A History of England, Period III. Constitutional Monarchy

by J. Franck Bright

Parliament was to continue for six months before dissolution, and everything for the present passed off quietly; the Civil List was voted as in the preceding reign; and on the 18th of September the King and his eldest son arrived in England. He was not a man to excite enthusiasm. An unostentatious man, used to a Court where his will was law, but where the manners were singularly primitive and plain, he was little suited to the peculiar position of an English Parliamentary sovereign, from whom, along with the possession of but little real power, much dignity and some magnificence were required. Unable therefore to comprehend the working of that constitution over which he had come to preside, and without ability sufficient to carry on a policy of his own, he naturally threw himself into the arms of that party to which he owed his Crown. The great offices, several of which had been for the last month united in the hands of Shrewsbury, were New Whig ministry. therefore distributed among the Whigs. Townshend was put at the head of the Government, and with him were Halifax, General Stanhope, Lord Cowper, Nottingham, and Lord Townshend's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole; while Sunderland was made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and the Duke of Marlborough (though the King had already shown his well-founded mistrust of him) reassumed the offices of Commander-in-chief and Master of the Ordnance. His power, however, was gone.

Triumph of the Whigs.

The establishment of the Hanoverian house had thus very much the appearance of a triumph of a faction. There were no attempts at conciliation, such as had been made after the Revolution, no efforts to give a general and national character to the Government. The King came forward as the head of the triumphant Whig party. This attitude naturally at the time excited much ill-feeling, yet on the whole it was wise. George was not the man to carry out a scheme of comprehensive government which had already twice failed in the abler hands of William and of Marlborough. The questions at issue were too vital to admit of compromise, and the Whig party were wise in their view of the crisis. A crushing victory was necessary to teach both their conscientious and factious opponents a lesson,—the one must yield to the force of circumstances, the other must discover that their only road to office lay in concession to principles which they were too weak to shake. Conscientious upholders of the Stuarts must be taught that their choice lay between submission and the resignation of their claim to be regarded as Englishmen; those who used the Stuarts as a road to power must be led to see that they must henceforward limit their opposition to points of minor importance, that the main principles of government were fixed for ever.

Riots in the country.

But the conduct of the King and of the Whigs, though wise, was such as to drive the Jacobites to extremities, and to render an appeal to arms sooner or later almost certain. The irritation of the high Tories at once showed itself. In January, as the six months had elapsed, the House was dissolved, and on the meeting of the new House in March, it was found, as was at that time usually the case, that the party in power commanded a large majority. This however had not been secured without serious riots. In Manchester and the midland counties the riots assumed the form of an attack upon the dissenters, and were so serious as to necessitate the passing of a Riot Act. By this Act, which is still in force, it is enacted, that "If any twelve persons are unlawfully assembled to the disturbance of the peace, and any justice of the peace, sheriff, &c., shall think proper to command them by proclamation to disperse, if they contemn his orders, and continue together for one hour afterwards, such contempt shall be felony, without benefit of clergy."

Impeachment of the late ministers. March.

Having secured their majority, it became evident that the Whigs intended to use their regained ascendancy to the uttermost. The Address, both in the House of Lords and in the Commons, was obviously pointed against the framers of the Peace of Utrecht, and before three weeks were over a secret committee was appointed to consider that peace. Bolingbroke had already fled and taken service with the Pretender. Ormond, who till this time had remained in England, putting himself ostentatiously forward as the leader of the Jacobite opposition, followed his example. Oxford alone awaited his trial. The two fugitives were proceeded against by bill of attainder. The impeachment of Oxford was after a while dropped; in fact, it was difficult to substantiate the charge of treason against him. It was not till long afterwards that any real proof existed of treasonable correspondence with the Pretender; and it was scarcely possible to twist the faults and weaknesses of the Peace, the desertion of the Catalans, even the surrender, unasked, of Tournay, one of our conquests, into crimes under the law of treason; nor was the doctrine of the responsibility of ministers as yet sufficiently established to allow the majority at once to answer Oxford's solemn declaration, that he had acted distinctly upon the royal authority. It is true that the plea had been overruled in the case of Danby; but even in the last reign the Whigs had themselves sought shelter, after the battle of Almanza, behind the royal authority, and it was not till more than twenty years of regular party government had intervened that the doctrine was thoroughly understood and adopted.

Jacobite conspiracy.

Meanwhile the aggressive policy of the Whigs was hurrying on an outbreak of the conspiracy which the timely death of the late Queen had checked. It was widespread. Ormond, until his flight, had been busily engaged in organizing it in England, while Bolingbroke had taken it in hand in France: for then, as always, it seems to have been accepted, that any insurrection would be useless without material help from France. In many parts of the country, particularly in the west, the feeling against the Hanoverian succession was strong, and measures had been taken to secure Bristol and Exeter, and other great western towns. In Scotland the difficulty was rather to restrain than to urge forward the Jacobite feeling. Many causes combined to create a widespread Disaffection in Scotland. discontent in that country. In the north the feeling of loyalty to an hereditary chief was part of the national character, inwoven with the whole system of clanship. The national pride was flattered by the thought of a Stuart, a Scotchman, sitting upon the throne of England. Moreover, there was one chief of predominant power whose interests had been always Whig, and jealousy of the ascendancy of the clan Campbell, and of its head, the Duke of Argyle, or Mac Callum More, on this, as on several other occasions, tended to throw all rival clans into the arms of any party of which he was the declared enemy. In the Lowlands other influences were at work. The Presbyterians were not likely to forget the unsparing cruelty of the later Stuarts, and now that they had the upper hand, the tolerated Episcopalians met with no great courtesy at their hands; a constant source of quarrel was thus opened, and the Episcopalians and Catholics might be well expected to seek refuge from the intolerance of their victorious rivals, and a restoration even of their former superiority, in the establishment of the exiled dynasty. But more than that, everything English was unpopular. Two great imaginary injuries were rankling in the national mind. The nation had never forgiven King William's treatment of the Darien Scheme, and were still smarting under the supposed yoke which the Union had laid upon them. Whoever was King of England was their natural enemy, so that, except in those places where settled industry had already felt the advantage of the union with England, there was great readiness to join in any enterprise which would be injurious to her. There were therefore ready to join the cause of the Stuarts in the north all the great clans except the Campbells, and in the south the Episcopalians, and those nationalists who regarded as righteous any act of antagonism to England.

Failure of the Jacobite hopes of French assistance.