Twice in the century we are now engaged on, we rose to be first of the military states in Europe, and twice, by mere inaction, we sank to the rank of Portugal or Naples.
Charles the Second of Spain died in November, 1700,—a person so feeble in health and intellect that in a lower state of life he would have been put in charge of guardians and debarred from the management of his affairs. As he was a king, these duties were performed on his behalf by the priests, and the wretched young man—he succeeded at three years old—was nothing but the slave and plaything of his confessor. Yet, though his existence was of no importance, his decease set all Europe in turmoil. By his testament, obtained from him on his death-bed, he appointed the grandson of Louis the Fourteenth his heir. A previous will had nominated Charles of Austria. A previous treaty between Louis and William of England and the States of Holland had arranged a partition of the Spanish monarchy for the benefit of the contracting parties and the maintenance of the balance of power. But now, when a choice was to be made between the wills and the treaty, between the balance of power and his personal ambition, the temptation was too great for the cupidity of the Grand Monarque. He accepted the throne of Spain and the Indies for his grandson Philip of Anjou, and sent him over the Pyrenees to take possession of his dignity. The stroke was so sudden that people were silent from surprise. A French prince at Madrid, at Milan, and Naples, was only the lieutenant in those capitals for the French king. The preponderance of the house of Bourbon was dangerous to the liberties of Europe, and when the house of Bourbon was represented by the haughtiest, and vainest, and most insulting of men, the dignity of the remaining sovereigns was offended by his ostentatious superiority; and the house of Austria, which in the previous century had been the terror of statesmen and princes, was turned to as a shelter from its successful rival, and all the world prepared to defend the cause of the Austrian Charles. The affairs of Europe, which were disturbed by the death of an imbecile king in Spain, were further complicated by the death of a still more imbecile king at St. Germain’s. James the Second brought his strange life to a close in 1701; and, though the advisers of Louis pointed out the consequence of offending England at that particular time by recognising the Prince of Wales as inheritor of the English crown, the vanity of the old man who could not forego the luxury of having a crowned king among his attendants prevailed over his better knowledge, and one day, to the amazement of courtiers and council, he gave the royal reception to James the Third, and threw down the gauntlet to William and England, which they were not slow to take up. William of Orange was not popular among his new subjects, and was always looked on as a foreigner. Perhaps the memory of Ruyter and Van Tromp was still fresh enough to make him additionally disliked because he was a Dutchman. But when it was known over the country that the bigoted and insulting despot in Paris had nominated a King of England, while the man the nation had chosen was still alive in Whitehall, the indignation of all classes was roused, and found its expression in loyalty and attachment to their deliverer from Popery and persecution. Great exertions were made to conduct the war on a scale befitting the importance of the interests at stake. Addresses poured in, with declarations of devotion to the throne; troops were raised, and taxes voted; and in the midst of these preparations, the King, prematurely old, in the fifty-third year of his age, died of a fall from his horse at Kensington, in March, 1702, and the powers of Europe felt that the best soldier they possessed was lost to the cause. Rather it was a fortunate thing for the confederated princes that William died at this time; for he never rose to the rank of a first-rate commander, and was so ambitious of glory and power that he would not have left the way clear for a greater than himself.
