FOOTNOTES:
For this success the volatile and unscrupulous Earl of Peterborough claimed all the credit. But his account of his doings in Spain is a mere romance, and he was in truth a hindrance rather than an aid to the allies.
A Scottish Colonial Company had been formed to seize and colonize the pestilential region about the Isthmus of Panama—then known as Darien—so as to obtain access to the Pacific (1698). The Scottish Parliament gave it great privileges, but William III. refused to confirm them, and would not commit England to the scheme. The colonists all perished of disease and tropical heat; but the Scots ascribed the failure to English jealousy.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE RULE OF THE WHIGS.
1714-1739.
Character of George I.
George Lewis, Elector of Hanover, who in virtue of the Act of Settlement now mounted the English throne, was a selfish, hard-hearted, unamiable, and uninteresting man of fifty-four. He was intensely German in all his ideas and prejudices; he could not speak a word of English, nor had he the slightest knowledge of the political and social state of the kingdom that he was called upon to govern. Being a very cautious man, he had never thought himself secure of the English crown, and now that he had obtained it, he always looked upon it as a precarious piece of property, that might some day be taken from him. He was convinced that he might at any moment be forced to return to his native Hanover, so he did not attempt to make himself at home on this side of the North Sea. During his thirteen years of rule he never ceased to feel himself a stranger in his palaces at London or Windsor. He wished to make what profit he could out of England, but he was so ignorant of English politics that he felt himself constrained to rely entirely on his ministers, and let them manage his affairs for him. His sole fixed idea was that the Tory party were irretrievably committed to Jacobitism, and that, if he wished to keep his throne, he must throw himself entirely into the hands of his friends the Whigs. With his accession, therefore, began the political ascendency of that party, which was to last more than half a century [1714-1770].
The king and the Whigs.
There was no romantic loyalty or mutual respect in the bargain which was thus struck between the Whig party and the new dynasty. The king knew that his ministers looked upon him as a mere political necessity. They could have no liking for their stolid, selfish master. George was indeed most unlovable to those who knew him best. He had placed his wife, Sophia of Celle, in lifelong captivity on a charge of unfaithfulness. But he himself lived in open sin with two mistresses, whom he made Duchess of Kendal and Countess of Darlington when he came to the English throne. He was at bitter enmity with his son George, Prince of Wales; they never met if they could avoid a meeting. George was, in short, the very last person to command either love or respect from any man.
The beginning of Cabinet government.
With the accession of George I. began the substitution of the prime minister and the Cabinet for the king as the actual ruler of England. Down to Anne's time the sovereign had habitually attended the meetings of the Privy Council, and was in constant contact with all the members of the ministry. They were still regarded as his personal servants, and he would often dismiss one minister without turning the whole ministry out of office. The notion that the Cabinet were jointly responsible for each other's actions, and that the king must accept any combination of ministers that a parliamentary majority chose to impose upon him, had not yet come into being. Even the mild and apathetic Queen Anne had been wont to remove her great officers of state at her own pleasure, without consulting the rest of the Cabinet, much less the Parliament.
But George I. was so absolutely ignorant of English politics, and placed at such a disadvantage by his inability to speak the English language, that he never attempted to interfere with his ministers. He seldom came to their meetings, and usually communicated with them through the prime minister of the day. A single fact gives a fair example of the difficulty which George found in dealing with his new subjects. He knew no English, while Walpole—his chief minister for more than half his reign—knew neither German nor French; they had therefore to discuss all affairs of state in Latin, which both of them spoke extremely ill. It can easily be understood that George was constrained to let all things remain in the hands of the Whig statesmen who had placed him on the throne. He fingered much English money, and he was occasionally able to use the influence of England for the profit of Hanover in continental politics. In other respects he was a perfect nonentity.
The Whig party which now obtained possession of office, and clung to it for two full generations, was no longer led by its old chiefs. Godolphin had died in 1712; Marlborough, though he had returned to England, was not restored to power. His character had been irretrievably injured by the revelations of 1711, and he was suspected (not without foundation) of having renewed his old intrigues with the exiled Stuarts during Harley's tenure of office. The Whigs now gave him the honourable and lucrative post of commander-in-chief, but would not serve under him. Only a year after George's accession he was attacked by paralysis and softening of the brain, and retired to his great palace of Blenheim, in Oxfordshire, where he lingered till 1722, broken in mind and body.
