The crisis was so threatening that the Austrian Emperor, who had refused to accede to the mediation of the Powers, yielded. England procured for him the Treaty of Passowitz, which secured him from the Turks, bought off at the expense of the Venetians, from whom they had conquered the Morea; and a Quadruple Alliance between England, France, Austria, and Holland was formed on the basis of the old project of mediation, with this difference, that Parma and Tuscany were to be held by Don Carlos only as fiefs of the Empire. Without open declaration of war, France and England had virtually joined the Austrian alliance. Alberoni, however, persisted in his schemes, but fortune had turned against him. The Spanish fleet, not knowing whether it was peace or war, was fallen upon and destroyed by Byng off Cape Passaro; Savoy, yielding to the pressure of the Quadruple Alliance, accepted Sardinia in exchange for Sicily; the death of Charles XII. broke up the Northern Alliance; the conspiracy in France was discovered when approaching maturity, the Spanish ambassador and the Duke and Duchess of Maine apprehended; of the Pretender's expedition, scattered in the Bay of Biscay, two frigates only reached Loch Alsh in Scotland. A few hundreds of the Highlanders gathered to their standard, but the appearance of English troops put them to flight; the chiefs escaped to Spain, the Highlanders were allowed to fly Fall of Alberoni. Dec. 1719. unmolested to their hills, the Spanish troops were taken prisoners of war. War having now been regularly declared, the French crossed the Pyrenees, and again and again defeated the Spanish troops; and at length Philip was compelled to dismiss his great minister, and on the 19th of January 1720 acceded to the terms of the Quadruple Alliance.
The affairs in the North of Europe were settled in a similar high-handed fashion. There too a nation, struggling to regain its old preponderance, had to be crushed. The death of Charles XII., and the revolution which followed it, put an end to any chance of Sweden's regaining its position in Europe. The new Government fell back upon the old policy of the country; Bremen and Verden were allowed to remain in the hands of George, and an alliance with England and France was entered into. As a necessary consequence the late allies of Sweden again became its enemies. But the friendship of France and England drove them to peace. Orders were even issued to the English Admiral of the Baltic to fall upon the fleet of the Czar without declaration of war, unless with Denmark, his ally, he consented to a cessation of hostilities. Too weak to resist, Denmark accepted a sum of money and retired from the contest; and the Czar, European peace. 1720. now standing alone, withdrew, though still in arms, to await a better opportunity for action. The foreign policy of Stanhope had thus been successful, and though unjust and domineering, secured for Europe a peace of twelve years.
Meanwhile the minister had carried out with consistency the politics of his party at home. In acting thus he was met with considerable difficulties. On the one hand he had to manage and repress the meddlesome and rapacious German coterie which surrounded the King, on the other he was met by a strong opposition headed by that party of the Whigs which had left office with Townshend.
Opposition of Walpole.
In all the chief measures of his administration he found an eager and at times a successful antagonist in Walpole. It was chiefly through his instrumentality that the impeachment of Oxford came to an untimely end. The Lords were persuaded to refuse to listen to any evidence in support of the charge of misdemeanour Trial of Oxford. June 1717. before they had heard that on the graver charge of treason. They knew that it was impossible for the Commons to support the more important charge. A quarrel between the Houses ended in the refusal of the Lower House to proceed to the impeachment. The Lords gravely assembled on the appointed day in Westminster Hall, sat there for a quarter of an hour, and then, as no accusers appeared, declared the impeachment at an end. Again, Walpole, regardless of party ties, vehemently upheld the charges of peculation brought against Lord Cadogan by the Jacobites in the House headed by Shippen. And again, with great inconsistency, Repeal of the Schism Act. Jan. 1719. he opposed the repeal of the Schism Act. The Act for restraining Occasional Conformity passed in the last reign, and the Schism Act of 1714, by which it had been followed, pressed very heavily on the Dissenters; and Stanhope, whose views appear in some respects to have been more liberal than those in vogue at the time, went so far in his wish to relieve them as even to dream of mitigating the severity of the Test and Corporation Acts. However, wisely yielding to the advice of Sunderland, he confined himself to an attempt to get the Schism Act repealed, and succeeded, after much opposition, in both Houses; but his narrow majorities show that a more extensive measure would have been useless. The Test Act continued in force, though rendered practically nugatory after the beginning of George II.'s reign by a Bill of Indemnity passed almost every year in favour of those who had evaded it.
The Peerage Bill rejected. Dec. 1719.
On the two last named occasions Walpole's opposition had been useless. On the more important question of the limitation of the power of the Crown to create Peers by the Peerage Bill, he fortunately proved too strong for the minister. Like the Septennial Act, the Peerage Bill was introduced partly on theoretical, partly on party grounds. The Revolution had been an aristocratic rather than a popular movement. The power or rather the influence of the Crown had not been destroyed, but was in abeyance, the Hanoverian monarchs being as it were in a state of tutelage to the Whig party, whose strength was in the Upper House. Popular in language, but aristocratic in feeling, this party regarded political liberty as best secured by its own predominance, rendered permanent by such institutions as a Septennial Parliament and an exclusive hereditary nobility. It feared alike the power of the King and the power of the people, and already the adoption of the Treaty of Utrecht, carried by the popular will and by a large creation of Peers, had shown the possibility of a union between King and people which might sooner or later destroy its influence. To guard against such a danger was the primary object for which Stanhope introduced his Peerage Bill. But temporary party interests had as much weight with him as general theory. Stanhope and his friends, especially Sunderland, were in dread of the conduct which might be pursued by the Prince of Wales when he came to the throne. He was on bad terms with his father, and regarded Sunderland as the chief cause of the royal jealousy. It was generally believed that his accession would be followed by a creation of peers from among his own favourites. Thus both on public and party grounds the ministry thought it desirable to limit the royal prerogative. As was natural, the Tories, in their dislike to restrictions on the royal prerogative, and the party of Walpole, who opposed it because it was a Government measure, made common cause against the Bill. By its enactments the Crown was to be restrained from the creation of more than six beyond the existing number of 178 English peerages (the power of creating a new peerage whenever an old one became extinct being reserved), no new peerage was to be created with remainders except to the original recipient and his heirs male; while, to place the Peerage of Scotland on the same footing, the sixteen representative Peers of that country were to give way to twenty-five hereditary Peers nominated by the Crown. The Bill met with little opposition in the House of Lords, but was thrown out by a large majority in the Lower House, where Walpole pointed out "that one of the most powerful incentives to virtue would be taken away, since there would be no arriving at honour but through the winding-sheet of a decrepit lord, or the grave of an extinct noble family."
At the present time a defeat on so important a measure must have driven the ministry from office. But the theory of party government was as yet so little perfected, that not only did Stanhope retain his place, but his administration was so strong, that the Whig malcontents thought it better to renew their old connection with it, and both Walpole and Townshend re-entered the Government, the one as Paymaster of the Forces, the other as Lord President. It seemed as if nothing short of some great convulsion could shake so powerful a Government, and, though little apprehended, such a convulsion was near at hand.