {229} the elements
were which fed it and kept it burning.  This latter passage is really
only a continuation of the former; both, except for the sake of mere
continuity of historic narrative, might have been told as one story,
and, indeed, would perhaps not have required many sentences for the
telling.  Walpole applied himself at home to the work of what has since
been called Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.  He was the first great
English finance minister; perhaps we may say he was the first English
minister who ever sincerely regarded the development of national
prosperity, the just and equal distribution of taxation, and the
lightening of the load of financial burdens, as the most important
business of a statesman.  The whole political and social conditions of
the country were changing under his wise and beneficent system of
administration.  Population was steadily increasing; some of the great
rising towns had doubled their numbers since Walpole's career began.
Agriculture was better in its systems, and was brightening the face of
the country everywhere; the farmer had almost ceased for the time to
grumble; the laborer was well fed and not too heavily worked.  We do
not mean to say that Walpole's administration was the one cause of all
this improvement in town and country, but most assuredly the peace, and
the security of peace, which Walpole's administration conferred was of
direct and material influence in the growing prosperity of the nation.
His financial systems lightened the burdens of taxation, distributed
the load more equally everywhere, and enabled the State to get the best
revenue possible at the lowest cost and with the least effort.  It
might almost be said that Walpole anticipated free-trade.  The Royal
speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament, on October 19,
1721, declared it to be "very obvious that nothing would more conduce
to the obtaining so public a good"--the extension of our
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 as easy as may be; by this means the balance {230}
of trade may be preserved in our favor, our navigation increased, and
greater numbers of our poor employed."  "I must, therefore," the speech
went on, "recommend it to you, gentlemen of the House of Commons, to
consider how far the duties upon these branches may be taken off and
replaced, without any violation of public faith or laying any new
burden upon my people; and I promise myself that, by a due
consideration of this matter, the produce of those duties, compared
with the infinite advantages that will accrue to the kingdom by their
being taken off, will be found so inconsiderable as to leave little
room for any difficulties or objections."  In furtherance of the policy
indicated in these passages of the Royal speech, more than one hundred
articles of British manufacture were allowed to be exported free of
duty, while some forty articles of raw material were allowed to be
imported in the same manner.  Walpole was anxious to make a full use of
this system of indirect taxation.  He desired to levy and collect taxes
in such a manner as to avoid the losses imposed upon the revenue by
smuggling and by various forms of fraud.  His principle was that the
necessaries of life and the raw materials from which our manufactures
were to be made ought to remain, as far as possible, free of taxation.
The whole history of our financial systems since Walpole's time has
been a history of the gradual development of his economic principles.
There has been, of course, reaction now and then, and sometimes the
counsels of statesmen appear for a while to have been under the
absolute domination of the policy which he strove to supplant; but the
reaction has only been for seasons, while the progress of Walpole's
policy has been steady.  We have now, in 1884, nearly accomplished the
financial task Walpole would, if he could, have accomplished a century
and a half earlier.

[Sidenote: 1723--Parliamentary corruption]

No one can deny that Walpole was an unscrupulous minister.  He would
gladly have carried out the best policy by the best means; but where
this was not practicable or convenient he was perfectly willing to
carry {231} out a noble policy by the vilest methods.  He was not
himself avaricious; he was not open to the temptations of money.  He
had a fortune large enough for him, and he spent it freely, but he was
willing to bribe and corrupt all those of whom he could make any use.
Under his rule corruption became a settled Parliamentary system.  He
had done more than any other man to make the House of Commons the most
powerful factor in the government of England; he had therefore made a
seat in the House of Commons an object of the highest ambition.  To sit
in that House made the obscurest country gentleman a power in the
State.  Naturally, therefore, a seat in the House of Commons was
struggled for, scrambled for, fought for--obtained at any cost of
money, influence, time, and temper.  Naturally, also, a seat thus
obtained was a possession through which recompense of some kind was
expected.  Those who buy their seats naturally expect to sell their
votes; at least that was so in the days of Walpole.  In times nearer to
our own, England has seen a condition of things in which public opinion
and the development of a sort of national conscience absolutely
prevented members from taking bribes, although it allowed them the most
liberal use of bribery and corruption in the obtaining of their seats.
The member of Parliament who, twenty or thirty years ago, would have
bought his seat by means of the most unblushing and shameless
corruption, would no more have thought of selling his vote to a
minister for a money payment than he would have thought of selling his
wife at Smithfield.  But in Walpole's time the man who bought his seat
was ready to sell his vote.  Walpole, the minister, was willing to buy
the vote of any man who would sell it.  He was lavish in the gift of
lucrative offices, of rich sinecures, of pensions, and even of bribes
in a lump sum, money down.  He would bribe a member's wife, if that
were more convenient than openly to bribe the member himself.  He had
no particular choice as to whether the bribe should be direct or
indirect, open or secret; he {232} wanted to get the vote, he was
willing to pay the price, and he cared not who knew of the arrangement.
We have already mentioned that the saying ascribed to him about every
man having his price was never uttered by him.  What he said probably
was, that "each of these men," alluding to a certain group or party,
had his price.  He is reported to have said that he never knew any
woman who would not take money, except one noble lady, whom he named,
and she, he said, took diamonds.  He acted consistently and was not
ashamed.  He was incorrupt himself; he was even in that sense
incorruptible; but in order to gain his own public purposes, wise and
just as they were, he was willing to corrupt a whole House of Commons,
and would not have shrunk from corrupting a nation.

[Sidenote: 1723--Lord Carteret]

It ought to be pointed out that the very pacific nature of Walpole's
policy and the security and steadiness of his administration made it
sometimes all the more necessary for him to have recourse to
questionable methods.  Great controversies of imperial or national
interest--controversies which stir the hearts of men, which appeal to
their principles and awaken their passions--did not often arise during
his long tenure of power.  Agitations of this kind, whatever trouble
and disturbance they may bring with them, have a purifying effect upon
the political atmosphere.  Only a very ignoble creature is to be bribed
out of his opinions when some interest is at stake, on which his heart,
his training, and his associations have already taught him to take
sides.  Walpole kept the nation out of such controversies for the most
part, and one result was that small political combinations of various
kinds were free to form themselves around him, beneath him, and against
him.  The House of Commons sometimes threatened to dissolve itself into
a number of little separate sections or factions, none of them
representing any real principle or having more than a temporary
attraction of cohesion.  Walpole was again and again placed in the
position of having to encounter {233} some little faction of this kind
by open exercise of power or by the process of corruption, and he
usually found the latter course more convenient and ready.  Nor could
such a man at any period of English history have remained long without
more or less formidable rivals.  Walpole himself must have known well
enough that the death of men like Sunderland, or the death or any
number of men, could not, so long as England was herself, secure him
for long an undisturbed political field, with no head raised against
him.  A country like this is never so barren of political intellect and
courage as to admit of a long dictatorship in political life.

Walpole had already one rising rival in the person of Lord Carteret,
afterwards Earl of Granville.  John Carteret was born April 22, 1690,
and was only five years old when the death of his father, the first
Lord Carteret, made him a member of the House of Lords.  He
distinguished himself greatly at Oxford, and entered very early into
public life.  He was from the beginning a favorite of George the First,
and by the influence of Stanhope was intrusted with various diplomatic
missions of more or less importance.  In 1721 he was actually appointed
ambassador to the Court of France.  The death of Craggs, the Secretary
of State, however, made a vacancy in the administration, and the place
was at once assigned to Carteret.  Carteret was one of those men whose
genius we have to believe in rather on the faith of contemporary
judgment than by reason of any track of its own it has left behind.
The unanimous opinion of all who knew him, and more especially of those
who were commonly brought into contact with him, was that Carteret
possessed the rarest combination of statesmanlike and literary gifts.
Probably no English public man ever exhibited in a higher degree the
qualities that bring success in politics and the qualities that bring
success in literature.  It seems strange to have to say this when one
remembers a man like Bolingbroke and a man like Burke; but it is
certain that neither Bolingbroke nor Burke could {234} boast of such
scholarship and accomplishments as those of Carteret.  [Sidenote:
1723--Carteret's German] He was a profound classical scholar; he was a
master of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Swedish.
His scientific knowledge was extraordinary for that time; he was a
close student of the history of past and passing time; he was deeply
interested in constitutional law, and had a passion for Church history.
He was a great parliamentary debater--some say he was even a great
orator.  He was prompt and bold in his decisions; he was not afraid of
any enterprise; he was not depressed or abashed by failure; he could
take fortune's buffets and rewards with equal thanks.  Large brains and
small affections are, according to Mr. Disraeli, the essential
qualities for success in public life.  Carteret had large brains and
small affections; he had no friendships and no enmities.  Like Fox, he
was a bad hater, but, unlike Fox, he had not a heart to love.  He was
fond of books and of wine and of women; he was a great drinker of wine,
even for those days of deep drink.  Beneath all the apparent energy and
daring of his character there lay a voluptuous love of ease and
languor.  He was not a lazy man, but his inclination was always to be
an indolent man.  He leaped up to sudden political action when the call
came, like Sardanapalus leaping up to the inevitable fight; but, like
Sardanapalus, he would have been always glad to lie down again and loll
in ease the moment the necessity for action had passed away.  No doubt
his daily allowance of Burgundy--a very liberal and generous
allowance--had a good deal to do with his tendency to indolence.
Whatever the reason, it is certain that, with all his magnificent gifts
and his splendid chances, he did nothing great, and has left no abiding
mark in history.  Every one who came near him seems to have regarded
his as a master-spirit.  Chesterfield said of him, "When he dies, the
ablest head in England dies too, take it for all in all."  Horace
Walpole declares him to be superior in one set of qualities to his
father.  Sir Robert Walpole, {235} and in others to the great Lord
Chatham.  "Why did they send you here?" Swift said to Carteret, with
rough good-humor, when Carteret came over to Dublin to be
Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.  "You are not fit for this place; let them
send us back our boobies."  Carteret's fame has always seemed to us
like the fame of Sheridan's Begum speech.  Such poor records as we have
of that speech seem hardly to hint at any extraordinary eloquence; yet
the absolutely unanimous opinion of all that heard it--of all the
orators and statesmen and critics of the time--was that so great a
speech had never before been spoken in Parliament.  Those men can
hardly have been all wrong, one would think; and yet, on the other
hand, it is not easy to believe that those who made such record of the
speech as we have can have purposely left out all the eloquence, the
wit, and the argument.  In like manner, readers of this day may perplex
themselves about the fame of Carteret.  All the men who knew him can
hardly have been mistaken when they concurred in giving him credit for
surpassing genius; and yet we find no evidence of that genius either in
the literature or the political history of England.

Carteret had one great advantage over Walpole and over all his
contemporaries in political life--he was able to speak German fluently;
he was able to talk for hours with the King in the King's own guttural
tongue.  The King clung to Carteret's companionship because of his
German.  While Walpole was trying to instil his policy and counsels
into George's mind through the non-conducting medium of very bad Latin,
while other ministers were endeavoring to approach the Royal
intelligence by means of French, which they spoke badly and he
understood imperfectly, Carteret could rattle away in idiomatic German,
and could amuse the Royal humor even with voluble German slang.
Carteret had come into public life under the influence of Lord
Sunderland and Lord Stanhope, and he regarded himself as the successor
to their policy.  He never considered himself as quite in {236}
understanding and harmony with Townshend and Walpole.  His principal
idea was that the time had passed when it was proper or expedient to
exclude the Tories or the High-churchmen from the political service of
the Crown.  He desired to enlarge the basis of administration by
admitting some of the more plastic and progressive of the Tories to a
share in it.  There was, however, something more than a conflict of
political views between Carteret and Walpole.  Walpole's ambition was
to be the constitution dictator of England.  We do not say that this
was a mere personal ambition; on the contrary, we believe Walpole acted
on the honest conviction that he knew better than any other man how
England ought to be governed.  He was sure, and reasonably sure, that
no other statesman could play the game so well; he therefore claimed
the right to play it.  Carteret, on the other hand, was far too strong
a man to be quietly pushed into the background.  He was determined that
if he remained in the service of the State he would be a statesman, and
not a clerk.

[Sidenote: 1723--A match making intrigue]

Therefore, while Carteret and Walpole were colleagues there was always
a struggle going on between them, and, like all the political struggles
of the time, it had a great deal of underhand influence, and the worst
kind of petticoat influence, engaged in it.  One of the King's
mistresses--the most influential of them--gave all her support to
Walpole; another Royal paramour lent her aid to Carteret's side.
Carteret played into the King's hands as regarded the Hanoverian
policy, and was for taking strong measures against Russia.  Townshend
and Walpole would hear of no schemes which threatened to entangle
England in war for the sake of Hanoverian interests.  George liked
Carteret, and was captivated by his policy as well as by his personal
qualities, but he could not help seeing that Townshend's advice was the
sounder, and that no man could manage the finances like Walpole.
George went to Hanover in the summer of 1723, and both the Secretaries
of State went with him.  This was {237} something unusual, and even
unprecedented; but the King would not do without the companionship of
Carteret, and knew that he could not do without the advice of
Townshend.  So both Townshend and Carteret went with his Majesty to
Herrenhausen, and Walpole had the whole business of administration in
his own hands at home.

A very paltry and pitiful intrigue at length settled the question
between Townshend and Carteret.  A marriage had been arranged between a
niece, or so-called niece, of one of George's mistresses and the son of
La Vrilličre, the French Secretary of State.  Madame La Vrilličre
insisted, as a condition of the marriage, that her husband should be
made a duke, and it was assumed that this could be brought about by the
influence of the English Government.  King George was anxious that the
marriage should take place, and Carteret, of course, was willing to
assist him.  The English ambassador at the Court of France was a man
named Sir Luke Schaub, by birth a Swiss, who had been Stanhope's
secretary, and by Stanhope's influence was pushed up in the diplomatic
service.  Sir Luke Schaub was in close understanding with Carteret, and
was strongly hostile to Townshend and Walpole.  Of this fact Townshend
was well aware, and he took care that Schaub should be closely watched
in Paris.  Schaub was instructed by Carteret to do all he could in
order to obtain the dukedom for Madame La Vrilličre's husband.
Cardinal Dubois died, and his place in the councils of the Duke of
Orleans was taken by Count Nocé, who was believed to be hostile to
England.  This fact gave Townshend an excuse for suggesting to the King
that some one should be sent to Paris to watch over the action of the
French Government and the conduct of the English ambassador, "in such a
manner," so Townshend wrote from Hanover to Walpole, "as may neither
hurt Sir Luke Schaub's credit with the Duke of Orleans, nor create a
jealousy in Sir Luke of the King's intending to withdraw his confidence
from him."  This was, of course, exactly what Townshend wanted to
do--to {238} induce the King to withdraw his confidence from poor Sir
Luke.  The King agreed that it was necessary some one "in whose
fidelity and dexterity he can depend" should set out from England to
Hanover, "and take Paris on his way hither, under pretence of a
curiosity to see that place, and without owning to any one living the
business he is employed in."  The person selected for this somewhat
delicate mission was Horace Walpole, Robert Walpole's only surviving
brother.

[Sidenote: 1724--Carteret goes to Ireland]

Horace Walpole acquitted himself very cleverly of the task assigned to
him.  He was a man of uncouth manners, but of some shrewd ability and
of varied experience.  He had been a soldier with Stanhope before
acting as Under-Secretary of State to Townshend; he had managed to
distinguish himself in Parliament and in diplomacy.  He soon contrived
to obtain the ear of the Duke of Orleans, and he found that Sir Luke
Schaub had been deceiving himself and his sovereign about the prospect
of La Vrilličre's dukedom.  Philip of Orleans told Horace Walpole
frankly that there never was the slightest idea of giving such a
dukedom, and added that the dignity of France would be compromised if
such a concession were made in order to enable the King of England "to
marry his bastard daughter"--so the Duke put it--into the French
_noblesse_.  Sir Luke Schaub's haste and indiscreet zeal had, in fact,
brought his sovereign into discredit, and even compromised the good
understanding between England and France.

Philip of Orleans died almost immediately.  His death was sudden, but
he had long run a course which set all laws of health at defiance.  He
stuck to his pleasures to the very last--died, one might say, in
harness.  His successor in the administration of France, under the
young King Louis the Fifteenth, who had just been declared of age, was
the Duke de Bourbon, Philip's equal, perhaps, in profligacy, but not by
any means his equal in capacity.  Horace Walpole won over the new
administrator.  The Duke de Bourbon told him that Sir Luke Schaub was
{239} obnoxious to every one in the French Court, and that he was not
fit, by birth, breeding, or capacity, to represent England there.

We need not follow the intrigue through all its turns and twists.
Walpole and Townshend succeeded.  Schaub was recalled; Horace Walpole
was appointed ambassador in his place.  The recall of Schaub involved
the fall of Carteret.  Carteret, however, was not a man to be rudely
thrust out of office, and a soft fall was therefore prepared for him;
he was made Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.  He knew that he was defeated.
Then, as at a later day and at an earlier, the Viceroyalty of Ireland
was the gilding which enabled a man to gulp down the bitter pill of
political failure.  When Lord John Russell obtained the dismissal of
Lord Palmerston from his cabinet in 1851, he endeavored, somewhat
awkwardly, to soften the blow by offering to his dispossessed rival the
position of Lord-lieutenant of Ireland.  Lord Palmerston understood the
meaning of the offer, and treated it--as was but natural--with open
contempt.  Carteret acted otherwise.  Probably he felt within himself
that he was not destined to a great political career.  In any case, he
accepted the offer with perfect good-humor, declaring that, on the
whole, he thought he should be much more pleasantly situated as a
dictator in Dublin than as the servant of a dictator in London.




{240}

CHAPTER XV.

THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS.

[Sidenote: 1724--Wood's coinage]

Lord Carteret arrived at the seat of his Viceroyalty in the midst of a
political storm which threatened at one time to blow down a good many
shaky institutions.  He found the whole country, and especially the
capital, convulsed by an agitation the like of which was not seen again
until the days of Grattan and the Volunteers.  The hero of the
agitation was Swift; the spell-words which gave it life and direction
were found in "The Drapier's Letters."

The copper coinage of Ireland had been for a long time deficient.
Employers of labor had in many cases been obliged to pay their workmen
in tokens; sometimes even with pieces of card, stamped and signed, and
representing each a small amount.  During Sunderland's time of power,
the Government set themselves to work to supply the lack of copper, and
invited tenders from the owners of mines for the supply.  A Mr. William
Wood, a man who owned iron and copper mines, and iron and copper works,
sent in a tender which was accepted.  A patent was given to Wood
permitting him to coin halfpence and farthings to the value of one
hundred and eight thousand pounds.  Walpole had not approved of the
scheme himself, but for various reasons he did not venture to upset it.
He had the patent prepared, and consulted Sir Isaac Newton, then Master
of the Mint, with regard to the objects which the Government had in
view, and the weight and fineness of the coin which Wood was to supply.
The halfpence and farthings were to be a little less in weight than the
coin of the same kind {241} current in England.  Walpole considered
this necessary because of the difference in exchange between the two
countries.  Sir Isaac Newton was of opinion that the Irish coin
exceeded the English in fineness of metal.  As to the King's
prerogative for granting such patents, Walpole himself explained in a
letter to Lord Townshend, then in Hanover with the King, that it was
one never disputed and often exercised.  The granting of this patent,
and the mode of supplying the deficiency in copper coin, might seem
little open to objection; but the Irish Privy Council at once declared
against the whole transaction.  Both Houses of the Irish Parliament
passed addresses to the King, declaring that the introduction of Wood's
coinage would be injurious to the revenue and positively destructive of
trade.  The Irish Lord Chancellor set himself sternly against the
patent in private, and urged all his friends, comrades, and dependents,
to act publicly against it.  The addresses from the two Houses of
Parliament were sent to Walpole, who transmitted them to Lord
Townshend.  Walpole accompanied the addresses with an explanation in
which he vindicated the policy represented by the granting of the
patent, and insisted that no harm whatever could be done to the trade
or revenue of Ireland by the introduction of the new copper coinage.
Walpole advised that the King should return a soothing and a
conciliatory reply to the addresses, and the King acted accordingly.
It seemed at one time probable that a satisfactory compromise would be
arranged between the Irish Parliament and King George's ministers.
This hope, however, was soon dispelled.

One objection felt by the Irish people in general to the patent and the
new coinage was founded on the discovery of the fact that Wood had
agreed to pay a large bribe to the Duchess of Kendal for her influence
in obtaining the patent for him.  The objection of the Irish Executive
and the Irish Parliament was mainly based on the fact that Dublin had
not been consulted in the arrangement of the business.  The ministers
in London {242} settled the whole affair, and then simply communicated
the nature of the arrangement to Dublin.  Wood himself was unpopular,
so far as anything could be known of him, in Ireland.  He was a
stranger to Ireland, and he was represented to be a boastful, arrogant
man, who went about saying he could do anything he liked with Walpole,
and that he would cram his copper coins down the throats of the Irish
people.  All these objections, however, might have been got over but
for the sudden appearance of an unexpected and a powerful actor on the
scene.  One morning appeared in Dublin "A letter to the shopkeepers,
tradesmen, farmers, and common people of Ireland, concerning the brass
halfpence coined by one William Wood, hardwareman, with a design to
have them pass in this kingdom; wherein is shown the power of his
patent, the value of his halfpence, and how far every person may be
obliged to take the same in payments; and how to behave himself in case
such an attempt should be made by Wood or any other person."  The
letter was signed "M. B., Drapier."  This was the first of those famous
"Drapier's Letters" which convulsed Ireland with a passion like that
preceding a great popular insurrection.  It may be questioned whether
the pamphlets of a literary politician ever before or since worked with
so powerful an influence on the mind of a nation as these marvellous
letters.

[Sidenote: 1724--Swift's sincerity]

The author of "The Drapier's Letters," we need hardly say, was Dean
Swift.  Swift had for some years withdrawn himself from the political
world.  He is described by one of his biographers as having "amused
himself for three or four years with poetry, conversation, and
trifles."  Now and then, however, he published some letter which showed
his interest in the condition of the people among whom he lived; his
proposal, for example, "for the universal use of Irish manufacture in
clothes and furniture of houses, etc.," was written in the year 1720.
This letter--the printer of which was subjected to a Government
prosecution--contains a passage which has been, perhaps, {243} more
often and more persistently misquoted than any other observation of any
author we can now remember.  It seems to have become an article of
faith with many writers and most readers that Swift said, "Burn
everything that comes from England, except its coals."  Without much
hope of correcting that false impression so far as the bulk of the
reading and quoting public is concerned, we may observe that Swift
never said anything of the kind.  This is what he did say: "I heard the
late Archbishop of Tuam mention a pleasant observation of somebody's
that 'Ireland would never be happy until a law were made for burning
everything that came from England, except their people and their
coals.'  I must confess that, as to the former, I should not be sorry
if they would stay at home, and, for the latter, I hope in a little
time we shall have no occasion for them."  Swift was not an Irish
patriot; he was not, indeed, an Irishman at all, except by the accident
of birth, and now by the accident of residence.  He did not love the
country; he would not have lived there a week if he could.  He had no
affection for the people, and, at first, very little sympathy with
them.  He was always angry if anybody regarded him as an Irishman.  His
friends were all found among what may be described as the English and
Protestant colony in Ireland.  He felt towards the native Irish--the
Irish Catholics--very much as the official of an English Government
might feel towards some savage tribe whom he had been sent out to
govern.  But at the same time it is an entire mistake to represent
Swift as insincere in the efforts which he made to ameliorate the
condition of the Irish people, and to redress some of the gross wrongs
which he saw inflicted on them.  The administrator of whom we have
already spoken might have gone out to the savage country with nothing
but contempt for its wild natives, but if he were at all a humane and a
just man, it would be natural for him as time went on to feel keenly if
any injustice were inflicted on the poor creatures whom he despised,
and at last to stand up {244} with indignation as their defender and
their champion.  So it was with Swift.  [Sidenote: 1724--The drapier's
arguments] Little as he liked the Irish people in the beginning, yet he
had a temper and a spirit which made him intolerant of injustice and
oppression.  That fierce indignation described by himself, and of which
such store was always laid up in his heart, was roused to its highest
point of heat by the sight of the miseries of the Irish people and of
the frequent acts of neglect and injustice by which their misery was
deepened.  He felt the most sincere resentment at the arbitrary manner
in which the Government in London were dealing with Ireland in the
matter of Wood's patent and Wood's copper coin.  Swift, of course, knew
well by what influence the patent had been obtained, and he knew that
when obtained it had been simply thrust upon the Irish authorities,
Parliament, and people without any previous sanction or knowledge on
their part.  Very likely he was also convinced, or had convinced
himself, that the patent and the new coin would be injurious to the
revenues and the trade of the country.  Certainly, if he was not
convinced of this, he gave to all his diatribes against Wood, Wood's
patent, and Wood's halfpence the tones of profoundest conviction.  He
assumed the character of a draper for the moment--why he chose to spell
draper "drapier" nobody knew--and he certainly succeeded in putting on
all the semblance of an honest trader driven to homely and robust
indignation by an impudent proposal to injure the business of himself
and his neighbors.  In England, he says, "the halfpence and farthings
pass for very little more than they are worth, and if you should beat
them to pieces and sell them to the brazier, you would not lose much
above a penny in a shilling."  But he goes on to say that Mr. Wood,
whom he describes as "a mean, ordinary man, a hardware dealer"--Wood
was, as we have already seen, a large owner of iron and copper mines
and works, but that was all one to Dean Swift--"made his halfpence of
such base metal, and so much smaller than the English ones, that the
brazier would hardly give you {245} above a penny of good money for a
shilling of his; so that this sum of one hundred and eight thousand
pounds in good gold and silver may be given for trash that will not be
worth above eight or nine thousand pounds real value."  Nor is even
this the worst, he contends, "for Mr. Wood, when he pleases, may by
stealth send over another hundred and eight thousand pounds and buy all
our goods for eleven parts in twelve under the value."  "For example,"
says Swift, "if a hatter sells a dozen of hats for five shillings
apiece, which amounts to three pounds, and receives the payment in
Wood's coin, he really receives only the value of five shillings."  Of
course this is the wildest exaggeration--is, in fact, mere extravagance
and absurdity, if regarded as a financial proposition.  But Swift
understood, as hardly any other man understood, the art of employing
exaggeration with such an effect as to make it do the business of
unquestionable fact.  He was able to make his literary coins pass for
much more than Wood could do with his halfpence and farthings.  The
artistic skill which bade the creatures whom Gulliver saw in his
travels seem real, life-like, and living, made the fantastic
extravagance of the "Drapier's Letters" strike home with all the force
of truth to the minds of an excited populace.

Many biographers and historians have expressed a blank and utter
amazement at the effect which Swift's letters produced.  They have
chosen to regard it as a mere historical curiosity, a sort of political
paradox and puzzle.  They have described the Irish people at the time
as under the spell of something like sorcery.  Even in our own days,
Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons, treated
the convulsion caused by Swift's letters and Wood's halfpence as an
outbreak of national frenzy, called up by the witchery of style
displayed in the "Drapier's Letters."  To some of us it is, on the
other hand, a matter of surprise to see how capable writers, and
especially how a man of Mr. Gladstone's genius and political knowledge,
could for a moment be thus deceived.  {246} One is almost inclined to
think that Mr. Gladstone could not have been reading the "Drapier's
Letters" recently, when he thus spoke of the effect which they
produced, and thus was willing to explain it.  [Sidenote: 1724--The
drapier's victory] Any one who reads the letters with impartial
attention will see that from first to last the anger that burns in
them, the sarcasm that withers and scorches, the passionate eloquence
which glows in even their most carefully measured sentences, are
directed against Wood and his halfpence only because the patent, the
bribe by which it was purchased, and the manner in which it was forced
on Ireland, represented the injustice of the whole system of Irish
administration, and the wrongs of many generations.  "It would be very
hard if all Ireland," Swift declares with indignation, "should be put
into one scale, and this sorry fellow Wood into the other."  "I have a
pretty good shop of Irish stuffs and silks," the Drapier declares, "and
instead of taking Mr. Wood's bad copper, I intend to truck with my
neighbors, the butchers and bakers and brewers, and the rest, goods for
goods; and the little gold and silver I have, I will keep by me like my
heart's blood till better times, or until I am just ready to starve."
"Wood's contract?" he asks.  "His contract with whom?  Was it with the
Parliament or people of Ireland?"  The reader who believes that such a
passage as that, and scores of similar passages, were inspired merely
by disapproval of the introduction of one hundred and eight thousand
pounds in copper coin, must have very little understanding of Swift's
temper or Swift's purpose, or the condition of the times in which Swift
lived.  "I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like
highwaymen or house-breakers, if they dare to force one farthing of
their coin on me in the payment of a hundred pounds.  It is no loss of
honor to submit to the lion, but who in the figure of a man can think
with patience of being devoured alive by a rat?" . . . "If the famous
Mr. Hampden rather chose to go to prison than pay a few shillings to
King Charles I., without authority of Parliament, I will {247} rather
choose to be hanged than have all my substance taxed at seventeen
shillings in the pound, at the arbitrary will and pleasure of the
venerable Mr. Wood."  Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, did not observe this
allusion to "the famous Mr. Hampden."  If he had done so, he would have
better understood the inspiration of the "Drapier's Letters."  Mr.
Hampden was not so ignorant a man as to believe that the mere
collection of the ship-money--the mere withdrawal of so much money from
the pockets of certain tax-payers--would really ruin the trade and
imperil the national existence of England.  What Mr. Hampden objected
to, and would have resisted to the death, was the unconstitutional and
despotic system which the levy of the ship-money represented.  The
American colonists did not rise in rebellion against the Government of
George III. merely because they had eaten of the insane root, and
fancied that a trifling tax upon tea would destroy the trade of Boston
and New York.  They rose in arms against the principle represented by
the imposition of the tax.  We can all understand why there should have
been a national rebellion against ship-money, and a national rebellion
against a trumpery duty on tea, but English writers and English public
men seem quite unable to explain the national outcry against Wood's
patent, except on the theory that a clever writer, pouring forth
captivating nonsense, bewitched the Irish Parliament and the Irish
people, and sent them out of their senses for a season.

Swift followed up his first letter by others in rapid succession.  Lord
Carteret arrived in Ireland when the agitation was at its height.  He
issued a proclamation against the "Drapier's Letters," offered a reward
of three hundred pounds for the discovery of the author, and had the
printer arrested.  The Grand Jury, however, unanimously threw out the
bill sent up against Harding, the printer.  Another Grand Jury passed a
presentment against all persons who should by fraud or otherwise impose
Wood's copper coins upon the public.  This {248} presentment is said to
have been drawn up by Swift's own hand.  Lord Carteret at last had the
good-sense to perceive, and the spirit to acknowledge, that there was
no alternative between concession and rebellion.  He strongly urged his
convictions on the Government, and the Government had the wisdom to
yield.  The patent was withdrawn, a pension was given to Wood in
consideration of the loss he had sustained, and Swift was the object of
universal gratitude, enthusiasm, love, and devotion, on the part of the
Irish nation.  Many a patriotic Irishman would fain believe to this
very day that Swift, too, was Irish, and an Irish patriot.  Ireland
certainly has not yet forgotten, probably never will forget, the
successful stand made by Swift against what he believed to be an insult
to the Irish nation, when he took up his pen to write the first of the
Drapier's immortal Letters.




{249}

CHAPTER XVI.

THE OPPOSITION.

[Sidenote: 1725--Troubles in Scotland]

The trouble had hardly been got rid of in Ireland by Carteret's
judicious advice and the withdrawal of Wood's patent when a commotion
that at one time threatened to be equally serious broke out in
Scotland.  English members of Parliament had been for many years
complaining that Scotland was exempt from any taxation on malt.  Up to
that time no Government had attempted to take any steps towards
establishing equality in this respect between the two countries.
Walpole now strove to deal with the question.  It was proposed in the
House of Commons that instead of a malt duty in Scotland a duty of
sixpence should be levied on every barrel of ale.  Walpole at first was
not inclined to deal with the difficulty in this way, but as the
feeling of the House was very strongly in favor of making some attempt,
he consented to adopt the principle suggested, but required that the
duty should be threepence instead of sixpence.  The moment it became
known in Scotland that any tax on malt or ale was to be imposed,
rioting began in the principal cities; the spirit of the national motto
asserted itself--"nemo me impune lacessit."  The ringleaders of various
mobs were arrested and sent for trial, but the Scotch juries, following
the recent example of the Irish, refused to convict.  Brewers all over
Scotland entered into a sort of league, by virtue of which they pledged
themselves not to give any securities for the new duty and to cease
brewing if the Government exacted it.  Unluckily for Walpole, the
Secretary of State for Scotland, the Duke of Roxburgh, was a great
friend of Carteret's, {250} and had joined with Carteret in endeavoring
to thwart Walpole in all his undertakings.  The success of Walpole's
policy in any instance was understood by Carteret and by Roxburgh to
mean Walpole's supremacy over all other ministers.  The Duke of
Roxburgh therefore took advantage of the crisis in Scotland to injure
the administration, and especially to injure Walpole.  In a subtle and
underhand way he contrived to favor and foment the disturbance.  He
took care that the orders of the Government should not be too quickly
carried out, and he gave more than a tacit encouragement to the common
rumor that the King in his heart was hostile to the new tax, that the
tax was wholly an invention of Walpole's, and that resistance to such a
measure would not be unwelcome to the Sovereign, and would lead to the
dismissal of the minister.  Walpole was not long in finding out the
treachery of the Duke of Roxburgh.  To adopt a homely phrase, he "took
the bull by the horns" at once.  Lord Townshend was in Hanover with the
King, and Walpole wrote to Lord Townshend, giving him a full account of
all that was going on in Scotland, and laying the chief blame for the
continuance of the disturbance on the Duke of Roxburgh.  "I beg leave
to observe," wrote Walpole, "that the present administration is the
first that was ever yet known to be answerable for the whole
Government, with a Secretary of State for one part of the kingdom who,
they are assured, acts counter to all their measures, or at least whom
they cannot confide in."  His remonstrance had to be pressed again and
again upon Townshend before anything was done to satisfy him.  Walpole,
however, was a man to press where he thought the occasion demanded it,
and he was successful in the end.  The Duke of Roxburgh had to resign,
and Walpole added to his own duties those of the Secretary of State for
Scotland.  He appointed, however, as his agent or deputy in the
administration of Scotland, the Earl of Isla, Lord-keeper of the Privy
Seal in that country, and a man on whose allegiance he could entirely
rely.  Having {251} thus secured a full power to act, Walpole was not
long in bringing the disturbances to an end.  He displayed both
discretion and resolve.  He was able to satisfy the most reasonable
among the brewers and maltsters that their interests would not really
suffer by the proposed resolutions.  The natural result was that the
combination of brewers began to melt away.  The brewers held a meeting,
and it was soon found that it would not be possible to secure a general
resolution to meet the legislation of the Government by passive
resistance and by ceasing to brew.  As all would not stand together,
every man was left to take his own course, and the result was that what
we should now call a strike came quietly to an end.

