denied us, by the distrust with which the Protestant exiles looked
on the accession to our throne of a narrower despot and more bigoted
persecutor than Louis; for in this same year James the Second succeeded
Charles. Relying on each other's support, and gratified with the formal
approval of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes pronounced by the Pope,
the two champions of Christendom pursued their way,--dismissals from
office, exclusion from promotion, proscription from worship in France,
and assaults on the Church, and bloody assizes, in England,--till all
the nations felt that a great crisis was reached in the fortunes both
of England and France, and Protestant and Romanist alike looked on
in expectation of the winding-up of so strange a history. Judicial
blindness was equally on the eyes of the two potentates chiefly
interested. James remained inactive while William Prince of Orange,
the avowed chief of the new opinions, was getting ready his ships and
army, and congratulated himself on the silence of his people, which
he thought was the sign of their acquiescence instead of the hush of
expectation. All the other powers--the Papal Chair included--were
not sorry to see a counterpoise to the predominance of France; and
when William appeared in England as the deliverer from Popery and
oppression, the battle was decided without a blow. [A.D. 1688.] James
was a fugitive in his turn, and found his way to Versailles. It is
difficult to believe that any of the blood of Scotland or Navarre
flowed in the veins of the pusillanimous king. He begged his protector,
through whose councils he had lost his kingdom, to give it him back
again; and the opportunity of a theatrical display of grandeur and
magnanimity was too tempting to be thrown away. Louis promised to
restore him his crown, as if it were a broken toy. It was a strange
sight, during the remainder of their lives, to see those two monarchs
keeping up the dignity of their rank by exaggerations of their former
state. No mimic stage ever presented a more piteous spectacle of
poverty and tinsel than the royal pair. Punctilios were observed at
their meetings and separations, as if a bow more or less were of as
much consequence as the bestowal or recovery of Great Britain; and
in the estimation of those professors of manners and deportment a
breach of etiquette would have been more serious than La Hogue or
the Boyne. In that wondrous palace of Versailles all things had long
ceased to be real. Speeches were made for effect, and dresses and
decorations had become a part of the art of governing, and for some
years the system seemed to succeed. When the king required to show
that he was still a conqueror like Alexander the Great, preparations
were made for his reception at the seat of war, and a pre-arranged
victory was attached lo his arrival, as Cleopatra wished to fix a
broiled fish to Anthony's hook. He entered the town of Mons in triumph
when Luxembourg had secured its fall. He appeared also with unbounded
applause at the first siege of Namur, and carried in person the news of
his achievement to Versailles. Every day came couriers hot and tired
with intelligence of fresh successes. Luxembourg conquered at Fleurus,
1690; Catinat conquered Savoy, 1691; Luxembourg again, in 1692, had
gained the great day of Steinkirk, and Nerwinde in 1693. But the tide
now turned. William the Third was the representative at that time of
the stubbornness of his new subjects' character, who have always found
it difficult to see that they were defeated. He was generally forced
to retire after a vigorously-contested fight; but he was always ready
to fight again next day, always calm and determined, and as confident
as ever in the firmness of his men. Reports very different from the
glorious bulletins of the earlier years of the Great Monarch now came
pouring in. Namur was retaken, Dieppe and Havre bombarded, all the
French establishments in India seized by the Dutch, their colony at St.
Domingo captured by the English, Luxembourg dead, and the whole land
again, for the second time, exhausted of men and money. It was another
opportunity for the display of his absolute power. France prayed him
to grant peace to Europe, and the earthly divinity granted France's
prayer. Europe itself, which had rebelled against him, accepted the
pacification it had won by its battles and combinations, as if it were
a gift from a superior being. [A.D. 1697.] He surrendered his conquests
with such grandeur, and looked so dignified while he withdrew his
pretensions, acknowledging the Prince of Orange to be King of England,
and the King of England to have no claim on the crown he had promised
to restore to him, that it took some time to perceive that the terms of
the Peace of Ryswick were proofs of weakness and not of magnanimity.
