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A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES
by
JUSTIN MCCARTHY, M.P.
Author of "A History of Our Own Times" Etc.
In Four Volumes
VOL. I.
New York
Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square
1901
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
CHAP. PAGE
I. "MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!" . . . . . . . 1
II. PARTIES AND LEADERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
III. "LOST FOR WANT OF SPIRIT" . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
IV. THE KING COMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
V. WHAT THE KING CAME TO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
VI. OXFORD'S HALL; BOLINGBKOKE'S FLIGHT . . . . . . . 91
VII. THE WHITE COCKADE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
VIII. AFTER THE REBELLION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
IX. "MALICE DOMESTIC.--FOREIGN LEVY" . . . . . . . . . 158
X. HOME AFFAIRS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
XI. "THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES" . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
XII. AFTER THE STORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
XIII. THE BANISHMENT OF ATTERBURY . . . . . . . . . . . 211
XIV. WALPOLE IN POWER AS WELL AS OFFICE . . . . . . . . 224
XV. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
XVI. THE OPPOSITION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
XVII. "OSNABRUCK! OSNABRUCK!" . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
XVIII. GEORGE THE SECOND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
XIX. "THE PATRIOTS" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
XX. A VICTORY FOR THE PATRIOTS . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
{1}
A HISTORY
OF
THE FOUR GEORGES.
CHAPTER I.
"MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!"
"The Queen is pretty well," Swift wrote to Lord Peterborough on May 18,
1714, "at present, but the least disorder she has puts all in alarm."
Swift goes on to tell his correspondent that "when it is over we act as
if she were immortal; neither is it possible to persuade people to make
any preparations against an evil day." Yet on the condition of Queen
Anne's health depended to all appearance the continuance of peace in
England. While Anne was sinking down to death, rival claimants were
planning to seize the throne; rival statesmen and rival parties were
plotting, intriguing, sending emissaries, moving troops, organizing
armies, for a great struggle. Queen Anne had reigned for little more
than twelve years. She succeeded William the Third on March 8, 1702,
and at the time when Swift wrote the words we have quoted, her reign
was drawing rapidly to a close.
Anne was not a woman of great capacity or of elevated moral tone. She
was moral indeed in the narrow and more limited sense which the word
has lately come to have among us. She always observed decorum and
propriety herself; she always discouraged vice in others; but she had
no idea of political morality or of high {2} political purpose, and she
had allowed herself to be made the instrument of one faction or
another, according as one old woman or the other prevailed over her
passing mood. While she was governed by the Duchess of Marlborough,
the Duke of Marlborough and his party had the ascendant. When Mrs.
Masham succeeded in establishing herself as chief favorite, the Duke of
Marlborough and his followers went down. Burnet, in his "History of My
Own Times," says of Queen Anne, that she "is easy of access, and hears
everything very gently; but opens herself to so few, and is so cold and
general in her answers, that people soon find that the chief
application is to be made to her ministers and favorites, who, in their
turns, have an entire credit and full power with her. She has laid
down the splendor of a court too much, and eats privately; so that,
except on Sundays, and a few hours twice or thrice a week, at night, in
the drawing-room, she appears so little that her court is, as it were,
abandoned." Although Anne lived during the Augustan Age of English
literature, she had no literary capacity or taste. Kneller's portrait
of the Queen gives her a face rather agreeable and intelligent than
otherwise--a round, full face, with ruddy complexion and dark-brown
hair. A courtly biographer, commenting on this portrait, takes
occasion to observe that Anne "was so universally beloved that her
death was more sincerely lamented than that of perhaps any other
monarch who ever sat on the throne of these realms." A curious comment
on that affection and devotion of the English people to Queen Anne is
supplied by the fact which Lord Stanhope mentions, that "the funds rose
considerably on the first tidings of her danger, and fell again on a
report of her recovery."
[Sidenote: 1714--Fighting for the Crown]
England watched with the greatest anxiety the latest days of Queen
Anne's life; not out of any deep concern for the Queen herself, but
simply because of the knowledge that with her death must come a crisis
and might come a revolution. Who was to snatch the crown as it fell
from Queen Anne's dying head? Over at Herrenhausen, in {3} Hanover,
was one claimant to the throne; flitting between Lorraine and St.