[Sidenote: 1725--Intrigue and counter-intrigue]

A modern reader is naturally shocked and surprised at the manner in
which members of the same Government in Walpole's day intrigued against
one another, and strove to thwart each other's policy.  No actual
defence is to be made for such a practice; but it is only fair to
observe that up to Walpole's own entrance into office, and after it,
the habit of English sovereigns had been to make up an administration
by taking members of different and even of opposing parties and
bringing them together, in the hope of securing thereby the
co-operation of all parties.  Under these circumstances it was natural,
it was only to be expected, that the minister who was pledged to one
policy would endeavor by all means in his power to counteract the
designs of the minister whom he knew to be pledged to a very different
kind of policy.  Nor, indeed, is the practice of intrigue and
counter-intrigue among members of the same cabinet actually unknown in
our own days, when there is not the same excuse to be pleaded for it
that might have been urged in the time of Walpole.  In the case of the
Duke of Roxburgh, however, the attempt to counteract the policy of
Walpole was made in somewhat bolder and less subtle fashion than was
common even in those days, and Walpole was well justified in the course
he took.  For once his high-handed way of dealing with men was
vindicated {252} by its principle and by the unqualified advantage it
brought to the interests of the State and to those of the minister as
well.

[Sidenote: 1725--Dictatorship overdone]

The student of history derives one satisfaction from the frequent
visits of King George to Hanover.  The correspondence between Walpole
and Townshend which was made necessary by those visits gives us many an
interesting glimpse into political affairs in their reality, in their
undress, in their secret movement, which no ordinary State papers or
diplomatic despatches could be trusted to give.  The Secretary of State
often communicates to the representative of his country at some foreign
court only just that view of a political situation which he wishes to
put under the eyes of the foreign sovereign and foreign statesmen.  But
Walpole writes to Townshend exactly what he himself believes, and what
it is important both to Townshend and to him that Townshend shall fully
know.  "I think," Walpole says to Townshend, in one of his letters, "we
have once more got Ireland and Scotland quiet, if we take care to keep
them so."  Exactly; if only care be taken to keep them so.  The same
chance had often been given to English statesmen before; Ireland and
Scotland quiet, and might have continued in quietness if care had only
been taken to keep them so.

The King was much pleased with Walpole's success.  He made him one of
the thirty-eight Knights of the Bath.  The Order of the Bath had gone
out of use, out of existence in fact, since the coronation of Charles
the Second; George the First revived it in 1725, and bestowed its
honors on Walpole.  It seems an odd sort of reward for the shrewd,
practical, and somewhat coarse-fibred squire-statesman.  The close
connection between man and the child, civilized man and the savage, is
never more clearly illustrated than in the joy and pride which the
wisest statesman feels in the wearing of a ribbon or a star.  In the
next year the King made Walpole a Knight of the Garter; after this
honor all other mark of dignity {253} would be but an anti-climax.
From the time of his introduction to the Order of the Bath, the great
minister ceased to be plain Mr. Walpole, and became Sir Robert Walpole.

Meanwhile, under Walpole's Order of the Bath, many a throb of pain must
have made itself felt.  The minister began to find himself harassed by
the most formidable opposition that had ever set itself against him.
Lord Carteret was out of the way for the moment--and only for the
moment; but Pulteney proved a much more pertinacious, ingenious, and
dangerous enemy than Carteret had hitherto been.  Pulteney was at one
time the faithful follower, the enthusiastic admirer, almost the
devotee, of Walpole.  The one great political defect of Walpole filled
him with faults.  He could not bear the idea of a divided rule; he
would be all or nothing; he would have clerks and servants for his
colleagues in office; not real ministers, actual statesmen.  He was
under the mistaken impression that a man of genius is to be reduced to
tame insignificance by merely keeping him out of important office.  He
had made this mistake with regard to Carteret; he made it now with
regard to Pulteney.  The consequences were far more serious; for
Pulteney was neither so good-humored nor so indolent as Carteret, and
he could not be put aside.

Pulteney was a man of singular eloquence, and of eloquence peculiarly
adapted to the House of Commons.  His style was brilliant, incisive,
and penetrating.  He could speak on any subject at the spur of the
moment.  He never delivered a set speech.  He was a born parliamentary
debater.  All his resources seemed to be at instant command, according
as he had need of them.  His reading was wide, deep, and varied; he was
a most accomplished classical scholar, and had a marvellous readiness
and aptitude for classical allusion.  He was a wit and a humorist; he
could brighten the dullest topics and make them sparkle by odd and
droll illustrations, as well as by picturesque allusions and eloquent
phrases.  He {254} could, when the subject called for it, break
suddenly into thrilling invective.  [Sidenote: 1725--Pulteney] But he
had some of the defects of the extemporaneous orator.  His eloquence,
his wit, his epigrams often carried him away from his better judgment.
He frequently committed himself to some opinion which was not really
his, and was led far from his proper position in the pursuit of some
paradox or by the charm of some fantastic idea.  He was a brilliant
writer as well as a brilliant speaker.  His private character would
have little blame if it were not that a fondness for money kept growing
with his growing years.  "For a good old-gentlemanly vice," says Byron,
"I think I must take up with avarice."  Pulteney did not even wait to
be an old gentleman to take up with "the good old-gentlemanly vice."
We have in some measure now to take his talents on trust, as we have
those of Carteret.  He proved to be little more than the comet of a
season; when he had gone, he left no line of light behind him.  But it
is certain that in the estimation of his contemporaries he was one of
the most gifted men of his time; and for a while he was the most
popular man in England--the darling and the hero of the multitude.
When Walpole was sent to the Tower in the late Queen's reign, Pulteney
had spoken up manfully for his friend.  When Townshend and Walpole
resigned office in 1717, Pulteney went resolutely with them and
resigned office also.  The time came when Walpole found himself
triumphant over all his enemies, and came back not merely to office but
likewise to power.  Naturally, Pulteney expected that Walpole would
invite him to fill some place of importance in the new administration.
Walpole did nothing of the kind.  He had seen ample evidence of
Pulteney's great parliamentary talents in the mean time, and he feared
that with Pulteney for an official colleague he could never be a
dictator.  He was anxious, however, not to offend Pulteney, and he had
the curious weakness to imagine that he could conciliate Pulteney by
offering him a peerage.  Even at that time, when the sceptre of popular
power had not yet {255} passed altogether into the hands of the
representative chamber, it was absurd to suppose that Pulteney would
consent to be withdrawn from the House in which he had made his fame,
which was his natural and fitting place, and which already was seen by
every man of sense to be the central force of England's political life.
Pulteney contemptuously refused the peerage.  From that hour his old
love for Walpole seems to have turned into hate.

The explosion, however, did not come at once.  Pulteney continued to be
on seemingly good terms with Walpole, and shortly afterwards the
comparatively humble post of Cofferer to the Household was offered to
him--some say was asked for by him.  It does not seem likely that even
then he had any intention of a serious reconciliation with Walpole.
Perhaps he accepted this post in the expectation that he would shortly
be raised to a much higher position in the State.  But Walpole,
although willing enough to give him any mark or place of honor on
condition that he withdrew to the House of Lords, was afraid to allow
him any office of influence while he remained in the Commons.  However
this may be, Pulteney's ambition was not satisfied, and he very soon
broke publicly away from Walpole altogether.  When a motion was brought
on in April, 1725, for discharging the debts of the Civil List, in
reply to a message from the King himself, Pulteney demanded an inquiry
into the manner in which the money had been spent, and even made a
fierce attack on the whole administration, and accused it of something
very like downright corruption.  He was dismissed from his office as
Cofferer, and, even making allowance for his love of money, the wonder
is that he should have held it long enough to be dismissed from it.  He
then went avowedly over into the ranks of the enemies of Walpole inside
and outside the House of Commons.

The position taken by Pulteney is chiefly interesting to us now in the
fact that it opened a distinctly new chapter in English politics.
Pulteney created the part of what has ever since been called the Leader
of Opposition.  {256} With him begins the time when the real Leader of
Opposition must have a place in the House of Commons; with him, too,
begins the time when the Opposition has for its recognized duty not
merely to watch with jealous care all the acts of the ministers in
order to prevent them from doing anything wrong, but also to watch for
every opportunity of turning them out of office.  With Pulteney and his
tactics began the party organization which inside the House of Commons
and outside works unceasingly with tongue and pen, with open antagonism
and underhand intrigue, with all the various social as well as
political influences--the pamphlet, the press, the petticoat, and even
the pulpit--to discredit everything done by the men in office, to turn
public opinion against them, and if possible to overthrow them.
Pulteney and his supporters were now and then somewhat more
unscrupulous in their measures than an English Opposition would be in
our time, but theirs was unquestionably the policy of all our more
modern English parties.  From this time forth almost to the close of
his active career as a politician Pulteney performed the part of Leader
of Opposition in the strictly modern sense.  His position in history
seems to us to be distinctly marked as that of the first Leader of
Opposition; whether history shows reason to thank him for creating such
a part is another and a different question.

[Sidenote: 1725--Bolingbroke again]

Pulteney had some powerful allies.  The King, as we know, hated his
son, the Prince of Wales; the Prince of Wales hated his father.  No
reconciliation got up between them could be lasting or real.  The
father and son hardly ever met except on the occasion of some great
public ceremonial.  The standing quarrel between the Sovereign and his
heir had the effect of creating two parties in political life, one of
which supported the King and the King's advisers, while the other found
its centre in the house of the Heir to the Throne.  We shall see this
condition of things re-appearing in all the subsequent reigns of the
Georges.  The ministry and their friends {257} were detested and
denounced by those who surrounded the Prince of Wales; the adherents of
the Prince of Wales were virtually proscribed by the King.  Then, as at
a later date in the history of the Georges, those who favored and were
favored by the Prince were looking out with anxious hope for the King's
death.  When "the old King is dead as nail in door," then indeed each
leading supporter of the new king believed he could say with Falstaff,
"The laws of England are at my commandment; happy are they which have
been my friends."  Pulteney and his supporters were among the friends
and favorites of the Prince of Wales; they constituted the Prince's
party.  The Prince's party was composed mainly of the men who were
Tories but were not Jacobites, and of the Whigs who disliked Walpole or
had been overlooked or offended by him, or who in sober honesty were
opposed to his policy.  In all these, and in a daily growing number of
the people out-of-doors, Pulteney had his friends and Walpole his
enemies.

But a more formidable rival than even Pulteney was now again to the
front and active in hostility to Walpole.  This was the man whom the
official records of the time described as "the late Viscount
Bolingbroke."  The late Viscount Bolingbroke, it need hardly be said,
means that Henry St. John whose title of viscount had been forfeited
when he fled to France and joined the Pretender.  Bolingbroke had
lately received the pardon of King George.  He had secured the pardon
chiefly by means of an influence then familiar and recognized in
politics--that of one of the King's mistresses.  Bolingbroke had got
money with his second wife, and through her he conveyed to the Duchess
of Kendal a large sum--about ten thousand pounds--with the intimation
that more would be forthcoming from the same place, if necessary, to
obtain his object.  The Duchess of Kendal was easily prevailed upon,
under these circumstances, to recognize the justice of Bolingbroke's
claim and the sincerity of his repentance.  Moreover, there was about
the same time that {258} political intrigue, or rather rivalry of
intrigues, going on between Walpole and Carteret, between England and
France, in which it was thought the influence of Bolingbroke might be
used with advantage--as it was, in fact, used--to Walpole's ends.
[Sidenote: 1725--The Bolingbroke Petition] For all these reasons the
pardon was obtained, and Bolingbroke was allowed to return to England.
Nor was he long put off with a mere forgiveness which kept from him his
forfeited estates and his right to the family inheritance.  "Here I
am," he wrote to Swift soon after, "two-thirds restored, my person safe
(unless I meet hereafter with harder treatment than even that of Sir
Walter Raleigh), and my estate, with all the other property I have
acquired or may acquire, secured to me.  But the attainder is kept
prudently in force, lest so corrupt a member should come again into the
House of Lords, and his bad leaven should sour that sweet, untainted
mass."  Walpole was quite willing that the forfeiture of Lord
Bolingbroke's estates and the interruption of the inheritance should be
recalled.  It was necessary for this purpose to pass an Act of
Parliament.  On April 20, 1725, Lord Finch presented to the House of
Lords the petition "of Henry St. John, late Viscount Bolingbroke."  The
petition set forth that the petitioner was "truly concerned for his
offence in not having surrendered himself, pursuant to the directions
of an act of the first year of his Majesty's reign;" that he had
lately, "in most humble and dutiful manner," made his submission to the
King, and given his Majesty "the strongest assurances of his inviolable
fidelity, and of his zeal for his Majesty's service and for the support
of the present happy establishment, which his Majesty hath been most
graciously pleased to accept."  The petition then prayed that leave
might be given to bring in a bill to enable the petitioner and his
heirs male to take and enjoy in person the estates of which he was then
or afterwards should be possessed.  Walpole, as Chancellor of the
Exchequer, informed the House that he had received his Majesty's
command to say that George was satisfied with Bolingbroke's {259}
penitence, was convinced that Lord Bolingbroke was a proper object of
mercy, and consented that the petition should be presented to the House.

Lord Finch then moved that a bill be brought in to carry out the prayer
of the petition.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer seconded and strongly
advocated the motion.  It was opposed with great vigor by Mr. Methuen,
the Controller of the Household, and formerly British Minister in
Portugal.  Methuen denounced Bolingbroke's "scandalous and villainous
conduct" during his administration of affairs in Queen Anne's reign;
his clandestine negotiation for peace; his insolent behavior towards
the allies of England; his sacrificing the interests of the whole
Confederacy and the honor of his country--more especially in the
abandonment of the Catalans; "and, to sum up all his crimes in one, his
traitorous designs of defeating the Protestant succession, and of
advancing a Popish pretender to the throne."  This speech, we read,
"made a great impression on the Assembly," and several distinguished
members, Arthur Onslow among the rest, spoke strongly on the same side.
The motion, however, was carried by 231 votes against 113.  The Bill
was prepared, and went up to the House of Lords on May 5th, was carried
there by a large majority, was sent back to the House of Commons with
some slight amendments, was accepted there, and received the Royal
assent.  Some of the peers put on record a strong and earnest protest
against the passing of such a measure.  The protest recited all the
charges against Bolingbroke; declared that those who signed it knew of
no particular public services which Bolingbroke had lately rendered,
and which would entitle him to a generous treatment; and further added
that "no assurances which this person hath given" could be a sufficient
security against his future insincerity, "he having already so often
violated the most solemn assurances and obligations, and in defiance of
them having openly attempted the dethroning his Majesty and the
destruction of the liberties of his country."

{260}

Bolingbroke, however, wanted something more than restoration to his
title and to his forfeited right of inheritance.  His active and
untamed spirit was eager for political strife again, and his heart
burned with a longing to take his old place in the debates of the House
of Lords.  Against this Walpole had made a firm resolve; on this point
he would not yield.  He would not allow his eloquent and daring rival
to have a voice in Parliament any more.  In this, as it seems to us,
Walpole acted neither wisely nor magnanimously.  Bolingbroke's safest
place, so far as the interests of the public, and even the political
interests of his rivals, were concerned, would have been in the House
of Lords.  He would have delivered brilliant speeches there, and would
have worked off his energies in that harmless fashion.  In Walpole's
time, however, the idea had not yet arisen that an enemy to the settled
order of things is least dangerous where he is most free to speak.
Bolingbroke, who had always hated Walpole, even lately when he was
professing regard and gratitude, hated him now more than ever, and set
to work by all the means in his power to injure Walpole in the
estimation of the country, and, if possible, to undermine his whole
political position.

[Sidenote: 1725-1726--The "craftsman"]

Bolingbroke and Pulteney soon came into political companionship.  There
was a certain affinity between the intellectual nature of the two men;
and they had now a common object.  Both were literary men as well as
politicians, and they naturally put their literary gifts to the fullest
account in the campaign they had undertaken.  In our days two such men
combining for such a purpose would contrive to get incessant leading
articles into some daily paper; perhaps would start a weekly or even a
daily evening paper of their own.  Bolingbroke and Pulteney were men in
advance of their age--in some respects at least.  They did between them
start a paper.  They established the famous _Craftsman_.  The
_Craftsman_ was started in 1726.  It was first issued daily in single
leaves or sheets after the fashion of the _Spectator_.  It was soon,
{261} however, changed into a weekly newspaper bearing the title of the
_Craftsman_ or _Country Journal_.  Its editor, Nicholas Amhurst, took
the feigned name of Caleb d'Anvers, and the paper itself was commonly
called _Caleb_ accordingly.  The _Craftsman_ was brilliantly written,
and was inspired by the most unscrupulous passion of partisan hate.
Walpole was held up in prose and verse, in bold invective and droll
lampoon, as a traitor to the country, as a man stuffed and gorged with
public plunder, audacious in his profligate disregard of political
principle and common honesty, a danger to the State and a disgrace to
parliamentary life.  The circulation of the _Craftsman_ at one time
surpassed that of the _Spectator_ at the height of the _Spectator's_
popularity.  Not always are more flies caught by honey than by vinegar.




{262}

CHAPTER XVII.

"OSNABRUCK!  OSNABRUCK!"

[Sidenote: 1725--Trial of Lord Macclesfield]

The impeachment of Lord Macclesfield was ascribed, rightly or wrongly,
to the influence of the Prince of Wales; the comparative leniency of
Lord Macclesfield's punishment to the favor and protection of the King.
Macclesfield was a justly distinguished judge.  He had had the highest
standing at the bar; had risen, step by step, until from plain Thomas
Parker, the son of an attorney, he became Chief Justice of the Court of
King's Bench, then one of the Lords Justices of the kingdom in the
interval between Anne's death and the arrival of George the First, and
finally Lord Chancellor.  George made him Baron, and subsequently Earl,
of Macclesfield.  He had always borne a high reputation for probity as
well as for generosity until the charge was made against him on which
he was impeached.  He was accused of having, while Lord Chancellor,
sold the offices of Masters in Chancery to incompetent persons and men
of straw, unfit to be intrusted with the money of suitors, but whom he
had publicly represented to be "persons of great fortunes, and in every
respect qualified for that trust;" with having extorted money from
several of the masters, and with having embezzled the estates of widows
and orphans.  On May 6, 1725, the managers of the House of Commons
appeared at the bar of the House of Lords and presented their articles
of impeachment against Macclesfield.  The trial took place at the bar
of the House, and not in Westminster Hall, where impeachments were
usually carried on, and it lasted until May 26th.  There was nothing
that could be called a defence to some of the charges, and as {263} to
others Lord Macclesfield simply insisted that he had followed the
example of some of his most illustrious predecessors, and that the
moneys he received as presents were reckoned among the known
perquisites of the Great Seal, and were not declared unlawful by any
Act of Parliament.  The Lords were unanimous in finding Macclesfield
guilty, and condemned him to be fined thirty thousand pounds, and to be
imprisoned in the Tower until the fine had been paid.  The motion that
he be declared forever incapable of any office, place, or employment in
the State was, however, rejected, as was also a motion to prohibit him
from ever sitting in Parliament or coming within the verge of the
court.  It would certainly seem as if these motions ought to have been
the natural and necessary consequence of the impeachment and the
conviction.  If the conviction were just--and it was obviously
just--then Lord Macclesfield had disgraced the highest bench of
justice, and merely to condemn him to disgorge a part of his plunder
was a singularly inadequate sort of punishment.  George the First,
however, chose to ascribe the impeachment to the malice and the
influence of the Prince of Wales, and when Macclesfield had paid the
fine by the mortgage of an estate, the King undertook to repay the
money to him.  George actually did pay to Macclesfield one instalment
of a thousand pounds, but fate interposed and prevented any further
payment.  Macclesfield retired from the world, and spent his remaining
years in the study of science and in religious meditation.  He died in
1732.  His was a strange story.  He had many of the noblest qualities;
he had had, on the whole, a great career.  It is not easy, if we may
borrow the words which Burke applied to a more picturesque and
interesting sufferer, "to contemplate without emotion that elevation
and that fall."

During all this time of comparative quietude we are not to suppose that
there were no threatenings of foreign disturbance.  The adherents of
the Stuarts were never at rest; the controversies which grew out of the
Treaty of Utrecht were always sputtering and menacing.  Cardinal {264}
Fleury, a statesman devoted to peace and economy, had become
Prime-minister of France.  Other new figures were arising on the field
of Continental politics.  Alberoni, in exile and disgrace, had been
succeeded by a burlesque imitation of him, the Duke of Ripperda, a
Dutch adventurer who turned diplomatist, and had risen into influence
through Alberoni's favor.  In 1725 Ripperda negotiated a secret treaty
between the Emperor, Charles the Sixth, and the King of Spain, and was
rewarded with the title of duke.  He became Prime-minister of Spain for
a short time, to be presently disgraced and thrown into prison, quite
after the fashion of a royal favorite in the pages of "Gil Blas."  He
was a fantastic, arrogant, feather-headed creature, an Alberoni of the
_opera bouffe_.  He betook himself at last to the service of the
Sovereign of Morocco.  England had a sort of Ripperda of her own in the
person of the wild Duke of Wharton, the man whose eloquent and
ferocious invective had contributed to the sudden death of Lord
Stanhope, and who had since that time devoted himself to the service of
James Stuart on the Continent, and actually fought as a volunteer in
the ranks of the Spanish army at the abortive siege of Gibraltar.  It
is to the credit of the sincerer and better supporters of the Stuart
cause that they would not even still consent to regard it as wholly
lost.  They kept their eyes fixed on England, and every murmur of
national discontent or disturbance became to them a new encouragement,
a fresh signal of hope, a reviving incitement to energy.  In England
men were constantly hearing rumors about the dissolute life of the
Chevalier, and his quarrels with his wife, Clementina Maria, a
granddaughter of one of the Kings of Poland.  The loyalists here at
home were ready to believe anything that could be said by anybody to
the discredit of James and his adherents; James and his adherents were
willing to be fed on any tales about the unpopularity of George the
First, and the tottering condition of his throne.  Nor could it be said
that George was popular with any class of persons in {265} England.  If
the reign of the Brunswicks depended upon personal popularity, it would
not have endured for many years.  But the people of England were able
to see clearly enough that George allowed his great minister to rule
for him, and that Walpole's policy meant prosperity and peace.  They
did not admire George's mistresses any more now than they had done when
first these ladies set their large feet on English soil; but even some
of the most devoted followers of the Stuart cause shook their heads
sadly over the doings of James in Italy, and could not pretend to say
that the cause of morality would gain much by a change from Brunswick
to Stuart.

[Sidenote: 1727--Death of George the First]

The end was very near for George.  He was now an old man, in his
sixty-eighth year, and he had not led a life to secure a long lease of
health.  His excesses in eating and drinking, his hot punch, and his
many mistresses had proved too much even for his originally robust
constitution.  Of late he had become a mere wreck.  He was eager to pay
one other visit to Hanover, and he embarked at Greenwich on June 3,
1727, landing in Holland on the 7th of the month.  He made for his
capital as quickly as he could, but in the course of the journey he was
attacked by a sort of lethargic paralysis.  Early on June 10th he was
seized with an apoplectic fit; his hands hung motionless by his sides,
his eyes were fixed, glassy, and staring, and his tongue protruded from
his mouth.  The sight of him horrified his attendants; they wished to
stop at once and secure some assistance for the poor old dying King.
George, however, recovered consciousness so far as to be able to insist
on pursuing his journey, crying out, with spasmodic efforts at command,
the words "Osnabrück!  Osnabrück!"  At Osnabrück lived his brother the
Prince-bishop.  The attendants dared not disobey George, even at that
moment, and the carriage drove at its fullest speed on towards
Osnabrück.  No swiftness of wheels, however, no flying chariot, could
have reached the house of the Prince-bishop in time for the King.  When
the royal carriages clattered into the court-yard of the {266}
Prince-bishop's palace the reign of the first George was over--the old
King lay dead in his seat.  Lord Townshend and the Duchess of Kendal
were following in different carriages on the road; an express was sent
back to tell them the grim news.  Lord Townshend came on to Osnabrück,
and finding that the King was dead, had nothing to do but to return
home at once.  The Duchess of Kendal is stated to have shown all the
signs of grief proper to be expected from a favorite.  She tore her
hair--at least she pulled and clutched at it--and she beat her ample
bosom, and professed the uttermost horror at the thought of having to
endure life without the companionship of her lord and master.  It is
satisfactory, however, to know that she did not die of grief.  She
lived for some sixteen years, and made her home for the most part at
Kendal House, near Twickenham.

[Sidenote: 1727--The raven]

Even such a man as George the First may become invested by death with a
certain dignity and something of a romantic interest.  Legends are
afloat concerning the King's later days which would not be altogether
unworthy the closing hours of a great Roman emperor.  George had his
melting moments, it would seem, and not long before his death, being in
a pathetic mood, he gave the Duchess of Kendal a pledge that if he
should die before her, and it were possible for departed souls to
return to earth and impress the living with a knowledge of their
presence, he, the faithful and aged lover, would come back from the
grave to his mistress.  When the Duchess of Kendal returned to her home
near Twickenham she was in constant expectation of a visit in some form
from her lost adorer.  One day while the windows of her house were
open, a large black raven, or bird of some kind--raven would seem to be
the more becoming and appropriate form for such a visitor--flew into
her presence from the outer air.  The lamenting lady assumed at once
that in this shape the soul of King George had come back to earth.  She
cherished and petted the bird, it is said, and lavished all fondness
and tenderness upon it.  What {267} became of it in the end history
does not allow us to know.  Whether it still is sitting, like the more
famous raven of poetry, it is not for us to guess.  Probably when the
Duchess herself expired in 1743, the ghastly, grim, and ancient raven
disappeared with her.  Why George the First, if he had the power of
returning in any shape to see his mistress, did not come in his own
proper form, it is not for us to explain.  One might be disposed to
imagine that in such a case it would be the first step which would
involve the cost, and that there would be no greater difficulty for the
departed soul to come back in the likeness of its old vestment of clay
than to put on the unfamiliar and somewhat inconvenient form of a fowl.
Perhaps the story is not true.  Possibly there was no raven or other
bird in the case at all.  It may be that, if a black raven did fly in
at the Duchess of Kendal's window, the bird was not the embodied spirit
of King George.  For ourselves, we should be sorry to lose the story.
Neither the King nor the mistress could afford to part with any slight
clement of romance wherewithal even legend has chosen to invest them.
Another story, which probably has more truth in it, adds a new
ghastliness to the circumstances of George's death.  On November 13,
1726, some seven months before that event, there died in a German
castle a woman whom the gazette of the capital described as the
Electress Dowager of Hanover.  This was the unfortunate Princess
Sophia, the wife of George.  Thirty-two years of melancholy captivity
she had endured, while George was drinking and hoarding money and
amusing himself with his seraglio of ugly women.  She died protesting
her innocence to the last.  In the closing days of her illness, so runs
the story, she gave into the hands of some one whom she could trust, a
letter addressed to her husband, and obtained a promise that the letter
should, somehow or other, be delivered to George himself.  This letter
contained a final declaration that she was absolutely guiltless of the
offence alleged against her, a bitter reproach to George for his
ruthless conduct, {268} and a solemn summons to him to stand by her
side before the judgment-seat of Heaven within a year, and there make
answer in her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her blighted
life and her miserable death.  There was no way of getting this letter
into George's hands while the King was in England, but an arrangement
was made by means of which it was put into his coach when he crossed
the frontier of Germany on his way towards his capital.  George, it is
said, opened the letter at once, and was so surprised and
horror-stricken by its stern summons that he fell that moment into the
apoplectic fit from which he never recovered.  Sophia, therefore, had
herself accomplished her own revenge; her reproach had killed the King;
her summons brought him at once within the ban of that judgment to
which she had called him.  It would be well if one could believe the
story; there would seem a dramatic justice--a tragic retribution--about
it.  Its very terror would dignify the story of a life that, on the
whole, was commonplace and vulgar.  But, for ourselves, we confess that
we cannot believe in the mysterious letter, the fatal summons, the
sudden fulfilment.  There are too many stories of the kind floating
about history to allow us to attach any special significance to this
particular tale.  We doubt even whether, if the letter had been
written, it would have greatly impressed the mind of George.  Remorse
for the treatment of his wife he could not have felt--he was incapable
of any such emotion; and we question whether any appeal to the
sentiment of the supernatural, any summons to another and an impalpable
world, would have made much impression on that stolid, prosaic
intelligence and that heart of lead.  Besides, according to some
versions of the tale, it was not, after all, a letter from his wife
which impressed him, but only the warning of a fortune-teller--a woman
who admonished the King to be careful of the life of his imprisoned
consort, because it was fated for him that he should not survive her a
year.  This story, too, is told of many kings and other persons less
illustrious.

{269}

[Sidenote: 1727--Character of the first George]

Much more probable is the rumor that Sophia made a will bequeathing all
her personal property to her son, that the will was given to George the
First in England, and that he composedly destroyed it.  If George
committed this act, he seems to have been repaid in kind.  His own will
left large legacies to the Duchess of Kendal and to other ladies.  The
Archbishop of Canterbury gave the will to the new King, who read it,
put it in his pocket, walked away with it, and never produced it again.
Both these stories are doubted by some of the contemporaries of George
the Second, but they were firmly believed in and strongly asserted by
others, who seem to have had authority for their belief.  At all
events, they fit in better with the character and surroundings of both
princes than the tragic story of the letter and its fearful summons,
the warning of the fortune-teller, or the soul of the dead King
revisiting the earth in the funereal form of a raven.

There is not much that is good to be said of George the First.  He had
a certain prosaic honesty, and was frugal amid all his vulgar
voluptuousness.  He managed the expenses of his court with creditable
economy and regularity.  The officers in his army, and his civil
servants, received their pay at the properly-appointed time.  It would
be hardly worth while recording these particulars to the King's credit,
but that it was somewhat of a novelty in the arrangements of a modern
court for men to receive the reward of their services at regular
intervals and in the proper amount.  George occasionally did a liberal
thing, and he more than once professed a strong interest in the
improvement of university education.  He is said to have declared to a
German nobleman, who was complimenting him on the possession of two
such kingdoms as England and Hanover, that a king ought to be
congratulated rather on having two such subjects as Newton in the one
country and Leibnitz in the other.  We fear, however, that this story
must go with the fortune-teller and the raven; one cannot think of dull
prosaic {270} George uttering such a monumental sort of sentiment.  He
cared nothing for literature or science or art.  He seems to have had
no genuine friendships.  He hated his son, and he used to speak of his
daughter-in-law, Caroline, as "that she-devil the princess." [Sidenote:
1727--His epitaph] Whatever was respectable in his character came out
best at times of trial.  He was not a man whom danger could make
afraid.  At the most critical moments--as, for instance, at the
outbreak of the rebellion in 1715--he never lost his head.  If he was
not capable of seeing far, he saw clearly, and he could look coming
events steadily in the face.  On one or two occasions, when an
important choice had to be made between this political course and that,
he chose quickly and well.  The fact that he thoroughly appreciated the
wisdom and the political integrity, of Walpole speaks, perhaps, his
highest praise.  His reign, on the whole, was one of prosperity for
England.  He did not love England--never, up to the very end, cared for
the country over which destiny had appointed him to rule.  His soul to
the last was faithful to Hanover.  England was to him as the State wife
whom for political reasons he was compelled to marry; Hanover, as the
sweetheart and mistress of his youth, to whom his affections, such as
they were, always clung, and whom he stole out to see at every possible
chance.  George behaved much better to his political consort, England,
than to the veritable wife of his bosom.  He managed England's affairs
for her like an honest, straightforward, narrow-minded steward.  We
shall see hereafter that England came to be governed much worse by men
not nearly so bad as George the First.  To do him justice, he knew when
he ought to leave the business of the State in the hands of those who
understood it better than he; this one merit redeemed many of his
faults, and, perhaps, may be regarded as having secured his dynasty.
Frederick the Great described George as a prince who governed England
by respecting liberty, even while he made use of the subsidies granted
by Parliament to corrupt the Parliament which voted them.  {271} He was
a king, Frederick declares, "without ostentation and without deceit,"
and who won by his conduct the confidence of Europe.  This latter part
of the description is a little too polite.  Kings do not criticise each
other too keenly in works that are meant for publication.  But the
words form, on the whole, an epitaph for George which might be
inscribed on his tomb without greater straining of the truth than is
common in the monumental inscriptions that adorn the graves of less
exalted persons.




{272}

CHAPTER XVIII.

GEORGE THE SECOND.

[Sidenote: 1727--Death of Newton]

The year when George the First died was made memorable forever by the
death of a far greater man than any European king of that generation.
When describing the events which led to the publication of the "Drapier's
Letters," we mentioned the fact that Sir Isaac Newton had been consulted
about the coinage of Wood's half-pence.  That was the last time that
Isaac Newton appeared as a living figure in public controversy of any
kind.  On March 20, 1727, the great philosopher died, after much
suffering, at his house in Kensington.  The epitaph which Pope intended
for him sums up as well as a long discourse could do his achievements in
science--

  "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
  God said, 'Let Newton be,' and all was light."

No other discovery ever made in science approaches in importance to the
discovery of the principle of universal gravitation--the principle that
every particle of matter is attracted by every other particle with a
force proportioned inversely to the square of their distances.  Vague
ideas of some such principle had long been floating in the minds of some
men; had probably been thus floating since ever men began to think
seriously over the phenomena of inanimate nature.  But the discovery of
the principle was, however, as distinctly the achievement of Newton as
"Paradise Lost" is the work of Milton.  We find it hard now to form to
ourselves any clear idea of a world to which Newton's principle was
unknown.  It would be almost as easy to realize the idea of a world
without {273} light or atmosphere.  Newton is called by Sir David
Brewster the greatest philosopher of any age.  Sir John Herschel assigns
to the name of Newton "a place in our veneration which belongs to no
other in the annals of science."  In this book we have only to record the
date at which the pure and simple life of this great man came to its end.
The important events of his career belong to an earlier period; his
teachings and his fame are for all time.  The humblest of historians as
well as the greatest may ask himself what is the principle of history
which bids us to assign so much more space to the wars of kings and the
controversies of statesmen than to the life and the deeds of a man like
Newton.  In the whole history of the world during Newton's lifetime, the
one most important fact, the one fact of which the magnitude dwarfs all
other facts, is the discovery of the principle of gravitation.  Yet its
meaning may be explained in fewer words than would be needed to describe
the nature of the antagonism between Walpole and Pulteney, or the reason
why Queen Anne was succeeded by King George.