But the object of his life had been gained. He had abased every order
in the State for the aggrandizement of the Crown, and, for the first
time since the termination of the Roman Empire, had concentrated the
whole power of a nation into the will of an individual. And this
strange spectacle of a possessor of unlimited authority over the lives
and fortunes of all his subjects was presented in an age that had seen
Charles the First of England brought to the block and James the Second
driven into exile! The chance of France's peacefully rising again
from this state of depression into liberty would have been greater if
Louis, in displacing the other authorities, had not disgraced them. He
dissolved his Parliament, not with a file of soldiers, like Cromwell
or Napoleon, but with a riding-whip in his hand. He degraded the
nobility by making them the satellites of his throne and creatures
of his favour. He humbled the Church by secularizing its leaders; so
that Bossuet, bishop and orator as he was, was proud to undertake the
office of peacemaker between him and Madame de Montespan in one of
their lovers' quarrels. And the Frenchmen of the next century looked in
vain for some rallying-point from which to begin their forward course
towards constitutional improvement. They found nothing but parliaments
contemned, nobles dishonoured, and priests unchristianized.
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Kings of France.
A.D.
LOUIS XIV.--(_cont._)
1715. LOUIS XV.
1774. LOUIS XVI.
1793. LOUIS XVII.
Emperors of Germany.
A.D.
LEOPOLD I.--(_cont._)
1705. JOSEPH I.
1711. CHARLES VI.
1740. MARIA-THERESA.
1742. CHARLES VII.
1745. FRANCIS I.
1765. JOSEPH II.
1790. LEOPOLD II.
1792. FRANCIS II.
Kings of England and Scotland.
A.D.
WILLIAM III. and MARY.--(_cont._)
1702. ANNE.
(_Great Britain_, 1707.)
1714. GEORGE I. }
1727. GEORGE II. } House of Hanover.
1760. GEORGE III. }
Kings of Spain.
A.D.
1700. PHILIP V.
1724. LOUIS I.
1724. PHILIP V. again.
1745. FERDINAND VI.
1759. CHARLES III.
1788. CHARLES IV.
Distinguished Men.
ADDISON, STEELE, SWIFT, POPE, ROBERTSON, HUME, GIBBON, VOLTAIRE,
ROUSSEAU, LESAGE, MARMONTEL, MONTESQUIEU, FRANKLIN, (1706-1790,)
JOHNSON, (1709-1784,) GOLDSMITH, (1728-1774,) WOLFE, (1726-1759,)
WASHINGTON, (1732-1799.)
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
INDIA--AMERICA--FRANCE.
The characteristic feature of this period is constant change on
the greatest scale. Hitherto changes have occurred in the internal
government of nations: the monarchic or popular feeling has found its
expression in the alternate elevation of the Kingly or Parliamentary
power. But in this most momentous of the centuries, nations themselves
come into being or disappear. Russia and Prussia for the first time
play conspicuous parts in the great drama of human affairs. France,
which begins the century with the despotic Louis the Fourteenth at
its head, leaves it as a vigorous Republic, with Napoleon Buonaparte
as its First Consul. The foundations of a British empire were laid in
India, which before the end of the period more than compensated for the
loss of that other empire in the West, which is now the United States
of America. It was the century of the breaking of old traditions,
and of the introduction of new systems in life and government,--more
complete in its transformations than the splitting up into hitherto
unheard-of nationalities of the old Roman world had been; for what Goth
and Vandal, and Frank and Lombard, were to the political geography
of Europe in the earlier time, new modes of thought, both religious
and political, were to the moral constitution of that later date. The
barbarous invasions of the early centuries were the overflowing of
rivers by the breaking down of the embankments; the revolutionary
madness of France was the sudden detachment of an avalanche which
had been growing unobserved, but which at last a voice or a footstep
was sufficient to set in motion. In all nations it was a period of
doubt and uneasiness. Something was about to happen, but nobody
could say what. The political sleight-of-hand men, who considered
the safety of the world to depend on the balance of power, where a
weight must be cast into one scale, exactly sufficient, and not more
