Frederick, Prince of Wales, died on the 20th of March, 1751. Having caught a slight cold, without being alarmed at his illness, he soon felt seriously affected. "I feel death," he had said. The dispute which reigned in the royal family did not cease at the grave; the project of the Regency law had occasioned some bitter passages between the dowager princess, mother of the new Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Cumberland. The prince was not popular. "I do not know why," said King George II. "This nation is capricious. The Scotch and the Jacobites think ill of him; and the English do not like discipline." On the 6th of March, 1754, Henry Pelham unexpectedly died. His administration had been just and intelligent, without vigor, but without disturbance. "I shall have no more peace," exclaimed the old king when he learned of his minister's death. As clever in court finesse as he was incapable of directing with grandeur general policy, the Duke of Newcastle knew how to seize the high rank that escaped the dying hands of his brother. William Pitt bided his time.
It was in the midst of this administrative weakness and intellectual stagnation that a religious movement had begun, and was spreading, which was destined to reanimate moral life in England, to purify manners, and to give it strength to resist the fatal impulse of the French Revolution. Under the influence of examples which originated in the court of Charles II., and which since then had been fostered by numerous scandals, English society was gradually corrupted in high places, and the contagion of moral evil was beginning to make itself felt even in the most remote provinces. Religious faith, enfeebled by the indifference of the clergy as well as by the theories of philosophers, was struggling faintly against the depravity of manners. The Anglican Church had fallen into a respectable languor; the old dissenting sects, having escaped from the tight bonds of persecution, had lost their ancient fervor.
William Pitt—Lord Chatham.
The religious sentiment yet existed in a latent condition among the lower and middle classes. Here it was that it awakened with an unexpected ardor at the eloquent voice of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Both students of Oxford, both destined to embrace the holy ministry, both consecrated in the Anglican Church, they undertook with enthusiasm a sacred crusade for the salvation of souls and the destruction of moral evil. Whitefield, who was more ardently eloquent, less contained, and of a less tolerant spirit than Wesley, now travelled over the country, preaching to the miners, who came out of their gloomy retreats in thousands in order to hear his fervent exhortations, and now assembled at the house of the Countess of Huntington the élite of the worldly society of London. Strong workingmen sobbed and groaned under his pathetic appeals; peasants fell to the earth as though stricken with inward convulsions; philosophers tranquilly admired an eloquence of which they recognized the power as well as the sincerity. "All appeared moved to some extent," said Whitefield in writing of a piously worldly assembly. "Lord Chesterfield thanked me, saying, 'Sir, I will not say to you, what I say of you to others, how much I commend you.' Lord Bolingbroke assisted at the meeting. He was seated like an archbishop, and did me the honor to say that in my discourse I had done justice to the divine attributes." Some years later the eloquence of Whitefield was to draw from the economical hands of Franklin the whole contents of his purse. But already the ardor of his zeal had closed to him the pulpits of the Anglican Church. He had sought sympathy for his cause even in America. On his return to England some difference of opinion had separated him from Wesley. Henceforth each worked for his reward in the vast field of unbelief, indifference, and moral corruption. Both, however, pursued the same work, following the bent of natural disposition, which was more ardent and dissenting with Whitefield and the Methodist sects born under his inspiration, more moderate and conservative with Wesley as with the innumerable adherents who yet do themselves the honor of bearing his name.