We have, however, in these pages only to deal with history in its old
and, we suppose, its everlasting fashion--that of telling what happened
in the way of actual fact, telling the story of the time.  The English
public took the death of George the First with becoming composure; the
vast majority of the people never troubled their heads about it.  It gave
a flutter of hope to Spain; it set the councils of the Stuart party in
eager commotion for a while; but it made no change in England.  "George
the First was always reckoned Vile; still viler George the Second."
These are the lines in which Walter Savage Landor sums up the character
of the first and second George before passing on to picture in little the
characters of the third and fourth of the name.  Landor was not wrong
when he described George the Second as, on the whole, rather worse than
George the First.  George the Second was born at Hanover on October {274}
30, 1683, and was therefore in his forty-fourth year when he succeeded to
the throne.  He had still less natural capacity than his father.  He was
parsimonious; he was avaricious; he was easily put out of temper.  His
instincts, feelings, passions were all purely selfish.  He had hot
hatreds and but cool friendships.  Personal courage was, perhaps, the
only quality becoming a sovereign which George the Second possessed.  He
had served as a volunteer under Marlborough in 1708, and at the battle of
Oudenarde he had headed a charge of his Hanoverian dragoons with a
bravery worthy of a prince.  He is to serve later on at Dettingen, and to
be in all probability the last English sovereign who commanded in person
on the battlefield.  His education was not even so good as that of his
father, and he had an utter contempt for literature.  He had little
religious feeling, but is said to have had a firm belief in the existence
of vampires.  He was fond of business--devoted to the small ways of
routine.  He took a great interest in military matters and all that
concerned the arrangements and affairs of an army.  Like his father he
found abiding pleasure in the society of a little group of more or less
attractive mistresses.

[Sidenote: 1727--Incredulity of the Prince of Wales]

George the Second had always detested his father, and during the greater
part of their lives was equally detested by him.  The reconciliation
which had lately taken place between them was as formal and superficial
as that of the two demons described in Le Sage's story.  "They brought us
together," says Asmodeus; "they reconciled us.  We shook hands and became
mortal enemies."  When the reconciliation between George the Second and
his father was brought about by the influence of Stanhope and of Walpole,
the father and son shook hands and continued to be mortal enemies.  If
George the First had his court at St. James's, George the Second had his
court and _coterie_ gathered around him at Leicester Fields and at
Richmond.  The two courts were, in fact, little better than hostile
camps.  Walpole had been for long years the confidential and favored
servant of George the First.  The {275} natural expectation was that he
would be instantly discredited and discarded when George the Second came
to the throne.

So, indeed, it seemed at first to happen.  When Walpole received the news
of George the First's death he hastened to Richmond Lodge, where George
the Second then was, in order to give him the news and hail him as King.
George was in bed, and had to be roused from a thick sleep.  He was angry
at being disturbed, and not in a humor to admit that there was any excuse
for disturbing him.  When Walpole told him that his father was dead, the
kingly answer of the sovereign was that the statesman's assertion was a
big lie.  George roared this at Walpole, and then was for turning round
in his bed and settling down to sleep again.  Walpole, however, persisted
in disturbing the royal slumbers, and assured the drowsy grumbler that he
really was George the Second, King of England.  He produced for George's
further satisfaction a letter from Lord Townshend, describing the time,
place, and circumstances of the late King's death.  Walpole tendered the
usual ceremonial expressions of loyalty, which George received coldly,
and even gruffly.  Then the minister asked whom his Majesty wished to
appoint to draw up the necessary declaration for the Privy Council.
Walpole assumed as a matter of course that the King would leave the task
in his hands.  George, however, disappointed him.  "Compton," said the
King; and when he had spoken that word he intimated to Walpole that the
interview was over.  Walpole left the royal abode believing himself a
fallen man.

"Compton," whom the King had thus curtly designated, was Sir Spencer
Compton, who had been chosen Speaker of the House of Commons in 1715.  He
had been one of George the Second's favorites while George was still
Prince of Wales.  He was a man of respectable character, publicly and
privately, but without remarkable capacity of any kind.  He knew little
or nothing of the business of a minister, and it is said that when
Walpole {276} came to him to tell him of the King's command he frankly
acknowledged that he did not know how to draw up the formal declaration.
Walpole good-naturedly came to his assistance, took his pen, and did the
work for him.

[Sidenote: 1727--Compton's evaporation]

If the King had persevered in his objection to Walpole, the story of the
reign would have to be very differently told.  Walpole was the one only
man who could at the time have firmly stood between England and foreign
intrigue--between England and financial blunder.  Nor is it unlikely that
the King would have persevered and refused to admit Walpole to office but
that he happened to be, without his own knowledge, under the influence of
the one only woman who had any legitimate right to influence him--his
wife Caroline.  Caroline, daughter of a petty German prince--the Margrave
of Brandenburg-Anspach--was one of the most remarkable women of her time.
Her faults, foibles, and weaknesses only served to make her more
remarkable.  She had beauty when she was young, and she still had an
expressive face and a sweet smile.  She was well educated, and always
continued to educate herself; she was fond of letters, art, politics, and
metaphysics.  She delighted in theological controversy, and also
delighted in contests of mere wit.  But of all her valuable gifts, the
most valuable for herself and for the country was the capacity she had
for governing her husband.  She governed him through his very anxiety not
to be governed by his wife.  One of George's strongest, and at the same
time meanest, desires was to let the world see that he was absolute
master in his own house, and could rule his wife with a rod of iron.
Caroline, having long since discovered this weakness, played into the
King's hands, and always made outward show of the utmost deference for
his authority, and dread of his anger.  She put herself metaphorically,
and indeed almost literally, under his feet.  She was pleased that all
the Court should see her thus grovelling.  George was in the habit of
making jocular allusion, in his jovial, graceful way, to living and dead
sovereigns who were {277} governed by their wives, and he often invited
his courtiers to notice the difference between them and him, and to
admire the imperial supremacy which he exercised over the humble
Caroline.  By humoring him in this way Caroline obtained, without any
consciousness on his part, an almost absolute power over him.  Another
and a worse failing of the King's she humored as well.  She had suffered
much in the beginning of her married life because of his amours and his
mistresses.  Her true and faithful heart had been wrung by long
jealousies; but, happily for herself and for the country, she was able at
last to rise superior to this natural weakness of woman.  Indeed, it has
to be said with regret for her self-degradation, that she not only
tolerated the love-makings of the King and his favorites, but even showed
occasionally a politic interest in the promotion of the amours and the
appointment of the ladies.  She humored her lord and master's avarice
with as little scruple.  Thus his principal defects--his sordid love of
money, his ignoble passion for women, and his ridiculous desire to seem
the absolute master of his wife--became in her skilful hands the
leading-strings by which she drew and guided him whither she would have
him go.  Through Caroline's influence mainly Walpole was retained in
power.  She played on the King's avarice, and poured into his greedy ear
the assurance that Walpole could raise money as no other living man
could.  Caroline acted in this chiefly from a sincere love of her
husband, and anxiety for his good, but partly also, it has to be
acknowledged, because it had been made known to her that Walpole would
provide her with a larger allowance than it was Compton's intention to
do.  The result was that Walpole was retained in office, or, perhaps it
should be said, restored to office.  The crowds of courtiers who love to
worship the rising sun had hardly time to offer their adoration to
Compton when they found that the supposed rising sun was only a meteor,
which instantly vanished.  Horace Walpole the younger describes the event
by a happy phrase as "Compton's evaporation."  Compton {278} himself had
soon found that the responsibility would be too much for him.  He
besought the King to relieve him of the burden to which he found himself
unequal.  The King acceded to his wish.  Walpole became once again First
Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Townshend
continued to be Secretary of State.  The crisis was over.

[Sidenote: 1727--Condolence and congratulation]

Parliament assembled on June 15th, after the death of George the First.
As the law then stood, any Parliament summoned by a sovereign was not to
be dissolved by that sovereign's death, but should continue to sit and
act during a term of six months, "unless the same shall be sooner
prorogued or dissolved by such person who shall be next heir to the Crown
of this Realm in succession."  The meeting of June 15th was merely
formal.  Parliament was prorogued by a Commission from George the Second
until the 27th of the month.  Both Houses then met at Westminster, and
the King came to the House of Peers in his royal robes and ascended the
throne with all the regular ceremonial.  Sir Charles Dalton, Gentleman
Usher of the Black Rod, was sent with a message from the King commanding
the attendance of the Commons.  When the Commons had crowded into the
space appointed for them in the Peers' Chamber, the King "delivered from
his own mouth" the Royal speech.  George the Second had at all events one
advantage over George the First as a King of England--he understood the
language of his subjects, and could speak to them in their own tongue.
The Royal speech began by expressing the King's persuasion that "you all
share with me in my grief and affliction for the death of my late royal
father."  The King was well warranted in this persuasion; nothing could
be more correct than his assumption.  The Lords and Commons quite shared
with him his grief and affliction for the death of his royal father.
They felt just as much distress at that event as he did.  The King then
went on to declare his fixed resolution to merit by all possible means
the love and affection of his people; to preserve the Constitution {279}
"as it is now happily established in Church and State;" and to secure to
all his subjects the full enjoyment of their religious and civil rights.
He expressed his satisfaction at the manner in which tranquillity and the
balance of power in Europe had been maintained, the strict union and
harmony which had hitherto subsisted among the allies of the Treaty of
Hanover, and which had chiefly contributed to the near prospect of a
general peace.  Finally, the King pointed out that the grant of the
greatest part of his Civil List revenues had now run out, and that it
would be necessary for the House of Commons to make a new provision for
the support of him and of his family.  "I am persuaded," said the King,
"that the experience of past times and a due regard to the honor and
dignity of the Crown will prevail upon you to give me this first proof of
your zeal and affection in a manner answerable to the necessities of my
Government."  Then the King withdrew, and Lord Chesterfield moved for "an
address of condolence, congratulation, and thanks."  The condoling and
congratulating address was unanimously voted, was presented next day to
his Majesty, and received his Majesty's most gracious acknowledgment.
Meanwhile the Commons having returned to their House, several new members
took the oaths.  Sir Paul Methuen, Treasurer of the Household, the author
of the commercial treaty with Portugal which still bears his name, moved
an address of condolence and congratulation to the King.  The motion was
seconded by Sir Robert Walpole, and as the formal record puts it, "voted
_nemine contradicente_."  A committee was appointed to draw up the
address, Sir Robert Walpole, of course, being one of its members.  The
chairman of the committee paid Walpole the compliment of handing him the
pen, "whereupon," as a contemporary account reports it, "Sir Robert,
without hesitation and with a masterly hand, drew up the said address."
Walpole could be courtly enough when he thought fit.  He seems to have
distinctly outdone the House of Lords in the fervor of his grief for the
late King and his devotion {280} to the present.  The death of George the
First, Walpole pronounced to be "a loss to this nation which your Majesty
alone could possibly repair." Having mentioned the fact that the death of
George the First had plunged all England into grief, Walpole changed, "as
by the stroke of an enchanter's wand," this winter of our discontent into
glorious summer.  "Your immediate succession," he assured the King,
"banished all our grief."

[Sidenote: 1727--"Honest Shippen"]

On Monday, July 3d, the Commons met to consider the amount of supply to
be granted to his Majesty.  Walpole, as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
stated to the House that the annual sum of seven hundred thousand pounds,
granted to the late King "for the support of his household and of the
honor and dignity of the Crown," had fallen short every year, and that
ministers had been obliged to make it up in other ways.  The present
sovereign's necessary expenses were likely to increase, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer explained, "by reason of the largeness of his family" and
the necessity of "settling a household for his royal consort."  The
Chancellor of the Exchequer therefore moved that the entire revenues of
the Civil List, which produced about one hundred and thirty thousand
pounds a year above the yearly sum of seven hundred thousand pounds
already mentioned, should be settled on his Majesty during life.  The
motion was supported by several members, but Mr. Shippen, the earnest and
able, though somewhat eccentric, Jacobite and Tory, had the spirit and
courage to oppose it.  Shippen's speech was expressed in a spirit of
loyalty, but was direct and incisive in its criticism of the Government
proposal.  Shippen pointed out that the yearly sum of seven hundred
thousand pounds, now thought too little, was not obtained by the late
sovereign without a long and solemn debate, and was described by every
one who contended for it as an ample revenue for a king.  He reminded the
House that Queen Anne used to pay about nineteen thousand pounds a year
out of her own pocket for the augmentation of the salaries of poor
clergymen, {281} allowed five thousand pounds a year out of the
Post-office revenue to the Duke of Marlborough, gave several hundred
thousand pounds for the building of the castle of Blenheim; and by this
means came under the necessity of asking Parliament for five hundred
thousand pounds, which she determined never to do again, and had
therefore prepared a scheme for the reduction of her expenses, which was
to bring her full yearly outlay down to four hundred and fifty thousand
pounds.  Shippen then severely criticised the foreign policy of the late
King's reign, and with justice condemned the extravagance which required
to be met by repeated grants from the nation.  "I confess," he said,
"that if the same management was to be continued, and if the same
ministers were to be again employed, a million a year would not be
sufficient to carry on the exorbitant expenses so often and so justly
complained of in this House."  He deplored the vast sum "sunk in the
bottomless gulf of secret service."  "I heartily wish," he exclaimed,
"that time, the great discoverer of hidden truths and concealed
iniquities, may produce a list of all such--if any such there were--who
have been perverted from their public duty by private pensions, who have
been the hired slaves and the corrupt instruments of a profuse and
vainglorious administration."  Shippen concluded by moving as an
amendment that the amount granted to his Majesty be the clear yearly sum
of seven hundred thousand pounds.  It is worth noticing that when Shippen
had occasion once to refer to some of Walpole's arguments he spoke of him
as "my honorable friend," and then, suddenly correcting himself, said, "I
ask pardon; I should have said the honorable person, for there is no
friendship betwixt us."

Shippen's speech hit hard, and must have been felt by the ministry.  The
one charge against Walpole's government which he could not refute was the
charge of extravagance in corruption.  The ministers, however, affected
to treat the speech with contempt, and were justified in doing so by the
manner in which the House of Commons {282} dealt with it.  No answer was
given to Shippen's statements, because Shippen's motion was not seconded
and fell to the ground.  The resolutions proposed by the Chancellor of
the Exchequer were carried without a division, and a bill was ordered to
be brought in to give effect to them.  A provision of one hundred
thousand pounds a year was voted for the Queen, in case she should
survive the King.  The vote was agreed to without division or debate.
Parliament was dissolved by proclamation on August 7th.

[Sidenote: 1728--Onslow as Haroun-al-Raschid]

The new Parliament met on January 23d, 1728.  It was found that the
ministerial majority was even greater than it had been before.  The King
opened Parliament in person, and directed the Commons, who had been
summoned to the House of Peers, to return to their own House and choose
their Speaker.  The Commons unanimously chose Arthur Onslow to this high
office.  Compton, the former Speaker, had been soothed with a peerage
after his "evaporation."  Arthur Onslow was born in 1691, and had been in
Parliament from 1719; in July, 1728, he was made Privy Councillor.  We
may anticipate events a little for the purpose of mentioning the fact
that all the writers of his time united in ascribing to Speaker Onslow,
as he has always since been called, a combination of the best attributes
which fit a man to preside over the House of Commons.  It is said that
his election to the Speaker's chair was brought about mainly by Sir
Robert Walpole, and that Walpole expected Onslow to use his great
abilities and authority to suit the policy and serve the wishes of the
administration.  If this was Walpole's idea, he must soon have found
himself as much mistaken as the conclave of cardinals about whom so much
is said in history, romance, and the drama, who elected one of their
order as Pope because they believed him to be too feeble and nerveless to
have any will of his own, and were much amazed to find that the moment
the new Pope had been elected he suddenly became strong and
energetic--the master and not the servant.  Onslow's whole {283} conduct
in the chair of the House of Commons during the many years which he
occupied it displayed an absolute and fearless impartiality.  The chair
has never been better filled in English history; the very title of
"Speaker Onslow," ever afterwards given to him, is of itself a tribute to
his impartiality and his services.  Onslow was a man who loved letters
and art, and also, it is said, loved studying all varieties of life.  It
is reported of him that he used to go about disguised, like a sort of
eighteenth-century Haroun-al-Raschid, among the lowest classes of men, in
out-of-the-way parts of the capital, for the purpose of studying the
forms and manners of human life.  Legend has preserved the memory of a
certain public-house, called "The Jews'-harp," where Onslow is said to
have amused himself many an evening, sitting in the chimney-corner and
exchanging talk and jests with the company who frequented the place.  It
is pleasant to be able to believe these stories of Speaker Onslow in that
highly artificial and formal age--that age of periwigs and paint and
shallow formulas.  It is somewhat refreshing to meet with this clever man
of eccentric ways, the great "Speaker," who could wear his official robes
with so much true dignity, and then, when he had laid them aside, could
amuse himself after his own fashion, and study life in some of its
queerest corners with the freshness of a school-boy and the eye of an
artist.




{284}

CHAPTER XIX.

"THE PATRIOTS."

[Sidenote: 1728--Pulteney's place in history]

The name and the career of William Pulteney are all but forgotten in
English political life.  It is doubtful whether Pulteney's name, if
pronounced in the course of a debate in the House of Commons just now,
would bring with it any manner of idea to the minds of nine-tenths of
the listening members.  Yet Pulteney played, all unconsciously, a great
part in the development of the Parliamentary life of this country.  So
far as intellectual gifts are concerned, he is not, of course, to be
named in the same breath with a man like Burke, for example; one might
as well think of comparing Offenbach with Mozart or Handel.  But the
influence of the career of Pulteney on the English Parliament is
nevertheless more distinctly marked than the influence of the career of
Burke.  We are speaking now not of political thought--no man ever made
a greater impression on political thought than Burke has done--but only
of the forms and the development of English Parliamentary systems.  For
Pulteney was, beyond all question, the founder of the modern practice
of Parliamentary opposition.  Walpole was mainly instrumental in
transferring the seat of political power from the House of Lords to the
House of Commons.  Never, since Walpole's time, has the House of Lords
exercised any real influence over the political life of England.  This
was not Walpole's doing; it was the doing of time and change, of
altered conditions and new forces.  But Walpole saw the coming change,
and bent all the energies of his robust intellect to help and forward
it.  Pulteney is in the same sense the author of {285} the modern
principle of Parliamentary opposition; but there is no reason to
believe that Pulteney saw what he was doing as clearly as Walpole did.
Until the beginning of Pulteney's brilliant career, the opposition
between parties had been mainly a competition for the ear and the favor
of the sovereign.  Thus Harley strove against Marlborough, and
Bolingbroke against Harley, and the Whigs against Harley and
Bolingbroke.  But the course of action taken by Pulteney against
Walpole converted the struggle into one of party against party, inside
and outside of the House of Commons.  The object sought was the command
of a majority in the representative assembly.  Pulteney showed how this
was to be obtained by the voices of the public out-of-doors as well as
by the votes of the elected representatives in Westminster.  Walpole
had made it clear that in the House of Commons the battle was to be
fought; Pulteney showed that in the House of Commons the victory was to
be gained, not by the favor of the sovereign, but by the co-operation
of the people.

We have said in a former chapter that Pulteney's form of procedure,
become now a component part of our whole Parliamentary system, brings
with it some serious disadvantages from which, for the present, it is
not easy, it is not even possible, to see any way of escape.  The
principle of government by party will some time or other come to be put
to the challenge in English political life.  For the present, however,
we have only to make the best we can of it; and no one in his senses
can doubt that it was an immense advance on the system of back-stairs
influence and bedchamber intrigue, the policy, to use the great Condé's
expression, "of petticoats and alcoves," which prevailed in the days
when Mrs. Masham was competing with Sarah Jennings, and later still,
when Walpole was buying his way back to power through the influence of
the sovereign's wife, in co-operation with the sovereign's paramour.

The student of English history will have to turn with {286} close
attention to the reigns of the First and Second George.  In those
reigns the transfer of power to the representative chamber began, and
the modern system of Parliamentary opposition grew into form.  The
student will have to remember that the time he is studying was one when
there was no such thing known in England as a public meeting.  There
were "demonstrations," as we call them now; there were crowds; there
were processions; there were tumults; there were disturbances, riots,
reading of Riot Acts, dispersion of mobs, charges of cavalry,
_fusillades_ of infantry; but there were no great public meetings
called together for the discussion of momentous political questions.
The rapid growth of the popular newspaper, soon to swell up like the
prophet's gourd, had hardly begun as yet.  We cannot call the
_Craftsman_ a newspaper; it was rather a series of pamphlets.  It stood
Pulteney instead of the more modern newspaper.  He worked on public
opinion with it outside the House of Commons.  Inside the House he made
it his business to form a party which should assail the ministry on all
points, lie in wait to find occasion for attacking it, attack it
rightly or wrongly, attack it even at the risk of exposing national
weakness or bringing on national danger, keep attacking it always.  In
former days a leader of opposition had often been disdainful of the
opinion of the vulgar herd out-of-doors; Pulteney and his companions
set themselves to appeal especially to the prejudices, passions, and
ignorance of the vulgar herd.  They made it their business to create a
public opinion of their own.  They dealt in the manufacture of public
opinion.  They set up political shops wherein to retail the article
which they had thus manufactured.  Pulteney was now in his prime--still
some years inside fifty.  He was full of energy and courage, and he
threw his whole soul into his work.  Much of what he did was
undoubtedly dictated by his spite against Walpole, but much, too, was
the mere outcome of his ambition, his energy, and the peculiar
character of his intellect.  He enjoyed playing a {287} conspicuous
part and he liked attacking somebody.  People used to think at one time
that Mr. Disraeli had a profound personal hatred for Sir Robert Peel
when he was flinging off his philippics against that great minister.
It afterwards appeared clear enough that Mr. Disraeli had no particular
dislike to his opponent, but that he enjoyed attacking an important
statesman.  Pulteney, of course, did actually begin his career of
imbittered opposition because of his quarrel with Walpole; but it is
likely enough that even if no quarrel had ever taken place and he never
had been Walpole's friend and colleague, he would sooner or later have
become the foremost gladiator of opposition all the same.

[Sidenote: 1728--Materials of opposition]

The materials of opposition consisted of three political groups of men.
There were the Jacobites, under Shippen; the Tories who no longer
acknowledged themselves Jacobites, and who were led by Sir William
Wyndham; and there were the discontented Whigs whom Pulteney led and
whose discontent he turned to his own uses.  It had long been a scheme
of Bolingbroke's--up to this time it should perhaps rather be called a
dream than a scheme--to combine these three groups into one distinct
party, having its bond of union in a common detestation of Walpole.
The dream now seemed likely to become a successful scheme.  The
conception of this plan of opposition was unquestionably Bolingbroke's
and not Pulteney's; but it fell to Pulteney's lot to work it out in the
House of Parliament, and he performed his task with consummate ability.
Pulteney was probably the greatest leader of Opposition ever known in
the House of Commons, with the single exception of Mr. Disraeli.
Charles Fox, with all his splendid genius for debate, was not a skilful
or a patient leader of Opposition.  Perhaps he was too great of heart
for such a part; certain it is that as a leader of Opposition he made
some fatal mistakes.  Pulteney seemed cut out for the part which a
strange combination of chances had allowed him to play.  He was not
merely a debater of inexhaustible resource {288} and a master of all
the trick and craft of Parliamentary leadership; but he thoroughly
understood the importance of public support out-of-doors, and the means
of getting at it and retaining it.  Pulteney saw that the time had come
when the English people would have their say in every political
question.

[Sidenote: 1728--Sir William Wyndam]

By the combined influence of Pulteney and Bolingbroke there was formed
a party of ultra-Whigs, who somewhat audaciously called themselves "The
Patriots."  Perhaps the title was first given to them by Walpole, in
contempt; if so, they accepted and adopted it.  Again and again in our
history this phenomenon presents itself.  Some men of ability and
unsatisfied ambition belonging to the Liberal party become discontented
with the policy of their leaders.  When the first opportunity arises
they make a public declaration against that policy.  In the
Conservative ranks there are to be found some other men, also able and
also discontented, to whom the general policy of Opposition seems
unsatisfactory and feeble.  Each of these discontented parties fancies
itself to be truly patriotic, public-spirited, and independent.  The
two factions at length unite for the common good of the country; they
tell the world that they are patriots, that they are the only patriots,
and the world for a while believes them.  This was the condition of
things when Pulteney in Parliament joined with Sir William Wyndham, the
extreme Jacobite, the Wyndham who is mentioned in Pope's poem about his
Twickenham grotto, the Wyndham with whom Bolingbroke corresponded for
many years, and to whom he addressed one of his most important
political manifestoes.  Sir William Wyndham belonged to an old
Somersetshire family.  He was a staunch Tory.  He had powerful
connections; his first wife was a daughter of the haughty Duke of
Somerset.  He entered Parliament and made a considerable figure there.
He had been Secretary at War and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer
under the Tories; he had clung to Bolingbroke's fortunes at the time of
Bolingbroke's {289} rupture with Harley.  He underwent the common fate
of Tory statesmen on the accession of George the First; he was deprived
of office, was accused of taking part in the Jacobite conspiracy, and
was committed to the Tower.  There was, however, no evidence against
him, and he resumed his political career.  His eloquence is described
by Speaker Onslow as "strong, full, and without affectation, arising
chiefly from his clearness, propriety, and argumentation; in the method
of which last, by a sort of induction almost peculiar to himself, he
had a force beyond any man I ever heard in public debates."  Lord
Hervey, who can be trusted not to overdo the praise of any one, says of
Wyndham that "he was very far from having first-rate parts, but by a
gentleman-like general behavior, a constant attendance in the House of
Commons, a close application to the business of it, and frequent
speaking, he had got a sort of Parliamentary routine, and without being
a bright speaker was a popular one, well heard, and useful to his
party."  So far as we now can judge, this seems a very correct estimate
of Wyndham's Parliamentary capacity and position.  He had a noble
presence, singularly graceful and charming manners, and a high personal
character.  A combination between such a man as Pulteney and such a man
as Wyndham could not but be formidable even to the most powerful
minister.

Shippen, the leader of the Jacobites--"honest Shippen," as Pope calls
him--we have often met already.  He was a straightforward, unselfish
man, absolutely given up to his principles and his party.  He was well
read and had written clever pamphlets and telling satirical verses.
His speeches, or such reports of them as can be got at, are full of
striking passages and impressive phrases; they are speeches which even
now one cannot read without interest.  But it would seem that Shippen
often marred the effect of his ideas and his language by a rapid,
careless, and imperfect delivery.  He appears to have been one of the
men who wanted nothing but a clear {290} articulation and effective
utterance to be great Parliamentary debaters, and whom that single want
condemned to comparative failure.  Those who remember the late Sir
George Cornewall Lewis, or, indeed, those who have heard the best
speeches of Lord Sherbrooke, when he was Mr. Robert Lowe, can probably
form a good idea of what Shippen was as a Parliamentary debater.
Shippen was nothing of a statesman, and his occasional eccentricities
of manner and conduct prevented him from obtaining all the influence
which would otherwise have been fairly due to his talents and his
political and personal integrity.

[Sidenote: 1729--The Hessians]

Pulteney's party had in Parliament the frequent, indeed for a time the
habitual, assistance of Wyndham and of Shippen.  Outside Parliament
Bolingbroke intrigued, wrote, and worked with the indomitable energy
and restless craving for activity and excitement which, despite all his
professions of love for philosophic quiet, had been his life-long
characteristic.  The _Craftsman_ was stimulated and guided much more
directly by his inspiration than even by that of Pulteney.  The
_Craftsman_ kept showering out articles, letters, verses, epigrams, all
intended to damage the ministry, and more especially to destroy the
reputation of Walpole.  All was fish that came into the _Craftsman's_
net.  Every step taken by the Government, no matter what it might be,
was made an occasion for ridicule, denunciation, and personal abuse.
Not the slightest scruple was shown in the management of the
_Craftsman_.  If the policy of the Government seemed to tend towards a
Continental war, the _Craftsman_ cried out for peace, and vituperated
the minister who dared to think of involving England in the trumpery
quarrels of foreign States.  Walpole, however, we need hardly say, made
it a set purpose of his administration to maintain peace on the
Continent; and as soon as the patriots began to find out in each
particular instance that his policy was still the same, they turned
round and shrieked against the minister whose feebleness and cowardice
were laying England at the feet of foreign alliances and Continental
{291} despots.  Walpole worked in cordial alliance with the French
Government, the principal member of which was now Cardinal Fleury.  It
became the object of the _Craftsman_ to hold Walpole up to contempt and
derision, as the dupe of a French cardinal and the sycophant of a
French Court.  The example of the _Craftsman_ was speedily followed by
pamphleteers, caricaturists, satirists, and even ballad-mongers without
end.  London and the provinces were flooded with such literature.
Walpole was described as "Sir Blue String," the blue string being a
cheap satirical allusion to the blue ribbon which was supposed to adorn
him as Knight of the Garter.  He was styled Sir Robert Brass, Sir
Robert Lynn, more often simple "Robin" or plain "Bob."  He was pictured
as a systematic promoter of public corruption, as one who fattened on
the taxation wrung from the miserable English taxpayer.  His personal
character, his domestic life, his household expenses, the habits of his
wife, his own social and other enjoyments, were coarsely criticised and
lampooned.  The _Craftsman_ and its imitators attacked not only Walpole
himself, but Walpole's friends.  The political satire of that day was
as indiscriminate as it was unsparing.  It was enough to be a political
or even a personal friend of Walpole to become the object of the
_Craftsman's_ fierce blows.  Pulteney did not even scruple to betray
the confidence of private conversation, and to disclose the words
which, in some unguarded moments of former friendship, Walpole had
spoken of George the Second when George was Prince of Wales.

An excellent opportunity was soon given to Pulteney to make an open and
a damaging attack on the ministry.  Horace Walpole, British Ambassador
to the French Court, had been brought over from Paris to explain and
justify his brother's foreign policy.  The Government put forward a
resolution in the House of Commons on February 7, 1729, for a grant of
some two hundred and fifty thousand pounds "for defraying the expense
of twelve thousand Hessians taken into his Majesty's pay."  Even {292}
if the maintenance of this force had been a positive necessity, which
it certainly was not, it would, nevertheless, have been a necessity
bringing with it disparagement and danger to the Government responsible
for it.  Pulteney made the most of the opportunity, and in a speech of
fine old English flavor denounced the proposal of the ministers.
[Sidenote: 1729--Subsidies voted] He asked with indignation whether
Englishmen were not brave enough or willing enough to defend their own
country without calling in the assistance of foreign mercenaries.  It
might, he admitted, be some advantage to Hanover that German soldiers
should be kept in the pay of England, but he wanted to know what
benefit could come to the English people from paying and maintaining
such a band.  These men were kept, he declared, in the pay of England,
not for the service of England, but for the service of Hanover.  It
need hardly be said that during all the earlier years of the Brunswick
accession, a bare allusion to the name of Hanover was enough to stir an
angry feeling in the minds of the larger number of the English people.
Even the very men who most loyally supported the House of Brunswick
winced and writhed under any allusion to the manner in which the
interests of England were made subservient to the interests of Hanover.
Pulteney therefore took every pains to chafe those sore places with
remorseless energy.  Sir William Wyndham supported Pulteney, and Sir
Robert Walpole himself found it necessary to throw all his influence
into the scale on the other side.  His arguments were of a kind with
which the House of Commons has been familiar during many generations.
His main point was, that by maintaining a large body of soldiers,
Hessian among the rest, the country had been enabled to avoid war.  The
Court of Vienna, with the assistance of Spanish subsidies, had been
making preparation for war, Walpole contended; and were it not for the
maintenance of this otherwise superfluous body of troops, the Emperor
of Austria would probably never have accepted the terms of peace.  "If
you desire peace, {293} prepare for war," may be an excellent maxim,
but its value lies a good deal in its practical application.  It is a
remarkably elastic maxim, and in times nearer to our own than those of
Walpole has been made to expand into a justification of the most
extravagant and unnecessary military armaments and of schemes of
fortification which afterwards were abandoned before they had been half
realized.  In this instance, however, there was something more to be
said against the proposal of the Government.  Some of the speakers in
the debate pointed out that England in former days, if it engaged in a
quarrel with its neighbors, fought the quarrel out with its own
strength, and was not in the habit of buying and maintaining the forces
of foreign princes to help Englishmen to hold their own.  The
resolution, of course, was carried.  It was even carried by an
overwhelming majority: 256 were on the "court side," as it was called,
against 91 on the "country side."  Fifty thousand pounds was also voted
as "one year's subsidy to the King of Sweden," and twenty-five thousand
pounds for one year's subsidy to the Duke of Brunswick.  In order,
however, to appease the consciences of some of those who supported the
resolution as well as those who had opposed it, the Government
permitted what we should now call a "rider" to be added to the
resolution requesting his Majesty that whenever it should be necessary
to take any foreign troops into his service, "he will be graciously
pleased to use his endeavors that they be clothed with the manufactures
of Great Britain."  It was supposed to be some solace to the wounded
national pride of Englishmen to be assured that if they had to pay
foreigners to fight for them, the foreigners should at least not be
allowed to come to this country clothed in the manufactures of their
own land, but would be compelled to buy their garments over the counter
of an English shop.

On Friday, February 21st, an event which led directly and indirectly to
results of some importance occurred.  Three petitions from the
merchants trading in tobacco {294} in London, Bristol, and Liverpool
were presented to the House of Commons.  These petitions complained of
great interruptions for several years past of the trade with the
British colonies in America by the Spaniards.  The depredations of the
Spanish, it was said, endangered the entire loss of that valuable trade
to England.  The Spaniards were accused of having treated such of his
Majesty's subjects as had fallen into their hands in a barbarous and
cruel manner.  The petitioners prayed for the consideration of the
House of Commons, and such timely remedy as the House should think fit
to recommend.  These petitions only preceded a great many others, all
in substance to the same effect.  The Commons entered upon the
consideration of the subject in a Committee of the whole House, heard
several petitioners, and examined many witnesses.  An address was
presented to the Crown, asking for copies of all memorials, petitions,
and representations to the late King or the present, in relation to
Spanish captures of British ships.  [Sidenote: 1729--The Campeachy
logwood] Copies were also asked for of the reports laid before the King
by the Commissioners of Trade and of Plantations, concerning the
dispute between England and Spain, with regard to the rights of the
subjects of Great Britain to cut logwood in the Bay of Campeachy, on
the western shore of that Yucatan peninsula which juts into the Gulf of
Mexico.  English traders had been for a long time in the habit of
cutting logwood along the shores in the Bay of Campeachy, and the
logwood trade had come to be one of the greatest importance to the West
Indies and to England.  The Spanish Government claimed the right to put
a stop to this cutting of logwood, and the Spanish Viceroy and Governor
had in some instances declared that they would dislodge the Englishmen
from the settlements which they had established, and even treat them as
pirates if they persisted in their trade.  There was, in fact, all the
material growing up for a serious quarrel between England and Spain.