than sufficient, to keep the other in equilibrio, were never so much
puzzled since the science of balancing began. A vast country, hitherto
omitted from their calculations, or only considered as a make-weight
against Sweden or Denmark, suddenly came forward to be a check, and
sometimes an over-weight, to half the states in Europe. Something had
therefore to be found to be a counterpoise to the twenty millions of
men and illimitable dominions of the Russian Czars. This was close at
the conjurer's hand in Prussia and her Austrian neighbour. Counties
were added,--populations fitted in,--Silesia given to the one,
Gallicia added to the other; and at last the whole of Poland, which
had ceased to be of any importance in its separate existence, was
cut up into such portions as might be required, with here a fragment
and there a fragment, till the scales stood pretty even, and the
three contiguous kingdoms were satisfied with their respective shares
of infamy and plunder. If you hear, therefore, of robberies upon a
gigantic scale,--no longer the buccaneering exploits of a few isolated
adventurers in the Western seas, but of kingdoms deliberately stolen,
or imperiously taken hold of by the right of the strong hand; of the
same Titanic magnitude distinguishing almost all other transactions;
colonies throwing off their allegiance, and swelling out into hostile
empires, instead of the usual discontent and occasional quarrellings
between the mother-country and her children; of whole nations breaking
forth into anarchy, instead of the former local efforts at reformation
ending in temporary civil strife; of commercial speculations reaching
the sublime of swindling and credulity, and involving whole populations
in ruin; and of commercial establishments, on the other hand, vaster
even in their territorial acquisitions than all the conquests of
Alexander,--you are to remember that these things can only have
happened in the Eighteenth Century; the century when the trammels of
all former experiences were thrown off, and when wealth, power, energy,
and mental aspirations were pushed to an unexampled excess. This
exaggerated action of the age is shown in the one great statement which
nearly comprehends all the rest. The Debt of this country, which at the
beginning of this century was sixteen millions and a half and tormented
our forefathers with fears of bankruptcy, had risen at the end of
it, in the heroic madness of conquest and national pride, to the sum
of three hundred and eighty millions, without a doubt of our perfect
competency to sustain the burden.
If the tendency of affairs on the other side of our encircling sea
was to pull down, to destroy, to modify, and to redistribute, the
tendency at home was to build up and consolidate; so that in almost
exact proportion to the wild experiments and frantic strugglings of
other nations after something new--new principles of government, new
theories of society--there arose in this country a dogged spirit of
resistance to all alterations, and a persistence in old paths and
old opinions. The charms which constitution-mongers saw in untried
novelties and philosophic systems existed for John Bull only in what
had stood the wear and tear of hundreds of years. The Prussians,
Austrians, Americans, and finally the French, were groping after
vague abstractions; and Frederick the Soldier, and Joseph the
Philanthropist, and Citizen Franklin, and Lafayette and Mirabeau,
were each in their own way carried away with the delusion of a golden
age; but the English statesmen clung rigidly to the realities of
life,--declared the universal fraternity of nations to be a cry of
knaves or hypocrites,--and answered all exclamations about the dignity
of humanity and the sovereignty of the people with "Rule Britannia,"
and "God save the King." How deeply this sentiment of loyalty and
traditionary Toryism is seated in the national mind is proved by
nothing so much as by the dreadful ordeal it had to go through in the
days of the first two Georges. It certainly was a faith altogether
independent of external circumstances, which saw the divinity that
hedges kings in such vulgar, gossiping, and undignified individuals.