This was found in Marlborough. Military science was the characteristic of this illustrious general; and no one before his time had ever possessed in an equal degree the power of attaching an army to its chief, or of regulating his strategic movements by the higher consideration of policy and statesmanship. For the first time, in English history at least, a march was equivalent to a battle. A change of his camp, or even a temporary retreat, was as effectual as a victory; and it was seen by the clearer observers of the time that a campaign was a game of skill, and not of the mere dash and intrepidity which appeal to the vulgar passions of our nature. Not so, however, the general public: their idea of war was a succession of hard knocks, with enormous lists of the killed and wounded. A manœuvre, without a charge of bayonets at the end of it, was little better than cowardice; and complaints were loud and common against the inactivity of a man who, by dint of long-prepared combinations, compelled the enemy to retreat by a mere shift of position and cleared the Low Countries of its invaders without requiring to strike a blow. “Let them see how we can fight,” cried all the corporations in the realm: “anybody can march and pitch his camp.” And it is not impossible that the foreign populations who had never seen the red-coats, or, at most, who had only known them acting as auxiliaries to the Dutch and often compelled to retire before the numbers and impetuosity of the French, had no expectation of success when they should be fairly brought opposite their former antagonists. Friends and foes alike were prepared for a renewal of the days of Luxembourg and Turenne. In this they were not disappointed; for a pupil of Turenne renewed, in a very remarkable manner, the glories of his master. Marlborough had served under that great commander, and profited by his lessons. He had fifty thousand British soldiers under his undivided command; and, to please the grumblers at home and the doubters abroad, he made the reign of Anne the most glorious in the English military annals by thick-coming fights, still unforgotten, though dimmed by the exploits of the more illustrious Wellington. The first of these was Blenheim, against the French and Bavarians, in 1704. How different this was from the hand-to-hand thrust and parry of ancient times is shown by the fate of a strong body of French, who were so posted on this occasion that the duke saw they were in his power without requiring to fire a gun. He sent his aid-de-camp, Lord Orkney, to them to point out the hopelessness of their position; and when he rode up, accompanied by a French officer, to act, perhaps, as his interpreter, a shout of gratulation broke from the unsuspecting Frenchmen. “Is it a prisoner you have brought us?” they asked their countryman. “Alas! no,” he replies: “Lord Orkney has come from Marlborough to tell you you are his prisoners. His lordship offers you your lives.” A glance at the contending armies confirmed the truth of this appalling communication, and the brigade laid down its arms. The tide of victory, once begun, knew no ebb till the grandeur of Louis the Fourteenth was overwhelmed. Disgraces followed quickly one upon the other,—marshals beaten, towns taken, conquests lost, his wealth exhausted, his people discontented, and the bravest of his generals hopeless of success. Prince Eugene of Savoy, equal to Marlborough in military genius, was more embittered against the French monarch, to whom he had offered his services, and who had had the folly to reject them. France, on the side of Germany and the Low Countries, was pressed upon by the triumphant invaders. In Spain, the affairs of the new king were more desperate still. Gibraltar was taken in 1704. Lord Peterborough, a wiser Quixote, of whose victories it is difficult to say whether they were the result of madness or skill, marched through the kingdom at the head of six or seven thousand English and conquered wherever he went.
When the war had lasted eight or nine years, the reputation of Marlborough and the British arms was at its height. Our fleets were masters of the sea, and the Grand Monarque sent humble petitions to the opposing powers for peace upon any terms. People tell us that Marlborough rejected all overtures which might have deprived him of the immense emoluments he received for carrying on the war. |A.D. 1711.|Perhaps, also, he was inspired by the love of fame; but, whether meanness or ambition was his motive, his warlike propensities were finally overcome,—for his wife, the imperious duchess, quarrelled with Queen Anne,—the ministry was changed, and the jealousies of Whitehall interfered with the campaigns in Flanders. |A.D. 1713.|Marlborough was displaced, and a peace patched up, which, under the name of the Peace of Utrecht, is quoted as showing what small fruits British diplomacy sometimes derives from British valour. Louis the Fourteenth, conquered at all points, his kingdom exhausted, and all his reputation gone, saw his grandson in possession of the crown which had been the original cause of the war, and Great Britain rewarded for all her struggles by the empty glory of filling up the harbour of Dunkirk, and the scarcely more substantial advantage, as many considered it at the time, of retaining Gibraltar, a barren rock, and Minorca, a useless island. After this, we find a long period of inaction on the continent produce its usual effect. When thirty years had passed without the foreign populations having sight of the British grenadiers, they either forgot their existence altogether, or had persuaded themselves that the new generation had greatly deteriorated from the old.A.D. 1743. A.D. 1745. It needed the victory of Dettingen, and the more glorious repulse of Fontenoy, to recall the soldiers of Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
In the interval, amazing things had been going on. Even while the career of Marlborough was attended with such glory in arms, a peaceful achievement was accomplished of far more importance than all his victories. An Act of Union between the two peoples who occupied the Isle was passed by both their Parliaments in 1707, and England and Scotland disappeared in their separate nationalities, to receive the more dignified appellation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was a statesman’s triumph; for the popular feeling on both sides of the Tweed was against it. Scotland considered herself sold; and England thought she was cheated. Clauses were introduced to preserve, as far as possible, the distinctions which each thought it for its honour to keep up. National peculiarities exaggerated themselves to prevent the chance of being obliterated; and Scotchmen were never as Scotch, nor Englishmen ever so English, as at the time when these denominations were about to cease. As neighbours, with the mere tie between them of being subjects of the same crown, they were on amicable and respectful terms. But when the alliance was proposed to be more intimate, their interests to be considered identical and the Parliaments to be merged in one, both parties took the alarm. “The preponderating number of English members would scarcely be affected by the miserable forty-five votes reserved for the Scotch representatives,” said Caledonia, stern and wild. “The compact phalanx of forty-five determined Scotchmen will give them the decision of every question brought before Parliament,” replied England, with equal fear,—and equal misapprehension, as it happily turned out. When eight years had elapsed after this great event in our domestic history, with just sufficient experience of the new machinery to find out some of its defects, it was put to the proof by an incident which might have been fatal to a far longer established system of government. This was a rebellion in favour of the exiled Stuarts. James the Third, whom we saw recognised by Louis the Fourteenth on the death of his father in 1701, made his appearance among the Highlanders of the North in 1714, and summoned them to support his family claims.