Despite the recent treaties which were supposed to {295} secure the
peace of Europe, the times were very critical.  "The British nation,"
says a contemporary writer, "had for many years past been in a state of
uncertainty, scarce knowing friends from foes, or indeed whether we had
either."  Each new treaty seemed only to disturb the balance of power,
as it was called, in a new way.  The Quadruple Alliance was intended to
rectify the defects of the Treaty of Utrecht; but it gave too much
power to the Emperor, and it increased the bitterness and the
discontent of the King of Spain.  The Treaty of Vienna, made between
the Empire and Spain, was justly regarded in England as portending
danger to this country.  It was even more dangerous than Englishmen in
general supposed at the time, although Walpole knew its full purport
and menace.  The Treaty of Vienna led to the Treaty of Hanover, an
arrangement made in the closing years of George the First's reign
between Great Britain, France, and Prussia, by virtue of which if any
one of the contracting parties were to be attacked, the other two were
pledged to come to the assistance with funds and with arms.  All these
arrangements were in the highest degree artificial; some of them might
fairly be described as unnatural.  It might be taken for granted that
not one of the States whom they professed to bind to this side or to
that would hold to the engagements one hour longer than would serve her
own interests.  No safety was secured by these overlapping treaties; no
one had any faith in them.  It was quite true that England did not know
her friends from her enemies about the time at which we have now
arrived.

The dispute between England and Spain concerning the question of the
Campeachy logwood was to involve a controversy as to the interpretation
of certain passages in the Treaty of Utrecht.  It was distinctly a
matter for calm consideration, for compromise, and for an amicable
settlement.  But each of the two parties mainly concerned showed its
desire to push its own claim to an extreme.  English traders have never
been particularly {296} moderate or considerate in pressing their
supposed rights to trade with foreign countries.  In this instance they
were strongly backed up, encouraged, and stimulated by the band of
Englishmen who chose to call themselves "The Patriots."  Few of the
"Patriots," we venture to think, cared a rush about the question of the
Campeachy logwood, or were very deeply grieved because Spain bore
herself in a high-handed fashion towards certain English merchants and
ship-owners.  But the opportunity seemed to the "Patriots" admirably
adapted for worrying and harassing, not the Spaniards, but the
administration of Sir Robert Walpole.  They used the opportunity to the
very full.  [Sidenote: 1729--Gibraltar] The debates on the conduct of
Spain brought out in the House of Lords the acknowledgment of the fact
that King George I. had at one time actually written to the Government
of Spain, distinctly undertaking to bring about the restitution of
Gibraltar.  A copy of the letter in French, with a translation, was
laid before the House.  It seemed that on June 1, 1721, George, the
late King, wrote to the King of Spain, "Sir, my brother," a letter
concerning the treaties then in the course of being re-established
between England and Spain.  In that letter occurred these words: "I do
no longer balance to assure your Majesty of my readiness to satisfy you
with regard to your demand touching the restitution of Gibraltar;
promising you to make use of the first favorable opportunity to
regulate this article with the consent of my Parliament."  The House of
Lords had a long and warm debate on this subject.  A resolution was
proposed, declaring that "for the honor of his Majesty, and the
preservation and security of the trade and commerce of this kingdom,"
care should be taken "that the King of Spain do renounce all claim and
pretension to Gibraltar and the island of Minorca, in plain and strong
terms."  This resolution, however, was thought in the end to be rather
too strong, and it was modified into a declaration that the Lords "do
entirely rely upon his Majesty, that he will, for the maintaining the
honor and securing the {297} trade of this kingdom, take effectual care
in the present treaty to preserve his undoubted right to Gibraltar and
the island of Minorca."  This resolution was communicated to the House
of Commons, and the Lords asked for a conference with that House in the
Painted Chamber.  The Commons had a long debate on the subject.  The
Opposition strongly denounced the ministers who had advised the late
King to write such a letter, and declared that it implied a positive
promise to surrender Gibraltar to Spain.  The courtiers, as the
supporters of the Ministry were then called, to distinguish them from
the country party--that is to say, the Opposition--endeavored to
qualify and make light of the expressions used in the late King's
letter, to show that they were merely hypothetical and conditional, and
insisted that effectual care had since been taken in every way to
maintain the right of England to Gibraltar.  The country party moved
that words be added to the Lords' resolution requiring "that all
pretensions on the part of the Crown of Spain to the said places be
specifically given up."  Two hundred and sixty-seven votes against one
hundred and eleven refused the addition of these words as unnecessary,
and too much in the nature of a challenge and defiance to Spain.  But
the motion that "this House does agree with the Lords in the said
resolution" was carried without a division, the Court party not
venturing to offer any objection to it.  The King received the address
of both Houses on Tuesday, March 25th, and returned an answer thanking
them for the confidence reposed in him, and assuring them that "I will
take effectual care, as I have hitherto done, to secure my undoubted
right to Gibraltar and the island of Minorca."

The difficulty was over for the present.  The Government contrived to
arrange a new treaty with Spain, the Treaty of Seville, in which France
also was included.  This treaty settled for the time the disputes about
English trade with the New World, and the claims of Spain for a
restoration of Gibraltar were, indirectly at least, {298} given up.
Perhaps the whole story is chiefly interesting now as affording an
illustration of the manner in which the Patriots turned everything to
account for their one great purpose of harassing the administration of
Sir Robert Walpole.  All the patriotic effusiveness about the undoubted
right of England to Gibraltar was merely well-painted passion.  Such
sentiment as exists in the English mind with regard to the possession
of "the Rock" now, did not exist, had not had time to come into
existence, then.  Gibraltar was taken in 1704; its possession was
confirmed to England by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Since that time
English Ministers had again and again been considering the expediency
of restoring Gibraltar to the Spaniards.  Stanhope had been in favor of
the restoration; Townshend and Carteret had been in favor of it.  Some
of the Patriots themselves, before they came to be dubbed Patriots, had
been in favor of it.  Only the unreasonable and insolent behavior of
Spain herself stood at one time in the way of the restitution.
Gibraltar was one capture, like many others; captured territory changed
and changed hands with each new arrangement in those days.  Minorca,
which was included with Gibraltar in the resolution of the two Houses
of Parliament and the consequent promise of the King, was taken by the
English forces shortly after the capture of Gibraltar, and was settled
upon England by the same Treaty of Utrecht.  Yet, as we all know, it
was given up by England at the peace of Amiens, and no tears of grief
were shed by any English eyes.  But the discovery that the late King
had at one time been willing to restore Gibraltar to Spain for a
consideration came in most opportunely for the Patriots.  To most of
them it was, of course, no discovery at all.  They had always known of
the intention, and some of them had approved of it.  None the less
shrill were their cries of surprise; none the less vociferous their
shouts of patriotic anger.




{299}

CHAPTER XX.

A VICTORY FOR THE PATRIOTS.

[Sidenote: 1729--Death of Congreve]

Literature lost some great names in the early part of George the
Second's reign.  William Congreve and Richard Steele both died in 1729.
Congreve's works do not belong to the time of which we are writing.  He
was not sixty years old when he died, and he had long ceased to take
any active part in literature.  Swift deplores, in a letter to an
acquaintance, "the death of our friend Mr. Congreve, whom I loved from
my youth, and who surely, besides his other talents, was a very
agreeable companion."  Swift adds that Congreve "had the misfortune to
squander away a very good constitution in his younger days," and "upon
his own account I could not much desire the continuance of his life
under so much pain and so many infirmities."  Congreve was beyond
comparison the greatest English comic dramatist of his time.  Since the
days of Ben Jonson and until the days of Sheridan there was no one who
could fairly be compared with him.  His comedy was not in the least
like the bold, broad, healthy, Aristophanic humor of Ben Jonson; the
two stand better in contrast than in comparison.  Jonson drew from the
whole living English world of his time; Congreve drew from the men and
women whom he had seen in society.  Congreve took society as he found
it in his earlier days.  The men and women with whom he then mixed were
for the most part flippant, insincere, corrupt, and rather proud of
their corruption; and Congreve filled his plays with figures very
lifelike for such a time.  He has not drawn many men or women whom one
could admire.  Even his heroines, if they are chaste in their lives,
{300} are anything but pure in their conversation, and seem to have no
moral principle beyond that which is represented by what Heine calls an
"anatomical chastity."  Angelica, the heroine of "Love for Love," is
evidently meant by Congreve to be all that a charming young
Englishwoman ought to be; and she is charming, fresh, and fascinating
even still.  But she occasionally talks in a manner which would be a
little strong for a barrack-room now; and nothing gives her more
genuine delight than to twit her kind, fond old uncle with his wife's
infidelities, to make it clear to him that all the world is acquainted
with the full particulars of his shame, and to sport with his jealous
agonies.  Congreve was the first dramatic author who put an English
seaman on the stage; and, after his characteristic fashion, he made his
Ben Legend a selfish, coarse, and ruffianly lout.  But if one cannot
admire many of Congreve's characters, on the other hand one cannot help
admiring every sentence they speak.  The only fault to be found with
their talk is that it is too witty, too brilliant, for any manner of
real life.  Society would have to be all composed of male and female
Congreves to make such conversation possible.  There is more strength,
originality, and depth in it than even in the conversation in "The
Rivals" and "The School for Scandal."  The same fault has been found
with Sheridan which is to be found with Congreve.  We need not make too
much of it.  No warning example is called for.  There will never be
many dramatists whose dialogue will deserve the censure of critics on
the ground that it is too witty.

[Sidenote: 1729--Death of Steele]

Of Steele we have often had occasion to speak.  His fame has been
growing rather than fading with time.  At one period he was ranked by
critics as far below the level of Addison; few men now would not set
him on a pedestal as high.  He was more natural, more simple, more
fresh than Addison.  There is some justice in the remark of Hazlitt
that "Steele seems to have gone into his closet chiefly to set down
what he had observed out-of-doors;" {301} while Addison appears "to
have spent most of his time in his study," spinning out to the utmost
there the hints "which he borrowed from Steele or took from nature."
Every one, however, will cordially say with Hazlitt, "I am far from
wishing to depreciate Addison's talents, but I am anxious to do justice
to Steele."  There are not many names in English literature round which
a greater affection clings than that of Steele.  Leigh Hunt, in writing
of Congreve, speaks of "the love of the highest aspirations" which he
sometimes displays, and which makes us think of what he might have been
under happier and purer auspices.  Leigh Hunt refers in especial to
Congreve's essay in the _Tatler_ on the character of Lady Elizabeth
Hastings, whom Congreve calls Aspasia--"an effusion so full of
enthusiasm for the moral graces, and worded with an appearance of
sincerity so cordial, that we can never read it without thinking it
must have come from Steele."  "It is in this essay," Leigh Hunt goes
on, "that he says one of the most elegant and truly loving things that
were ever uttered by an unworldly passion: 'To love her is a liberal
education.'"  Leigh Hunt's critical judgment was better than his
information.  The words "to love her is a liberal education" are by
Steele, and not by Congreve.  They do not appear in the essay by
Congreve on the character of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, but in a
subsequent essay by Steele, in which, after a fashion common enough in
the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_, one author takes up some figure
created or described by another, and gives it new touches and commends
it afresh to the reader.  Steele was doing this with Congreve's picture
of Aspasia, and it was then that he crowned the whole work by the
exquisite and immortal words which Leigh Hunt could never read without
thinking they must have come from the man who was in fact their author.

If literature had its losses in these years, it had also its gains.
Not long before the time at which we have now arrived, English
literature had achieved three great successes.  Pope wrote the first
three books of his {302} "Dunciad," Swift published his "Gulliver's
Travels," and Gay set the town wild with his "Beggar's Opera."  We are
far from any thought of classifying the "Beggar's Opera" as a work of
art on a level with the "Dunciad" or "Gulliver's Travels," but in its
way it is a masterpiece.  It is thoroughly original, fresh, and vivid.
It added one or two distinctly new figures to the humorous drama.  It
is clever as a satire and charming as a story.  One cannot be surprised
that when it had the attraction of novelty the public raved about it.
To say anything about "Gulliver's Travels" or the "Dunciad," except to
note the historical fact that each was published, would of course be
mere superfluity and waste of words.

In 1731 the first steps were taken in a reform of some importance in
the liberation of our legal procedure.  It was arranged that English
should be substituted for Latin in the presentments, indictments,
pleadings, and all other documents used in our courts of law.  The
early stages of this most wise and needful reform were met with much
opposition by lawyers and pedants.  One main argument employed in favor
of the retention of the old system was that, if the language of our
legal documents were to be changed, no man would be at the pains of
studying Latin any more, and that in a few years no one would be able
to read a word of some of our own most valuable historical records.  It
was mildly suggested on the other side that there would always be some
men among us who "either out of curiosity, or for the sake of gain,"
would make it their business to keep up the knowledge of Latin, and
that a very few of such antiquarians would suffice to give the country
all the information drawn from Latin records which it could possibly
require or care to have.  We have had some experience since that time,
and it does not appear that the disuse of Latin in our legal documents
has led to its falling into absolute disuse among reading men.  There
are still among us, and apparently will always be, persons who, "either
out of curiosity, or for the sake of gain," keep up their knowledge of
Latin.  {303} The curiosity to read Virgil and Horace and Cicero and
Caesar, in the tongue which those authors employed, is more keen than
it ever was before.  Men indulge themselves freely in it, even without
reference to the sake of gain.

[Sidenote: 1731--Quarrel of Walpole and Townshend]

Meanwhile a change long foreseen by those who were in the inner
political circles was rapidly approaching.  The combination between
Walpole and his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, was about to be broken
up.  It had for a long time been a question whether it was to be the
firm of Townshend and Walpole, or Walpole and Townshend; and of late
years the question was becoming settled.  If the firm was to endure at
all, it must clearly be Walpole and Townshend.  Walpole had been
growing every day in power and influence.  The King, as well as the
Queen, treated him openly and privately as the head of the Government.
Townshend saw this, and felt bitterly aggrieved.  He had for a long
time been a much more powerful personage socially than Walpole, and he
could not bear with patience the supremacy which Walpole was all too
certainly obtaining.  Great part of that supremacy was due to Walpole's
superiority of talents; but something was due also to the fact that the
House of Commons was becoming a much more important assembly than the
House of Lords.  The result was inevitable.  Townshend for a long time
struggled against it.  He tried to intrigue against Walpole; he did his
best to ingratiate himself with the King.  He was a man of austere
character and stainless life; but he seems, nevertheless, to have tried
at one time the merest arts of the political intriguer to supplant his
brother-in-law in the favor and confidence of the King.  Perhaps he
might have succeeded--it is at least possible--but for the watchful
intelligence of Queen Caroline.  She saw through all Townshend's
schemes, and took care that they should not succeed.  At last the two
rivals quarrelled.  Their quarrel broke out very openly, in the
drawing-room of a lady, and in the presence of several distinguished
{304} persons.  From hot words they were going on to a positive
personal struggle, when the spectators at last intervened to "pluck
them asunder," in the words of the King in "Hamlet."  They were plucked
asunder, and then there was talk of a duel.  The friends of both
succeeded in preventing this scandal, but the brothers-in-law were
never thoroughly reconciled, and after a short time Lord Townshend
resigned his office.  He withdrew from public life altogether, and
devoted his remaining years to the enjoyment of the country and the
cultivation of agriculture.  It is to his credit that when once he had
given way to the superior influence of Walpole, he did not afterwards
cabal against him, or try to injure him, according to the fashion of
the statesmen of the time.  On the contrary, when he was once pressed
to join in an attack on Walpole's ministry, he firmly refused to do
anything of the kind.  He said he had resolved to take no further part
in political contests, and he did not mean to break his resolution.  He
was particularly determined not to depart from his resolve in this
case, he explained, because his temper was hot, and he was apprehensive
that he might be hurried away by personal resentment to take a course
which in his cooler moments he should have to regret.  Nothing in his
public life, perhaps, became him so well as his dignified conduct in
his retirement.  His place in history is not strongly marked; in this
history we shall not hear of him any more.

[Sidenote: 1730--Signs of change in foreign policy]

Colonel Stanhope, who had made the Treaty of Seville, and had been
raised to the peerage as Lord Harrington for his services, succeeded
Townshend as Secretary of State.  Horace Walpole, the brother of
Robert, was at his own request recalled from Paris.  Walpole, the
Prime-minister, had begun to see that it would be necessary for the
future to have something like a good understanding with Austria.  The
friendship with France had been a priceless advantage in its time, but
Walpole believed that it had served its turn.  It was valuable to
England chiefly because it had enabled the Sovereign to keep {305} the
movements of the Stuart party in check, and Walpole hoped that the
House of Hanover was now secure on the throne, and believed, with too
sanguine a confidence, that no other effort would be made to disturb
it.  Moreover, he saw some reason to think that France, no longer
guided by the political intelligence of a man like the Duke of Orleans,
was drawing a little too close in her relationship with Spain.  Walpole
was already looking forward to the coming of a time when it might be
necessary for England to strengthen herself against France and Spain,
and he therefore desired to get into a good understanding with the
Emperor and Austria.

Walpole now had the Government entirely to himself.  He was not merely
all-powerful in the administration, he actually was the administration.
The King knew him to be indispensable; the Queen put the fullest trust
in him.  His only trouble was with the intrigues of Bolingbroke and the
opposition of Pulteney.  The latter sometimes affected what would have
been called at the time a "mighty unconcern" about political affairs.
Writing once to Pope, he says, "Mrs. Pulteney is now in labor; if she
does well, and brings me a boy, I shall not care one sixpence how much
longer Sir Robert governs England, or Horace governs France."  This was
written while Horace Walpole was still Ambassador at the French Court.
Pulteney, however, was very far from feeling anything like the
philosophical indifference which he expressed in his letter to Pope.
He never ceased to attack everything done by the Ministry, and to
satirize every word said by Walpole.  At the same time Pulteney was
complaining bitterly to his friends of the attacks made on him by the
supporters of Walpole.  On February 9, 1730, he wrote a letter to
Swift, in which he says that "certain people" had been driven by want
of argument "to that last resort of calling names: villain, traitor,
seditious rascal, and such ingenious appellations have frequently been
bestowed on a couple of friends of yours."  "Such usage," he
complacently adds, "has made it {306} necessary to return the same
polite language; and there has been more Billingsgate stuff uttered
from the press within these two months than ever was known before."
Swift himself had previously written to his friend Dr. Sheridan a
letter in which he declared that "Walpole is peevish and disconcerted,
stoops to the vilest offices of hireling scoundrels to write
Billingsgate of the lowest and most prostitute kind, and has none but
beasts and blockheads for his penmen, whom he pays in ready guineas
very liberally."  One would have thought that beasts and blockheads
could hardly prove very formidable enemies to Swift and Bolingbroke and
Pulteney.

[Sidenote: 1730--Lord Hervey]

One of the incidents in the controversy carried on by the Ministerial
penmen and the _Craftsman_ was a duel between Pulteney and Lord Hervey.
Pulteney and his friends were apparently under the impression that they
had a right to a monopoly of personal abuse, and they resented any
effusion of the kind from the other side as a breach of their
privilege.  Hervey had written a tract called "Sedition and Defamation
displayed, in a Letter to the Author of the _Craftsman_;" and this led
to a new outburst of passion on both sides.  Pulteney stigmatized
Hervey, on account of his effeminate appearance, as a thing that was
half man, half woman, and a duel took place in which Hervey was
wounded.  Hervey was a remarkable man.  His physical frame was as
feeble as that of Voltaire.  He suffered from epilepsy and a variety of
other ailments.  He had to live mainly on a dietary of ass's milk.  His
face was so meagre and so pallid, or rather livid, that he used to
paint and make up like an actress or a fine lady.  Pope, who might have
been considerate to the weak of frame, was merciless in his ridicule of
Hervey.  He ridiculed him as Sporus, who could neither feel satire nor
sense, and as Lord Fanny.  Yet Hervey could appreciate satire and
sense; could write satire and sense.  He was a man of very rare
capacity.  He had already distinguished himself as a debater in the
House of Commons, and was afterwards to distinguish himself as a {307}
debater in the House of Lords.  He wrote pretty verses and clever
pamphlets, and he has left to the world a collection of "Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second," which will always be read for its
vivacity, its pungency, its bitterness, and its keen, penetrating
good-sense.  Hervey succeeded in obtaining the hand of one of the most
beautiful women of the day, the charming Mary Lepell, whose name has
been celebrated in more than one poetical panegyric by Pope, and he
captivated the heart of one of the royal princesses.  The historical
reader must strike a sort of balance for himself in getting at an
estimate of Hervey's character.  No man has been more bitterly
denounced by his enemies or more warmly praised by his friends.
Affectation, insincerity, prodigality, selfishness, servility to the
great, contempt for the humble, are among the qualities his opponents
ascribe to him.  According to his friends, his cynicism was a mere
affectation to hide a sensitive and generous nature; his bitterness
arose from his disappointment at finding so few men or women who came
up to a really high standard of nobleness; his homage of the great was
but the half-disguised mockery of a scornful philosopher.  Probably the
picture drawn by the friends is on the whole more near to life than
that painted by the enemies.  The world owes him some thanks for a
really interesting book, the very boldness and bitterness of which
enhance to a certain extent its historical value.  At this time Hervey
was but little over thirty years of age.  He was the son of the first
Earl of Bristol by a second marriage, had been educated at Westminster
School and at Clare Hall, Cambridge; had gone early through the usual
round of Continental travels, and became a friend of George the First's
grandson, now Prince of Wales, at Hanover.  This friendship not merely
did not endure, but soon turned into hate.  Hervey was an admirer of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and was admired by her; but her own
assurances, which may be trusted to, declared that there had been
nothing warmer than friendship between them.  Lady Mary afterwards
{308} maintained that the relationship between Hervey and her
established the possibility of "a long and steady friendship subsisting
between two persons of different sexes without the least admixture of
love."  Hervey was in his day a somewhat free and liberal lover of
women, and it is not surprising that the world should have regarded his
acquaintanceship with Lady Mary as something warmer than mere
friendship.  We shall have occasion to refer to Hervey's memoirs of the
reign of George the Second more than once hereafter, and may perhaps
now cite a few words which Hervey himself says in vindication of their
sincerity and their historical accuracy; "No one who did not live in
these times will, I dare say, believe but some of those I describe in
these papers must have had some hard features and deformities
exaggerated and heightened by the malice and ill-nature of the painter
who drew them.  Others, perhaps, will say that at least no painter is
obliged to draw every wart or wen or humpback in its full proportions,
and that I might have softened these blemishes where I found them.  But
I am determined to report everything just as it is, or at least just as
it appears to me; and those who have a curiosity to see courts and
courtiers dissected, must bear with the dirt they find in laying open
such minds with as little nicety and as much patience as, in a
dissection of their bodies, if they wanted to see that operation, they
must submit to the disgust."

Hervey fought with spirit and effect on the side of Walpole, although
Lady Hervey strongly disliked the Minister and was disliked by him.
Walpole had at one time, it was said, made unsuccessful love to the
beautiful and witty Molly Lepell, and he did not forgive her because of
her scornful rejection of his ponderous attempts at gallantry.  Hervey,
nevertheless, took Walpole's side, and proved to be an ally of some
importance.  A great struggle was approaching, in which the whole
strength of Walpole's hold on the Sovereign and the country was to be
tested by the severest strain.

{309}

[Sidenote: 1730--The Sinking Fund]

Walpole was, as we have said more than once, the first of the great
financier statesmen of England.  He was the first statesman who
properly appreciated the virtue and the value of mere economy in the
disposal of a nation's revenues.  He was the first to devise anything
like a solid and symmetrical plan for the fair adjustment of taxation.
Sometimes he had recourse to rather poor and common-place artifices, as
in the case of his proposal to meet a certain financial strain by
borrowing half a million from the Sinking Fund.  This proposal he
carried by a large majority, in spite of the most vehement and even
furious opposition on the part of the Patriots.  It must be owned that
the Patriots were right enough in the principle of their objection to
this encroachment on the Sinking Fund, although their predictions as to
the ruin it must bring upon the country were preposterous.  Borrowing
from a sinking fund is always rather a shabby dodge; but it is a trick
familiar to all statesmen in difficulties, and Walpole did no worse
than many statesmen of later days, who, with the full advantages of a
sound and well-developed financial system, have shown that they were
not able to do any better.

The Patriots seem to have made up their minds to earn their title.
They fought the "Court," or Ministerial, party on a variety of issues.
They supported motions for the reduction of the numbers of the army,
and they declaimed against the whole principle of a standing army with
patriotic passion, which sometimes appeared for the time quite genuine.
They brought illustrations of all kinds, applicable and inapplicable,
from Greek and Roman, from French and Spanish history, even from
Eastern history, to show that a standing army was invariably the
instrument of despotism and the forerunner of doom to the liberties of
a people.  The financial policy of the Government gave them frequent
opportunities for using the sword of the partisan behind the fluttering
cloak of the patriot.  On both sides of the House there was
considerable confusion of ideas on the subject of political economy
{310} and the incidence of taxation.  Walpole was ahead of his own
party as well as of his opponents on such subjects; his followers were
little more enlightened than his antagonists.

[Sidenote: 1732--The American colonies]

In 1732 there was presented to the House of Commons an interesting
report from the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations on "the state
of his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America, with respect to
any laws made, manufactures set up, and trade carried on there, which
may affect the trade, navigation, and manufactures of this kingdom."
From this report we learn that at the time there were three different
systems of government prevailing in the American colonies.  Some
provinces were immediately under the administration of the Crown: these
were Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, the Jerseys, New York, Virginia, the
two Carolinas, Bermuda, Bahama Islands, Jamaica, Barbadoes, and the
Leeward Islands.  Others were vested in proprietors--Pennsylvania, for
example, and Maryland--and the Bahamas and the two Carolinas had not
long before been in the same condition.  There were three Charter
Governments, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, in which the
power was divided between the Crown and the population, where the
people chose their representative assemblies, and the Governor was
dependent upon the Assembly for his annual support, "which," as the
report observed ingenuously, "has so frequently laid the Governor of
such a province under temptations of giving up the prerogative of the
Crown and the interest of Great Britain."  The report contains a very
full account of the state of manufactures in all the provinces.  New
York, for example, had no manufactures "that deserved mentioning;" the
trade there "consisted chiefly in furs, whalebone, oil, pitch, tar, and
provisions."  In Massachusetts "the inhabitants worked up their wool
and flax, and made an ordinary coarse cloth for their own use, but did
not export any."  In Pennsylvania the "chief trade lay in the
exportation of provisions and lumber," and there were {311} "no
manufactures established, their clothing and utensils for their houses
being all imported from Great Britain."  For the object of the whole
report was not to discover how far the energy of the colonists was
developing the resources of the colonies, in order that the Government
and the people of England might be gratified with a knowledge of the
progress made, and give their best encouragement to further progress.
The inquiry was set on foot in order to find out whether the colonists
were presuming to manufacture for themselves any goods which they ought
by right to buy from English makers, and to recommend steps by which
such audacious enterprises might be rebuked and prevented.  This is the
avowed object of the report, and we find governor after governor
assuring the Commissioners earnestly and plaintively that the
population of his province really manufacture nothing, or at all events
nothing that could possibly interfere with the sacred privileges of the
English monopolists.  The report significantly recommends the House of
Commons to take into consideration the question "whether it might not
be expedient to give these colonies proper encouragements for turning
their industry to such manufactures and products as might be of service
to Great Britain, and more particularly to the production of all kinds
of naval stores."  The proper encouragement given to this sort of
productiveness would imply, of course, proper discouragement given to
anything else.  The colonies were to exist merely for the convenience
and benefit of the so-called mother country, a phrase surely of
sardonic impressiveness.  Such, however, was the common feeling of that
day in England.  It was so with regard to India; it was so with regard
to Ireland.  The story of the pelican was reversed.  The pelican did
not in this case feed her young with her blood; the young were expected
to give their blood to feed the pelican.

The real strain was to come when Walpole should introduce his famous
and long-expected scheme for a reform in the customs and excise laws.
Walpole's scheme {312} was inspired by two central ideas.  One of these
was to diminish the amount of taxation imposed on the land of the
country, and make up the deficiency by indirect taxation; the other was
to reduce the customs duties by substituting as far as possible an
excise duty.  Walpole would have desired something like free-trade as
regarded the introduction of food and the raw materials of manufacture.
Let these be got into the country as easily and freely as possible was
his principle, and then let us see afterwards how we can adjust the
excise duties so as to produce the largest amount of revenue with the
smallest injury to the interest of the consumer, and with the minimum
of waste.  His design was that the necessaries of life and the raw
materials of manufacture should remain as nearly as possible untaxed,
and that the revenue of the country should be collected from land and
from luxuries.  We do not mean to say that the plans which Walpole
presented to the country were faithful in all their details to these
central ideas.  One scheme at least which he laid before Parliament was
positively at variance with the main principles which he had long been
trying to establish.  But in considering the whole controversy between
him and his opponents, the reader may take it for granted that such
were the principles by which his financial policy was inspired.  He had
been moving quietly in this direction for some time.  He had removed
the import duties from tea, coffee, and chocolate, and made them
subject to inland or excise duties.  In 1732 he revived the salt tax.
The Bill which was introduced on February 9, 1732, to accomplish this
object, met with a strong opposition in both Houses of Parliament.
Walpole's speech in introducing the motion for the revival of the tax
contained a very clear statement of his financial creed.  "Where every
man contributes a small share, a great sum may be raised for the public
service without any man's being sensible of what he pays; whereas a
small sum raised upon a few, lies heavy upon each particular man, and
is the more grievous in that it is unjust; for where {313} the benefit
is mutual, the expense ought to be in common." [Sidenote:
1732--Opposition alarm] The general principle is unassailable; but
Walpole seems to us to have been quite wrong in his application of it
to such an impost as the salt tax.  "Of all the taxes I ever could
think of," he argued, "there is not one more general, nor one less
felt, than that of the duty upon salt."  He described it as a "tax that
every man in the nation contributes to according to his circumstances
and condition in life."  This is exactly what every man does not do.
The family of the rich man does not by any means consume more salt than
the family of the poor man in proportion to their respective incomes.
Pulteney knocked Walpole's argument all to pieces in a speech of
remarkable force and ingenuity even for him.  There was something
honestly pathetic in his appeal on behalf of the poor man, whom the
duty on salt would touch most nearly.  The tax, he said, would be at
least one shilling a head for every man or woman able to work; to a man
with a family it would average four shillings and sixpence a year.
Such a yearly sum "may be looked upon as a trifle by a gentleman of a
large estate and easy circumstances, but a poor man feels sometimes
severely the want of a shilling; many a poor man has for want of a
shilling been obliged to pawn the only whole coat he had to his back,
and has never been able to redeem it again.  Even a farthing to a poor
man is a considerable sum; what shifts do the frugal among them make to
save even a farthing!"

Had all Pulteney's speech been animated by this spirit he would have
made out an unanswerable case.  The objection to a salt tax in England
then was not so great as in India at a later period; but the principle
of the tax was undoubtedly bad, while the general principle of
Walpole's finance was undoubtedly good.  The question, however, was not
argued out by Pulteney or any other speaker on his side upon such a
ground as the hardship to the poor man.  The tyranny of an excise
system, of any excise system, its unconstitutional, despotic, and
inquisitorial nature--this was the chief ground of attack.  Sir {314}
William Wyndham sounded the alarm which was soon to be followed by a
tremendous echo.  He declared the proposed tax "not only destructive to
the trade, but inconsistent with the liberties of this nation."  The
very number of the officers who would have to be appointed to collect
this one tax, who would be named by the Crown and scattered all over
the country, would have immense influence on the elections; and this
fact alone would give a power into the hands of the Crown greater than
was consistent with the liberties of the people, and "of the most
dangerous consequence to our happy constitution."  The Bill passed the
House of Commons, and was read a first time in the House of Lords on
March 22d.  The second reading was moved on March 27th, and a long
debate took place.  Not the least interesting fact concerning this
debate was that the leading part in opposition to the Bill was taken by
Lord Carteret, who had returned from his Irish Government, and was
beginning to show himself a pertinacious and a formidable enemy of
Walpole and his administration.  Carteret outshone even Pulteney and
Wyndham in wholesale and extravagant denunciation of the measure.  He
likened it to the domestic policy of Cardinal Richelieu, by which the
estates of the nobility and gentry were virtually confiscated to the
Crown, and the liberties of the people were lost.  It would place it in
the power of a wicked administration to reduce the English people to
the same condition as the people in Turkey; "their only resource will
be in mobs and tumults, and the prevailing party will administer
justice by general massacres and proscriptions."  All this may now seem
sheer absurdity; but for the purposes of Carteret and Pulteney it was
by no means absurd.  The salt tax was carried through the House of
Lords; but the public out-of-doors were taught to believe that the
Minister's financial policy was merely a series of artifices for the
destruction of popular rights, and for robbing England of her political
liberty.

[Sidenote: 1733--"A very terrible affair"]

Walpole had long had in his mind a measure of a different {315}
nature--a measure to readjust the duties on tobacco and wine.  It was
known that he was preparing some bill on the subject, and the
excitement which was beginning to show itself at the time of the salt
tax debates was turned to account by the Opposition to forestall the
popular reception of the expected measure.  The cry was got up that the
administration were planning a scheme for a general excise, and the
bare idea of a general excise was then odious and terrible to the
public.  Whatever Walpole's final purposes may have been, there was
nothing to alarm any one in the scheme which he was presently to
introduce.  Nobody now would think of impugning the soundness of the
economical principles on which his moderate, limited, and tentative
scheme of fiscal reform was founded.

The coming event threw its shadow before it, and the shadow became
marvellously distorted.  Pulteney, speaking on February 23, 1733, with
regard to the Sinking Fund proposal, talked of the expected excise
scheme in language of such exaggeration that it is impossible to
believe the orator could have felt anything like the alarm and horror
he expressed.  There is "a very terrible affair impending," Pulteney
said, "a monstrous project--yea, more monstrous than has ever yet been
represented.  It is such a project as has struck terror into the minds
of most gentlemen within this House, and into the minds of all men
without-doors who have any regard to the happiness or to the
constitution of their country.  I mean that monster the excise; that
plan of arbitrary power which is expected to be laid before this House
in the present session of Parliament."  Sir John Barnard, one of the
members for the City of London, a man of great respectability,
capacity, and influence, ventured to predict that Walpole's scheme
would "turn out to be his eternal shame and dishonor, and that the more
the project is examined, and the consequences thereof considered, the
more the projector will be hated and despised."