Germains was another. Here, at home, in the Queen's very
council-chamber, round the Queen's dying bed, were the English heads of
the rival parties caballing against each other, some of them deceiving
Hanover, some of them deceiving James Stuart, and more than one, it
must be confessed, deceiving at the same moment Hanoverians and Stuarts
alike. Anne had no children living; she had borne to her husband, the
feeble and colorless George of Denmark, a great many children--eighteen
or nineteen it is said--but most of them died in their very infancy,
and none lived to maturity. No succession therefore could take place,
but only an accession, and at such a crisis in the history of England
any deviation from the direct line must bring peril with it. At the
time when Queen Anne lay dying, it might have meant a new revolution
and another civil war.
While Anne lies on that which is soon to be her death-bed, let us take
a glance at the rival claimants of her crown, and the leading English
statesmen who were partisans on this side or on that, or who were still
hesitating about the side it would be, on the whole, most prudent and
profitable to choose.
The English Parliament had taken steps, immediately after the
Revolution of 1688, to prevent a restoration of the Stuart dynasty.
The Bill of Rights, passed in the first year of the reign of William
and Mary, declared that the crown of England should pass in the first
instance to the heirs of Mary, then to the Princess Anne, her sister,
and to the heirs of the Princess Anne, and after that to the heirs, if
any, of William, by any subsequent marriage. Mary, however, died
childless; William was sinking into years and in miserable health,
apparently only waiting and anxious for death, and it was clear that he
would not marry again. The only one of Anne's many children who
approached maturity, the Duke of Gloucester, died just after his
eleventh birthday. The little duke was a pupil of Bishop Burnet, and
was a child of great promise. {4} Readers of fiction will remember
that Henry Esmond, in Thackeray's novel, is described as having
obtained some distinction in his academical course, "his Latin poem on
the 'Death of the Duke of Gloucester,' Princess Anne of Denmark's son,
having gained him a medal and introduced him to the society of the
University wits." After the death of this poor child it was thought
necessary that some new steps should be taken to cut off the chances of
the Stuarts. The Act of Settlement, passed in 1701, excluded the sons
or successors of James the Second, and all other Catholic claimants,
from the throne of England, and entailed the crown on the Electress
Sophia of Hanover as the nearest Protestant heir, in case neither the
reigning king nor the Princess Anne should have issue. The Electress
Sophia was the mother of George, afterwards the First of England. She
seems to have had good-sense as well as talent; her close friend
Leibnitz once said of her that she was not only given to asking why,
but also wanted to know the why of the whys. She was not very anxious
to see her son George made sovereign of England, and appeared to be
under the impression that his training and temper would not allow him
to govern with a due regard for the notions of constitutional liberty
which prevailed even then among Englishmen. It even seems that Sophia
made the suggestion that James Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he has
since been called, would do well to become a Protestant, go in for
constitutional Government, and thus have a chance of the English
throne. It is certain that she strongly objected to his being compared
with Perkin Warbeck, or called a bastard. She accepted, however, the
position offered to her and her son by the Act of Settlement, and
appears to have become gradually reconciled to it, and even, as she
sank into years, is said to have expressed a hope many times that the
name of Queen of England might be inscribed upon her coffin. She came
very near to the gratification of her wish. She died in June, 1714,
being then in her eighty-fourth year--only a very few days before {5}
Queen Anne received her first warning of the near approach of death.
Her son George succeeded to her claim upon the crown of England.
[Sidenote: 1714--The House of Brunswick]
The reigning house of Hanover was one of those lucky families which
appear to have what may be called a gift of inheritance. There are
some such houses among European sovereignties; whenever there is a
breach in the continuity of succession anywhere, one or other of them
is sure to come in for the inheritance. George the Elector, who was
now waiting to become King of England as soon as the breath should be
out of Anne's body, belonged to the House of Guelf, or Welf, said to
have been founded by Guelf, the son of Isembert, a count of Altdorf,
and Irmintrude, sister of Charlemagne, early in the ninth century. It
had two branches, which were united in the eleventh century by the
marriage of one of the Guelf ladies to Albert Azzo the Second, Lord of
Este and Marquis of Italy. His son Guelf obtained the Bavarian
possessions of his wife's step-father, a Guelf of Bavaria. One of his
descendants, called Henry the Lion, married Maud, daughter of Henry the
Second of England, and became the founder of the family of Brunswick.