The new Whig leaders.
The Whigs were now led by the Earl of Sunderland, the son-in-law of Marlborough, by Earl Stanhope—a general who had won some military reputation in Spain during the late war—by Lord Townshend, and Sir Robert Walpole, the youngest and ablest of the party chiefs. They were all four men of considerable ability, too much so for any one of them to be content to act as the subordinate and lieutenant of another. Hence it came that, though they had combined to put George I. on the throne, they soon fell to intriguing against each other, and split the Whig party into factions. These cliques did not differ from each other in principles, but were divided merely by personal grudges that their leaders bore against each other. They were always making ephemeral combinations with each other, and then breaking loose again. But on one thing they were agreed—the Tories should never come into power again, and to keep their enemies out of office they could always rally and present a united front.
The supporters of the Whig government.
The Whig party drew its main strength from three sources. The first was the strong Protestant feeling in England, which made most men resolve that the Pretender must be kept over-seas at any cost, even at that of submitting to the selfish and stolid George I. The second was the fact that the Whigs had enlisted the support of the mercantile classes all over the country by their care for trade and commerce. While in power in Anne's reign, they had done their best to make the war profitable by concluding commercial treaties with the allies, and by furthering the colonial expansion of England. This was never forgotten by the merchants. The third mainstay of the Whig party was their parliamentary influence. A majority of the House of Lords was on their side, and they contrived to manage the Commons by a judicious mixture of corruption and coercion.
Pocket boroughs and crown boroughs.
The great peers had many "pocket boroughs" in their power—that is, they possessed such local influence in their own shires that they could rely on returning their own dependents or relatives for the seats that lay in their neighbourhood. Many of these "pocket boroughs" were also "rotten boroughs"—places, that is, which had been important in the middle ages, but had now decayed into mere hamlets with a few score of inhabitants. Over such constituencies the influence of the local landlord was so complete, that he could even sell or barter away the right to represent them in Parliament. The most extraordinary of these rotten boroughs were Old Sarum and Gatton, each of which owned only two voters, men paid to live on the deserted sites by their landlords. Yet they had as many representatives in the House of Commons as Yorkshire or Devon! Besides these nomination boroughs, the Whigs had now control over a number of crown boroughs, places where of late the members had been wont to be chosen by the sovereign; there were many such in Cornwall, where the king, as duke of that county, was supreme landlord. The Tudors had made many Cornish villages into parliamentary constituencies in order to pack the House of Commons with obedient members.
Parliamentary influence of the Whigs.
Hitherto the crown and the great peers had seldom acted together, and no one had realized how large a portion of the House of Commons could be influenced by their combination. But when, in the days of the two first Georges, the Whig oligarchy wielded the power of the crown as well as their own, they obtained a complete control over the Lower House. Often the Tory opposition shrank to a minority of sixty or eighty votes, and the only semblance of party government that remained was caused by the quarrels and intrigues of the leaders of the Whigs, who fought each other on personal grounds as bitterly as if they had been divided by some important principle.
The Jacobites.—Death of Lewis XIV.
In the first year of King George, however, the Whigs were still kept together by their fear of the enemy. The Jacobites, who had seemed so near to triumph in Bolingbroke's short tenure of power, did not yield without an appeal to arms. The late prime minister and his chief military adviser, the Duke of Ormonde, both fled to France and joined the Pretender. When safe over-seas they began to organize an insurrection, counting on the active assistance of Lewis XIV., who was always ready to aid his old dependents the Stuarts. But the plot was not yet ready to burst, when the old king died, and his successor in power, the regent Philip of Orleans, refused to risk any step that might lead to a war with England.
Bolingbroke and the Tory party.
Nevertheless, Bolingbroke and his master persevered. They had so many friends both in England and in Scotland, that they thought that they could hardly fail. They had not realized that most of these friends were lukewarm, and unprepared to take arms in order to give the crown to a Romanist. Two-thirds of the Tory party hated the Pope even more than they hated the Whigs and the Hanoverian king, and would not move unless James Stuart showed some signs of wishing to conform to the Church of England. Their loyalty to the national Church was stronger than their loyalty to the divine right of kings.
