The rising of 1715.
The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger passed away like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some outbreaks of riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne; while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader, Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism, showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival of two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred these insurgents to march into Lancashire, where the Catholic party was strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a surrender.
England and France.
The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts, and to venture on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 this necessity coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of Spain observed the renunciation of his rights which he had made in the Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.
Their alliance against Spain.
To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England and France together. The Abbé Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.
Resignation of Townshend.
Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions; but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it secured the help of Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England shielded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant assent to a measure which they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands of a friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and Walpole were forced to resign their posts.
The Stanhope Ministry.
The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconstituted cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king. Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by limiting the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred. Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were substituted for the sixteen elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered representative government impossible. For representative government was now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.