War and imperial favor and imperial displeasure interfered during many
generations with the integrity of the Duchy of Brunswick, and the
Electorate of Hanover was made up for the most part out of territories
which Brunswick had once owned. The Emperor Leopold constructed it
formally into an Electorate in 1692, with Ernest Augustus of
Brunswick-Lüneberg as its first Elector. The George Louis who now, in
1714, is waiting to become King of England, was the son of Ernest
Augustus and of Sophia, youngest daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of
Bohemia, sister to Charles First of England. Elizabeth had married
Frederick, the Elector-Palatine of the Rhine, and her life was crossed
and thwarted by the opening of the Thirty Years' War, and then by the
misfortunes of her brother Charles and his dynasty. Elizabeth survived
the English troubles and saw the Restoration, and came to live in {6}
England, and to see her nephew, Charles the Second, reign as king. She
barely saw this. Two years after the Restoration she died in London.
Sophia was her twelfth child: she had thirteen in all. One of Sophia's
elder brothers was Prince Rupert--that "Rupert of the Rhine" of whom
Macaulay's ballad says that "Rupert never comes but to conquer or to
die"--the Rupert whose daring and irresistible charges generally won
his half of the battle, only that the other half might be lost, and
that his success might be swallowed up in the ruin of his companions.
His headlong bravery was a misfortune rather than an advantage to his
cause, and there seems to have been one instance--that of the surrender
of Bristol--in which that bravery deserted him for the moment. We see
him afterwards in the pages of Pepys, an uninteresting, prosaic,
pedantic figure, usefully employed in scientific experiments, and with
all the gilt washed off him by time and years and the commonplace wear
and tear of routine life.
[Sidenote: 1714--The "Princess of Ahlden"]
George inherited none of the accomplishments of his mother. His father
was a man of some talent and force of character, but he cared nothing
for books or education of any kind, and George was allowed to revel in
ignorance. He had no particular merit except a certain easy
good-nature, which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to
any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient.
His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to
profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age,
against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil,
who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political
one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of
Lüneberg. George was attached to another girl; the princess is
supposed to have fixed her affections upon another man. They were
married, however, on November 21, 1682, and during all her life Sophia
Dorothea had to put up with the neglect, the contempt, and afterwards
the cruelty of {7} her husband. George's strongest taste was for ugly
women. One of his favorites, Mademoiselle Schulemberg, maid of honor
to his mother, and who was afterwards made Duchess of Kendal, was
conspicuous, even in the unlovely Hanoverian court, for the awkwardness
of her long, gaunt, fleshless figure. Another favorite of George's,
Madame Kilmansegge, afterwards made Countess of Darlington, represented
a different style of beauty. She is described by Horace Walpole as
having "large, fierce, black eyes, rolling beneath lofty-arched
eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck
that overflowed and was not distinguishable from the lower part of her
body, and no portion of which was restrained by stays."
It would not be surprising if the neglected Sophia Dorothea should have
looked for love elsewhere, or at least should not have been strict
enough in repelling it when it offered itself. Philip Christof
Königsmark, a Swedish soldier of fortune, was supposed to be her
favored lover. He suffered for his amour, and it was said that his
death came by the special order--one version has it by the very
hand--of George the Elector, the owner of the ladies Schulemberg and
Kilmansegge. Sophia Dorothea was banished for the rest of her life to
the Castle of Ahlden, on the river Aller. In the old schloss of
Hanover the spot is still shown, outside the door of the Hall of
Knights, which tradition has fixed upon as the spot where the
assassination of Königsmark took place.
The Königsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother
was the Charles John Königsmark celebrated in an English State trial as
the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas
Thynne. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of Titus Oates, the
"Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade of
Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was betrothed to
Elizabeth, the child widow--she was only fifteen years old--of Lord
Ogle. Königsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the courts of
Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at
Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with
Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of
obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done, and its
story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in
Westminster Abbey. Königsmark's accomplices were executed, but
Königsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at
the siege of classic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign
field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. The elder Königsmark, dying
before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St.
Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death. The
Königsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress of
Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous
Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand. Later, like the fair
sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious
retirement, as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg.
[Sidenote: 1714--Wooden shoes and warming-pans]
George was born in Osnabrück, in May, 1660, and was therefore now in
his fifty-fifth year. As his first qualification for the government of
England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence of
the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and
traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of
the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath
succeeding an Amurath.