Disaffection in Scotland.
But the wilder and more excitable spirits in the party were ready to follow Bolingbroke. They saw all their hopes of political advancement cut away by George's alliance with the Whigs, and determined to make a bold stroke for power. In Scotland more especially did the emissaries of the Pretender meet with encouragement. The Scots were still very sore over the passing of the Act of Union in 1707, and nursed their ancient grudge against England. But the most active source of discontent was the hatred which the minor clans of the Highlands felt for the powerful tribe of the Campbells.
Ascendency of the Campbells.
The rule of George I. in England implied the domination of that great Whig clan, and its chief the Duke of Argyle, over the lands north of Forth and Clyde. For now, as in 1645 and 1685, the chief of the Campbells, the MacCallain Mor, as his clansmen called him, was at the head of the Presbyterian or Whig party in Scotland. The chiefs of the other Highland tribes were as bitterly hostile to the present Duke of Argyle as their ancestors had been to his father and grandfather.
The Earl of Mar in the Highlands.
The Lowland Jacobites.
The English Jacobites.
The head of the Jacobite plotters in the north was John Erskine, Earl of Mar, who had been Bolingbroke's Secretary of State for Scotland in the Cabinet of 1714. He was a busy and ambitious man, who was bitterly vexed at seeing his prospects of political advancement at an end. Under the pretence of gathering a great hunting-party, he assembled a number of the leading chiefs of the Highlands at Braemar Castle. On his persuasion they resolved to take arms for King James. Among the clans which joined in the rising were the Gordons, Murrays, Stuarts, Mackintoshes, Macphersons, Macdonalds, Farquharsons, and many more. In the Lowlands a simultaneous rising was arranged by some of the lords of the Border, headed by the Earls of Nithsdale, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure. Meanwhile England was also to be stirred up. The Duke of Ormonde was to land in Devonshire with some refugees from France. Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster, a rich Northumbrian squire, undertook to raise and organize the northern counties. A third rising was to take place in Wales.
The Highlanders as a military force.
In the autumn of 1715 the Jacobites struck their blow. On September 6th Mar raised the royal standard of Scotland at the Castletown of Braemar. Immediately a score of chiefs joined him, and an army of 5000 or 6000 men was at his disposal. Nor were the Highlanders to be despised as a military force. The ancient Celtic turbulence and tribal feuds yet survived in the lands beyond the Tay, and the clansmen were still reared to arms from their youth up. Their fathers had fought under Dundee, and their grandfathers had served Montrose in the old civil wars of Charles I. The Scottish Government had never succeeded in pacifying the Highlands, and the clans were still wont to lift each other's cattle, and to engage in bloody affrays. They were blindly devoted to their chiefs, and would follow them into any quarrel; the cause in which they armed was indifferent to them—it was enough for them to know their master's will, and to carry it out. When called to arms, they came out with gun, broadsword, and shield. The force and fury of their charge were tremendous, and none but the best of regular troops could stand against them. But they were utterly undisciplined; it was difficult to keep them to their standards, since they were prone to melt home after a battle, to stow away their plunder. Moreover, their tribal pride was so great, and their ancient tribal feuds so many, that it was very hard to induce any two clans to serve side by side, or to help each other loyally.
Mar was a mere politician; he was destitute of force of character, and had earned the dishonourable name of "Bobbing John" by his fickle and shifty conduct. No worse leader could have been found to command the horde of high-spirited, jealous, and quarrelsome mountaineers whom he had called to arms.
Failures of the insurrection in the West of England.
When the news of Mar's rising was noised abroad, the Jacobites in the Scottish Lowlands and in Northumberland gathered themselves together according to their promise. But the insurrections in Devonshire and Wales, on which the Pretender had been counting, did not take place. The Whig Government had sent most of its available troops to the West of England, and had arrested the chief Jacobites of those parts, so that the Duke of Ormonde, on landing near Plymouth, found no support, and hastily returned to France. But Scotland and Northumberland were all ablaze, and it seemed that the throne of George I. was in great danger, for the army available against the insurgents was less than 10,000 strong, owing to the reductions which the Tories had carried out after the peace of Utrecht.
