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.
Meantime, a great contest was going on abroad, which, after being
hushed for a while by the peace of 1748, broke out with fiercer
vehemence than ever in what is called the Seven Years' War.
[A.D. 1756-1763.] The military hero of this period was Frederick the
Second of Prussia, by whose genius and skill the kingdom he succeeded
to--a match for Saxony or Bavaria--rapidly assumed its position as a
first-rate power. A combination of all the old despotisms was formed
against him,--not, however, without cause; for a more unprincipled
remover of his neighbour's landmarks, and despiser of generosity and
justice, never appeared in history. But when he was pressed on one side
by Russia and Austria, and on the other by France, and all the little
German potentates were on the watch to pounce on the unprotected State
and get their respective shares in the general pillage, Frederick
placed his life upon the cast, and stood the hazard of the die in
many tremendous combats, crushed the belligerents one by one, made
forced marches which caught them unawares, and, though often defeated,
conducted his retreats so that they yielded him all the fruits of
victory. In his extremity he sought and found alliances in the most
unlikely quarters. Though a self-willed despot in his own domains, he
won the earnest support and liberal subsidies of the freedom-loving
English; and though a philosopher of the most amazing powers of
unbelief, he awakened the sympathy of all the religious Protestants in
our land. All his faults were forgiven--his unchivalrous treatment of
the heroic _King_ of Hungary, Maria-Theresa, the Empress-Queen, his
assaults upon her territory, and general faithlessness and ambition--on
the one strong ground that he opposed Catholics and tyrants, and,
though irreligious and even scoffing himself, was at the head of a
true-hearted Protestant people.
It is not unlikely the instincts of a free nation led us at that time
to throw our moral weight, if nothing more, into the scale against
the intrusion of a new and untried power which began to take part in
the conflicts of Europe; for at this period we find the ill-omened
announcement that the Russians have issued from their deserts a
hundred thousand strong, and made themselves masters of most of the
Prussian provinces. [A.D. 1758.] Though defeated in the great battle
of Zorndorf, they never lost the hope of renewing the march they
had made eleven years before, when thirty-five thousand of them had
rested on the Rhine. But Britain was not blind either to the past or
future. At the head of our affairs was a man whose fame continues as
fresh at the present hour as in the day of his greatness. William Pitt
had been a cornet of horse, and even in his youth had attracted the
admiration and hatred of old Sir Robert Walpole by an eloquence and a
character which the world has agreed in honouring with the epithet of
majestic; and when war was again perplexing the nations, and Britain,
as usual, had sunk to the lowest point in the military estimate of the
Continent, the Great Commoner, as he was called, took the government
into his hands, and the glories of the noblest periods of our annals
were immediately renewed or cast into the shade. Wherever the Great
Commoner pointed with his finger, success was certain. His fleets
swept the seas. Howe and Hawke and Boscawen executed his plans. In
the East he was answered by the congenial energy of Clive, and in the
West by the heroic bravery of Wolfe. For, though the war in which we
were now engaged had commenced nominally for European interests, the
crash of arms between France and England extended to all quarters of
the world. In India and America equally their troops and policies were
opposed, and, in fact, the battle of the two nations was fought out
in those distant realms. Our triumph at Plassey and on the Heights of
Abraham had an immense reaction on both the peoples at home. And a very
cursory glance at those regions, from the middle of the century, will
be a fitting introduction to the crowning event of the period we have
now reached,--namely, the French Revolution of 1789. The rise of the
British Empire in the East, no less than the loss of our dominion in
the West, will be found to contribute to that grand catastrophe, of
which the results for good and evil will be felt "to the last syllable
of recorded time."