Of all this strong language Walpole took little account.  {316} He
meant to propose his scheme, he said, when the proper time should come,
and he did not doubt but that honorable members would find it something
very different from the vague and monstrous project of which they had
been told.  In any case he meant to propose it.  [Sidenote:
1733--Walpole's scheme] Accordingly, on Wednesday, March 7, 1733,
Walpole moved that the House should on that day week resolve itself
into a committee "to consider of the most proper methods for the better
security and improvement of the duties and revenues already charged
upon and payable from tobacco and wines."  On the day appointed,
Wednesday, March 14th, the House went into committee accordingly, and
Walpole expounded his scheme.  It was simply a plan to deal with the
duties on wines and tobacco, and Walpole protested that his views and
purposes were confined altogether to these two branches of the revenue,
and that such a thing as a scheme for a general excise had never
entered into his head, "nor, for what I know, into the head of any man
I am acquainted with."  There was in the mind of the English people
then a vague horror of all excise laws and excise officers, and the
whole opposition to Walpole's scheme in and out of the House of Commons
was maintained by an appeal to that common feeling.  Walpole's
resolutions with regard to the tobacco trade were taken first and
separately.  It will soon be seen that the resolutions concerning the
duties on wine were destined never to be discussed at all.  What
Walpole proposed to do in regard to tobacco was to make the customs
duty very small and to increase the excise duty; to establish bonded
warehouses for the storing of the tobacco imported into this country
and meant to be exported again or sold here for home consumption; thus
to encourage and facilitate the importation; to get rid of many of the
dishonest practices which injured the fair dealer and defrauded the
revenue; to put a stop to smuggling; to benefit at once the grower, the
manufacturer, the consumer, and the revenue.  We need not relate at
great length and in minute detail the history of these resolutions
{317} and of the debates on them in the House of Commons.  But it may
be pointed out that, wild and absurd as were the outcries of the
Patriots, there yet was good reason for their apprehension of a growing
scheme to substitute excise for land-tax or poll-tax or customs.
Walpole was, as we know, a firm believer in the advantages of indirect
taxation, and of the introduction, as freely as possible, of all raw
materials for manufacture, and all articles useful for the food of a
nation.  He was a free-trader before his time, and he saw that in
certain cases there was immense advantage to the consumer and to the
revenue in allowing articles to be imported under as light a duty as
possible, and then putting an excise duty on their distribution here.
Walpole was perfectly right in all this, but his enemies were none the
less justified in proclaiming that the proposals he was introducing
could not end in a mere readjustment of the tobacco and wine duties.

Walpole's first resolution was carried by 206 votes against 205.  The
Government had won a victory, but it was such a victory as Walpole did
not care to win.  He had been used of late to bear down all before him,
and he saw with eyes of clear foreboding the ominous significance of
his present majority.  He knew well that the Opposition had got the
most telling cry they could possibly have sought or found against him.
He knew that popular tumult would grow from day to day.  He knew that
his enemies were unscrupulous, and that they were banded together
against him on many grounds and with many different purposes.  Every
section of the nation which had any hostile feeling to the House of
Hanover, to the existing administration, or to the Prime-minister
himself, made common cause against, not his Excise Bill, but him.  The
tobacco resolutions were passed, and a bill to put them into execution
was ordered to be prepared.  On April 4th the Bill was introduced to
the House of Commons, and a motion was made that it be read a first
time.  Much, however, had happened out-of-doors since the day when
Walpole introduced his {318} resolutions.  Even at that time there was
a great excitement abroad, which, brought crowds of more or less
tumultuous persons round the entrances of the House of Commons.  The
troops had to be kept in readiness for any emergency that might arise.
The least thing feared was that they might have to be employed to keep
the access to the House clear for its members.  [Sidenote: 1733--The
Bill abandoned] By the time the first division had taken place, the
tide of popular passion had swollen still higher.  As Walpole was
quitting the House a furious rush was made at him, and but that some of
his colleagues surrounded, protected, and bore him off, he would have
been in serious personal danger.  But the interval between that event
and the introduction of the Bill had been turned to very practical
account by those who were agitating against him, and the country was
now in a flame of excitement.  The _Craftsman_ and the pamphleteers had
done their work well.  The most extravagant consequences were described
as certain to follow from the adoption of Walpole's excise scheme.  A
minister once allowed to impose his excise duty upon wine and tobacco,
and--thus shrieked the mouths of a hundred pamphleteers and
verse-mongers--he will go on imposing excise on every article of food
and dress and household use.  Nothing will be able to resist the
inquisitorial exciseman.  It was positively asserted in ballad and in
pamphlet that before long the exciseman would everywhere practise on
the daughters of England the atrociously insulting test which was
attempted on Wat Tyler's daughter, and which brought about Wat Tyler's
insurrection.  The memories of Wat Tyler and of Jack Straw were invoked
to arouse popular panic and fury.  Strange as it may now seem, these
appeals were successful in their object; they did create a popular
panic, and stir up popular passion and fury to the uttermost height.
Not even Walpole attempted any longer to argue down the monstrous
misrepresentations of his policy.  The fury against him and his excise
scheme grew hotter every day, and at one time it was positively thought
that his life {319} was in danger.  Tumultuous crowds of people
gathered in and around all the approaches to the House of Commons.
Several members of the House who were known to be in favor of the
Ministerial scheme complained that they had been menaced, insulted, and
even assaulted; and the House had for the security of its own debates,
and the personal safety of its own members, to pass resolutions
declaring that this riotous behavior was destructive of the freedom and
constitution of Parliament, and a high crime and misdemeanor.  In the
House itself certain tactics, with which Parliament has been very
familiar at a later period, were tried with some effect.  Various
motions for adjournment and other such delay to the progress of the
Bill were made and pressed to a division.  It was becoming evident to
every one that the measure was doomed, and the hearts of the leaders of
Opposition rose with each hour that passed, while the spirits of the
Ministerialists fell.

Walpole never lost his head, although he well knew that a certain and a
damaging failure was now awaiting him.  He still proclaimed that his
measure could be hurtful to none but smugglers and unfair traders, that
it would be of great benefit to the revenue and the nation, that it
would tend "to make London a free port, and by consequence the market
of the world."  He spoke with scorn of the riotous crowds whom some had
declared to be merely respectful petitioners.  "Gentlemen may give them
what name they think fit; it may be said that they came hither as
humble suppliants, but I know whom the law calls sturdy beggars."  The
Common Council of London, spirited on by a Jacobite Lord Mayor,
petitioned against the excise scheme, and its example was followed by
various municipalities in the kingdom.  Walpole acted at last according
to the principle which always governed him at such a crisis.  He had
the courage to abandon the ground which he had taken up, and which he
would have been well entitled to maintain if argument could prevail
over misrepresentation and passion.  With that {320} cool contempt for
the extravagance and the ignorance of the sentiment which thwarted him,
he abandoned his scheme and let the mob have its way.  On Wednesday,
April 11, 1733, it was made known that the Government did not intend to
go any farther with the Bill.  Exultation all over the island was
unbounded.  Church bells rang, windows were illumined, bonfires blazed,
multitudes shouted everywhere.  If England had gained some splendid
victory over a combination of foreign enemies, there could not have
been a greater display of frantic national enthusiasm than that which
broke out when it was found that hostile clamor had prevailed against
the Minister, and that his excise scheme was abandoned.

Frederick the Great has enriched the curiosities of history with an
account which he gives of the abandonment of the Bill.  According to
him, George the Second had devised the measure as a means of making
himself absolute sovereign of England.  The Excise Bill was intended to
put him in possession of a revenue fixed and assured, a revenue large
enough to allow him to increase his military power to any strength he
pleased.  It only needed a word of command and a chief for revolution
to break out.  Walpole escaped from Parliament covered with an old
cloak, and shouting with all his might, "Liberty, liberty! no excise!"
Thus disguised, he managed to get to the King in St. James's Palace.
He found the King preparing for the worst, arming himself at all
points, having put on the hat he wore at Malplaquet, and trying the
temper of the sword he carried at Oudenarde.  George desired to put
himself at once at the head of his guards, and try conclusions with his
enemies.  Walpole had all the trouble in the world to moderate his
sovereign's impetuosity, and at length represented to him, "with the
generous hardihood of an Englishman attached to his master," that it
was only a choice between abandoning the Excise Bill and losing the
crown.  Whereupon George at last gave way; the Bill was abandoned, and
the crown preserved.

{321}

[Sidenote: 1733--Romance and reality]

This scene is, of course, a piece of the purest romance.  But it is
certain that the passions of the people were so thoroughly aroused that
a man less cool and in the true sense courageous than Walpole might
have provoked a popular outbreak, and no one can say whether the crown
of the Brunswicks might not have gone down in a popular outbreak just
then.  Time and education have long since vindicated Walpole's
financial principles; but the passion, the ignorance, and the
partisanship of his own day were too strong, and prevailed against him.




END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.






{322}

INDEX.


  Abernethy, Dr., death, iv. 282.
  Act for better securing the Dependency of Ireland, i. 177.
  Act of Settlement, i. 4.
  Act of Union passed, iii. 327, 330.
  Acts of Trade, iii. 82, 84, 86, 105.
  Adams, John:
    Conduct towards Colonel Preston, iii. 152.
    Opposes dominion of England, iii. 85.
  Adams, Samuel, protests against Stamp Act, iii. 90.
  Addington, Henry, Viscount Sidmouth, Prime Minister, iii. 337.
  Addison, Joseph:
    M. P. for Malmesbury, i. 52.
    Secretary of State; circular letter to English Ministers, ii. 109.
    Sketch of, i. 37, 180.
  Address (1715), i. 102.
  Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, wife of William IV., iv. 97.
    Supposed attitude towards Reform, iv. 172.
  Agrarian crime, iv. 84, 106.
  Agriculture in Scotland (1714), i. 87, 89.
  Agriculture in 1721, i. 229.
  Aislabie, John:
    Chancellor of Exchequer, i. 188, 190.
    Committed to Tower, i. 199.
    Impeaches Lord Strafford, i. 109, 110.
    Treasurer of Navy, i. 105.
  Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, ii. 260, 280.
  Akerman, Keeper of Newgate, attitude towards mob, iii. 203.
  Albany, Countess of, wife of Charles Stuart, ii. 233.
  Alberoni, Giulio:
    Policy, i. 159.
    Sketch of, i. 158.
  Ale-tax in Scotland, i. 249.
  Ali Vardi Khan, death of, ii. 265.
  Allan, killed in riot (1768), iii. 120.
  Allen, Ethan, iii. 179.
  Almanza, battle of, ii. 35.
  Althorp,  Lord  (_see_ Spencer, John Charles, Earl).
  Amelia, daughter of George III., death of, iii. 341.
  Amelia, Princess  (_see_ Emily, Princess).
  American Colonies:
    Discontent in, iii. 147 _seqq._
    Grievances, iii. 82.
    Proclaim their Independence, iii. 183.
    Report on, i. 310.
    Sketch of history, iii. 74.
    Systems of governing, i. 310.
  American  Republic  acknowledged, iii. 184.
    Influence on France, iii. 290, 292.
  American War of Independence, iii. 173 _seqq._
  American War, Second, iii. 344.
  Amherst, Jeffrey, Baron:
    Commander-in-Chief, iii. 207.
    Commands troops in Canada, ii. 287.
  Amhurst, Nicholas (Caleb d'Anvers), edits _Craftsman_, i. 261.
  Anaverdi Khan, Nabob of Carnatic, ii. 201.
  André, Major, death as spy, iii. 184.
  Anglesey, Marquis of, Viceroy of Ireland, attitude towards
      Catholic Emancipation, iv. 73, 74.
  Anne, Princess of Orange, ii. 38.
    Illness, ii. 71, 76.
    Marriage, ii. 42.
  Anne, Queen:
    Character, i. 1, 13.
    Death, i. 47.
    Declining health, i. 1.
    Scheme to reduce expenses, i. 281.
  "Annual Register":
    Description of mob in London, iii. 205.
    Founded by Edmund Burke, iii. 99.
  Anti-Irish riots, ii. 45.
  "Anti-Jacobin," iv. 33.
  Arbuthnot, John:
    History of John Bull, i. 97.
    Sketch of, ii. 20.
  Arcot, Siege of, ii. 263.
  Arden, Richard Pepper, iii. 236.
  Argyll, John Campbell, Duke of, i. 42.
    Commander-in-Chief for Scotland, i. 98, 123.
    Sketch of, i. 44.
    Speech on Convention, ii. 166.
  Aristotle on administration, ii. 246.
  Arnold, Benedict, iii. 179.
    Treason, iii. 184.
  Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, ii. 293.
  Ashley, Lord (_see_ Shaftesbury, Earl of).
  Association of United Irishmen, iii. 309, 313, 319.
  Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of Rochester, i. 48.
    Arrested and committed to Tower, i. 212.
    Banished, i. 222.
    Evidence against, i. 219, 220, 222.
    On condition of church, ii. 129.
    Opposes Septennial Act, i. 146.
    Sketch of, i. 214.
  _Auditor_, iii. 15, 55.
  Augusta, Princess of Saxe-Gotha, wife of Frederick,
      Prince of Wales, ii. 46, 47; iii. 6, 7.
    Birth of first child, ii. 104-107.
    Regency Bill and, iii. 73.
  Augustus, Elector of Saxony, ii. 23.
  Augustus II. of Poland, ii. 23.
  Aurungzebe, Empire on death of, ii. 257.
  Austerlitz, Battle of, iii. 338, 339.
  Austria in 1716, i. 154.

  Bailly, Mayor of Paris, iii. 298.
  Ballot system, iv. 131.
  Balmerino, Lord, trial, ii. 228.
  Bank of England:
    Attacked by rioters, iii. 207.
    Charter renewed, iv. 232.
    Imitates South Sea Company, i. 189.
  Barber, John:
    Letter to Swift, i. 48.
    On Arbuthnot, ii. 20.
  Barnard, Sir John:
    Abandons seceders, ii. 174.
    On Convention, ii. 162.
    On grievances against Spaniards, ii. 154, 157.
    On Walpole's Excise scheme, i. 315.
  Barré, Colonel, iii. 131, 133, 136.
  Barry, Richard, Lord Barrymore, iii. 244.
    Supports Young Pretender, ii. 221.
  Barry, Sir Charles, designs new Houses of Parliament, iv. 270, 272.
  Bartholomew Fair, i. 73.
  Barwell, Richard, iii. 260.
    Supports Hastings, iii. 260, 261, 264.
  Bastile captured, iii. 294.
  Bath in 1714, i. 79.
  Bathurst, Lord, demands prosecution of rioters, iii. 201.
  Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of:
    On Lord John Russell, iv. 126.
    Philippics against Sir Robert Peel, i. 287.
  Beaux and requisites, i. 76.
  Bedford, Duke of:
    Opposes Pitt, iii. 26.
    Patron of Rigby, iii. 37.
    Presents petition against Convention, ii. 164.
  Bellingham, John, shot Spencer Perceval, iii. 341.
  Benares annexed, iii. 258.
  Benares, Chait Singh, Rajah of, iii. 269.
  Bentham, Jeremy, theories of, iv. 281.
  Béranger, "King of Yvetot," iv. 119.
  Berkeley, George Bishop:
    Character, ii. 296.
    Lives in Rhode Island, ii. 295.
    Scheme of Settlement in Bermuda, ii. 294.
    Sketch of, ii. 292.
  Berkeley, Lord, of Stratton, describes duel between Colonel
      Chudleigh and Charles Aldworth, i. 58.
  Bermuda, Scheme for Settlement in, ii. 294.
  Bernard, Francis, Governor of Massachusetts, iii. 106, 148.
    Dissolves Massachusetts Legislature, iii. 150.
    Recalled, iii. 151.
  Berwick, James FitzJames, Duke of:
    Sketch of, ii. 34.
    Takes Kehl, ii. 24.
  Bill for Catholic Relief, iii. 190, 191.
  Bill for Princess Anne's dowry, ii. 43.
  Bill for strengthening Protestant interest, i. 171, 172.
  Bill of Rights, i. 3.
  Bill to adjust affairs of South Sea Company, i. 203, 205.
  Bill to suspend Habeas Corpus Act, i. 213.
  Birmingham, iv. 99.
  Bismarck, Prince, Peace policy, ii. 147.
  Black Hole of Calcutta, ii. 266, 267; iii. 249.
  Blackstone, Speech on Middlesex Election Petition, iii. 131.
  Bland-Burges Papers, ii. 217.
  Bland-Burges, Sir James, defends Warren Hastings, iii. 277, 278.
  Bloomfield, patronized by Duke of Grafton, iii. 35.
  Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, i. 22, 115.
    Advises secession from Commons, ii. 172.
    Alliance with Pulteney, i. 260; ii. 17.
    At St. Germains, i. 116.
    Attitude towards restoration of Stuarts, i. 39, 48, 107.
    Character, i. 116; ii. 18, 279.
    Correspondence with James Stuart, ii. 18.
    Dismissed by James, i. 131.
    Dreams of Coalition Ministry, ii. 194.
    Flight, i. 103.
    Impeached of high treason, i. 108, 110.
    Inspires _Craftsman_, i. 290.
    Leaves England for France, ii. 17, 18.
    Letter to Swift, i. 47.
    Name erased from roll of peers, i. 114.
    On Duke of Berwick, ii. 34.
    On Duke of Shrewsbury, i. 42.
    On Wyndham's death, ii. 179.
    Petition to Lords, i. 258.
    Removed from Secretaryship of State, i. 101.
    Returns to England, i. 222, 258.
    Scheme of Opposition, i. 287.
    Sketch of, i. 26; later life, i. 133; ii. 278, 279.
    Style as speaker and writer, i. 27.
    Walpole's portrait of, ii. 15, 16.
  Bombay, dower of Catherine of Braganza, iii. 248.
  Boston:
    Evacuated, iii. 182.
    Hostile to British, iii. 151.
    Invested, iii. 175, 181.
    Life in 1765, iii. 77.
    Massacre, iii. 151.
    Protests against Stamp Act, iii. 90.
    Tea thrown into harbor, ii. 43; iii. 160.
  Boston, Lord, in hands of mob, iii. 197.
  Boston Port Bill, iii. 163; copies circulated, iii. 165.
  Boswell, James:
    Johnson and, iii. 44.
    On Alexander Wedderburn, iii. 158.
  Bourbon family:
    Aims of, ii. 28.
    Compacts, ii. 26.
  Bourne, Vincent, at Westminster School, iii. 53.
  Braddock, General, defeat and death, ii. 286; iii. 79, 180.
  Bradley on reform of Calendar, ii. 275.
  Breed Hill battle, iii. 176.
  Bremen ceded to Hanover, i. 160, 161.
  Brewster, Sir David:
    British Association and, iv. 262.
    On Newton, i. 273.
  Bright, John, doctrine of non-intervention, iv. 62.
  Bristol:
    Growth of, i. 78.
    Reform riot at, iv. 171.
  British Admirals of Eighteenth Century, iii. 336.
  British Association founded, iv. 262.
  British garrison proposed for America, iii. 84, 86.
  British sailor (1797), iii. 334.
  _Briton_, iii. 51, 55.
  "Broad-bottomed Ministry," ii. 245, 246.
  Bromley, William, motion on Septennial Act, ii. 10, 12.
  "Brothers" Club, i. 74.
  Brougham, Henry, Lord Brougham and Vaux:
    Advice to Queen Caroline, iv. 5.
    Attitude towards electoral reform, iv. 52.
    Attitude towards Poor Relief, iv. 223.
    Attitude towards West Indian Slavery, iv. 192, 193.
    British Association and, iv. 262.
    Character, iv. 251.
    Defends Queen Caroline, iv. 6, 8.
    Evidence in Cobbett's prosecution, iv. 156.
    Leader of Opposition, iv. 103.
    Lord Chancellor, iv. 124.
    Motion on Reform, iv. 104, 110, 111.
    Motions against Slavery, iv. 194, 195.
    Negotiates with King on creation of new peers, iv. 180.
    On Parliamentary Reform, iv. 85.
    Oratory, iv. 104, 174.
    "Penny Cyclopaedia" and, iv. 262.
    Persuades William IV. to dissolve Parliament, iv. 151.
    Power as Reformer, iv. 122, 125.
    Retires from Ministerial life, iv. 251.
    Scheme for national education, iv. 22.
    Speech on Catholic Emancipation, iv. 74.
  Brunswick family, i. 5.
  Buchanan, messenger of Young Pretender, ii. 205.
  Buckingham, Earl of, iii. 338.
  Buckingham House, i. 66.
  Buckingham Palace, iv. 93.
  Bunbury, Sir Thomas Charles, marries Lady Sarah Lennox, iii. 10.
  Burdett, Sir Francis, resolution on Catholic Emancipation, iv. 73.
  Burgoyne at Boston, iii. 175, 182.
  Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga, iii. 183.
  Burke, Edmund:
    Alliance with Fox and North, iii. 226.
    Attitude on American Independence, iii. 87.
    Attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 285.
    Career, iii. 96 _seqq._
    Character, iii. 227.
    Crusade against French Revolution, iii. 296, 298.
    Denunciation of French Revolution, i. 96.
    "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful," iii. 98.
    Friend of Goldsmith, iii. 168.
    Impeaches Warren Hastings, iii. 281, 285.
    Indian policy, iii. 273.
    Influence on generation, iii. 96, 100.
    Maiden speech, iii. 100.
    Marriage, iii. 98.
    On Ballot system, iv. 131.
       Boston exploit, iii. 161.
       Chesterfield's rule in Ireland, ii. 251.
       Ministry and Wilkes's riots, iii. 121, 122.
       Townshend, iii. 111.
       Walpole's opposition to war party, ii. 181.
       War with Spain, ii. 184.
       Warren Hastings, iii. 258, 259.
       Wilkes's reception in London, iii. 116; in Middlesex, iii. 117.
    Opinion of George IV., iv. 90.
    Oratory, iii. 100.
    Passion for justice, iii. 272.
    Paymaster-General, iii. 224, 228.
    Praises of Pitt, iii. 223.
    Private Secretary to Lord Rockingham, iii. 99.
    Reproves Charles James Fox, iii. 141.
    Speech against American war, iii. 188.
    Speech on Middlesex Election Petition, iii. 132.
    Vindication of Natural Society, iii. 98.
  Burke, William, iii. 99.
  Burnet, Bishop, on:
    Condition of Church, ii. 129.
    Duke of Marlborough, i. 23.
    High and Low Church, i. 17.
    Queen Anne, i. 2.
  Burney, Miss, in Burke's arraignment of Hastings, iii. 286.
  Burns, Robert, on William IV. and Mrs. Jordan, iv. 97.
  Bury Street, price of lodgings in, in 1714, i. 70.
  Bute, Lord:
    Bribery under, iii. 28, 30.
    Cabals against Pitt, iii. 26.
    Character, iii. 7, 28.
    Foreign policy, iii. 28, 29.
    House besieged, iii. 117.
    Influence over Princess of Wales and her son, iii. 8.
    Prime Minister, iii. 28.
    Proposes cider tax, iii. 30, 32.
    Resigns office, iii. 32.
    Secretary of State, iii. 8.
    Sketch of, iii. 7.
    Unpopular, iii. 28, 32.
  Buxton, Fowell, West Indian slavery and, iv. 190, 191, 194, 195.
  Byng, Admiral:
    Fails to relieve Minorca, ii. 297.
    Tried and shot, ii. 298.
  Byrne, Miles:
    Career, iii. 321.
    Memoirs, iii. 321.
  Byron, Lord:
    Assists Greeks, iv. 48.
    Death at Missolonghi, iv. 50.
    On George IV., iii. 242.
    On Grattan, iii. 307.
    Scorn of O'Connell's loyalty, iv. 23, 27.
    Verses on Castlereagh's death, iv. 37.

  Cabot, John and Sebastian, discover Canada, ii. 283.
  Calder, Admiral Sir Robert, iii. 336.
  Calendar, reform of, ii. 275.
  Campbell, John, Baron, on Lord Harcourt, i. 51.
  Campeachy logwood question, i. 294, 295; ii. 160.
  Camperdown, battle of, iii. 318, 336.
  Canada:
    French and English colonies in, ii. 283, 284.
    Sketch of history, ii. 283 _seqq._
  "Canter of Coltbrigg," ii. 213-215.
  Canterbury, Archbishop of, attends Queen Caroline, ii. 121.
  Canning, George:
    Accepts Governor-Generalship of India, iv. 35.
    Attitude towards Free Trade and Parliamentary reform, iv. 52, 62.
    Character, iv. 60, 65.
    Death, iv. 61.
    Duel with Lord Castlereagh, iv. 34.
    Foreign Secretary, iv. 38.
    Funeral in Westminster Abbey, iv. 62.
    Monroe doctrine and, iv. 44.
    Opponents in House of Lords, iv. 59.
    Oratory, iv. 33, 34, 64.
    Policy, iv. 34, 38, 41, 42, 43, 52, 55.
    Summary of, iv. 62.
    Prime Minister, iv. 55, 58.
    Resigns office, iv. 7, 31, 34.
    Sketch of career, iv. 31 _seqq._, 62.
    Supports Queen Caroline, iv. 5, 7.
    Sympathy with Greece, iv. 49, 52.
  Canning, Stratford, iv. 32.
  "Canningites," iv. 65, 72.
  Carew, Sir George, builds Chichester House, Dublin, i. 80.
  Caricature in political controversy, i. 52.
  Caricatures during Hastings's trial, iii. 288.
  Caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, iii. 333.
  Carnwath, Earl of, a prisoner, i. 137, 138.
  Caroline, Amelia Elizabeth, Princess of Brunswick, wife of
      George IV., iii. 244.
    Character, iv. 11.
    Demands to be crowned, iv. 8, 10.
    Divorce bill, iv. 6; abandoned, iv. 8.
    Illness and death, iv. 10, 11.
    Italian witnesses against, iv. 7.
    Returns to England on accession of George IV., iv. 5, 6.
  Caroline, Princess, ii. 38, 71, 79, 105.
    Attends on Queen, ii. 118, 124.
    Dislikes Walpole, ii. 126.
  Caroline, Wilhelmina Dorothea, wife of George II., i. 303.
    Action towards Porteous, ii. 62, 66.
    Acts as Regent, ii. 49.
    Alarmed for King's safety, ii. 71, 72.
    Character, i. 276; ii. 77.
    Death-bed, ii. 114 _seqq._
    Family, ii. 38.
    Godmother to her granddaughter, ii. 108.
    Hates Prince of Wales, ii. 40, 50, 71, 76, 118.
    Lampoons on, ii. 102.
  Carteret, John, Earl of Granville:
    Attacks Ministry and Convention, ii. 165.
    Character, ii. 240, 241; iii. 38.
    Death, iii. 38.
    Denounces Convention, ii. 163.
    Enmity to Walpole, ii. 159, 160, 185.
    Foreign Policy, ii. 177, 240, 241.
    Hatred of Pulteney, ii. 192.
    Knowledge of German, i. 235.
    Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, i. 239; iii. 38.
    Motion on Petition against Convention, ii. 164.
    Moves motion for removal of Walpole, ii. 185.
    Proclamation against "Drapier's Letters," i. 247.
    Proposes address on Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 89.
    Resigns, ii. 244.
    Secretary of State, ii. 191.
    Sketch of career, i. 233.
    Speech on Salt Tax, i. 314.
  Cartier, Jacques, ascends St. Lawrence, ii. 283.
  Castlereagh, Viscount (Marquis of Londonderry):
    Character, iv. 36.
    Death, iv. 36.
    Duel with Canning, iv. 34.
    Policy, iv. 34, 39, 41.
  Catalans and Peace of Utrecht, i. 94.
  "Catholic" and "Protestant" Ministers, iv. 54.
  Catholic Association formed, iv. 21.
  Catholic disabilities, iii. 307.
  Catholic emancipation question, iv. 52, 67 _seqq._
  Catholic Relief Bill passed, iv. 78.
  Catholics, feeling against, i. 143.
  Catholics, penalty against, i. 216.
  Cato Street Conspiracy, iv. 2, 15.
  Censorship for stage and press discussed, ii. 96 _seqq._
  Chadwick, Sir Edwin, on Poor Law Commission, iv. 225, 227.
  Chait Singh, Rajah of Benares, and Warren Hastings, ii. 269.
  Chambord, Count de, i. 40.
  Charing Cross in 1714, i. 68.
  Charles II. of Spain:
    Character, i. 61.
    Will of, ii. 27.
  Charles VI., Emperor, ii. 23.
    Death, ii. 182.
    Denounces Walpole, ii. 25.
    Pragmatic sanction, i. 228.
  Charles X. deposed, iv. 98.
  Charles XII. of Sweden:
    Action in Poland, ii. 23.
    Sketch of, i. 160, 162.
  Charles River, English fleet in, iii. 173, 182.
  Charleston in 1765, iii. 77.
  Charleston, tea landed at, iii. 161.
  Charlotte, Princess:
    Death, iii. 348.
    Marries Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, iii. 348.
  Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George
      III., iii. 10.
    Character and personal appearance, iii. 12, 14.
    Death, iii. 348.
  Chartists demand vote by ballot, iv. 131.
  Chaworth, Mary, Mrs. Musters, iv. 170.
  Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of:
    Administration in Ireland, ii. 249.
    Advice to Prince of Wales, ii. 78.
    Attitude on Penal Laws, ii. 249.
    Character, ii. 6.
    Conduct to Johnson, iii. 44.
    Enmity to Walpole, ii. 159, 160, 185.
    Irish policy, ii. 7.
    Moves address on Accession of George II., ii. 7.
    On Bolingbroke, i. 117.
       Bute's nationality, iii. 30.
       Carteret, i. 235.
       Lord Cowper, i. 98.
    Recalled from Ireland, ii. 252.
    Retires from public life, ii. 274.
    Secretary of State, ii. 252.
    Sketch of, ii. 4 _seqq._
    Speech on Convention, ii. 164.
    Speech on Playhouse Bill, ii. 100.
    Speech on Reform of Calendar, ii. 275.
    Viceroy of Ireland, ii. 246, 247.
  Chichester, Sir Arthur, i. 80.
  China trade and East India Company, iv. 231.
  Chippenham election petition, ii. 189, 190.
  Chiswick, Mr., sends Warren Hastings to Calcutta, iii. 247.
  Cholmondeley, Earl of, moves address on Convention, ii. 164.
  Chudleigh, Colonel, quarrels with Charles Aldworth, i. 58.
  Chunar fortress, iii. 270.
  Chunda Sahib:
    Besieges Trichinopoly, ii. 262.
    Captured and put to death, ii. 264.
    Invades Carnatic, ii. 261.
  Church of England, condition in 1738, ii. 129, 132.
  Churchill, Charles:
    Character, iii. 52.
    Death, iii. 69.
    Denunciation of Hogarth, iii. 63.
    Flight, iii. 59.
    "Rosciad," iii. 54.
    Satires, iv. 69.
    Wilkes and, iii. 55.
  Cider tax proposed, iii. 30.
  Claimants to throne (1714), i. 3 _seqq._
  Clare Election (1828), iv. 70, 78.
  Clarence, Duke of (_see_ William IV.).
  Clarendon, Lord, bears tidings of Queen Anne's death to
      George, i. 56.
  Clarke, Adam, death, iv. 284.
  Clarke, George, killed in riot, iii. 129.
  Clarkson, Thomas, West Indian Slavery and, iv. 195, 200.
  Clavering, General Francis, iii. 260, 261.
    Death, iii. 264.
  Clement, Pope, interview with Charles Stuart, ii. 202.
  Clerk, Lord Justice, i. 130.
  Clerkenwell Prison broken open, iii. 203.
  Cleveland, Duchess of, i. 23.
  Clifton, engagement at, ii. 223.
  Clinton at Boston, iii. 175.
  Clive, Richard, ii. 254.
  Clive, Robert, ii. 253.
    Advances against Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 268.
    Captures Arcot, ii. 262.
    Character, ii. 255.
    Discerns Warren Hastings's talent, iii. 250, 252.
    Escapes from Madras, ii. 260.
    Forges Admiral Watson's signature, ii. 270.
    Governor of Fort St. David, ii. 265.
    Marries, ii. 264.
    Negotiates with Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 269.
    Protests against Indian Administration, iii. 251.
    Returns to England, ii. 264, 273.
    Returns to India, iii. 253.
    Sketch of career, ii. 256 _seqq._
  Clonmel, State trials at, iv. 179.
    Clubs in 1714, i. 73.
  Coalition Ministry (1783), iii. 225, 229
    Fall of, iii. 235, 237.
  Cobbett, William:
    Death, iv. 282.
    Prosecution, iv. 154.
    Sketch of career, iv. 155.
  Cobden, R., doctrine of non-intervention, iv. 62.
  Cochrane, Thomas, Earl of Dundonald, assists Greeks, iv. 48.
  "Cocoa Tree" coffee-house, i. 76.
  Code Napoléon, iii. 332.
  Codrington, Sir Edward, commands at Navarino, iv. 50, 96.
  Coffee-houses, i. 75, 76.
  Coke's description of Raleigh, iii. 286.
  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, death, iv. 283.
  Colonial Administration System (1765), iii. 80.
  Committee of Secrecy, i. 104, 168.
  Compton, Sir Spencer, Lord Wilmington, ii. 107, 189.
    Character, i. 275.
    Death, ii. 240.
    Prime Minister, ii. 191.
    Speaker of House of Commons, i. 212.
  Concord, battle and retreat from, iii. 174.
  Congress of Verona and Vienna (_see_ Verona and Vienna Congress).
  Congreve, William, sketch of, i. 299.
  Coningsby, Lord, i. 105.
    Impeaches Oxford, i. 108.
  Convention between England and Spain (1739), ii. 161, 168.
    Petition against, ii. 163.
  Conway, Circular letter to governors of colonies, iii. 105.
  Cooke, George, Tory candidate for Middlesex, iii. 117.
    Death, iii. 124.
  Coote, Major Eyre, ii. 272.
  Cope, Sir John, Scottish Commander-in-Chief, ii. 210.
    Defeated at Preston Pans, ii. 214, 215.
  Copley, Sir John (_see_ Lyndhurst, Baron).
  Cork Hill, Dublin, i. 82.
  Cork in 1714, i. 83.
  Cornwallis, Charles, Marquis:
    Commands royal troops in Ireland, iii. 323.
    Surrenders at Yorktown, iii. 184.
  Corporation Act repealed, iv. 52, 67.
  Corstorphine, Dragoons at, ii. 212.
  Cottenham, Lord Chancellor, iv. 252.
  Court Street Conspiracy, iii. 160.
  Covent Garden in 1714, i. 68.
  Cowper, Spencer, i. 105.
  Cowper, William, Earl, Lord Chancellor:
    Condemns South Sea Bill, i. 190.
    Evidence against, i. 219.
    Opposes taxing Catholics, i. 216.
    Sketch of, i. 98.
  Coxe, Archdeacon, on:
    Division on Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 88.
    Duke of Newcastle, ii. 33.
  Crabbe, George:
    Account of taking of Newgate, iii. 203.
    Death, iv. 282.
  _Craftsman_:
    Objects of, i. 290, 291.
    On Walpole's excise scheme, i. 318.
    Picture of Walpole, ii. 14.
    "Sedition and defamation displayed," i. 306.
    Series of pamphlets, i. 286.
    Started, i. 260.
  Craggs, Father and Son, i. 197.
  Crawford, Earl of, on Princess Anne's dowry, ii. 44.
  Croix, Petit de la, Persian Tales, iii. 254.
  Croker, John Wilson, ii. 107.
    Obstructs Reform Bill, iv. 163.
  Cromarty, Lord, trial, ii. 228.
  Cromwell, Elizabeth, death, ii. 3.
  Cruden, Alexander, dislike to Wilkes, iii. 135.
  Culloden, Battle of, ii. 224.
    Prisoners, ii. 232.
  Cumberland, Ernest Augustus, Duke of:
    Orange Association and, iv. 276, 278.
    Supports Irish Church, iv. 219.
    Unpopularity, iv. 102.
  Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of (Butcher), ii. 38.
    Army at Stafford, ii. 217.
    Character, ii. 223.
    Commands English troops at Lauffeld, ii. 239.
    Conduct after Culloden, ii. 226.
    Invites Pitt to return to office, iii. 73, 93.
    Queen Caroline's advice to, ii. 118.
  Curran, John Philpot:
    Appeal on behalf of Wolfe Tone, iii. 326.
    Description of Ireland, iv. 27.
  Curran, Sarah, and Robert Emmet, iii. 329.