Battle of Preston.
But the mistakes and feebleness of the Jacobite leaders sufficed to wreck their enterprise. The insurgents on the English and Scottish Border united, and advanced into Lancashire, where Roman Catholics were many and Toryism strong. But their imbecile and cowardly leader, Thomas Forster, allowed himself to be surrounded at Preston by a force of 1000 cavalry under General Carpenter, and tamely laid down his arms after a slight skirmish, though his men outnumbered the regulars by three to one. He and all his chief supporters, the Earls of Derwentwater, Nithsdale, Nairn, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure, were sent prisoners to London (November 12, 1715).
Battle of Sheriffmuir.
Meanwhile Mar had gathered an army of 10,000 men, and had seized Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and the whole of the north of Scotland; but, with an unaccountable sluggishness, he lingered north of the Tay, and made no attempt to capture Edinburgh or to overrun the Lowlands. He allowed the Duke of Argyle, who had taken post at Stirling with 3000 men, to maintain the line of the Forth, and to keep separate the two areas of insurrection. It was only on the very day of the surrender of Preston that Mar at last consented to move southward from Perth. Argyle advanced to meet him, and then ensued the indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir. In this fight each army routed the left wing of the other, and then retired towards its base. Mar's bad generalship and the petty quarrels of the clans had neutralized the vast advantage of numbers which the Jacobites possessed (November 13, 1715).
Mar's army disperses.
Mar brought his army back to Perth in a mutinous and discontented condition; each chief laid on another the loss of the expected victory, and the Highlanders began to melt away to their homes. It was to no purpose that James Stuart himself at last appeared, to endeavour to rally his dispirited followers. The Pretender was a slow and ungenial young man, with a melancholy face and a hesitating manner. He failed to inspire his followers with the enthusiasm which he did not himself possess, and his cause continued to lose ground. When Argyle, largely reinforced from England, began to move northward, James deserted his army and took ship for France. The remnants of Mar's once formidable host then disbanded themselves; the chiefs fled over-sea or submitted to Argyle, while the clansmen dispersed to their valleys.
Thus ended in ignominious failure the great rising of 1715. The Whigs took no very cruel revenge on the insurgents. Two peers, the Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure, [51] were beheaded, and about 30 persons of meaner rank hanged. As the years went by, most of the Jacobite chiefs were pardoned and returned to England. Even Bolingbroke was allowed to come back from exile in 1722.
Second attempt of the Pretender.
Even after his lamentable failure in 1715-16, the Pretender still nourished some hopes of exciting another rebellion. When France refused to help him, he turned to Spain, and got some small assistance from Philip V., who, as we shall see, had the best reasons for disliking the Whigs. A few hundred Spanish troops landed in Rosshire in 1719, and were joined by the clans of the neighbourhood; but no general rising took place, and the whole Jacobite force was dispersed or captured by Carpenter—the victor of Preston—at the battle of Glenshiel.
War with Spain.—Schemes of Alberoni.
The tale of "the Fifteen" is the one stirring incident in the inglorious annals of George I. The domestic interest of the remainder of his reign centred in the quarrels and intrigues of the various Whig parties with each other. The only important constitutional change which dates from this time is the "Septennial Act" of 1716, which fixed the duration of Parliament at seven years. Since 1694 three years had been their legal term, but, on account of the inconvenience of general elections at such short intervals, the longer term was substituted and still prevails. In foreign politics the only notable event was a short war with Spain in 1718-20. This was caused by an attempt of Philip V. and his able minister, Cardinal Alberoni, to reconquer the old Spanish dominions in Sicily and Naples. England, as one of the guarantors of the treaty of Utrecht, interfered to aid the Austrians and the Duke of Savoy, the two powers whom Spain had attacked, and an English fleet under Admiral Byng destroyed off Cape Passaro the Spanish squadron which had accompanied the army that invaded Sicily.