But the memory of his ancestors was too recent. Men of middle age remembered James the Second in his tyrannical supremacy at Holyrood. The time was not sufficiently remote for romance to have gathered round the harsh reality and hidden its repulsive outlines. A few months showed the Pretender the hopelessness of his attempt; and the tranquillity of the country was considered to be re-established when the adherents of the losing cause were visited with the harshest penalties. The real result of these vindictive punishments was, that they added the spirit of revenge for private wrong to the spirit of loyalty to the banished line. Many circumstances concurred to favour the defeated candidate, who seemed to require to do nothing but bide his time. The throne was no longer held, even under legalized usurpation, as the discontented expressed it, by one of the ancient blood. |A.D. 1714.|A foreigner, old and stupid, had come over from Hanover and claimed the Parliamentary crown, and the few remaining links of attachment which kept the high-prerogative men and the Roman Catholics inactive in the reign of Queen Anne, the daughter of their rightful king, lost all their power over them on the advent of George the First, who had to trace up through mother and grandmother till he struck into the royal pedigree in the reign of James the First. It was thought hard that descent from that champion of monarchic authority and hereditary right should be pleaded as a title to a crown dependent on the popular choice. As years passed on, the number of the discontented was of course increased. Whoever considered himself neglected by the intrusive government turned instinctively to the rival house. A courtier offended by the brutal manners of the Hanoverian rulers looked longingly across the sea to the descendant of his lineal kings. The foreign predilections, and still more foreign English, of the coarse-minded Georges, made them unpopular with the weak or inconsiderate, who did not see that a very inelegant pronunciation might be united with a true regard for the interests of their country.
The commercial passions of the nations succeeded to the military enthusiasm of the past age, and brought their usual fruits of selfish competition and social degradation. Money became the most powerful principle of public and private life: Sir Robert Walpole, a man of perfect honesty himself, founded his ministry on the avowed disbelief of personal honesty among all classes of the people; and there were many things which appeared to justify his incredulity. |A.D. 1720.|There was the South-Sea Bubble, a swindling speculation, to which our own railway-mania is the only parallel, where lords and ladies, high ecclesiastics and dignified office-bearers, the highest and the lowest, rushed into the wildest excesses of gambling and false play, and which caused a greater loss of character and moral integrity than even of money to its dupes and framers. There was the acknowledged system of rewarding a ministerial vote with notes for five hundred or a thousand pounds. There were the party libels of the time, all imputing the greatest iniquities to the object of their vituperation, and left uncontradicted except by savage proceedings at law or by similar insinuations against the other side. There were philosophers like Bolingbroke and clergymen like Swift. But let us distinguish between the performers on the great scenes of life, the place hunter at St. James’s, and the great body of the English and Scottish gentry, and their still undepraved friends and neighbours, whom it is the fashion to involve in the same condemnation of recklessness and dishonour. We are to remember that the dregs of the former society were not yet cleared away. The generation had been brought up at the feet of the professors of morality and religion as they were practised in the days of Charles and James, with Congreve and Wycherly for their exponents on the stage and Dryden for their poet-laureate.