  "Daily Advertiser," iii. 128.
  _Daily Post_, iii. 128.
  Dalton, Sir Charles, Gentleman Usher of Black Rod, i. 278.
  Dashwood, Francis, Lord Le Despencer, iii. 33, 65.
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 48.
    Founds brotherhood of Medmenham, iii. 46.
  Davy, Sir Humphry, iv. 93.
  Dawson, James, supports Young Pretender, ii. 221, 229.
  Dawson Street, Dublin, i. 81.
  Daylesford Manor, Worcestershire, iii. 245, 247.
  D'Espremesnil, Duval, Governor of Madras, ii. 261.
  De Launay decapitated, iii. 294.
  De Quincey, iii. 44.
  Deccan, Nizam of, sends diamond to George III., iii. 281.
  Declaration of Rights, Philadelphia, iii. 173.
  Declaratory Act, iii. 104, 105.
  Defoe, Daniel, "Robinson Crusoe," ii. 1.
  Demerara, "Insurrection" of slaves, iv. 193.
  Denman, Thomas, Lord Chief Justice:
    Defends Queen Caroline, iv. 6, 7, 8.
  Denmark, King of:
    Character, i. 3.
    Treaty with George I., i. 161.
    Treaty with George II., ii. 176.
  Derby, Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Earl of:
    Letter to Peel declining office, iv. 238.
    Political principles, iv. 217.
    Secretary to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, iv. 127.
    Speech on Emancipation of Slaves, iv. 196.
    Speech on Irish State Church, iv. 217, 246.
  Derby, Reform riot at, iv. 170.
  Derwentwater, Earl of, i. 137.
    Executed, i. 142.
  Dettingen, battle of, ii. 182.
  Devonshire, Duke of, Premier of Coalition Ministry, ii. 298.
  D'Iberville on Whigs, i. 18.
  Dickens, Charles, iv. 286.
  Dinner hour, changes in, iii. 18.
  Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, ii. 285.
  Disarmament of clans, ii. 208, 232.
  Disarming Act (1716), result of, ii. 209.
  Disraeli (_see_ Beaconsfield, Lord).
  Divorce Bill (1820), iv. 6.
    Abandoned, iv. 8.
  Don Carlos:
    Compact to protect (1733), ii. 26.
    Heir to Parma and Placentia, ii. 28.
  Dorset, Duke of, English ambassador to France, iii. 295.
  Drake, Governor, in Fulta Island, iii. 249.
  Draper, Sir William, replies to letters of Junius, iii. 129.
  Drapier's letters, i. 240, 242.
  Drummond, Lord James, supports Young Pretender, ii. 221.
  Dublin coffee-houses, i. 82.
  Dublin in 1714, i. 80.
  Dubois, Abbé, Sketch of, i. 155.
  Duddington, Lieutenant, Commands "Gaspee," iii. 152.
  Dumouriez and Duke of Wellington, i. 129.
  Duncan, Admiral (Lord Camperdown):
    Deserted by squadron, iii. 335.
    Victory of Camperdown, iii. 318, 336.
  Duncannon, Lord, Commissioner of Woods and Forests, iv. 127.
  Dundas, Henry, Viscount Melville:
    Catholic Relief Bill for Scotland, iii. 195.
    Fall of, iii. 338.
    Sketch of, iii. 232.
  Dundonald, Admiral, last of sea-kings, iii. 336.
  Dunleary (_see_ Kingstown).
  Dunoyer, dancing-master and spy, ii. 106.
  Dupleix, Governor of S. India, ii. 261.
    Dreams of French empire in India, ii. 258.
    Founds Chandernagor, ii. 258.
    Indian policy, iii. 249.
    Recalled to France, ii. 262.
    Refuses to ratify Convention and pillages Madras, ii. 259.
  Duplicity universal, i. 30.
  Durham, Earl of, iv. 291.
    Efforts for Parliamentary reform, iv. 22.
    Lord Privy Seal, iv. 127.
    Manners, iv. 121.
    Sketch of, iv. 127.
    Suggestions on Reform Bill, iv. 129.
  Dutch (Batavian) expedition to Ireland, iii. 317.
  Dymoke, King's champion, iii. 13.

  East India Companies, ii. 254, 260.
  East India Company:
    Charter renewed, iv. 230, 232.
    Clamors for revenge, iii. 163.
    Forces tea on America, iii. 161.
    Policy, iii. 248 _seqq._
    Semi-regal authority, iii. 230.
  Edgeworth, Talbot, i. 82.
  Edinburgh:
    Bill, ii. 66, 68.
    City guard, ii. 60.
    Condition in 1745, ii. 210.
    In 1714, i. 84.
    Life in, i. 85.
  Edinburgh Castle:
    Jacobite plan to capture, i. 129.
    Reduction  abandoned  by Young Pretender, ii. 216.
  Edwards, spy in Cato Street conspiracy, iv. 17, 19.
  Effingham, Lord, Earl Marshal, iii. 13.
  Egremont, Lord, iii. 59, 63.
    House besieged, iii. 117.
    Wilkes before, iii. 60.
  Elcho, Lord, ii. 227.
  Eldon, Earl of, Lord Chancellor, iv. 3.
    Attitude on Catholic Emancipation, iv. 69.
    Attitude towards death penalty for stealing, iv. 21.
    Resigns office, iv. 57.
    Toryism, iv. 3.
  Elizabeth, Electress Palatine of the Rhine, i. 5.
  Elizabeth of Parma, wife of Philip V., ii. 28.
  Ellis, relations with Nawab Mir Kasim, iii. 251.
  Emerson prophesies rise of Orientalism in England, iii. 254.
  Emily, Princess:
    At her father's death-bed, ii. 304.
    Attends on Queen, ii. 117, 122, 123.
    Dislikes Walpole, ii. 126.
  Emmet, Robert, iii. 313, 314; iv. 206.
    Projects for Independence of Ireland, iii. 327.
  Emmet, Thomas Addis, iii. 313, 314.
  England:
    American Colonies and Advantages of union between, iii. 80.
    Declares war against Spain, ii. 178.
    Politics of Continent, and, i. 154, 225.
    Protests against War of Independence, iii. 183, 184.
    Recuperates, iii. 187.
    Spain and, trade disputes, ii. 150.
  English Copper Company and South Sea Company, i. 193.
  English Protestant Association, iii. 192, 195.
    Meeting in St. George's Fields, iii. 169.
  English substituted for Latin in indictments, etc., i. 302.
  Entinck, John, Editor of _Monitor_, iii. 51.
  Eon, Chevalier d', present to Wilkes, iii. 134.
  Erskine, Thomas, Lord:
    Defends Lord George Gordon, iii. 210.
    On Coronation oath, iv. 54.
  Eugene, Prince, of Savoy, ii. 24, 35.
  Excise Bill (1733), i. 317.
    Abandoned, i. 320.
  Excise Reform, i. 311.
  Exeter in 1714, i. 79.

  Factories Act (1833), iv. 202, 204.
  Factory labor and State, iv. 201, 202.
  Fairman, Colonel, Orange lodges and, iv. 278.
  Falkirk, Hawley defeated at, ii. 223.
  "Family compacts," ii. 26; iii. 27.
  Famines in Scotland, i. 89.
  "Fancy Franchises," iv. 183.
  Fane, British Envoy at Florence, ii. 202.
  Fashions in 1760, iii. 16.
  Ferguson, on Edinburgh City Guard, ii. 60.
  Fielding, Henry:
    On mob in London, iii. 123.
    Satires on Pretender, ii. 219.
  Fielding, Sir John, house sacked, iii. 203.
  Finch, Lord, presents Bolingbroke's petition to Lords, i. 258.
  Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, iii. 309, 314; iv. 206.
    Death, iii. 323.
    Marriage, iii. 220.
    Sketch of career, iii. 312.
    Withdraws from Dublin Parliament, iii. 319.
  Fitzgerald, Vesey, defeated by O'Connell, iv. 74.
  Fitzherbert, Mrs.:
    Death, iv. 289.
    George IV. and, iii. 242; iv. 88.
  Fitzwilliam, Earl, Viceroy of Ireland, iii. 308.
  Flaxman, John, iv. 93.
  Fleet ditch, i. 72.
  Fleet marriages, ii. 279.
  Fleming, Sir Michael, and Lord George Gordon, iii. 199.
  Fletcher, Andrew, in Edinburgh in 1745, ii. 211.
  Fleury, Cardinal, Prime Minister of France, i. 264, 291.
  Florida and Carolina, dispute as to boundaries, ii. 160.
  Fontenoy, Battle of, ii. 210.
  Foote, on Alexander Wedderburn, iii. 158.
  Forbes, Duncan, in Edinburgh in 1745, ii. 62.
  Foreign aid for America, iii. 183.
  Forster, Thomas:
    Escapes, i. 142.
    In Newgate, i. 137.
  Fort Duquesne built, ii. 286.
  Fort Duquesne taken, iii. 180.
  Fort St. David, Olive at, ii. 260, 263.
  Fort Ticonderoga taken, iii. 79.
  "Forty-five," Account of Rebellion, ii. 203 _seqq._
  Forty-shilling freeholders, iv. 179.
  Fowke, charged with conspiracy, iii. 261.
  Fox, Charles James, i. 28.
    Acquainted with Paris, iii. 293.
    Antagonism to Pitt, iii. 225.
    As Leader of Opposition, i. 287.
    Attitude on Regency, iii. 243.
    Attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 296, 299.
    Attitude towards Pitt, iii. 339.
    Character, iii. 227.
    Coalition with North, iii. 225.
    Contracted with Pitt, iii. 212
    Death, iii. 340; iv. 61.
    Early life, iii. 142.
    Foreign Secretary and Leader of Commons, iii. 340.
    Friend to Ireland, iii. 319; iv. 23.
    India Bill, iii. 230 _seqq._
    On Henry Grattan, iii. 307.
    Parliamentary career, iii. 141, 143.
    Praises of Pitt, iii. 223.
    Prince of Wales's conduct to, iii. 243.
    Resigns office, iii. 225.
    Scholarship, iii. 143.
    Secretary of State, iii. 224.
    Speech on Middlesex Election Petition, iii. 132.
  Fox, Henry (_see_ Holland, Lord).
  Fox's Martyrs, iii. 237.
  France:
    Acknowledges independence of America, iii. 183.
    Condition before Revolution, iii. 291.
    Declares war (1793), iii. 303.
    In 1716, i. 154, 155.
    Spain and, Alliance between, ii. 25, 26, 182.
    Spanish policy, iv. 42.
  Francis, Philip:
    Character, iii. 260.
    Duel with Hastings, iii. 267.
    Hostile to Hastings, iii. 280.
    Probable author of "Letters of Junius," iii. 39.
  Franklin, Benjamin:
    At Bar of House, iii. 103, 156.
    Gala suit, iii. 156, 184.
    Letters of Hutchinson and Oliver and, iii. 153, 155.
    On Whitefield's eloquence, ii. 139.
    On Wilkes's candidature for Parliament, iii. 116, 132.
    Signs Peace in Paris, iii. 184.
    Sketch of, iii. 102.
  Frazer, Under Secretary of State, iii. 235.
  Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, ii. 38.
    Attempts to see his mother, ii. 118.
    Banished from King's palaces, ii. 108.
    Bids for popularity, ii. 71.
    Carries off his wife to London, ii. 106.
    Character, ii. 71, 72, 74, 77.
    Claims independent allowance, ii. 77.
    Conduct on declaration of war, ii. 178.
    Death, ii. 276.
    Epitaphs, ii. 276.
    Income, ii. 87.
    Marries Princess Augusta, ii. 47.
    Patriots and, ii. 50, 108, 110.
    Relations with George II., ii. 39, 50, 76, 91, 104.
    Sketch of, ii. 39.
    Votes against address on Convention, ii. 169.
  Frederick II. of Prussia (the Great), ii. 280.
    Account of abandonment of Excise Bill, i. 320.
    Description of George I., i. 270.
    Occupies Silesia, ii. 182.
  Frederick William, King of Prussia, and George II., ii. 45.
  Free Trade, movement towards, iv. 93.
  Free Trade, Walpole and, i. 317.
  Freedom of City, origin of, iv. 256.
  French aims in America, ii. 285.
  French expeditions to Ireland, iii. 315, 323, 325.
  French in Canada, ii. 283.
  French Revolution, iii. 284, 293 _seqq._
    Condition of France before, iii. 291.
    England and, iii. 302, 306.
  French Revolution of 1830, iv. 98.
  Fuseli, Henry, iv. 93.

  Gage, General:
    Arrives in Massachusetts, iii. 165.
    Raid upon stores in Concord, iii. 174.
  Galland, version of "Arabian Nights," iii. 254.
  Game Laws, severity of, iv. 84.
  Garrick, David, and Samuel Johnson, iii. 42.
  Gascoigne, General, amendment to Reform Bill, iv. 150.
  "Gaspee," iii. 152.
  Gates, General Horatio, iii. 179.
    Traitor, iii. 184.
  Gay, John;
    "Beggar's Opera," i. 302; ii. 95.
    Lampoons, ii. 102.
    "Polly," ii. 95.
    Secretary to Lord Clarendon, i. 38.
    Sketch of, ii. 3.
  _Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser_, iii. 128.
  George I. (George Louis, Elector of Hanover):
    Attitude towards Prince of Wales, i. 153, 256, 274.
    Character, i. 6, 8, 58, 91, 269.
    Conduct during 1715, i. 136.
    Coronation, i. 101.
    Death, i. 266.
    Descent, i. 6.
    Directions about Czar, i. 163.
    Distrusts Marlborough, i. 54.
    Entry into London, i. 58.
    Extent of Empire, i. 89.
    Journey to England, i. 56.
    Letter to King of Spain on Gibraltar, i. 296.
    New Lords Justices, i. 54.
    Principles of government, i. 91.
    Proclaimed King, i. 47, 49.
    Project for kidnapping Prince of Wales, ii. 109, 110.
    Stories of later years, i. 266.
    Treatment of Oxford and Bolingbroke, i. 101.
    Visits Hanover, i. 152, 236, 265.
    Will, i. 269.
  George II.:
    At Dettingen, ii. 182.
    Character, i. 274; ii. 46, 48, 76, 117, 123, 304.
    Consults Walpole, ii. 195.
    Death, ii. 303.
    Godfather to his grand-daughter, ii. 108.
    Guardian of the Realm and Lieutenant, i. 153.
    His family, ii. 38.
    In danger through storms, ii. 69.
    Income, ii. 89.
    Letter to Queen, ii. 76.
    On Handel, ii. 52.
    Opens Parliament (1728), i. 282.
    Negotiates with Carteret and Pulteney, ii. 244.
    Party when Prince of Wales, i. 257.
    Proposes allowance to Prince of Wales, ii. 81, 86.
    Proposes duel with Frederick William of Prussia, ii. 46.
    Relations with George I., i. 153, 256, 274; ii. 109.
    Relations with Prince of Wales, ii. 40, 50, 76, 104 _seqq._, 118.
    Royal speech (1727), i. 278.
    Speech from throne (1735), ii. 22.
    Sympathy with his mother, i. 153.
    Unpopular, ii. 69.
    Visits Hanover, ii. 47, 49, 210.
  George III.:
    Accession, iii. 2.
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iv. 53.
    Attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 301.
    Attitude towards Wilkes, iii. 17, 119, 132.
    Birth, ii. 278.
    Character, iii. 4, 241; iv. 91.
    Coronation, iii. 12.
    Courage during Gordon riots, iii. 206.
    Death, iii. 348.
    Dislikes Fox and North, iii. 225.
    Dislikes Pitt, iii. 3, 26.
    Dismisses Fox and North, iii. 235.
    Grenville and, iii. 71, 72, 93.
    Ideal of governing, iii. 23, 25, 80.
    Illnesses, iii. 72, 243, 341.
    Improvements during reign, iii. 349.
    Letter to Temple on India Bills, iii. 234.
    Ministry of all the talents and, iii. 340.
    Personal appearance, iii. 3.
    Policy towards American colonies, iii. 78, 79, 153, 164.
    Private life, iii. 19.
    Speech from throne (1760), iii. 22.
  George IV. (Augustus Frederick):
    Accession and illness, iv. 1.
    Attitude towards Canning, iv. 31, 37, 46, 48, 55, 65.
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iv. 54, 55, 76.
    Attitude towards Lord Grey, iv. 76.
    Character, iii. 241; iv. 24, 28, 30, 89 _seqq._
    Coronation, iv. 9.
    Death, iv. 87.
    Endeavors to obtain divorce, iv. 3, 4, 6, 8.
    Friend of Fox and Sheridan, iii. 242; iv. 23.
    Illness, iv. 86.
    In opposition, iii. 242.
    Interview with Wellington, Lyndhurst, and Peel, iv. 77.
    Letters to Lord Liverpool, iv. 27, 37.
    Marries Princess Caroline of Brunswick, iii. 244.
    Mrs. Fitzherbert and, iii. 242; iv. 88.
    Regent, iii. 341.
    Visits Hanover, iv. 28.
    Visits Ireland, iv. 23 _seqq._
    Visits Scotland, iv. 29.
  Georgia, John Wesley visits, ii. 127, 134.
  Georgian drama, ii. 94.
  Georgian literature, iii. 171.
  Gheriah, Pirate stronghold, ii. 265.
  Gibbon on Gordon riots, iii. 196.
  Gibraltar:
    Besieged (1727), i. 228.
    Debate on restitution of, i. 296.
  Gin riots, ii. 56.
  Gladsmuir (_see_ Preston Pans, battle of).
  Gladstone, John, entertains George Canning, iv. 35.
  Gladstone, William Ewart, iv. 35.
    Junior Lord of Treasury, iv. 239.
    On "Drapier's Letters," i. 245.
    Speech on Irish Church revenues, iv. 247.
  Glasgow in 1714, i. 86.
  Gloucester, Duke of, death, i. 3.
  Glynn, Serjeant, M. P. for Middlesex, iii. 124.
  Goderich, Viscount:
    Colonial and War Secretary, iv. 58.
    Prime Minister, iv. 65.
    "Prosperity Robinson," iv. 65.
    Resigns office, iv. 67.
    Sketch of, iv. 65.
  Godolphin, Countess of, i. 210.
  Godolphin, Earl of, Lord Privy Seal, ii. 107.
  Goethe, referred to, iii. 144, 145.
    "Sorrows of Werther," iii. 167.
  Goldsmith, Oliver:
    Plays, iii. 170.
    Sketch of career and writings, iii. 167, 171.
  Gordon, Colonel, threatens rioters, iii. 199.
  Gordon, Elizabeth, Duchess of, improves Scotch agriculture, i. 88.
  Gordon, Lord George:
    Acquitted, iii. 210.
    Arrested, iii. 209.
    Death in Newgate, iii. 210.
    Denounces Burke, iii. 199.
    Presents petition to Commons, iii. 198.
    Sketch of, iii. 192.
  Gordon riots, iii. 196 _seqq._
  Gordon, Sir John, ii. 223.
  Government by party, i. 284.
  Graeme, Colonel, mission, iii. 11.
  Grafton, Duke of (I.), killed in Cork, i. 83.
  Grafton, Duke of (II.), Bill to suspend Habeas Corpus Act, i. 213.
  Grafton (Augustus Henry Fitzroy), Duke of (III.):
    Junius's indictment of, iii. 129.
    Resigns place in Rockingham ministry, iii. 108.
    Sketch of, iii. 35.
  Graham, Sir James:
    First Lord of Admiralty, iv. 127.
    Refuses office in Peel's ministry, iv. 238.
    Resigns office, iv. 218.
    Speech on Irish Church revenues, iv. 246.
  Granard, Lord, tells King James of conspiracy, i. 24.
  Grant, Sir Archibald, interest in road-making, i. 88.
  Granville, Earl of (_see_ Carteret, John).
  Grattan, Henry:
    Buried in Westminster Abbey, iv. 23.
    Leader of Irish, iii. 307.
    Withdraws from Dublin Parliament, iii. 319.
  Gray, "Elegy in a Country Church-yard," ii. 289.
  Great Seal stolen, iii. 237.
  "Grecian" coffee-house, i. 76.
  Greece: struggle for independence, iv. 40, 48.
  Green, J. B., on "Family Compact," ii. 31.
  Greene, Nathaniel, iii. 176, 179.
  Gregory XIII. reforms calendar, ii. 275.
  Grenville, George, iii. 26, 57.
    Colonial policy, iii. 84, 87.
    Prime minister, iii. 72.
    Proposes tax to maintain garrison in America, iii. 87.
    Regency Bill and, iii. 72.
    Sketch of, iii. 31.
    Speech on Middlesex election petition, iii. 131.
    Stamp Act, iii. 87, 90.
  Grenville, James, iii. 26.
  Grenville, William Wyndham, Lord, Ministry of
      all the talents, iii. 340.
  Greville, Charles, on:
    Duel between Wellington and Winchilsea, iv. 83.
    Edmund Burke, iii. 96.
    George IV.'s illness, iv. 86.
    James and John Stuart Mill, iv. 281.
    Meeting Macaulay, iv. 185.
    Princess Victoria, iv. 290, 291.
    William IV., iv. 114, 115.
    William IV. and Whig ministers, iv. 175.
  Grey, Charles, Earl:
    Appeal to archbishops and bishops on Reform Bill, iv. 171.
    Appeals to country, iv. 152.
    Attacks Canning, iv. 59.
    Attitude towards electoral reform, iv. 52, 59.
    Attitude towards Irish State Church, iv. 218, 220.
    Catholic Emancipation and, iv. 76.
    Character, iv. 120.
    Introduces third Reform Bill, iv. 173.
    Irish grievances and, iv. 207.
    Leader of Opposition, iv. 103.
    Motion on speech from throne, iv. 104.
    Prime Minister, iv. 122.
    Resigns office, iv. 233.
    Scheme for creating new peers, iv. 176, 180.
    Speech on reform, iv. 108.
    Speech on Reform Bill (second), iv. 168.
  Grey, Earl:
    Committed to Tower, i. 214.
    Condemns South Sea Bill, i. 190.
  Grey, Sir George, Under-Secretary of Colonies, iv. 252.
  Grosvenor, Sir Richard, names squares and streets, i. 68.
  Grote, George:
    On Irish State Church system, iv. 210.
    Motion for ballot in municipal elections, iv. 259.
    Sketch of, iv. 215.
    Speech on Ward's motion on Irish Church, iv. 216, 217.
  Guelf, history of family, i. 5.
  Guildhall banquet rumors, iv. 112.

  Haddington, Lord, introduces sowing grass seeds, i. 88.
  Haidar:
    Grudge against English, iii. 265.
    Sketch of career, iii. 265.
  Halhed, friend of Sheridan, iii. 217, 218.
  Halifax, Lord, iii. 59.
    Wilkes before, iii. 60.
  Halkett, Sir P. K., warns General Braddock, ii. 286.
  Hall, Robert, death, iv. 284.
  Hamilton, James, Duke of, killed in duel, i. 122.
  Hamilton, Lady Archibald, accompanies Prince and Princess
      of Wales to London, ii. 107.
  Hamilton (Single-speech), Secretary to Halifax, iii. 99.
  Hampden, John, and ship money, i. 247.
  Hampden, Richard, i. 105.
  Hampton Court Palace, Royal Family in, ii. 105, 106.
  Handel:
    Reception of "Messiah," ii. 51.
    Royal Family and, ii. 51.
  Hanger, George, iii. 244.
  Hanover:
    Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's account of, i. 152.
    Separation from English Crown proposed, ii. 105.
    Sketch of House of, i. 5.
    Thackeray's description of, i. 55.
    Treaty of, i. 295.
  Hanoverian dynasty, position of, iv. 94.
  Harcourt, Simon, Lord Chancellor:
    Motion on Oxford's impeachment, i. 169.
    Sketch of career, i. 49.
  Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, Lord Chancellor, ii. 9, 192.
    Heads deputation to Prince of Wales, ii. 81.
    On declaration of war, ii. 177.
    Opposes Pitt, iii. 26.
    Passes Marriage Act, ii. 279.
  Harley, Robert (_see_ Oxford, Earl of).
  Harley, Thomas, arrest ordered, i. 106.
  Harrington, Lord, Secretary of State, i. 304.
  Harrison, Audrey, marries third Marquis Townshend, iii. 110.
  Harrowby, Lord, and Cato Street conspiracy, iv. 18.
  Harvard College, places in lists, iii. 77.
  Hastings, Howard, assists his nephew, iii. 246.
  Hastings, Lady Elizabeth, Essays by Congreve and Steele on, i. 301.
  Hastings, Pynaston, iii. 245.
  Hastings, Warren:
    Acquitted, iii. 285.
    Advice on quarrel of Nawab and Ellis, iii. 252.
    At Bar of House, iii. 276, 289.
    Attempts literature, iii. 253.
    Benares expedition, iii. 269.
    Buys Dalesford, iii. 276.
    Charges against, iii. 258.
    Company's representative at Murshidabad, iii. 250.
    Defence at Bar of House, iii. 276.
    Duel with Francis, iii. 267.
    Enemies, iii. 260, 264, 265.
    Evidence before House of Commons' Committee, iii. 253.
    Friendship for Sir James Bland-Burges, iii. 278.
    Governor-General, iii. 260; his Council, iii. 260 _seqq._
    Governor of Bengal, iii. 257.
    Impeached, iii. 281.
    Indian policy, iii. 273.
    Life at Daylesford, iii. 288.
    Marriage, iii. 250, 256.
    Oriental diplomacy, iii. 249.
    Oriental studies, iii. 254.
    Presents Deccan diamond to king, iii. 281.
    Reforms needed and carried out, iii. 257, 258.
    Relations with Impey, iii. 267, 268.
    Resignation accepted, iii. 264.
    Returns to England, iii. 253.
    Returns to India, iii. 255.
    Scheme for Supreme Court and Council, iii. 267.
    Sketch of career, iii. 245 _seqq._
    State of India on his arrival, iii. 249.
    Trial, iii. 281 _seqq._
    Work accomplished, iii. 258.
  Hatzfeldt, Count, mobbed, iii. 118.
  Hawley, defeated at Falkirk, ii. 223.
  Hazlitt on Steele and Addison, i. 300, 301.
  Heath, --, iii. 179.
  Heber, Bishop, death, iv. 92.
  Heights of Abraham, ii. 288, 289.
  Hell-Fire Club, iii. 47.
  Hemans, Felicia, death, iv. 284.
  Henry IV. becomes a Catholic, i. 13.
  Henry, Patrick, speech against Stamp Act, iii. 90.
  Hepburn, James, of Keith, ii. 214.
  Herbert, Colonel (Lord Carnarvon), Treatment of Lord
      George Gordon, iii. 202.
  Herbert, Sidney, as debater, iv. 239.
  Herrenhausen, i. 55.
  Herschel, Sir John, on Newton, i. 273.
  Hertford, Lord, preparations against insurgents, iii. 205.
  Hervey, James, author of "Meditations," ii. 128.
  Hervey, John, Lord, Baron Hervy of Ickworth:
    Appeal on Convention, ii. 163.
    Attends dying Queen, ii. 118, 123.
    Compares Chesterfield with Scarborough and Carteret, ii. 5.
    Interviews with Walpole on Queen's death, ii. 120, 125.
    Lampoons, ii. 102.
    Memoirs of Reign of George II., i. 306, 308.
    On Duke of Argyll, i. 44.
    On Frederick, Prince of Wales, ii. 39, 105.
    On George II.'s danger, ii. 69.
    On George II.'s illness, ii. 303.
    On Handel and Royal Family, ii. 51.
    On Hardwicke and Talbot, ii. 10.
    On letters between George I. and Prince of Wales, ii. 109.
    On Princess Caroline, ii. 38.
    On Princess Emily, ii. 38.
    On Sir William Wyndham, i. 288.
    On Walpole being indispensable, ii. 91.
    Sedition and Defamation displayed, i. 306.
    Sketch of, i. 306.
    Supports Walpole's policy, ii. 160, 168.
    Takes news of Prince of Wales's claim to Queen, ii. 78, 79.
  Hessian mercenaries, i. 291, 292.
    For America, iii. 183.
    In Ireland, iii. 322.
  Highlands, modern prosperity of, ii. 233.
  Highlands, pacification after Culloden, ii. 227.
  Hill, Frank H., quoted on:
    Fame and George Canning, iv. 59.
    Peel and art of government, iv. 57.
  Hill, Rowland, death, iv. 284.
  Hill, Sir George, recognizes Wolfe Tone, iii. 325.
  Hillsborough, Lord, Secretary of State, iii. 147.
    Colonial policy, iii. 147, 148, 150, 152.
  Hoadley, Dr., Bishop of Winchester, opposed to Test Act,
      ii. 110, 111.
  Hoche, General:
    Commands expedition to Ireland, iii. 315.
    Death, iii. 318.
  Hogarth, William:
    Caricature of Churchill, iii. 63.
    Caricature of Wilkes, iii. 61.
    Death, iii. 68.
    "March to Finchley," ii. 231.
    Pictures of London, i. 64, 65.
    "Polling Day," ii. 188.
    Portrait of Lord Lovat, ii. 230.
    Sketch of career, ii. 230.
  Hogg, James, death, iv. 282.
  Holland, Henry Fox, Lord:
    As Administrator and Debater, ii. 274.
    Asked to support Prince of Wales's claim, ii. 78.
    Character, iii. 33, 141.
    Forms Opposition to Pitt, iii. 26.
    Macaulay and C. Greville dine with, iv. 185.
    Paymaster, ii. 298.
    Protests against words "On the true faith of a Christian," iv. 69.
    Secretary at War, ii. 296.
  Holroyd, Colonel, threatens Lord George Gordon, iii. 199.
  Holwell, on Black Hole of Calcutta, ii. 267.
  Holy Alliance and Congress of Verona, iv. 39, 42, 45.
  Horne-Tooke, John, Rector of Brentford:
    Candidate for Westminster, iii. 139.
    Quarrels with Wilkes, iii. 136.
    Supports Wilkes, iii. 117.
  Horneck, Mary, "Jessamy Bride," iii. 169.
  Houghton, Walpole at, i. 196.
  House of Commons:
    Chairman of Committee, iv. 160.
    Commencement of Party organization, i. 256.
    Committee on Convention, ii. 171.
    Debates on:
      Allowance for Prince of Wales, ii. 82, 88.
      American Colonies, iii. 162.
      Middlesex Election, iii. 131.
      Restitution of Gibraltar, i. 297.
      Supply to George II., i. 280.
    Election Petitions, ii. 189.
    Gordon presents petition to, iii. 198.
    Growth of, i. 32.
    In Committee, iv. 160.
    Inadequate accommodation, iv. 270, 271.
    Ladies' Gallery, iv. 272.
    Numbers in 1714, i. 51.
    Obstruction in, iv. 159, 160 _seqq._
    Petition of merchants against Spaniards, ii. 153.
    Petitions against Spaniards, i. 294.
    Secession from, ii. 172, 174.
    Subsidies for foreign mercenaries, i. 293.
  House of Lords:
    Agitation against, iv. 167.
    Debates on:
      Bill for Princess Anne's dowry, ii. 43.
      Convention, ii. 164, 168.
      Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 89.
    India Bills rejected, iii. 235.
    Numbers in 1714, i. 51.
    Protest against Address on Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 90.
    Reform and, iv. 169, 173, 176.
    Scene during Gordon Riot, iii. 197, 201.
    Walpole and, ii. 159.
  Houses of Parliament (old), i. 64.
    Destroyed by fire, iv. 267.
  Houses of Parliament, design for new, iv. 269, 270.
  Howe, Admiral Richard, Viscount, Mutiny at Spithead and, iii. 335.
  Howe, William, Viscount, iii. 182.
    Commands at Breed Hill, iii. 176.
  Humbert, General, commands expedition to Ireland, iii. 323.
  Hume, David, on Whitefield's eloquence, ii. 139.
  Hume, Joseph, Committee on Orangeism, iv. 387.
  Hungerford speaks for Bolingbroke, i. 108.
  Hunt, Leigh, on:
    George IV., iii. 242.
    William Congreve, i. 301.
  Hunt, Orator, defeats Stanley at Preston, iv. 131.
  Huskisson, William:
    Attitude on Catholic Emancipation, iv. 68.
    Colonial and War Secretary, iv. 65, 67.
    Death, iv. 103.
    Resigns office, iv. 72.
    Sketch of career, iv. 52.
    Treasurer of Navy and President of Board of Trade, iv. 58.
  Hutchinson, Governor-General of Massachusetts:
    House in Boston ransacked, iii. 91.
    Letters to Whately, iii. 153.
  Hyde Park, camp in, i. 121.

  Ibraham Pasha, military capacity, iv. 49.
  Imhoff, Baroness von, and Warren Hastings, iii. 255.
  Impey, Elijah, Chief Justice, iii. 261, 268.
  Impressment for Navy abolished, iv. 263, 267.
  India Bills:
    Fox's, iii. 230 _seqq._
    Pitt's, iii. 237, 238.
  Indian Empire, ii. 257.
    Condition in 1707, ii. 257.
    Three Presidencies, ii. 253.
  Inglis, Sir Robert Harry, speech on Reform Bill, iv. 144.
  Insurrection of 1715, i. 118 _seqq._
    Conditions of success, i. 118.
  Intrigues in Cabinet, i. 251.
  Ireland:
    Agitation in 1724, i. 240.
    Condition in 1797, iii. 318.
    Grievances, iii. 306.
    In 1714, i. 80.
    New copper coinage, i. 240.
  Irish and English Parliaments, i. 179.
  Irish Brigade at Fontenoy and Lauffeld, ii. 239.
  Irish clergy, ii. 130.
  Irish House of Lords, i. 178.
  Irish Parliament, i. 80; iii. 307.
    Abolished, iv. 206.
  Irish, Penal Laws against, ii. 248.
  Irish Rebellion of '98, iii. 313, 314 _seqq._; iv. 206.
  Irish State Church question, tithes, iv. 207 _seqq._
    Debate on, iv. 212.
    (_See also_ Tithe question, Ireland.)
  Irish vote, iv. 244.
  Irving, Washington, essay on Robert Emmet, iii. 329.
  Isla, Earl of, i. 250.
  Italy in 1716, i. 154.