In revenge Cardinal Alberoni gave the Jacobites what help he could, and endeavoured to concert an alliance with Charles XII., the warlike King of Sweden. But he and his helpers were too weak to cope with Austria, France, and England, who were all leagued against him. Alberoni was forced from office, and his master Philip V. signed an ignominious peace, and gave up his ephemeral conquests in Sicily (1720).
The ministry which had carried on the war with Spain had been composed of that section of the Whigs who followed Stanhope and Sunderland. But in the same year in which peace was signed, that cabinet was replaced by another, and England saw the advent to power of the prime minister who was to rule the three kingdoms for the next twenty-two years (1721-42), Sir Robert Walpole.
The South Sea Bubble.
The Stanhope cabinet was overthrown, not by the strength of its enemies, but by its own misfortune in becoming involved in the great financial panic known as the "South Sea Bubble." The South Sea Company was a trading venture which had been started in 1711 for developing commerce with Spanish America and the countries of the Pacific. The undertaking had been very successful, and the shares of the company were much sought after, and commanded a very heavy premium. But the directors who managed it were venturesome and reckless men, who wished to extend their operations outside the sphere of trade into that of finance and stock-jobbing. They formed a great scheme for offering the Government the huge sum of £7,000,000 for the privilege of taking over the management of the National Debt, which had hitherto been in the hands of the Bank of England. They intended to recoup themselves by inducing the creditors who held the state loans to exchange them for new stock of the South Sea Company, which would thus accumulate a capital sufficient to develop its trade all over the world, and distance all rivals.
Stanhope and Sunderland accepted this wild offer; they were glad to get the burden of the National Debt off their shoulders, and did not stop to think if they were treating the public creditors fairly in handing them over to the mercies of a greedy trading company. Accordingly, the management of the debt was duly transferred to the South Sea Company, and the directors did their best to put off their shares on the late holders of Government stock. For a time they were successful; the exchange was in many cases effected, and on terms very favourable to the Company, whose prospects were so well thought of that a share nominally worth £100 was actually sold for £1000. But this prosperity was purely fictitious; the actual bulk and profit of the Company's trade with the Pacific was not able to bear a quarter of the financial mountain that had been built up upon it. The first shock to credit that occurred was sufficient to expose the fraud that had been perpetrated on the public. The success of the South Sea Company had led to the starting of many other companies, some of them genuine but hazardous ventures, some mere swindling devices for robbing the investor. A general madness seemed to have fallen upon the nation, and in the haste to make money quickly and without exertion, all classes rushed into the whirl of speculation and stock-jobbing. It is said that subscribers were found for schemes "to discover perpetual motion, and utilize it for machinery," "to make salt water fresh," "to render quicksilver malleable," "to fatten hogs by a new process," and even "to engage in a secret undertaking which shall hereafter be made public." Of course, all these bubble companies began to burst before they were many months old, and to ruin those who had engaged in them. The financial crisis which was brought about by these failures, led to a general panic, which affected all speculative enterprises, great and small. None suffered more than the South Sea Company itself, whose shares gradually sank from 1000 down to 135. This ruined thousands of investors, and finally broke the company itself, which proved unable to pay the Government the £7,000,000 that it had covenanted to give for the privilege of managing the National Debt.
Fall of the Stanhope cabinet.
On the suspension of the South Sea Company, a cry of wrath arose all over the country against the Stanhope cabinet, which had taken the venture under its patronage and entrusted it with such important public duties. It was whispered that some of the ministers had been induced to lend their aid to the scheme by corrupt influences, and that others had made money by using their official information to aid them in speculation. These suspicions were mooted in Parliament, and, when investigated, proved to be not without foundation. When an inquiry was pressed for, Craggs, the Postmaster-General, committed suicide; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled from the House as "guilty of notorious and infamous corruption;" Stanhope, the prime minister, was being attacked in the Lords for the doings of his subordinates, when he fell down dead in an apoplectic fit. His colleague Sunderland resigned his post of First Lord of the Treasury, though he was personally acquitted of all blame in the matter of the South Sea Company.
Walpole and Townshend in office.