Never was the author of a great and lasting popular movement further removed than Wesley from all revolutionary tendency. The spirit of government and organization, attachment to ancient and venerated forms, a lofty and calm judgment united to an ascetic nature, a slight leaning towards mysticism—such were the characteristic and necessary traits of a reformer and religious founder in the eighteenth century. Wesley was tenderly attached to the Anglican Church; he only separated himself from it with regret, constrained by the ecclesiastical dislike which closed the pulpits to him, and compelled, little by little, and against his inclination, to accept the vault of heaven for his temple, and the laity for his fellow laborers, as Whitefield had done since the beginning. During his long apostolate, which lasted from 1729 to 1791, from the prayer-meetings in his room at Oxford to the complete and strong organization of the sect he had founded, Wesley exercised an absolute authority over his numerous subjects. "If you mean by an arbitrary power, a power which I alone exercise," he said, with a tranquil simplicity, "it is certainly true; but I see no harm in it." However, in courageously accomplishing his work, Wesley did more than he intended; he had founded a religious society; he had not had the intention of founding a sect. A minister of the Anglican Church, and a witness of its shortcomings, he had felt that in order to awaken the parish clergy it was necessary to create a kind of regular clergy; that in order to announce the Gospel to those who did not go to church, or who only heard these cold exhortations, it was necessary to organize an army of ardent missionaries; that in order to touch the heart of the masses it was necessary to seek them in the fields, the markets, and the byways, and to address them in their own common language. Wesley was forced to separate himself from the Anglican Church, but his disciples have constantly remained respectful to her, and as an intermediate body between her and dissenters, they have, from without, rendered her most important services. Wesley and Whitefield have reawakened religious life in England, and no religious society has profited by it so much as the Anglican Church herself. Movements of various kinds, all serious and sincere, have manifested themselves in her wide bosom. She has sufficed to foster much warmth, to satisfy minds and hearts widely dissimilar, but all beset by veritable religious needs; she has united herself to the most noble attempts of modern philanthropy, the worthy fruits of awakened and revived Christian faith. It is to the great religious movement created in the eighteenth century by Wesley and Whitefield that England has owed the glorious efforts of Clarkson and Wilberforce for the emancipation of slaves, and the prison reform of John Howard.
England had need of all her forces, ancient and new, moral, religious, and patriotic, for she was approaching an era of blended glory and danger, agitated and tempestuous even in victory. The war with France, long sustained on distant seas without preliminary declaration, and with enormous detriment to French commerce, which was everywhere interrupted and ruined, became at last patent and officially inevitable. In the Indies as well as in Canada, it had not ceased for a single day. In the month of March, 1755, the ministers asked Parliament for an increase of forces for the defence of the American possessions threatened by the French. The governor of Canada, the Marquis Duquesne, had erected a series of forts in the valley of the Ohio. M. de Contrecœur, who commanded in that region, learned that a body of English troops was marching upon him under the orders of young Colonel Washington. He immediately detailed M. de Jumonville along with thirty men, to call upon the English to retire and evacuate the French territory. At break of day on the 18th of May, 1754, Washington's corps surprised De Jumonville's little encampment. The attack was unforeseen; the French envoy was killed along with nine of his troop. The irritation caused by this event precipitated the commencement of hostilities. A band of Canadians, reinforced by some savages, marched against Washington, who had intrenched himself in the plain. It was necessary to attack him with cannon shot. In spite of his bravery, the future conqueror of American independence was forced to capitulate. The colonies were keenly excited; they formed a sort of confederation against the French power in America. They especially raised militia. In January, 1755, General Braddock was already in Virginia with regular troops. In the early part of May, Admiral Boscawen, after a desperate combat, captured several vessels which had been separated by bad weather from the squadron of Admiral Dubois de la Motte. Three hundred merchant vessels fell into the hands of the English navy. War was finally declared, to the secret uneasiness of the two governments as well as of the two nations. "What is the use of having plenty of troops and money," wrote the lawyer Barbier, "if we only wage war with the English by sea? They will one after another take all our vessels, get hold of all our American settlements, and manage all the commerce. Some division in the English nation itself must be hoped for, because the king personally does not desire war."
King George II. was uneasy on account of Hanover—a point of attack naturally pointed out to the armies of King Louis XV. The English nation dreaded the landing so often and so vainly announced. "What I wish," exclaimed Pitt, "is to snatch this country from a state of enervation which makes it tremble before twenty thousand Frenchmen." Being a member of the administration, as well as paymaster-general of the forces, he violently attacked the treaties of subsidies and alliance, which the king had just concluded with Prussia and Hesse. For the first time, his eloquence swayed the House. "He has surpassed himself," wrote Horace Walpole. "Do I need to tell you that he has surpassed Demosthenes and Cicero? What figure would their solemn, elaborate, studied harangues have cut beside this manly vivacity and this impetuous eloquence which, all at once, at one o'clock in the morning, after eleven hours' session, pierced the stifling atmosphere." Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had, like Pitt, refused his assent to the treaties. Both were replaced, and Pitt was thrown into the opposition, which rallied round the princess dowager and the young Prince of Wales. "This day will, I hope, give the key-note to my life," he had rightly said in his great speech.