  Jacobite demonstration in England, i. 121, 135.
  Jacobitism and Tory cause, iii. 24.
  Jamaica: Act to mitigate punishment of slaves, iv. 193.
  Jekyll, Sir Joseph, Gin Act, ii. 56.
  Jenkins, Captain, story of his ear, ii. 158.
  Johnson, Samuel:
    English dictionary, ii. 299.
    Epitaph on Goldsmith, iii. 171.
    Friend of Goldsmith, iii. 169.
    Interview with Wilkes, iii. 138.
    On acquittal of Lord George Gordon, iii. 210.
    On Alexander Wedderburn, iii. 158.
    On authorship of _Letters of Junius_, iii. 131.
    On state of Irish, ii. 248.
    On taking of Newgate, iii. 203.
    Opinion of Thomas Sheridan, iii. 217.
    Receives pension, iii. 55.
    Regard for Warren Hastings, iii. 255.
    Sketch of, iii. 39 _seqq._
    Visits Paris, iii. 293.
  Jones, Inigo, lays out Covent Garden, i. 68.
  Jones, Paul, commands "Le Bonhomme Richard," iii. 183.
  Jones, Sir William, Persian grammar, iii. 254.
  Jonson, Ben, Comedies, i. 299.
  Jordan, Mrs., and William IV., iv. 97.
  Julius Caesar regulates calendar, ii. 275.
  _Junius's Letters in Public Advertiser_, iii. 128.

  Kazim Bazar Settlement, iii. 249.
  Keats, John, death, iv. 92.
  Kean, Edmund, death, iv. 285.
  Kelly supports Young Pretender, ii. 205.
  Kemble, John, death, iv. 92.
  Kendal, Mlle. Schulemberg, Duchess of, i. 7, 241, 266.
    Bribed by Bolingbroke, i. 267.
    Death, i. 266.
  Kenmure, Viscount, i. 137.
    Executed, i. 142.
  Kennett, Lord Mayor of London, iii. 201.
  Kent, Edward, Duke of, death, iii. 348.
  Kent, Duchess of, and William IV., iv. 117.
  Kenyon defends Lord George Gordon, iii. 210.
  Ker, Lord Mark, reception of Cope, ii. 215.
  Kilmansegge, Mme. (Countess of Darlington), i. 7.
  Kilmarnock, Lord, trial of, ii. 228, 229.
  Kilwarden, Lord Chief Justice:
    Action  respecting  Wolfe Tone, iii. 326.
    Murdered, iii. 328.
  King's Evil, iii. 39.
  King's friends, iii. 108.
  Kingstown, origin of name, iv. 25.
  Kinnison, David, iii. 161.
  "Kit-Kat" Club, i. 74.
  Kneller: portrait of Queen Anne, i. 2.
  Knighton, Sir William, sketch of, iv. 47.
  Königsmark, Aurora, mother of Maurice de Saxe, i. 8.
  Königsmark, Charles John, i. 7.
    Murders Lord Thynne, i. 8.
  Königsmark, Philip Christof, assassinated, i. 7.
  Kosciusko in America, iii. 183.

  La Bourdonnais:
    Besieges and takes Madras, ii. 259.
    Founds colonies of Ile de France and Bourbon, ii. 258.
    Sent to France under arrest, ii. 259.
  La Vendée, Royalist revolt in, iii. 303.
  La Vrilličre, Mme., i. 237.
  Lade, Sir John, iii. 244.
  Lafayette:
    Demands revival of States-General, iii. 293.
    In America, iii. 183.
  Lamb, Charles:
    Death, iv. 284.
    On "Robinson Crusoe," ii. 2.
  Lambton, J. G. (_see_ Durham, Earl of).
  Lampooners, ii. 102.
  Landor, Walter Savage:
    Epigram on the Four Georges, iii. 242.
    On George I. and George II., i. 273.
  Langdale, distilleries fired by mob, iii. 207.
  Lauderdale, Lord, attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 301.
  Lauffeld, battle of, ii. 239.
  Law, defends Warren Hastings, iii. 285.
  Law, John, forms Mississippi Company, i. 184.
  Law, William, "Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life," ii. 133.
  Lawrence, Major, commands in S. India (1751), ii. 264.
  Lawrence, Sir Thomas, iv. 93.
  Layer, Christopher:
    Arrested, i. 219.
    Hanged, i. 221.
  Lecky, William E. H., on:
    Catholics and Protestants, iv. 55.
    Shrewsbury as Lord High Treasurer, i. 46.
  Lee, Richard Henry, on George Washington, iii. 189.
  Lee, General Charles, iii. 179.
    Traitor, iii. 184.
  Leeds, iv. 99.
  Leeds, Duke of, protests against Act for Dependency
      of Ireland, i. 178.
  Leibnitz on Electress Sophia, i. 4.
  Lennox, Lady Sarah, sketch of, iii. 9.
  Leopold, King of the Belgians, iv. 117, 290.
  Lepell, Mary, Lady Hervey, i. 307, 308.
  Lessing, "Laocoon," iii. 98.
    Referred to, iii. 145.
  Leszczynski, Stanislaus, King of Poland, sketch of, ii. 23.
  _Letters of Junius_ in _Public Advertiser_, iii. 128.
    Authorship, iii. 130.
  Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, i. 290.
  Lexington, battle at, ii. 43; iii. 174.
  Liberal political principles, rise of, iv. 94.
  Lightfoot, Hannah, iii. 8.
  Limerick invested by William III., i. 83.
  Limerick, Treaty of, i. 83.
  Linley, Elizabeth (Mrs. Richard B. Sheridan), iii. 218.
  Liverpool:
    As commercial port, iv. 99.
    In 1714, i. 79.
    Memorials of Canning, iv. 34.
  Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, iv. 103.
  Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of:
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iv. 34.
    Attitude towards popular liberty, iv. 3.
    Character, iii. 345.
    Death, iv. 62.
    Illness, iv. 55, 58.
    Prime Minister, iv. 3.
    Recommends Canning as Foreign Secretary, iv. 37.
  Lloyd, Dr., at Westminster School, iii. 54.
  Logwood Trade on Campeachy Bay, i. 294, 295.
  London:
    In panic, iii. 204.
    In 1714, i. 63.
    In 1760, iii. 15.
    Penny Post, i. 78.
    Poverty in, ii. 89.
    State during '45, ii. 218.
  London University Charter, iv. 261.
  Londonderry, Marquis of (_see_ Castlereagh, Viscount).
  Lord High Treasurer, office of, i. 46.
  Lord Mayor of London committed to Tower, iii. 135.
  Lord Mayor of London presents addresses to King, iii. 133.
  Lord Treasurership in Commission, i. 97.
  "Lords of Trade," iii. 80.
  Louis XIV. and Stuart cause, i. 117.
  Louis XV. places Stanislaus Leszczynski on throne of Poland,
      ii. 23.
  Louis XVI.:
    Character, iii. 295.
    Executed, iii. 300, 303.
  Louis Napoleon, Emperor, demeanor, i. 127.
  Louis Napoleon, Prince, i. 10.
  Louis Philippe, King of the French, iv. 98, 105.
  Louisiana, ii. 283.
  Lovat, Simon Fraser, Lord, sketch of, ii. 229.
  Lowe, Sir Hudson, and Napoleon Bonaparte, iii. 344.
  Lowland Agriculture, i. 87.
  Loyalty in 1714, i. 59.
  Luttrell, Colonel:
    Opposes Wilkes, iii. 126.
    Petition against, iii. 132.
  Lyall, Sir Alfred, on Hastings's application for annuity
      for his wife, iii. 289.
  Lyndhurst, John Singleton Copley, Baron, iv. 58, 65.
    Amendment on Reform Bill (third), iv. 174.
    Interview with King on Catholic emancipation, iv. 77.
    Lord Chancellor, iv. 239.
    Opposes Municipal Bill, iv. 259.
    Oratory, iv. 174.
  Lyons rises against Paris, iii. 303.
  Lyttelton in politics and literature, ii. 274.

  Maberly, house sacked, iii. 201.
  Macartney, General, returns to England, i. 122.
  Macartney, Lord, governor of Madras, iii. 266.
  Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord:
    On Arbuthnot, ii. 21.
    On Irish tithe question, iv. 210.
    On Warren Hastings, iii. 258.
    Sketch of, iv. 184.
  Macaulay, Zachary, West Indian Slavery and, iv. 190.
  Macclesfield, Thomas Parker, Earl of:
    Impeached, i. 262.
    On reform of calendar, ii. 275.
  M'Cullock, Lieutenant, suggests scaling Heights of Abraham, ii. 288.
  Macdonald, Aeneas, evidence on '45, ii. 205, 227.
  Macdonald of Barrisdale, ii. 227.
  Macdonald of Sleat refuses to support Young Pretender, ii. 205.
  Macdonald, Sir John, supports Young Pretender, ii. 205,
  Macdonalds' conduct at Culloden, ii. 225.
  Mackintosh, Brigadier, escapes from Newgate, i. 142.
  Mackintosh, Sir James:
    Bill to abolish death penalty for minor offences, iv. 20.
    Death, iv. 281.
    Denounces trial of Rev. John Smith, iv. 194.
  M'Laurin improves fortifications of Edinburgh, ii. 211.
  Maclean, Donald, tried for murdering Allan, iii. 120.
  Macleod of Macleod refuses to support Young Pretender, ii. 205.
  M'Quirk, Edward, tried for murder of George Clarke, iii. 129.
  Madras:
    Besieged by Le Bourdonnais, ii. 259.
    Restored to England, ii. 260.
  Madras expedition, iii. 250.
  Mahon, Lord, iii. 186.
  Mahratta States and Nizam of Deccan, iii. 265, 266.
  Malleson, Colonel, on Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 267.
  Malthus, Thomas Robert, iv. 281.
  Manchester, iv. 99.
    In 1714, i. 79.
  Mangan, Clarence, "Dark Rosaleen," iv. 205.
  Manley, Isaac, Postmaster-General, Dublin, i. 82.
  Mansfield, Murray, Lord, ii. 274.
    Attorney-General, ii. 296.
    Demeanor during Gordon riot, iii. 197.
    House sacked, iii. 203.
  Mar, John Erskine, Earl of, i. 39.
    Leader of insurrection, 1715, i. 123.
    Letter to Bolingbroke, i. 120.
    Sketch of, i. 123.
  March Club, i. 74.
  Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary, British troops support, ii. 182.
  Marie Antoinette executed, iii. 300.
  Markham arrests Rajah of Benares, iii. 269.
  Marlborough House, i. 69.
  Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, i. 2, 54.
    Advice on rebellion of 1715, i. 128.
    Advice to Bolingbroke, i. 104.
    Character, i. 22, 24, 210.
    Charges against, i. 94.
    Closing days, i. 208.
    Funeral, i. 211.
    Member of Privy Council, i. 100.
    Return to England, i. 16, 52.
  Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, i. 208.
    Advice to Duke, i. 100.
    Character, i. 25.
  Marriage Act, ii. 279.
  Marseilles rises against Paris, iii. 303.
  Martin challenges Wilkes, iii. 66.
  Martineau, H.:
    Attitude towards Poor Relief, iv. 224.
    On admission of ladies to hear debates in House, iv. 272.
    On movement against monopoly of East India Company, iv. 232.
    On Queen Caroline, iv. 10.
  Masham, created peer, i. 174.
  Masham, Mrs., i. 2.
    Letter to Swift, i. 36.
    Result of influence with Queen, i. 94.
  Massachusetts:
    Memorial from, ii. 42.
    Mutiny Act and, iii. 150.
    Petition for recall of Hutchinson and Oliver, iii. 155.
    Protests against Stamp Act, iii. 90.
    Punishment of, iii. 164.
  Mathews, Charles, Sen., "At Home" performance, iv. 285.
  Maximilian, Emperor, iv. 45.
  Mayfair, i. 72.
  Mechanics' Institutes, iv. 93.
  Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Duchy of, iii. 11.
  Medmenham-on-Thames, iii. 46.
  Meer Jaffier conspires against Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 269,
      270, 271, 272.
  Melbourne, William Lamb, Viscount:
    Attitude towards reforms, iv. 254.
    Character, iv. 234.
    Home Secretary, iv. 126.
    Irish Members and, iv. 253.
    Prime Minister, iv. 233, 250.
  Meredith, George, "Ironic procession," iii. 2.
  Methodism (_see_ Wesleyan Movement).
  Methuen, Sir Paul, Treasurer of Household, i. 279.
    Opposes Bolingbroke's pardon, i. 259.
  Mexican Empire, iv. 45.
  Middlesex election (1768), iii. 117.
    Debate on petition, iii. 131.
  Mill, James, historian of British India, iv. 281.
  Mill, John Stuart:
    Doctrine of non-intervention, iv. 62.
    On Irish cottier tenant, iv. 222.
  Mills, Mrs., friend of Lady Nithisdale, i. 139.
  Ministry of All the Talents, iii. 340.
  Ministry of 1714, i. 97.
  Ministry of 1742, ii. 192.
  Minorca, i. 296, 298.
    Captured by French, ii. 297.
  Mir Jaffier, iii. 250, 253.
    Intrigues, iii. 250.
  Mir Kasim, Nawab, and Ellis, iii. 251.
  Mirzapha Jung claims Deccan Vice-royalty, ii. 261.
    Death, ii. 262.
  Mississippi scheme, i. 184 _seqq._
  Mitchel, John, on Chesterfield's rule in Ireland, ii. 250.
  Mob law in London, iii. 122.
  Mob orators, Sir Robert Inglis on, iv. 145.
  Mohun, Lord, i. 74.
    Killed in duel, i. 122.
  Moira, Lady Elizabeth, letter on French expedition to Ireland,
      iii. 315.
  Molesworth: on renewal of East India Company's Charter, iv. 230, 232.
  Monarchy under Hanoverians, ii. 74.
  _Monitor_ edited by John Entinck, iii. 51, 52, 55.
  Monopolies, petitions for, i. 191.
  Monroe doctrine, iv. 44.
  Monson, Colonel, iii. 260, 261.
    Death, iii. 264.
  Montagu, Edward Wortley, i. 105.
    Ambassador to Constantinople, i. 148.
  Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley:
    Letters, i. 148, 149, 152, 157.
    Sketch of, i. 148, 149, 150.
  Montcalm, Louis, Marquis de:
    Killed at Quebec, ii. 290.
    Monument, ii. 290.
  Montesquieu, on Duke of Berwick, ii. 34.
  Montgomery, --, iii. 179.
  Moore, Thomas:
    Lines on Robert Emmet, iii. 329.
    On George IV., iii. 242.
    Quoted, iv. 23.
  Moravian sect, ii. 134.
  More, Hannah:
    Death, iv. 282.
    On Lord George Gordon, iii. 193.
  Morgan, Mrs., friend of Lady Nithisdale, i. 139.
  Morris, Charles, iii. 244.
  Mostyn, Sir Thomas, iii. 338.
  "Mug houses," i. 75.
  Municipal Corporation Bill for Ireland, iv. 258.
  Municipal Corporations Commission and Bill, iv. 257, 258.
  Municipal system, reorganization of, iv. 254 _seqq._
  Munster, Earl of, iv. 114.
  Murari Rao offers to assist English, ii. 263.
  Murchison, Sir Roderick, and British Association, iv. 262.
  Murger, Henri, "bohemianiam," iii. 310.
  Murphy, Father John:
    And _Auditor_, iii. 51.
    Conduct in '98, iii. 320.
  Murray, James (Earl of Dunbar), Secretary to James Stuart, ii. 18.
  Murray, John, of Broughton, ii. 227.
  Murray, tutor to Charles Edward, Young Pretender, ii. 202.
  Murray (_see_ Mansfield, Lord).
  Musters, Mr., house set fire to, iv. 170.
  Mutiny Act and New York, iii. 149.

  Nairn, Lord, a prisoner, i. 137, 138.
  Nand Kumar (Nuncomar), iii. 258, 259.
    Accusations against Hastings, iii. 261.
    Charged with conspiracy, iii. 261.
    Charged with forgery, iii. 261.
    Tried and hanged, iii. 262.
  Napier, Hon. George, marries Lady Sarah Bunbury, iii. 10.
  Napier, Sir Charles, iii. 10; iv. 179.
  Napier, Sir William, iii. 10.
  Napoleon I. (Bonaparte):
    Close of career, iv. 12.
    On Romilly's suicide, iii. 347.
    On Thames Embankment, iv. 14.
    On Wellington seizing English crown, iv. 277.
    Scheme for invasion of Ireland and, iii. 312, 314.
    Sketch of career, iii. 331 _seqq._, 344.
    Wins Toulon, iii. 304.
  Napoleon III. (Charles Louis), Policy, iv. 45.
  National Assembly, declaration of war and, iii. 302, 303.
  National Crisis (1832), iv. 178.
  National Debt (1714), i. 93.
    Pitt's plan for redemption of, iii. 239.
  National distress in 1830, iv. 100, 105.
  Navarino, battle of, iv. 50, 67, 96.
  Navy, press-gang system abolished, iv. 263, 266.
  Nelson, Horatio, Viscount, iii. 337.
    Receives freedom of London, iii. 139.
  Nepean,  Under-Secretary of State, iii. 235.
  New England Colonies, iii. 75.
  New York:
    Congress of 1765, iii. 91.
    In 1765, iii. 77.
    Mutiny Act and, iii. 149.
  Newbottle, Lord, and Lady Sarah Lennox, iii. 9, 10.
  Newcastle, Duke of:
    Appeal to Lords on declaration of war, ii. 177.
    Bribery under, iii. 25.
    Family influence, ii. 243.
    Jealous of Pulteney, ii. 192.
    Leader of Administration, ii. 210, 296.
    On Bill for Princess Anne's dowry, ii. 44.
    On "Briton," iii. 23.
    On "Family Compact," ii. 33.
    Resigns office, ii. 298.
    Sacrifices Byng, ii. 298.
    Secretary for Foreign Affairs, ii. 160.
    Secretary of State, ii. 192.
    Traitor to Walpole, ii. 160, 189.
    Warns Rockingham against Burke, iii. 100.
  Newfoundland, French fishing-stations on, iii. 78.
  Newgate taken by rioters, iii. 203.
  Newton, Sir Isaac:
    Death, i. 272.
    Opinion on Irish coins, i. 241.
  Neyoe, Irish priest:
    Arrested, i. 219.
    Drowned, i. 221.
  Nile, battle of the, iii. 337.
  Nithisdale, Countess of:
    Effects Earl's escape, i. 140.
    Petition to King, i. 139.
  Nithisdale, William Maxwell, Earl of:
    Condemnation and escape, i. 138.
  Nizam-Al-Mulk, Viceroy of Deccan, death of, ii. 261.
  Nizam of Deccan and Mahratta States, iii. 265, 266.
  Nollekens, Joseph, iv. 93.
  Nootka Sound, English settlement at, iii. 302.
  Norbury, Baron, tries Robert Emmet, iii. 329.
  Nore, mutiny at, iii. 335.
  Norfolk, Duke of:
    Committed to Tower, i. 214.
    Discharged, i. 215.
  Norris, James, sketch of, iv. 288.
  _North Briton_, iii. 51, 52, 155.
    Churchill writes on, iii. 55.
    No. 45 on King's Speech, iii. 57, 60.
    Ordered to be burned, iii. 67.
    Warrant for arrest of authors, printers, and publishers, iii. 58.
  North, Frederick, Lord:
    Attitude during Wedderburn's attack on Franklin, iii. 156.
    Bill to close Port of Boston, iii. 163.
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 113.
    Coalition with Fox, iii. 225.
    Colonial policy, iii. 152.
    Fall of Ministry, iii. 223.
    Finances and, iii. 239.
    Makes peace with America, iii. 184.
    Moves repeal of American duties except tea tax, iii. 151.
    Regulates Act of 1773, iii. 260.
  North, Lord:
    Committed to Tower, i. 214.
    Discharged, i. 215.
    Condemns South Sea Bill, i. 190.
  Northcote, James, on Queen Charlotte, iii. 12.
  Northumberland, Duchess of:
    Governess to Princess Victoria, iv. 291.
  Northumberland, Duke of, forced to toast Wilkes, iii. 118.
  Norton, Fletcher, speech on Middlesex election petition, iii. 131.
  Norwich in 1714, i. 79.
  Nottingham Castle burned, iv. 170.
  Nunjeraj, Vizier of Rajah of Mysore, iii. 265.

  Oates, Titus, on term "Tory," i. 17.
  O'Brien, Smith, iv. 179.
  O'Connell, Daniel:
    Demands municipal reform for Ireland, iv. 258.
    Elected for Clare, iv. 71, 78.
    In favor of ballot, iv. 131.
    Loyalty, iv. 23, 27.
    On Universal Suffrage, iv. 85.
    Oratory, iv. 70.
    Seconds amendment on Emancipation of Slaves, iv. 197.
    Sketch of, iv. 53, 69.
    Speech on Irish Church Revenues, iv. 248, 249.
    Speeches on Reform Bill, iv. 148, 172.
  O'Connor, Arthur, iii. 313, 314.
    Withdraws from Dublin Parliament, iii. 319.
  October Club, i. 74.
  Oglethorpe, General, invites John Wesley to Georgia, ii. 134.
  Ohio, English and French on, ii. 285.
  Oliver, Alderman, committed to Tower, iii. 135.
  Oliver, Andrew, collector of stamp taxes at Boston, iii. 91.
  Oliver, Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts:
    Letters to Whately, iii. 153.
  O'Meara, Dr. Barry E., conversations with Napoleon, iv. 13.
  Omichund:
    Death, ii. 273.
    Plots against English and Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 269, 270.
  Onslow, Arthur, Speaker of House of Commons:
    On Sir William Wyndham, i. 288.
    Opposes Bolingbroke's pardon, i. 259.
    Re-elected Speaker, ii. 22, 186.
    Sketch of, i. 282.
  Onslow, Sir Richard, i. 105.
  Orange Associations, iv. 274 _seqq._
  Orange, Prince of, marries Princess Anne, ii. 41.
  Order of Bath revived, i. 252.
  Orleans, Louis Philippe, Duke of (Egalité), iii. 293.
  Orleans, Philippe, Duke of (Regent), i. 117.
    Death, i. 238.
    Overtures to George I., i. 156, 181.
    Sketch of, i. 155.
  Ormond, Duke of:
    Flight, i. 111.
    Heads Spanish Jacobite expedition, i. 162.
    Impeached, i. 109, 110.
    In Paris, i. 119, 120.
    Name razed from roll of Peers, i. 114.
    Warden of Cinque Ports, i. 39.
  Orrery, Earl of:
    Committed to Tower, i. 214.
    Discharged, i. 215.
  Otis, James, denounces Writs of Assistance, iii. 84.
  Oude subjected, iii. 258.
  Oude, Vizier of, and Begums, iii. 271.
  Oxford in '45, ii. 220.
  Oxford, Robert Harley, Earl of, i. 26, 29.
    Acquitted, i. 111, 170.
    Attitude towards Restoration of Stuarts, i. 107.
    Character, i. 113.
    Committed to Tower, i. 112.
    Establishes South Sea Company, i. 187.
    Impeached of high treason, i. 109, 110, 112, 168.
    Petition to House of Lords, i. 168.
    Reception by George I., i. 101.
    Sketch of, i. 30.
  Ozinda's chocolate-house, i. 76.

  Paine, Thomas, iii. 312.
  Pakenham, Hon. Catherine, Duchess of Wellington, iii. 334.
  Palmerston, Viscount:
    Foreign Secretary, iv. 126, 252.
    Member for Tiverton, iv. 254.
    Member of Liverpool Administration, iv. 3.
    On the "Inevitable Man," iv. 55.
    Resigns office, iv. 72.
    Secretary at War, iv. 58.
  Pamela, wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, iii. 313.
  Paradis defeats Nabob of Carnatic at St. Thome, ii. 261.
  Parker heads mutiny at Nore, iii. 335.
  Parliament:
    Annual, i. 146.
    Dissolved (1831), iv. 143.
    Election of 1734, ii. 19.
    Election of 1830, iv. 105.
    Irish and English, i. 179.
    Language of sycophancy, ii. 85.
    Motions for removal of Walpole, ii. 185.
    Of 1722, i. 206, 213.
    Prorogued  (1727), Royal Speech, i. 278.
    Septennial Act, i. 146.
    Short, ii. 11.
    Speech from Throne (1739), ii. 162; (1741), ii. 186;
      (1765), iii. 88.
    Triennial Acts, i. 145.
    (_See also_ House of Lords and House of Commons.)
  Parliamentary Opposition, system of, i. 285 _seqq._
  Parma, Duke of, i. 158.
  Parnell, Sir Henry:
    Motion on Civil Service Estimates, iv. 110.
    Paymaster-General, iv. 252.
  Parr, Dr., opinion of Sheridan, iii. 217.
  Patents, petitions for, i. 190.
  "Patriots," i. 288, 296, 298.
    Frederick, Prince of Wales, and, ii. 50, 108, 110.
    In Opposition and power, ii. 242.
    Oppose borrowing from Sinking Fund, i. 309.
    Raise war cry, ii. 149, 157.
    Return to Commons, ii. 178.
    Secede from Commons, ii. 172.
    Struggle against Walpole, ii. 11.
  Patten, Rev. Robert, as King's evidence, i. 137.
  Peel, Sir Robert:
    At opening of Liverpool and Manchester railway, iv. 103.
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iv. 57, 68, 74, 75.
    Attitude towards Reform, iv. 152, 163.
    Declines to form Ministry, iv. 177.
    Free Trade and, iv. 52.
    Home Secretary, iv. 71, 103.
    Interview with King on Catholic emancipation, iv. 77.
    Measure on Irish Tithe System, iv. 245; Speech on, iv. 249.
    On claims of "Princess" Olivia, iv. 287.
    Prime Minister and Chancellor of Exchequer, iv. 238.
    Resigns office, iv. 113, 250.
    Speech on municipal reform, iv. 259, 260.
    Speech on Reform Bill, iv. 146.
    Summoned to form Ministry, iv. 235.
    Tamworth Address, iv. 240.
  Peerage Bill, object of, i. 174.
  Peers, creation of new, iv. 180.
  Pelham, Henry:
    Death, ii. 296.
    Letter to Duke of Cumberland, ii. 239.
    Paymaster, ii. 192.
    Prime Minister, ii. 244, 245.
  Pelham Ministry:
    Resign, ii. 244.
    Return to power, ii. 245.
  Penn, William, death, i. 179.
  Penny Post, London, i. 78.
  Pepys quoted on Duchess of Cleveland, i. 23.
  Perceval, Spencer:
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 341.
    Death, iii. 341.
    Regency Bill, iii. 341.
  Percy, Lord, commands reinforcements from Boston, iii. 174.
  Perry, presents petition of merchants against Spaniards, ii. 153.
  Perth, Duke of, ii. 223.
    Appeal to Macdonalds, ii. 225.
    Death, ii. 232.
  Perth, Jacobites retreat from, i. 128.
  Pestolozzi, Johann H., iv. 93.
  Peter the Great, character, i. 162.
  Peterborough, Lord, anecdote of, ii. 167.
  Philadelphia:
    Congress draws up Declaration of Rights, iii. 173.
    Evacuated, iii. 183.
    In hands of British, iii. 183.
    In 1765, iii. 77.
    Tea-ship at, iii. 161.
  Philip V. of Spain, ii. 28.
    Renounces French throne, i. 157.
  Phipps, Sir Constantine, removed from office of Chancellor, i. 98.
  Pitt diamond, ii. 54.
  Pitt Ministry (1766), members of, iii. 108.
  Pitt, Thomas, i. 105.
    M. P. for Okehampton, ii. 54.
  Pitt, William, Earl of Chatham:
    Accepts pension and barony for his wife, iii. 27.
    Advice to Prince of Wales, ii. 78.
    As War Minister, ii. 299; iii. 2, 27, 29.
    Character, iii. 186.
    Coalition against, iii. 26.
    Death, iii. 186.
    Denunciation of Walpole and Carteret, ii. 245.
    Illness, iii. 73, 108, 109.
    In House of Peers, iii. 109.
    Maiden speech, ii. 52, 55.
    On action of Boston people, iii. 161, 163.
    Paymaster-General, ii. 296.
    Protests against war with America, iii. 185.
    Quarrels with Temple, iii. 108.
    Refuses office, iii. 73, 93.
    Resigns office, iii. 27.
    Sketch of, ii. 54.
    Speech on Convention, ii. 171.
    Takes news of accession to George III., iii. 2.
    Takes office, ii. 274; iii. 108.
    Wilkes and, iii. 57.
  Pitt, William (the younger), iii. 211.
    Antagonism to Fox, iii. 225.
    Attacks Fox's India Bill, iii. 232.
    Attitude on Regency, iii. 243.
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iii. 308; iv. 53.
    Challenge to Ministry on Eastern possessions, iii. 230.
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 225.
    Closing hours, iii. 338.
    Coalition against, iii. 26, 225.
    Contrasted with Fox, iii. 212.
    Death, iii. 339.
    Declines Vice-Treasurership of Ireland, iii. 224.
    Difficulties of Administration, iii. 240.
    Financial measures, iii. 239.
    First Lord of Treasury and Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 236.
    Foreign policy, iii. 302.
    French policy, iii. 301.
    India Bill, iii. 237, 238.
    Irish policy, iii. 319, 327.
    Makes name in Commons, iii. 223.
    Plan of Parliamentary reform, iii. 229, 240.
    Refuses to appeal for payment of Prince of Wales's debts, iii. 242.
    Resigns office, iii. 337.
    Sketch of, iii. 214.
    Speech on Benares vote, iii. 277, 279.
    Speech on Trafalgar, iii. 339.
    Struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte, iii. 332, 337.
    Supports Dundas, iii. 338.
  Plassey (Palasi), Battle of, ii. 271, 272.
  Playhouse Bill, ii. 96, 99.
  Plunket, Lord, Lord Chancellor for Ireland, iv. 127.
  Pocket boroughs, iv. 99, 147.
  Poland, condition of, iv. 40.
  Poland, election of king, ii. 23.
  Political freedom in 1716, i. 144.
  Political life in 1742, ii. 239.
  Political parties in 1728, i. 287, 288.
  Pomeroy, General, iii. 176, 179.
  Pontiac conspiracy, iii. 79.
  Population of Great Britain (1714), i. 63.
  Poor Laws, iv. 221 _seqq._
    Commission, iv. 225.
    Bill, iv. 228, 229.
  Pope, Alexander:
    "Dunciad," i. 301.
    Epitaph on James Craggs, i. 198.
    Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton, i. 272.
    Lampoons, ii. 102, 103.
    Loses money in South Sea stock, i. 22.
    On Argyll, Duke of, i. 44.
    On Bacon, i. 22.
    On Bolingbroke, i. 29.
    On Oxford, i. 29, 31.
    Place in literature, ii. 197.
    Sketch of, ii. 197.
  Popham, Major, defeats Rajah's troops, iii. 270.
  "Porcupine Papers," iv. 155.
  Porteous, Captain John:
    Death, ii. 64.
    Sentence on, ii. 62.
    Sketch of, ii. 58.
  Porteous riots, ii. 58 _seqq._
  Portland, William Cavendish Bentinck, Duke of:
    Prime Minister, iii. 340.
    Supports Wilkes, iii. 116.
  Portsmouth, press-gang in, iv. 265.
  Portugal: free institutions, iv. 43.
  Potter, Thomas, iii. 48, 65.
    Vice-Treasurer for Ireland, iii. 49.
  Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, iv. 239.
  Pratt, Justice, Lord Camden, iii. 109.
    Discharges Wilkes, iii. 60, 67.
  Predestination, Wesley and Whitefield dispute on, ii. 139.
  Prescott, hero of Breed Hill, iii. 179.
  Preston:
    "Fancy franchises," iv. 183.
    Jacobites defeated at, i. 128.
  Preston, Colonel, commands British troops at Boston, iii. 151.
  Preston, General, in Edinburgh Castle, ii. 215.
  Preston Pans, Battle of, ii. 214, 215.
  Prideaux, --, in Canada, ii. 287.
  Primacy of Ireland and George IV., iv. 27.
  Prior, Matthew, i. 38.
    Arrested, i. 106.
    M. P. for East Grinstead, i. 52.
  Prisoners in 1715, i. 136.
  Privy Council, July 30, 1714, i. 40, 45, 46.
  Proctor, Sir W. Beauchamp, Whig candidate for Middlesex, iii. 117.
  "Protestant" and "Catholic" Ministers, iv. 54.
  Prussia, position at end of Seven Years' War, iii. 29.
  _Public Advertiser, Letters of Junius_ in, iii. 128.
  Pulteney, William (Earl of Bath), i. 105.
    Accepts Peerage, ii. 192.
    Advice to Prince of Wales, ii. 78.
    Alliance with Bolingbroke, i. 260; ii. 17.
    Attacks Convention and Ministers, ii. 156, 172.
    Declines office, ii. 191.
    Duel with Hervey, i. 306.
    Founder of Parliamentary Opposition, i. 225, 284, 288; ii. 195.
    Leader of discontented Whigs, i. 287.
    Letters to Pope, i. 305.
    Letter to Swift, i. 306.
    Motion on papers concerning war, ii. 187.
    On Arbuthnot, ii. 20.
    On grievances against Spain, ii. 154, 156.
    On Walpole's excise scheme, i. 315.
    Opposes Playhouse Bill, ii. 99.
    Proposes allowance for Prince of Wales, ii. 82.
    Sketch of, i. 98, 253, 286.
    Speech on salt tax, i. 313.
    Speech on Secession, ii. 178.
    Tribune of Commons, ii. 192, 194.
  Puritanism in Boston, iii. 76.
  Purkitt, Henry, iii. 161.
  Putnam, Israel, iii. 176, 179.

  Quadruple Alliance, i. 161.
    Principle of, i. 295.
  Quebec:
    Attacked by Wolfe, ii. 287.
    Described, ii. 287, 291.
    Founded, ii. 283.
  Queen Anne's Bounty, i. 280.
  Queen Anne's houses, i. 69.
  Queensberry, Duke of, iii. 244.