And yet through all the troubled years of their reigns the great
British heart beat true with loyalty to the throne, though it was
grieved with the proceedings of the sovereigns; and when the third
George gave it a man to rally round--as truly native-born as the
most indigenous of the people, as stubborn, as strong-willed, and as
determined to resist innovation as the most consistent of the squires
and most anti-foreign of the citizens--the nation attained a point of
union which had never been known in all their previous history, and
looked across the Channel, at the insanity of the perplexed populations
and the threats of their furious leaders, with a growl of contempt
and hatred which warned their democrats and incendiaries of the fate
that awaited them here. There are times in all national annals when
the narrowest prejudices have an amazing resemblance to the noblest
virtues. When Hannibal was encamped at the gates of Rome, the bigoted
old Patricians in the forum carried on their courts of law as usual,
and would not deduct a farthing from the value of the lands they set
up for sale, though the besieger was encamped upon them. When a king
of Sicily offered a great army and fleet for the defence of Greece
against the Persians, the Athenian ambassador said, "Heaven forefend
that a man of Athens should serve under a foreign admiral!" The
Lacedemonian ambassador said the Spartans would put him to death if he
proposed any man but a Spartan to command their troops; and those very
prejudiced and narrow-minded patriots were reduced to the necessity of
exterminating the invaders by themselves. Great Britain, in the year
1800, was also of opinion that she was equal to all the world,--that
she could hold her own whatever powers might be gathered against
her,--and would not have exchanged her Hood, and Jervis, and Nelson,
for the assistance of all the fleets of Europe.
Nothing seems to die out so rapidly as the memory of martial
achievements. The military glory of this country is a thing of fits and
starts. Cressy and Poictiers left us at a pitch of reputation which
you might have supposed would have lasted for a long time. But in a
very few years after those victories the English name was a byword of
reproach. All the conquests of the Edwards were wrenched away, and
it needed only the short period of the reign of Richard the Second
to sink the recollection of the imperturbable line and inevitable
shaft. Henry the Fifth and Agincourt for a moment brought the previous
triumphs into very vivid remembrance. But civil dissensions between
York and Lancaster blunted the English sword upon kindred helmets, and
peaceful Henry the Seventh loaded the subject with intolerable taxes,
and his son wasted his treasures in feasts and tournaments. The long
reigns of Elizabeth and James were undistinguished by British armies
performing any separate achievements on the Continent; and again civil
war lavished on domestic fields an amount of courage and conduct which
would have eclipsed all previous actions if exhibited on a wider scene.
We need not, therefore, be surprised, if, after the astonishing course
of Louis the Fourteenth's arms, the discomfiture of his adversaries,
the constant repulses of the English contingent which fought under
William in Flanders, and at last the quiet, looking so like exhaustion,
which ushered in the Eighteenth Century, the British forces were
despised, and we were confessed, in the ludicrous cant which at
intervals becomes fashionable still, to be not a military nation. How
this astounding proposition agrees with the fact that we have met in
battle every single nation, and tribe, and kindred, and tongue, on the
face of the whole earth, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and have
beaten them all; how it further agrees with the fact that no civilized
power was ever engaged in such constant and multitudinous wars, so that
there is no month or week in the history of the last two hundred years
in which it can be said we were not interchanging shot or sabre-stroke
somewhere or other on the surface of the globe; how, further still,
the statement is to be reconciled with the fact, perceptible to all
mankind, that the result of these engagements is an unexampled growth
of influence and empire,--the acquisition of kingdoms defended by
millions of warriors in Hindostan, of colonies ten times the extent
of the conqueror's realm, defended by Montcalm and the armies of
France,--we must leave to the individuals who make it: the truth being
that the British people is not only the most military nation the world
has ever seen, not excepting the Roman, but the most warlike. It is
impossible to say when these pages may meet the reader's eye; but, at
whatever time it may be, he has only to look at the "Times" newspaper
of that morning, and he will see that either in the East or the West,
in China or the Cape, or the Persian Gulf, or on the Indus, or the
Irrawaddy, the meteor flag is waved in bloody advance. And this seems
an indispensable part of the British position. She is so ludicrously
small upon the map, and so absorbed in speculation, so padded with
cotton, and so sunk in coal-pits, that it is only constant experience
of her prowess that keeps the world aware of her power. The other great
nations can repose upon their size, and their armies of six or seven
hundred thousand men. Nobody would think France or Russia weak because
they were inactive. But with us the case is different: we must fight or
fall.
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
manoeuvre, 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.