When George became Elector, on the death of his father in 1698, he
showed, however, some capacity for improvement, under the influence of
the new responsibility imposed upon him by his station. His private
life did not amend, but his public conduct acquired a certain solidity
and consistency which was not to have been expected from his previous
mode of living. One of his merits was not likely to be by any means a
merit in the eyes of the English people. He was, to do him justice,
deeply attached to his native country. He had all the {9} love for
Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed. The
ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole
conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He
lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute
Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits
and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to
turn his thoughts to England.
The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward
Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his
enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when
they did not think it prudent to give him the title of king. James was
the step-brother of Queen Anne. He was the son of James the Second, by
James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena.
Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just passed
her fourteenth year. Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike
Juliet she was poor. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and
therefore was especially acceptable to her husband. She had four
children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for
ten years she had no child. The _London Gazette_ surprised the world
one day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and
upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son. It need hardly be told
now that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince.
The great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared,
that the alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen. The story
was that a newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought
into the Queen's room in a warming-pan, and passed off as the son of
the Queen. It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had
been instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the
enemies of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or
Petrelin. The warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in
satirical literature and art for many generations after. {10} A whole
school of caricature was heated into life, if we may use such an
expression, by this fabulous warming-pan. Warming-pans were associated
with brass money and wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig
partisans, down to a day not very far remote from our own. Mr. Jobson,
the vulgar lawyer in Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a
Catholic, about "King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our
immortal deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden shoes and
warming-pans." "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans,"
retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his
wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at
present, Mr. Jobson." There was not, of course, the slightest
foundation for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne.
Some little excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere
fact that there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be
present at the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to
make the report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one
whose opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at
the time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all. At the
time, however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large
proportion of the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the
supposed warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the
supporters of the Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the
slightest chance whatever of a Stuart restoration. This story of a
spurious heir to a throne repeats itself at various intervals of
history. The child of Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed
by many Legitimist partisans to be supposititious. In our own days
there were many intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the
unfortunate Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not
the son of the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her
sister, the Duchess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the
French {11} people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist
throne.
[Sidenote: 1714--The "Old Pretender"]
James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was
therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history
begins. Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to
escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed
discrowned. He had led an unhappy life--unhappy all the more because
of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it. He is
described as tall, meagre, and melancholy. Although not strikingly
like Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the
Stuart aspect. Horace Walpole said of him many years after that,
"without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the
strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all." The words
"fatality of air" describe very expressively that look of melancholy
which all the Stuart features wore when in repose. The melancholy look
represented an underlying habitual mood of melancholy, or even
despondency, which a close observer may read in the character of the
"merry monarch" himself, for all his mirth and his dissipation, just as
well as in that of Charles the First or of James the Second. The
profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it.
James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of
Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and
dissipation. His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he
drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought.
He was always the slave of women. Women knew all his secrets, and were
made acquainted with his projected political enterprises. Sometimes
the fair favorite to whom he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled
all over Versailles or Paris of what she had heard, and in some
instances, perhaps, she even took her newly-acquired knowledge to the
English Ambassador and disposed of it for a consideration. At this
time James Stuart is not yet married; but marriage made as little {12}
difference in his way of living as it had done in that of his elderly
political rival, George the Elector. It is strange that James Stuart
should have made so faint an impression upon history and upon
literature. Romance and poetry, which have done so much for his son,
"Bonnie Prince Charlie," have taken hardly any account of him. He
figures in Thackeray's "Esmond," but the picture is not made very
distinct, even by that master of portraiture, and the merely frivolous
side of his character is presented with disproportionate prominence.
James Stuart had stronger qualities for good or evil than Thackeray
seems to have found in him. Some of his contemporaries denied him the
credit of man's ordinary courage; he has even been accused of positive
cowardice; but there does not seem to be the slightest ground for such
an accusation. Studied with the severest eye, his various enterprises,
and the manner in which he bore himself throughout them, would seem to
prove that he had courage enough for any undertaking. Princes seldom
show any want of physical courage. They are trained from their very
birth to regard themselves as always on parade; and even if they should
feel their hearts give way in presence of danger, they are not likely
to allow it to be seen. It was not lack of personal bravery that
marred the chances of James Stuart.
[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's sympathies]
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.
{16}