  Radcliffe, Charles, escapes from Newgate, i. 142.
  Radical party, i. 20.
    Rise of, iv. 218.
  Rae, Fraser, on elections of Lord Mayor, iii. 137.
  "Rainbow" Coffee-house, i. 75.
  Rainsforth, house sacked, iii. 201.
  Rajah Dulab Ram, ii. 272.
  Rajah Sahib:
    Besieges Arcot, ii. 263.
    Defeated, ii. 263.
  Ramnagar stronghold, iii. 270.
  Rathbone, William, and movement against monopoly of East
      India Company, iv. 231.
  Ray, Miss, murdered by Hickman, iii. 50.
  "Rebecca and Her Daughters," ii. 56.
  Rebellion of 1745, ii. 203 _seqq._
  Reform Bill (First):
    Committee, iv. 127.
    Debate on, iv. 144, 149.
    Introduced in Commons, iv. 134, 137.
    General Gascoigne's amendment, iv. 150.
    Principles of, iv. 143.
    Redistribution, iv. 142.
    Scheme for, iv. 129, 132.
    Second Reading, iv. 149.
  Reform Bill (Second), iv. 154.
    Introduced into House of Lords, iv. 168.
    Rejected, iv. 169.
    Second Reading, iv. 154, 159.
    Third Reading, iv. 166.
    Obstructed, iv. 161, 163.
  Reform Bill (Third), iv. 172.
    Defect in, iv. 182.
    Passed, iv. 181.
    Political Parties and, iv. 218.
  Reform Bills for Ireland and Scotland, iv. 181.
  Reform Meetings, iv. 177.
  Reform Parliament (First), iv. 172, 204, 241.
  Reform Riots, iv. 170.
  Regency Bill, iii. 72.
  Regency Question (1830), iv. 101, 104, 107.
  Religious equality and Parliament, iv. 67, 99.
  Restoration dramatists, character of, ii. 93.
  Revere, Paul, iii. 174.
  Reynolds, Sir Joshua:
    Friend of Goldsmith, iii. 169.
    Portrait of Wilkes, iii. 68.
  Richelieu, Duc de, captures Minorca, ii. 297.
  Richmond, Duke of:
    On "Our Army," iii. 183.
    Speech on Annual Parliaments, iii. 197.
  Richter, Jean Paul, on:
    Eloquence, ii. 135.
    Laurence Sterne, ii. 302.
  Rigby, Richard, sketch of, iii. 36.
  Riot in St. George's Fields, iii. 120, 124.
  Rioters killed, wounded, and executed, iii. 209.
  Ripon, Earl of (_see_ Goderich, Viscount).
  Ripperda, Duke of, i. 264.
  Rob Roy at Sheriffmuir, i. 126.
  Robertson, Dr., threatened, iii. 195.
  Robertson, George, and Porteous riots, ii. 58.
  Robinson, Dr. John, Bishop of London, i. 109.
  Robinson, Frederick (_see_ Goderich, Viscount).
  Robinson, Sir Thomas, ii. 297.
  Rockingham, Charles Watson Wentworth, Marquis of:
    Character, iii. 94.
    Dismissed from office, iii. 108.
    Prime Minister, iii. 94.
    Repeals Stamp Act, iii. 104.
    Second Ministry, iii. 223.
  Rohilla War, iii. 258.
  Roman Catholics (_see_ Catholics).
  Romilly, Sir Samuel:
    Death and character, iii. 346.
    Philanthropic reforms, iv. 21.
  Rosebery, Lord, on Pitt's position, iii. 240.
  Ross, General:
    Captures Washington, iii. 346.
    Speaks for Bolingbroke, i. 108.
  Rousseau, on "Robinson Crusoe," ii. 1.
  Rowe, Nicholas, i. 38.
  Roxburgh, Duke of, attitude towards Walpole, i. 250.
  Royal Society of Literature founded, iv. 93.
  Royal Standard set up at Glenfinnan, ii. 206, 210.
  Russell, Lord John:
    As reformer, iv. 104, 126, 127.
    As speaker, iv. 133.
    Beaten in S. Devonshire, iv. 253.
    Carries repeal of Test and Corporation Acts, iv. 52, 67.
    "English Government and Constitution," iv. 128, 129.
    Home Secretary, iv. 252.
    Interview with Napoleon in Elba, iv. 277.
    Leader of Opposition, iv. 103.
    Municipal Bill, iv. 257, 260.
    On Parliamentary Reform, iv. 85.
    Reforms Parliamentary representation, iv. 22.
    Resolution on Irish Church revenues, iv. 246, 250.
    Second Reform Bill, iv. 154.
    Sketch of proposed Reform Bill, iv. 128, 132.
    Speech on Greek cause, iv. 48.
    Speech on Reform Bill, iv. 137 _seqq._
    Statement on Reform Act, iv. 182.
  Rupert, Prince, sketch of, i. 6.
  Russia in 1716, i. 154.
  Russia: policy towards Greece and Turkey, iv. 49.

  Sacheverell, Dr., impeached, i. 34.
  St. James's, i. 65.
  St. James's coffee-house, i. 75.
  _St. James's Chronicle_, iii. 124.
  St. James's Square, i. 67.
  St. James's Street, i. 66.
  St. John, Henry, Viscount (_see_ Bolingbroke).
  St. Helena, Island of, iii. 344.
  St. Margaret's Lane, London, i. 64.
  St. Patrick's Well, Dublin, i. 81.
  St. Simon on Mississippi scheme, i. 185.
  St. Thome, Nabob of Carnatic defeated at, ii. 261.
  Sala, George Augustus, picture of London in '45, ii. 219.
  Salt tax, i. 313.
  Sandwich, Earl of, iii. 48, 49.
    Denounces Wilkes, and "Essay on Woman," iii. 65.
    First Lord of Admiralty, iii. 48.
    "Jemmy Twitcher," iii. 68.
    Mobbed, iii. 202.
  Sandys, Samuel, Chancellor of Exchequer, ii. 192.
    Motions against Walpole, ii. 185, 186.
  Saratoga, Burgoyne surrenders at, iii. 183.
  Sarsfield defends Limerick, i. 83.
  "Saturday" Club, i. 74.
  Savile, Sir George:
    Bill for Catholic Relief, iii. 190, 191.
    House sacked, iii. 201.
    Sketch of, iii. 190.
  Saxe, Maurice de:
    Commands at Fontenoy and Lauffeld, ii. 239.
    Parentage, i. 8.
  Sayer, James, caricature of Fox, iii. 233.
  Scarborough, Lord:
    Character, ii. 5.
    On Declaration of War, ii. 178.
  Schaub, Sir Luke, Ambassador at Paris, i. 237.
    Recalled, i. 239.
  Schleswig-Holstein, seized by King of Denmark, i. 161.
  Schomberg, Duke of, opinion of Marlborough, i. 24.
  Scotch Judges at Bar of House of Lords, ii. 66, 67.
  Scotland:
    Condition in 1745, ii. 208.
    Fanaticism in, iii. 194.
    Riots in, i. 249.
  Scott, Captain, commands Scots Royal, ii. 206.
  Scott, Dr., iii. 203.
  Scott, Major, defends Hastings, iii. 274, 276, 282.
  Scott, Sir Walter:
    Interview with George IV., iv. 29.
    Later years and death, iv. 187.
    Sketch of John, Duke of Argyll, i. 44.
  Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, i. 87.
  Scratton, represents Company at Murshidabad, iii. 250.
  "Scriblerus" Club, i. 73.
  Secession from House of Commons, ii. 172, 175.
  Secretary of State, two departments, ii. 192.
  Seeley, Professor, on "Family Compact," ii. 31, 33.
  Selwyn, George, attachment to Fox, iii. 214.
  Senior, Nassau:
    Attitude towards Poor Relief, iv. 223.
    On Poor Law Committee, iv. 225.
  Septennial Act, i. 146, 147.
    Debate on repealing, ii. 10.
  Serres, Olivia Wilmot, sketch of, iv. 286.
  Servants in 1714, i. 77.
  Seven Men of Moidart, ii. 205.
  Seven Years' War, ii. 297; iii. 29.
    Close of, iii. 79.
  Sévigné, Mme. de, ii. 35.
  Seville, Treaty of, i. 297.
    Trade disputes and, ii. 150.
  Shackleton, Richard, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke, iii. 97.
  Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of:
    Factory labor and, iv. 200 _seqq._
    Sketch of, iv. 203.
  Shah Alum, enterprise against Meer Jaffier, ii. 273.
  Sheffield, iv. 99.
  Shelburne, William Petty, Earl of:
    Opposes calling out military, iii. 198.
    Passed over by Pitt, iii. 236.
    Secretary of State, iii. 109.
    Sketch of, iii. 223, 224.
  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, death, iv. 92.
  Sherbrooke, Robert Lowe, Lord, i. 290.
  Sheridan, Charles, iii. 218.
  Sheridan, Mrs., opinion of her boys, iii. 217.
  Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, iii. 211.
    Attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 296.
    Begum speech, iii. 280.
    Duel with Matthews, iii. 219.
    Funeral in Westminster Abbey, iii. 346.
    M. P. for Stamford, iii. 221.
    Marriage, iii. 220, 222.
    "School for Scandal," "Critic," iii. 221.
    Sketch of, iii. 216.
    Speeches during Hastings's trial, iii. 280, 286.
    "The Rivals," iii. 221.
    Under-Secretary of State, iii. 224.
  Sheridan (Dr.), Thomas, friend of Swift, iii. 216.
  Sheridan (Sir), Thomas:
    Death, ii. 232.
    Tutor to Charles Stuart, ii. 205.
  Sheriffmuir, battle of, i. 125.
  Shippen:
    Amendment on Supply (1727), i. 280.
    Leader of Jacobites, i. 287.
    Opposes Septennial Bill, i. 146.
    Sketch of, i. 289.
  Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, Duke of, i. 41.
    Death, i. 179.
    Lord High Treasurer, i. 45.
    Resigns offices, i. 97.
    Sketch of career, i. 41.
  Shrewsbury, Duke of, killed by Duke of Buckingham, i. 41.
  Shrewsbury in 1714, i. 79.
  Siddons, Mrs., death, iv. 285.
  Sidmouth, Viscount, Home Secretary:
    Challenged by Thistlewood, iv. 16.
  Signs in streets, i. 70.
  Sinking Fund, borrowing from, i. 309.
  Slaughter's coffee-house, i. 75.
  Slave Trade, Fox and, iii. 340.
  Slavery, iv. 189 _seqq._
    Crusade against, iv. 93.
    (_See also_ West Indies, slavery in.)
  Smith, Rev. John, sentenced to death, iv. 194.
  Smith, Sydney, on:
    Collection of tithes in Ireland, iv. 208, 210, 211.
    Spencer Perceval, iii. 341.
  "Smock races," i. 72.
  Smollett and _Briton_, iii. 51.
  Smuggling in American colonies, iii. 83.
  Sobieski, Clementine, wife of James Stuart, ii. 199.
    Retires to convent, ii. 200.
  Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge founded, iv. 93.
  Somers, John, Lord, i. 47, 54.
    Accomplishes Union of England and Scotland, i. 84.
    Approves Septennial Bill, i. 147.
    Member of New Council, i. 101.
    Sketch of career, i. 147.
  Somerset, Charles Seymour, Duke of: sketch of, i. 42.
  Somerset, Charlotte, Duchess of, i. 42.
  Somerset, Elizabeth, Duchess of, i. 43.
  Somerville, Dr. Thomas, _History of Reign of Queen Anne_, i. 13.
  Somerville, Lord, house molested, ii. 217.
  Sophia Dorothea, wife of George I., i. 6, 153.
    Banished to Castle of Ahlden, i. 7.
    Death, i. 267.
    Will, i. 269.
  Sophia, Electress of Hanover, i. 4, 5.
  South Sea Bill, i. 189, 190.
  South Sea Company, i. 187, 193; ii. 150.
    Petitions for relief, i. 194.
    Principle of, i. 194.
    Reconstituted, ii. 167.
  South Sea House, i. 186.
  South Sea victims, i. 194, 204.
  Spain:
    Claims Right of Search, ii. 151, 163, 245.
    Complaints against, i. 294.
    Demands constitutional government, iv. 40, 43.
    England and, trade disputes, ii. 150.
    In 1716, i. 154, 155.
    Portugal and, dispute between, ii. 35.
    Treaty of Utrecht and, i. 227.
    War declared against, ii. 178.
  Spean's Bridge, brush at, ii. 206.
  Spencer, John Charles, Earl, iv. 234.
    As Speaker, iv. 133.
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iv. 125.
    Declaration on Reform Bill, iv. 164.
    Motion on speech from Throne, iv. 104.
    On Government measure for Irish Tithe Question, iv. 211.
    On slavery in Colonies, iv. 195.
    Sketch of, iv. 125.
  Spies in Ireland in '98, iii. 314.
  Spithead, mutiny at, iii. 335.
  Stage Censorship, ii. 96 _seqq._
  Stair, John Dalrymple, Earl of:
    Character, i. 120, 225.
    Commands British troops, ii. 182.
    Recalled from French Court, i. 225.
  Stamp Act, iii. 87, 88.
    Repealed, iii. 103.
  Stanhope, Charles, and South Sea Company, i. 197, 200.
  Stanhope, Colonel (_see_ Harrington, Lord).
  Stanhope, James, Earl, iii. 339.
    Attitude towards French Revolution, iii. 302.
    Death, i. 173.
    First Lord of Treasury and Chancellor of Exchequer, i. 165.
    Impeaches Duke of Ormond, i. 109.
    Mission to Vienna, i. 152.
    On funds and Queen Anne's health, i. 2.
    On Irish clergy, ii. 130.
    On Oxford, Earl of, i. 31.
    Recognized religious equality, i. 173.
    Second Secretary of State, i. 97, 99.
    Sketch of, i. 100.
  Stanhope, Lady Hester, iii. 339.
  Stanley, Lord (_see_ Derby, Earl of).
  States-General convoked, iii. 293.
  Steele, Sir Richard:
    Career, i. 38.
    Compared with Addison, i. 300.
    Death, i. 299.
    M. P. for Stockbridge, i. 52.
    On Somers, i. 147.
    On Whig and Tory, i. 17.
    Petition in favor of rebels, i. 137, 138.
    Tribute to Atterbury, i. 214.
  Stephen, Sir James, "Story of Nuncomar," iii. 263.
  Sterne, Laurence, "Tristram Shandy," ii. 299, 301.
  Sterne, Roger, ii. 299.
    Death, ii. 300.
  Stevenson, Dr., keeps guard at Netherbow Gate, ii. 212.
  Stewart, Dugald, iv. 93.
  Stoke Pogis church-yard, ii. 289.
  Stow, "Survey of London" quoted on penny post, i. 78.
  Strafford, Lord, charges against, i. 109.
  Stratford de Redcliffe, Viscount, iv. 32.
  Streets of London in 1714, i. 70.
  Strickland, Francis, supports Young Pretender, ii. 205.
  Stuart, Cardinal Henry, death, ii. 234.
  Stuart, Charles Edward, Young Pretender:
    Advantages on his side, ii. 208, 209, 218, 221.
    Adventures after Culloden, ii. 226.
    At siege of Gaeta, ii. 29, 201, 203.
    Birth, ii. 199.
    Education, ii. 201, 202.
    Enters Holyrood, ii. 214.
    Humanity during campaign, ii. 215, 217.
    In London, iii. 14.
    Later career, ii. 233, 234.
    March into England, ii. 217.
    Marches on Edinburgh, ii. 210, 213.
    Proclamation, ii. 206.
    Rebellion of 1745, ii. 204 _seqq._
    Retreats, ii. 223.
    Wishes to advance on London, ii. 222.
  Stuart influence on literature, ii. 234.
  Stuart, James Francis Edward (Old Pretender), i. 4.
    Character, i. 126.
    Dismisses Bolingbroke, i. 131.
    Embarks for Scotland, i. 120.
    Life of exile, ii. 199, 201.
    On South Sea scheme, i. 200.
    Proclaimed in Dundee, i. 123.
    Rebellion in favor of, i. 118.
    Returns to France, i. 128.
    Rumors of, i. 264.
    Sketch of, i. 9 _seqq._
  Stuart standard set up at Braemer, i. 121, 123.
  Sugar Act of 1733, iii. 83.
  Sullivan, iii. 179.
  Sully, advice to Henry IV., i. 13.
  Sumner, Dr., Head-master of Harrow, iii. 217.
  Sunderland, Charles, Earl of, i. 54.
    Accusations against Townshend and Walpole, i. 164.
    Death, i. 206.
    Motion implicating him in South Sea scheme, i. 199.
    Plot against Walpole, i. 207.
    Speech in favor of South Sea Bill, i. 191.
    Viceroy of Ireland, i. 97.
  Suraj ud Dowlah:
    Black Hole of Calcutta, ii. 266.
    Captured and killed, ii. 273.
    Character, ii. 266.
    Death, iii. 250.
    Declares war against English, iii. 249.
  Swetenham, Captain, ii. 207.
  Swift, Jonathan, Dean of St. Patrick's:
    Attitude towards Irish, i. 243.
    Character, ii. 237.
    Death, ii. 236.
    Defends Treaty of Utrecht, i. 96.
    Dialogue between Whig and Tory, i. 219.
    "Drapier's Letters," i. 240, 242, 247.
    "Gulliver's Travels," i. 302.
    Lampoons, ii. 102.
    Letter to Lord Peterborough, i. 36.
    Letter to Sheridan on Walpole, i. 306.
    On Arbuthnot, ii. 21.
    On Bolingbroke, i. 26, 28.
    On Condition of Church, ii. 129.
    On Marlborough, i. 24.
    On Oxford, Earl of, i. 31, 168.
    On Queen Anne's health, i. 1, 36.
    On Somerset, Duke of, i. 43.
    On William Congreve, i. 299.
    Patron of Berkeley, ii. 293.
    Poems on South Sea mania, i. 202.
    Reception of Carteret, i. 235.
    Sketch of, i. 35.
    Stella and, ii. 236.
  Swinburne, "A Jacobite's Exile," ii. 235.

  Talbot, Charles, Lord Chancellor, ii. 9, 81.
  Talleyrand:
    Dines with William IV., iv. 117.
    On Alexander Hamilton, ii. 248; iv. 281.
  Tea tax introduced by Townshend, iii. 113.
  Telford, Thomas, death, iv. 282.
  Temple, John, iii. 155.
  Temple, Richard Grenville, Earl, iii. 26.
    Action on India Bill, iii. 234.
    Persuades Pitt to refuse office, iii. 73, 93.
    Removed from Lord-Lieutenancy, iii. 64.
    Resigns office, iii. 236.
    Shows King's speech to Wilkes, iii. 57.
    Supports Wilkes, iii. 116.
  Ten-pound franchise, iv. 130.
  Tenterden, Chief Justice, decision in Cobbett prosecution, iv. 157.
  Test Act:
    Debate on proposed repeal, ii. 176.
    Repeal proposed, ii. 110.
    Repealed, iv. 52, 67.
  Thackeray, W. M., iv. 286.
    Description of Hanover, i. 55.
    On George IV., iii. 242.
    On interview of George IV. and Sir Walter Scott, iv. 29.
    On interview of George IV. with Wellington, Lyndhurst,
      and Peel, iv. 78.
    On Laurence Sterne, ii. 302.
    On Swift's character, ii. 237, 238.
  Thames frozen (1716), i. 154.
  Thames Tunnel, iv. 93.
  Thistlewood, plots to assassinate Ministers, iv. 15.
  Thomas, --, iii. 179.
  Thornhill, Sir James, i. 68.
  Thurlow, Lord, iii. 228.
  Thynne, Thomas, Lord, i. 8.
  Tippu, English make treaty with, iii. 266.
  Tithe question, Ireland, iv. 207 _seqq._, 216, 220.
    Government proposal on, iv. 211, 245.
  Tobacco, excise duty on, i. 316.
  Tolbooth fired, ii. 64.
  Tone, Matthew, fights under Humbert, iii. 324.
  Tone, Theobald Wolfe, iv. 206.
    Death, iii. 327.
    Letter to his wife, iii. 324.
    Marriage, iii. 311.
    Project for colony in South Sea island, iii. 310.
    Scheme for French invasion of Ireland, iii. 311.
    Sketch of, iii. 309 _seqq._
  Tonson, Jacob, Secretary to Kit-Kat Club, i. 74.
  Torcy, Marquis de, Secretary of State, France, i. 110.
  Tories:
    Attitude towards restoration of Stuarts, i. 16, 19.
    Doctrines, i. 17 _seqq._
    Jacobitism and, iii. 24.
    Old school of, iv. 241.
    Origin of name, i. 17.
    Peace of Utrecht and, i. 92.
  Toulon:
    Retaken by French, iii. 304.
    Welcomes English fleet, iii. 303.
  Townshend, Alderman, opposes Wilkes, iii. 136.
  Townshend, Audrey, Marchioness of, iii. 110.
  Townshend, Charles ("Weathercock"), i. 99.
    Chancellor of Exchequer, iii. 109.
    Character, iii. 110.
    Death, iii. 113.
    Introduces tea tax for America, iii. 113.
  Townshend, Charles, Viscount:
    Accompanies King to Hanover, i. 237.
    Dismissed, i. 164.
    President of Council, i. 182.
    Resigns office, i. 304.
    Secretary of State, i. 97, 278.
    Sketch of, i. 99.
  Trading Guilds, origin of, iv. 255.
  Trafalgar, battle of, iii. 337.
  Traill, H. D., on Laurence Sterne, ii. 302.
  Treaties (_see_ under various titles).
  Trichinopoly:
    Besieged, ii. 262.
    Relieved, ii. 264.
  Triennial Parliament Acts, i. 145.
  Triple Alliance, i. 161, 163.
  Tucker, Dean, on mutinous colonies, iii. 163.
  Tullibardine:
    Dies in Tower, ii. 232.
    Supports Young Pretender, ii. 205, 206.
  Turkey in 1716, i. 154.

  Ulm, capitulation of, iii. 338.
  Union, Scotland's attitude towards, i. 83.
  University College Charter, iv. 261.
  University of London, Charter, iv. 261.
  Upper Ossory, John, Earl of, iii. 36.
  Utrecht, Treaty of, i. 95, 157, 227, 263.
    Campeachy logwood question and, i. 295.
    Tories and, i. 92.
    Trade disputes and, ii. 150.
    Will of Charles II. and, ii. 27.

  Valley Forge, iii. 183.
  Vanhomrigh, Esther (Vanessa), i. 36.
    Alters her will, ii. 294.
  Vansittart, Governor of East India Company, iii. 251.
    Advice on quarrel of Nawab and Ellis, iii. 252.
  Vendôme, Duc de, i. 100.
    Character, i. 158.
  Verazani forms settlement in Canada, ii. 283.
  Verden ceded to Hanover, i. 161.
  Verona Congress and Holy Alliance, iv. 39, 42, 45.
  Victoria, Princess Alexandrina:
    Birth, iii. 348.
    Heir-presumptive, iv. 101.
    William IV, and, iv. 117, 118.
  Vienna, Congress of, iv. 38.
  Vienna, Treaty of, i. 295; ii. 30.
  Virginia protests against Stamp Act, iii. 90.
  Voltaire, epigram on Byng, ii. 298.
  Von Steuben in America, iii. 183.
  Vote by ballot proposed, iv. 131.

  Wade, General, clans surrender arms to, ii. 209.
  Wales, Prince of (_see_ Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales,
      and George IV.).
  Walkenshaw, Miss, ii. 233.
  Walmoden, Mme., ii. 48, 76, 304.
  Walpole, Baron, i. 224.
  Walpole, Horace, Earl of Orford:
    Account of his father (1742), ii. 189.
    Acquainted with Paris, iii. 293.
    Contrasts Townshend with Burke, iii. 112.
    Description of George I., i. 58.
    Description of Lord Hillsborough, iii. 148.
    Description of Mme. Kilmansegge, i. 7.
    Eulogy of Queen Charlotte, iii. 12.
    Maiden speech in defence of his father, ii. 195.
    On Bute's Administration, iii. 28.
    On Carteret, i. 235.
    On Chesterfield's speeches, ii. 5.
    On Coronation of George III., iii. 12.
    On dinner hour, iii. 18.
    On James Stuart, i. 11.
    On Lord George Gordon, iii. 193.
    On Whitefield's eloquence, ii. 139.
    On Wilkes's career, iii. 137.
  Walpole, Horatio, Lord:
    Ambassador to Paris, i. 237, 238, 291.
    Moves Address on Convention, ii. 171.
    Recalled from Paris, i. 304.
  Walpole, Sir Robert, Earl of Orford:
    Accepts war policy, ii. 180.
    Administration, i. 224 _seqq._, 305.
    Address to George II., i. 280.
    Advice to Princesses, ii. 126.
    At Houghton, i. 196; ii. 195.
    At Queen Caroline's death-bed, ii. 119.
    Attacks Peerage Bill, i. 176.
    Attempts to get influence of James Stuart, ii. 186.
    Attitude towards financial reform, ii. 36.
    Bill to adjust affairs of South Sea Company, i. 203, 205.
    Chairman of Committee of Secrecy, i. 105, 106, 168.
    Character, i. 165; ii. 8, 18, 196.
    Charges against, ii. 187, 195.
    Conduct on Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 80.
    Correspondence with Townshend, i. 252.
    Corruption under, i. 231; ii. 13, 19, 90, 195; iii. 25.
    Created Earl of Orford, ii. 190.
    Death, ii. 196.
    First great finance minister, i. 229.
    Fiscal policy, i. 230, 309, 311 _seqq._
    Foreign policy, i. 229, 236, 292, 305; ii. 24, 31, 149.
    Hails George II. King, i. 275.
    Health in 1742, ii. 188.
    Made K. B., i. 252.
    Made K. G., i. 252.
    Masterly inactivity, ii. 24, 31, 36.
    Moves Address (1715), i. 103.
    On Frederick, Prince of Wales, ii. 71.
    On Queen's illness, ii. 115.
    On Royal family, ii. 74.
    On South Sea Company, i. 188, 196.
    Paymaster-General, i. 97, 181.
    Pleads against war with Spain, ii. 155, 159.
    Quarrel with Townshend, i. 304.
    Relations with stage, ii. 95.
    Resigns office, i. 164; ii. 190.
    Restored to office, i. 278.
    Secretary of State for Scotland, i. 250.
    Settles dispute between Spain and Portugal, ii. 35.
    Sketch of career, i. 32; ii. 196.
    Speech on Bolingbroke, ii. 15.
    Speech on Prince of Wales's allowance, ii. 86.
    Speech on secession from Commons, ii. 174.
  War declared against Spain, ii. 178.
    Results of, ii. 183.
  War of Independence, ii. 43.
  War of Polish Succession, ii. 23 _seqq._
  War of the Succession, purpose of, i. 92.
  War passion, ii. 148.
  War with Spain, iii. 29.
  Ward, Artemus, iii. 179.
  Ward, Henry, resolution on Irish State Church, iv. 212, 213, 214.
  Ward, Ned, ballad on Marlborough's return to England, i. 53.
  Ward, Plumer, author of "Tremaine," iv. 213.
  Ward, Sir John, petition on South Sea Company, i. 203.
  Wardle, Colonel, iii. 338.
  Warren, General, iii. 176.
  Washington, George:
    Character, iii. 188.
    Commands Continental army, iii. 181.
    Disapproves of Boston exploit, iii. 161, 163.
    Fires first shot against enemy, ii. 285.
    First President of American Republic, iii. 189.
    Sketch of career, iii. 180.
  Watson, Admiral, commands fleet against Suraj ud Dowlah, ii. 269.
  "Waverers," iv. 173.
  Webster, "Duchess of Malfi" quoted, iv. 11.
  Wedderburn, Alexander, Solicitor-General, iii. 149.
    Denounces Franklin, iii. 156, 157.
    On using military against mob, iii. 207.
    Sketch of, iii. 158.
    Speech on Middlesex election petition, iii. 131.
  "Weekly Political Register," Cobbett's article in, iv. 156, 157.
  Wellesley, Arthur (_see_ Wellington, Duke of).
  Wellesley, Garret, Earl of Mornington, iii. 341.
  Wellesley, Richard C., Marquis of:
    Resigns Vice-royalty of Ireland, iv. 73.
    Sketch of career, iv. 72.
  Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of:
    Accompanies George IV. to Waterloo, iv. 28.
    At opening of Liverpool and Manchester railway, iv. 103.
    Attitude towards Catholic Emancipation, iv. 54, 56, 75, 106.
    Attitude towards Municipal Bill, iv. 260.
    Attitude towards Parliamentary reform, iv. 52.
    Attitude towards Queen Caroline, iv. 7.
    Character, iv. 120.
    Declines to form ministry, iv. 177.
    Duel with Lord Winchilsea, iv. 81.
    Interview with King on Catholic emancipation, iv. 77.
    Prime Minister, iv. 67, 100.
    Represents England at Congress of Verona, iv. 41, 42.
    Resigns office, iv. 113.
    Secretary for Foreign Affairs, iv. 238.
    Sketch of, iii. 341 _seqq._
    Speech against Reform Bill, iv. 169.
    Speech on Parliamentary reform, iv. 108.
    Supports Poor Law Bill, iv. 229.
    Unpopular, iv. 153.
  Welsh Copper and Lead Company, and South Sea Company, i. 193.
  Wentworth, Lady, describes house in Golden Square, i. 70.
  Wesley, Charles, ii. 128, 137, 145.
    Accompanies John to Georgia, ii. 134.
    On Revivalist meetings, ii. 139.
  Wesley, John:
    Breaks away from Moravians, ii. 140.
    Breaks from discipline of Church of England, ii. 142.
    Character, ii. 134, 135, 137, 142.
    Dispute with Whitefield, ii. 139.
    Marriage, ii. 137.
    Organization, ii. 140.
    Sketch of, ii. 127 _seqq._
    Visits Georgia, ii. 127.
  Wesleyan Movement, account of, ii. 127 _seqq._
    In United States, ii. 144.
    Revivalist meetings, ii. 138.
  West Indian Planters, grant to, iv. 198, 200.
  West Indies, slavery in, iv. 190 _seqq._
    Abolished, iv. 199, 200.
  Westminster Hall, iv. 268.
    Booths in, i. 64.
    Explosion in, ii. 45.
  Wetherell, Sir Charles, obstructs Reform Bill, iv. 163.
    Rescued from rioters, iv. 197.
  Weymouth, Lord, letter to magistrate in case of riot, iii. 120, 124.
  Wharncliffe, Lord, amendment to Reform Bill, iv. 169.
  Wharton, Duke of:
    Character, i. 264.
    Condemns South Sea Bill, i. 191, 198.
  Whately, --, private secretary to George Grenville, iii. 153.
  Whately, William, iii. 155.
  Wheler, appointed Governor-General, iii. 264.
  Whigs:
    Ascendency, iii. 24.
    Attitude towards Hanoverian Succession, i. 16.
    Doctrines, i. 17 _seqq._
    Foreign policy (1716), i. 157.
    Nobles and Reform Bill, iv. 178.
    Origin of name, i. 17.
  Whitbread, efforts to inquire into troubles in Ireland, iii. 319.
  Whitefield, George, ii. 128, 137, 145.
    Disputes with Wesley, ii. 139.
    Oratory, ii. 139.
  White's chocolate-house, i. 76.
  Widdrington, Lord, a prisoner, i. 137, 138.
  Wilberforce, William:
    Later years, iv. 280.
    Supports Queen Caroline, iv. 6.
    Votes against Dundas, iii. 338.
    West-Indian Slavery and, iv. 191, 193, 194.
  Wilkes, John:
    Arrested, iii. 59.
    At King's Bench, iii. 119.
    Attack on, iii. 64, 66.
    Brings actions against Lord Halifax and Wood, iii. 63.
    Candidate for Parliament, iii. 116, 117, 126, 137.
    Catholic Relief for Scotland and, iii. 195.
    Churchill and, iii. 55.
    Committed to Tower, iii. 60.
    Death, iii. 139.
    Duel with Martin, iii. 66.
    Elected Alderman for Farringdon Without, iii. 134.
    Elected Lord Mayor, iii. 137.
    Elected Sheriff, iii. 136.
    Expelled from House, iii. 130.
    Interview with Johnson, iii. 138.
    Later life, iii. 137.
    Liberated from prison, iii. 135.
    Literary executor to Churchill, iii. 69.
    M. P. for Aylesbury, iii. 49, 51.
    _North Briton_ and, iii. 52, 55, 57.
    On rioters, iii. 209.
    Outlawed, iii. 68.
    Released by Judge Pratt, iii. 60, 63.
    Sketch of, iii. 48 _seqq._
    Summoned before Commons, iii. 135.
  William III., opinion of Duke of Marlborough, i. 24.
  William IV.:
    Accession, iv. 96.
    Assents to Bill for Abolition of Slavery, iv. 199.
    Attitude towards Duke of Wellington, iv. 115.
    Attitude towards Irish State Church, iv. 219.
    Attitude towards Ministry (1831), iv. 151.
    Attitude towards Reform, iv. 172, 173, 175, 179, 181.
    Character, iv. 98, 114, 115, 120, 293.
    Conduct as admiral, iv. 115.
    Conduct to Mrs. Fitzherbert, iv. 88.
    Death, iv. 293.
    Dismisses Whig Government and sends for Sir Robert Peel, iv. 235.
    Illness, iv. 289.
    Lord High Admiral, iv. 60, 96.
    Marries Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, iv. 97.
    Mrs. Jordan and, iv. 97.
    Opens Parliament (1831), iv. 154.
    Orangeism and, iv. 279.
    Popular, iv. 153, 154.
    Prayers for, iv. 292.
    Raises his children to Peerage, iv. 114.
    Sanctions Reform Bill, iv. 132.
    Speech from Throne (1830), iv. 100, 103, 108.
    Speech from Throne (1831), iv. 172.
    Speeches at state dinners, iv. 116, 117.
    Unconventionalities, iv. 118.
    Unpopular, iv. 179.
  Williamson, Dr. Hugh, iii. 154.
  Will's coffee-house, i. 75.
  Wilmington, Lord (_see_ Compton, Sir Spencer).
  Wilmot, Olivia, sketch of, iv. 286.
  Wilmot, Robert, on grievances against Spaniards, ii. 154.
  Wilson, Alexander, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Bill
      against, ii. 66, 68.
  Wilson's execution and Porteous riots, ii. 60, 61.
  Winchilsea, Earl of:
    Duel with Duke of Wellington, iv. 81.
    On Princess Anne's Dowry, ii. 44, 45.
    Letter on Duke of Wellington and Catholic Emancipation, iv. 80.
  Window tax, iii. 239.
  Wine-drinking in Georgian era, iii. 20.
  Wintoun, Earl of, a prisoner, i. 137.
    Escapes, i. 142.
  Witherington, Matilda, wife of Wolfe Tone, iii. 311, 329.
  Wolfe, James:
    At Culloden, ii. 227, 282.
    Character, ii. 282.
    Death, ii. 290.
    Monument, ii. 290.
  Wood, Alderman, supports Queen Caroline, iv. 5.
  Wood, William, patent for copper coins, i. 164, 241, 244.
    Withdrawn, i. 248.
  Wooster, --, iii. 179.
  Wray, Sir Cecil, opponent of Fox at Westminster, iii. 238.
  Writs of Assistance, iii. 84, 86.
  Wyndham, Sir William:
    Announces secession from Commons, ii. 173.
    Death, ii. 179.
    Leader of Tories, i. 287.
    On grievances against Spaniards, ii. 156.
    On Salt Tax, i. 313.
    Sketch of, i. 288; ii. 179.
    Speech on repeal of Septennial Act, ii. 12.
  Wynn, Sir Walter Williams, supports Young Pretender, ii. 221.
  Wynn, Watkin Williams, argument against long Parliaments, ii. 12.

  Yale College, places in lists, iii. 77.
  York, Frederick Augustus, Duke of:
    Death, iv. 60.
    Public career, iv. 60.
  York in 1714, i. 79.
  Yorktown, Cornwallis surrenders at, iii. 184.
  Young, Arthur, travels in France, iii. 293.

  Zinzendorf, Count von, founds Moravian sect, ii. 134.
  Zoological Gardens opened, iv. 93.



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