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].