A History of the Four Georges, Volume I

by Justin McCarthy

It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have met with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that James might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by statesmen in power—by Oxford and by Bolingbroke—that if he could not actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one, and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church. James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any meanness so ignoble and detestable. His conduct in thus adhering to his convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted with that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a mass!" But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard to his conversion. Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him to become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart. Sully gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of Henry's own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and the turn of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith, commenting shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself more than once on the field of battle in the presence of danger. Thus, according to Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic, would be only following the bent of his own natural inclinations. However that may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by changing his profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown, and that James the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change, lost his best chance of a throne.

What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession? There cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went. There is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and published in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King. It is called on its title-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Concerning the Danger of the Protestant Succession." Such an author, writing comparatively soon after the events, and in a book dedicated to the reigning king, was not likely to do any conscious injustice to the memory of Queen Anne, and was especially likely to take a fair view of the influence which her personal inclinations were calculated to have on the succession. Dr. Somerville declares with great justice that "mildness, timidity, and anxiety were constitutional ingredients in the temper" of Queen Anne. This very timidity, this very anxiety, {14} appears, according to Dr. Somerville's judgment, to have worked favorably for the Hanoverian succession. [Sidenote: 1714—James the Third] The Queen herself, by sentiment, and by what may be called a sort of superstition, leaned much towards the Stuarts. "The loss," says Dr. Somerville, "of all her children bore the aspect of an angry Providence adjusting punishment to the nature and quality of her offence." Her offence, of course, was the part she had taken in helping to dethrone her father. "Wounded in spirit, and prone to superstition, she naturally thought of the restitution of the crown to her brother as the only atonement she could make to the memory of her injured father." This feeling might have ripened into action with her but for that constitutional timidity and anxiety of which Somerville speaks. There would undoubtedly have been dangers, obvious to even the bravest or the most reckless, in an attempt just then to alter the succession; but Anne saw those dangers "in the most terrific form, and recoiled with horror from the sight." Moreover, she had a constitutional objection, as strong as that of Queen Elizabeth herself, to the presence of an intended successor near her throne. "She trembled," says Somerville, "at the idea of the presence of a successor, whoever he might be; and the residence of her own brother in England was not less dreadful to her than that of the electoral prince." But it is probable that had she lived longer she would have found herself constrained to put up with the presence either of one claimant or the other. Her ministers, whoever they might be, would surely have seen the imperative necessity of bringing over to England the man whom the Queen and they had determined to present to the English people as the destined heir of the throne. In such an event as that, and most assuredly if men like Bolingbroke had been in power, it may be taken for granted that the Queen would have preferred her own brother, a Stuart, to the Electoral Prince of Hanover. "What the consequence might have been, if the Queen had survived," says Somerville, "is merely a matter of conjecture; but we may {15} pronounce, with some degree of assurance, that the Protestant interest would have been exposed to more certain and to more imminent dangers than ever had threatened it before at any period since the revolution." This seems a reasonable and just assertion. If Anne had lived much longer, it is possible that England might have seen a James the Third.

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CHAPTER II.

PARTIES AND LEADERS.

[Sidenote: 1714—Whig and Tory]

All the closing months of Queen Anne's reign were occupied by Whigs and Tories, and indeed by Anne herself as well, in the invention and conduct of intrigues about the succession. The Queen herself, with the grave opening before her, kept her fading eyes turned, not to the world she was about to enter, but to the world she was about to leave. She was thinking much more about the future of her throne than about her own soul and future state. The Whigs were quite ready to maintain the Hanoverian succession by force. They did not expect to be able to carry matters easily, and they were ready to encounter a civil war. Their belief seems to have been that they and not their opponents would have to strike the blow, and they had already summoned the Duke of Marlborough from his retirement in Flanders to take the lead in their movement. Having Marlborough, they knew that they would have the army. On the other hand, if Bolingbroke and the Tories really had any actual hope of a restoration of the Stuarts, it is certain that up to the last moment they had made no substantial preparations to accomplish their object.