Thus the Stanhope-Sunderland cabinet had disappeared, and the other section of the Whigs, headed by Walpole and Townshend, came into office. The former became Chancellor of the Exchequer and took charge of home affairs, while Townshend was entrusted with the foreign relations of the country. Entering into power under pledges to stay the financial crisis and save all that could be rescued from the wreck of the South Sea Company, they executed their task with success. The company was let off the payment of £7,000,000 which it had promised to the state, but deprived of the charge of the National Debt. By confiscating the estates of its fraudulent directors, enough money was obtained to pay all its debtors, and thus the crisis proved less disastrous than had at first been expected.
Supremacy of Walpole.
Sir Robert Walpole was the ruling spirit of the new cabinet; he showed his masterful mind by keeping his brother-in-law Townshend in the second place, and ultimately turned him out of the ministry. "The firm," he said, "must be Walpole and Townshend, not Townshend and Walpole." He soon got the king into complete subjection, for George asked for nothing more than a liberal civil list and frequent opportunities of visiting his beloved Hanover. Nor was he less masterful with the two Houses, where the Tory opposition and the Whigs of the rival faction were equally unable to make any head against him.
Walpole as a statesman.
Walpole was a strange example of the height to which the practical power of dealing with other men may raise one who is neither intellectually nor morally the superior of his fellows. He was a wealthy county gentleman from Norfolk, who had entered parliament early, and had already made himself a place in politics before the death of Queen Anne. The one subject of which he had a competent knowledge was finance; in most of the other spheres of politics he was grossly ignorant, and most of all was he deficient in a grasp of European politics. He did not understand a word of French or any other modern tongue, a fact which is enough by itself to account for his inadequate foreign policy. His morals and his language were alike coarse; he affected a shameless cynicism, which is well reflected in the saying that "every man has his price" which was put into his mouth by his enemies.
Government by corruption.
This phrase, indeed, well expresses his political methods; his one end was to maintain himself in office, and for that purpose he kept his party in a state of complete subjection. Good service he rewarded by good pay, whether in the form of office and preferment, or in the grosser shape of hard cash. He was always prepared to buy any member or group of members by open bribery, and the taint of corruption dating from the times of Charles II. was still so strong in English politics that he seldom failed to secure his prize. He was impatient of opposition, and gradually turned out of office any colleague who would not obey his slightest nod; even his own brother-in-law Townshend and Lord Carteret, the ablest diplomatist of the day, were forced to leave his cabinet by his unreasoning jealousy. He preferred to work with nonentities, because they feared and obeyed him.
Walpole was a thoroughly bad influence in English politics; he lowered the moral tone of a whole generation by his constant sneers at probity and patriotism. He promoted a host of unworthy men to power. Most especially did he injure the national Church by his practice of bestowing bishoprics and other high preferments on mere political partisans, without any thought as to their spiritual fitness.
Though the Whigs professed to be the party of liberty, enlightenment, and toleration, Walpole did not pass one important bill to improve the constitution or the social state of the nation in his twenty-two years of power. He only took thought for the material prosperity of England, and cared nothing for her moral welfare. Hence it comes that his whole term of office is almost a blank in our political history.
Death of George I.
So firm a grasp had Walpole on the helm of power, that his position was not in the least shaken by the death of his master George I. [1727]. The king died suddenly while absent on one of his periodical visits to Hanover, and was succeeded by his son and bitter enemy, George, Prince of Wales. The new sovereign disliked Walpole on principle, because he had been his father's confidant, but found himself quite unable to turn him out of power. Immediately on hearing of his predecessor's death, George II. bade Walpole give up his seals of office, but a few days later he had to ask him to resume them, after finding that no one else would undertake to construct a cabinet. For fifteen years more he was constrained to keep his father's old minister (1727-1742).
Character of George II.
George II. was a man of much greater force of character than George I. He was a busy, consequential, irascible little man, who would have liked to play a considerable part in English politics if the Whigs had only allowed him. He was a keen if not an able soldier, and had served with some distinction under Marlborough in the Low Countries. He took a great interest in foreign affairs, and chafed bitterly at the way in which Walpole persisted in keeping out of all European complications. He spoke English fluently with a vile German accent: every one has heard of his famous dictum, "I don't like Boetry, and I don't like Bainting." His tastes were coarse, and his private life indifferent. But he was wise enough to let himself be guided in many things by his clever wife, Caroline of Anspach, who possessed the very qualities in which he was most wanting, was a judicious patroness of arts and letters, and knew how to win popularity both for her husband and herself. It was mainly by her advice that King George was induced to keep Walpole in power, instead of rushing into the turmoil that would have followed his dismissal.