It seems a characteristic of literature that it becomes pure in proportion as it becomes powerful. While it is the mere vehicle for amusement or the exercise of wit and fancy, it does not care in what degrading quarters its materials are found. But when it feels that its voice is influential and its lessons attended to by a wider audience, it rises to the height of the great office to which it is called, and is dignified because it is conscious of its authority. In the incontestable amendment visible in the writings of the period of Anne and the Georges, we find a proof that the vices of the busy politicians and gambling speculators were not shared by the general public. The papers of the Spectator and Tatler, the writings of Pope and Arbuthnot, were not addressed to a depraved or sensualized people, as the works of Rochester and Sedley had been. When we talk, therefore, of the Augustan age of Anne, we are to remember that its freedom from grossness and immorality is still more remarkable than its advance in literary merit, and we are to look on the conduct of intriguing directors and bribed members of Parliament as the relics of a time about to pass away and to give place to truer ideas of commercial honesty and public duty. The country, in spite of coarseness of manners and language, was still sound at heart. The jolly squire swore at inconvenient seasons and drank beyond what was right, but he kept open house to friend and tenant, administered justice to the best of his ability, had his children Christianly and virtuously brought up, and was a connecting link in his own neighbourhood between the great nobles who affected almost a princely state, and the snug merchant in the country town, or retired citizen from London, whom he met at the weekly club. The glimpses we get of the social status of the country gentlemen of Queen Anne make us enamoured of their simple ways and patriarchal position. For the argument to be drawn from the character and friends of Sir Roger de Coverly and the delightful Lady Lizard and her daughters, is that the great British nation was still the home of the domestic affections, that the behaviour was pure though the grammar was a little faulty, and the ideas modest and becoming though the expression might be somewhat unadorned. Hence it was that, when the trial came, the heart of all the people turned to the uninviting but honest man who filled the British throne. George the Second became a hero, because the country was healthy at the core.
A son of the old Pretender, relying on the lax morality of the statesmen and the venality of the courtiers, forgot the unshaken firmness and dogged love of the right which was yet a living principle among the populations of both the nations, and landed in the North of Scotland in 1745, to recover the kingdom of his ancestors by force of arms. The kingdoms, however, had got entirely out of the habit of being recovered by any such means. The law had become so powerful, and was so guarded by forms and precedents, that Prince Charles Edward would have had a better chance of obtaining his object by an action of ejectment, or a suit of recovery, than by the aid of sword and bayonet. Everybody knows the main incidents of this romantic campaign,—the successful battles which gave the insurgents the apparent command of the Lowlands,—the advance into England,—the retreat from Derby,—the disasters of the rebel army, and its final extinction at Culloden. But, although to us it appears a very serious state of affairs,—a crown placed on the arbitrament of war, battles in open field, surprise on the part of the Hanoverians, and loud talking on the part of their rivals,—the tranquillity of all ranks and in all quarters is the most inexplicable thing in the whole proceeding. When the landing was first announced, alarm was of course felt, as at a fair when it is reported that a tiger has broken loose from the menagerie. But in a little time every thing resumed its ordinary appearance. George himself cried, “Pooh! pooh! Don’t talk to me of such nonsense.” His ministers, who probably knew the state of public feeling, were equally unconcerned. A few troops were brought over from the Continent, to show that force was not wanting if the application of it was required. But in other respects no one appeared to believe that the assumed fears of the disaffected, and the no less assumed exultation of the Jacobites, had any foundation in fact. Trade, law, buying and selling, writing and publishing, went on exactly as before. The march of the Pretender was little attended to, except perhaps in the political circles in London. In the great towns it passed almost unheeded. Quiet families within a few miles of the invaders’ march posted or walked across to see the uncouth battalions pass. Their strange appearance furnished subjects of conversation for a month; but nowhere does there seem to have been the terror of a real state of war,—the anxious waiting for intelligence, “the pang, the agony, the doubt:” no one felt uneasy as to the result. England had determined to have no more Stuart kings, and Scotland was beginning to feel the benefit of the Union, and left the defence of the true inheritor to the uninformed, discontented, disunited inhabitants of the hills. When the tribes emerged from their mountains, they seemed to melt like their winter snows. No squadrons of stout-armed cavaliers came to join them from holt and farm, as in the days of the Great Rebellion, when the royal flag was raised