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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 Molière. 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.