The reign of George the Second was not a great era of reform; but there was accomplished about this time a measure of reform which we cannot omit to mention. This was the Marriage Act, brought in and passed by Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, in 1753. The Marriage Act provided that no marriage should be legal in England unless the banns had been put up in the parish church for three successive Sundays previously, or a special license had been obtained from the archbishop, and unless the marriage were celebrated in the parish church. The Bill provided that any clergyman celebrating a marriage without these formalities should be liable to penal servitude for seven years. This piece of legislation put a stop to some of the most shocking and disgraceful abuses in certain classes of English social life. With other abuses went the infamous Fleet marriages—marriages performed by broken-down and disreputable clergymen whose headquarters were very commonly the Fleet prison—"couple-beggars" who would perform the marriage ceremony between any man and woman without asking questions, sometimes not even asking their names, provided {280} they got a fee for the performance. Men of this class, a scandal to their order, and still more to the system of law which allowed them to flourish, were to be found at almost every pothouse in the populous neighborhoods, ready to ply their trade at any moment. Perhaps a drunken young lad was brought up to be married in a half unconscious state to some elderly prostitute, perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his fee—and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke's Act stopped the business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.
[Sidenote: 1759—England's control in North America]
Years went on—years of quiet at home, save for little ministerial wrangles—years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not last—that was not meant to last. If no other European power would have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without regard to treaties and truces on the European continent. There was, in fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out. England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and a dispute concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance to the {281} genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The breaking out of war in North America established England as the controlling power there, and settled forever the pretensions of France and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the course of the continental wars. The great results of these to England were worked out on other soil.
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CHAPTER XL.
CANADA.
[Sidenote: 1756—The struggle for Canada]
We have seen that, when the young Duke of Cumberland, after the battle of Culloden, was earning his right to the title of "Butcher," one English officer at least had the courage to protest by his actions against the atrocities of the English general. That soldier was James Wolfe, then a young lieutenant-colonel, who had served his apprenticeship to arms in the Low Countries in the war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honorable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer—a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more the better men among those Puritan soldiers who rallied around the name of Cromwell and battled beneath the standards of Monk. He cherished an austere ideal of public and private virtue. The sweet, simple gravity of the man's nature lives for us very vividly in the portrait Thackeray draws of him in the pages of "The Virginians," where so many of the famous figures of the crowded last century world seem to take bodily shape again and live and move around us.
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From the end of the fifteenth century, when John and Sebastian Cabot discovered Canada, France considered that portion of the New World as her own. Early in the sixteenth century a French expedition under Verazzani formed a settlement named New France, and eleven years later the Breton Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence as far as the site of Montreal. The first permanent settlement was made in 1608, when Quebec was founded. From that time Quebec seems like the prize for which English and French arms are to strive. Canada was taken by the English in 1629, only to be restored in 1632; but when more than a century later France and England were newly at war, the serious and final struggle for the possession of Canada took place.