at Nottingham. Puritans and Independents took no heed, and cried no cries about “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” They had turned cutlers at Sheffield and fustian-makers at Manchester. The Prince found not only that he created no enthusiasm, but no alarm,—a most painful thing for an invading chief; and, in fact, when they had reached the great central plains of England they felt lost in the immensity of the solitude that surrounded them. If they had met enemies they would have fought; if they had found friends they would have hoped; but they positively wasted away for lack of either confederate or opponent. The expedition disappeared like a small river in sand. What was the use of going on? If they reached London itself, they would be swallowed up in the vastness of the population, and, instead of meeting an army, they would be in danger of being taken up by the police. So they reversed their steps. Donald had stolen considerably in the course of the foray, and was anxious to go and invest his fortune in his native vale. An English guinea—a coin hitherto as fabulous as the Bodach glas—would pay the rent of his holding for twenty years; five pounds would make him a cousin of the Laird. But Donald never got back to display the spoils of Carlisle or Derby. He loitered by the road, and was stripped of all his booty. |A.D. 1746.|He was imprisoned, and hanged, and starved, and beaten, and finally, after the strange tragi-comedy of his fight at Falkirk, had the good fortune, on that bare expanse of Drummossie Moor, to hide some of the ludicrous features of his retreat in the glory of a warrior’s death. Justice became revenge by its severity after the insurrection was quelled. The followers of the Prince were punished as traitors; but treason means rebellion against an acknowledged government, which extends to its subjects the securities of law. These did not exist in the Highlands. All those distant populations knew of law was the edge of its sword, not the balance of its scales. They saw their chiefs depressed, they remembered the dismal massacre of Glencoe in William’s time, and the legal massacres of George the First’s. They spoke another language, were different in blood, and manners, and religion, and should have been treated as prisoners of war fighting under a legal banner, and not drawn and quartered as revolted subjects. It is doubtful if one man in the hundred knew the name of the king he was trying to displace, or the position of the prince who summoned him to his camp. Poor, gallant, warm-hearted, ignorant, trusting Gael! His chieftain told him to follow and slay the Saxons, and he required no further instruction. He was not cruel or bloodthirsty in his strange advance. He had no personal enmity to Scot or Englishman, and, with the simple awe of childhood, soon looked with reverence on the proofs of wealth and skill which met him in the crowded cities and cultivated plains. He was subdued by the solemn cathedrals and grand old gentlemen’s seats that studded all the road, as some of his ancestors, the ancient Gauls, had been at the sight of the Roman civilization. And, for all these causes, the incursion of the Jacobites left no lasting bitterness among the British peoples. Pity began before long to take the place of opposition; and when all was quite secure, and the Highlanders were fairly subdued, and the Pretender himself was sunk in sloth and drunkenness, a sort of morbid sympathy with the gallant adventurers arose among the new generation. Tender and romantic ballads, purporting to be “Laments for Charlie,” and declarations of attachment to the “Young Chevalier,” were composed by comfortable ladies and gentlemen, and sung in polished drawing-rooms in Edinburgh and London with immense applause. Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome,” or Aytoun’s “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” have as much right to be called the contemporary expression of the sacrifice of Virginia or the burial of Dundee as the Jacobite songs to be the living voice of the Forty-Five. Who was there in the Forty-Five, or Forty-Six, or for many years after that date, to write such charming verses? The Highlanders themselves knew not a word of English; the blue bonnets in Scotland were not addicted to the graces of poetry and music. The citizens of England were too busy, the gentlemen of England too little concerned in the rising, to immortalize the landing at Kinloch-Moidart or the procession to Holyrood. The earliest song which commemorates the Pretender’s arrival, or laments his fall, was not written within twenty years of his attempt. By that time George the Third was on the safest throne in Europe, and Great Britain was mistress of the trade of India and the illimitable regions of America. It was easy to sing about having our “rightful King,” when we were in undisputed possession of the Ganges and the Hudson and had just planted the British colours on Quebec and Montreal.
This rebellion of Forty-Five, therefore, is remarkable as a feature in this century, not for the greatness of the interest it excited, but for the small effect it had upon either government or people. It showed on what firm foundations the liberties and religion of the nations rested, that the appearance of armed enemies upon our soil never shook our justly-balanced state. The courts sat at Westminster, and the bells rang for church. People read Thomson’s “Seasons,” and wondered at Garrick in “Hamlet” at Drury Lane.