The Excise Bill.
Walpole went on, for the first twelve years of the reign of George II., ruling the country in the same unostentatious way as before. He only made one attempt to introduce a measure of importance in the whole time; this was his Excise Bill of 1733, a financial scheme for suppressing smuggling, and encouraging the use of England as a central depôt by other nations, by means of a system of free trade. Tobacco, wine, and spirits were to be imported without paying any customs duty at the port of entry, and were to be permitted to be re-exported without any charge. But the retailers of these commodities were to pay the duty on each quantity as they sold it, so that the tax should be paid inland if not at the seaport. When a great cry was raised against the bill, as inquisitorial and tyrannous, Walpole tamely dropped it rather than risk his hold on power.
The War of the Polish Succession.
Meanwhile the continent was much disturbed by the "War of the Polish Succession" (1733-1735), in which Austria fought unsuccessfully against Spain, France, and Turkey. But Walpole would not interfere to aid our old ally, and saw her lose Naples and Sicily without stirring a hand. Much was to be said in favour of keeping England out of foreign wars in which she had no direct interest; but the new union of France and Spain boded ill for England. Already these two powers had secretly formed a union, afterwards known as the "Family Compact," by which the uncle and nephew, Philip V. and Lewis XV., bound themselves to do their best to put an end to England's naval supremacy, and to crush her commercial greatness (1733).
Commercial hostility of Spain.
This treaty was carefully kept dark, but the spirit which had inspired it could not be concealed. The Spanish government began to redouble its vexatious pretensions to a monopoly of the trade of South America, and to interfere with the commercial rights which England possessed under the treaty of Utrecht. The governors of the Spanish colonies and their custom-house officials waxed more and more tyrannous and insolent to the English merchants who endeavoured to carry on a trade with America. The state of public feeling in England grew very bitter over this matter—all the more so because Walpole refused to listen to any complaints, or to remonstrate with the Spaniards.
The case of Captain Jenkins.
At last the case of a merchant captain named Jenkins brought the national anger to boiling-point. His vessel had been boarded, and he himself maltreated by a Spanish guarda-costa. He asserted that the officer who searched his ship had cut off his ear, and told him to take it back and show it to his masters. And he certainly produced the severed ear in a box, and exhibited it freely. His story may have been exaggerated, but it was universally believed, and Walpole was attacked on all sides for his tame submission to Spanish insults.
War with Spain declared.
Determined to keep himself in power at all costs, the prime minister demanded reparation from Spain, and, on failing to obtain it, reluctantly declared war. The public joy on the news of the rupture was unbounded. Only Walpole was sad at the end of twenty years of peace and prosperity that his inglorious rule had given to the land. "Ring your bells now," he is reported to have said when he heard the rejoicings of London, "but you will soon be wringing your hands."
Thus England embarked on the first of four great continental wars, which were to cover the greater part of the eighteenth century.
THE HOUSE OF HANOVER.
| George I. 1714-1727 = Sophia of Celle. | |||||||||
| George II. 1727-1760 = Caroline of Anspach. | |||||||||
| Frederic, Prince of Wales = Augusta of Saxe Gotha. | William, Duke of Cumberland. | ||||||||
| George III. 1760-1820 = Charlotte of Mecklenburg Strelitz. | |||||||||
| George IV. 1820-1830. = Caroline of Brunswick. | Frederic, Duke of York and Albany. | William IV. 1830-1837. | Edward, Duke of Kent = Victoria of Saxe Coburg. | Ernest, Duke of Cumberland; King of Hanover 1830-1851. | |||||
| Princess Charlotte died 1816 = Leopold of Saxe Coburg- Gotha. | Victoria 1837 = Albert of Saxe Coburg-Gotha. | ||||||||