The Whigs and Tories divided between them whatever political force there was in English society at this time. Outside both parties lay a considerable section of people who did not distinctly belong to the one faction or the other, but were ready to incline now to this and now to that, according as the conditions of the hour might inspire them. Outside these again, and far outnumbering these and all others combined, was the great mass of the English {17} people—hard-working, much-suffering, poor, patient, and almost absolutely indifferent to changes in governments and the humors and struggles of parties. "These wrangling jars of Whig and Tory," says Dean Swift, "are stale and old as Troy-town story." But if the principles were old, the titles of the parties were new. Steele, in 1710, published in the Tatler a letter from Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff, asking for "an account of those two religious orders which have lately sprung up amongst you, the Whigs and the Tories." Steele declared that you could not come even among women "but you find them divided into Whig and Tory." It was like the famous lawsuit in Abdera, alluded to by Lucian and amplified by Wieland, concerning the ownership of the ass's shadow, on which all the Abderites took sides, and every one was either a "Shadow" or an "Ass."

Various explanations have been given of these titles Whig and Tory. Titus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York. The word "Whig" first arose during the Cameronian rising, when it was applied to the Scotch Presbyterians, and is derived by some from the whey which they habitually drank, and by others from a word, "whiggam," used by the western Scottish drovers.

The Whigs and the Tories represent in the main not only two political doctrines, but two different feelings in the human mind. The natural tendency of some men is to regard political liberty as of more importance than political authority, and of other men to think that the maintenance of authority is the first object to be secured, and that only so much of individual liberty is to be conceded as will not interfere with authority's strictest exercise. Roughly speaking, therefore, the Tories were for authority, and the Whigs for liberty. The Tories naturally held to the principle of the monarchy and of the State church; the Whigs {18} were inclined for the supremacy of Parliament, and for something like an approach to religious equality. [Sidenote: 1714—Political change] Up to this time at least the Tory party still accepted the theory of the Divine origin of the king's supremacy. The Whigs were even then the advocates of a constitutional system, and held that the people at large were the source of monarchical power. To the one set of men the sovereign was a divinely appointed ruler; to the other he was the hereditary chief of the realm, having the source of his authority in popular election. The Tories, as the Church party, disliked the Dissenters even more than they disliked the Roman Catholics. The Whigs were then even inclined to regard the Church as a branch of the Civil Service—to adopt a much more modern phrase—and they were in favor of extending freedom of worship to Dissenters, and in a certain sense to Roman Catholics. According to Bishop Burnet, it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the distinction between High-Church and Low-Church first marked itself out, and we find almost as a natural necessity that the High-Churchmen were Tories, and the Low-Churchmen were Whigs. Then as now the chief strength of the Tories was found in the country, and not in the large towns. So far as town populations were concerned, the Tories were proportionately strongest where the borough was smallest. The great bulk of the agricultural population, so far as it had definite political feelings, was distinctly Tory. The strength of the Whigs lay in the manufacturing towns and the great ports. London was at that time much stronger in its Liberal political sentiments than it has been more recently. The moneyed interest, the bankers, the merchants, were attached to the Whig party. Many peers and bishops were Whigs, but they were chiefly the peers and bishops who owed their appointments to William the Third. The French envoy, D'Iberville, at this time describes the Whigs as having at their command the best purses, the best swords, the ablest heads, and the handsomest women. The Tory party was strong at the University of Oxford; the Whig party was {19} in greater force at Cambridge. Both Whigs and Tories, however, were in a somewhat subdued condition of mind about the time that Anne's reign was closing. Neither party as a whole was inclined to push its political principles to anything like a logical extreme. Whigs and Tories alike were practically satisfied with the form which the English governing system had put on after the Revolution of 1688. Neither party was inclined for another revolution. The civil war had carried the Whig principle a little too far for the Whigs. The Restoration had brought a certain amount of scandal on sovereign authority and the principle of Divine right. The minds of men were settling down into willingness for a compromise. There were, of course, among the Tories the extreme party, so pledged to the restoration of the Stuarts that they would have moved heaven and earth, at all events they would have convulsed England, for the sake of bringing them back. These men constituted what would now be called in the language of French politics the Extreme Right of the Tory party; they would become of importance at any hour when some actual movement was made from the outside to restore the Stuarts. Such a movement would of course have carried with it and with them the great bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the mean time, and until some such movement was made, the Jacobite section of the Tories was not in a condition to be active or influential, and was not a serious difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.