CHAPTER IV

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

1714-1760

[Sidenote: England's European position.]

The accession of George the First marked a change in the position of

England as a member of the European Commonwealth. From the age of the

Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart

from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for

if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House

of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his

successor from any effective interference in the strife across the

Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at

the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm

as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the

ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when

England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful

outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts

of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the

Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts

William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against

France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the

exiled king. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done

England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples,

and reluctantly as she was drawn into it she at once found herself its

head. Political and military genius set William and Marlborough in the

forefront of the struggle; Lewis reeled beneath the shock of Blenheim

and Ramillies; and shameful as were some of its incidents the Peace of

Utrecht left England the main barrier against the ambition of the House

of Bourbon.

Nor was this a position from which any change of domestic policy could

withdraw her. So long as a Stuart pretender threatened the throne of the

Revolution, so long every adherent of the cause of the Revolution,

whether Tory or Whig, was forced to guard jealously against the

supremacy of the power which could alone bring about a Jacobite

restoration. As the one check on France lay in the maintenance of a

European concert, in her efforts to maintain this concert England was

drawn out of the narrower circle of her own home interests to watch

every movement of the nations from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. And

not only did the Revolution set England irrevocably among the powers of

Europe, but it assigned her a special place among them. The result of

the alliance and the war had been to establish what was then called a

"balance of power" between the great European states; a balance which

rested indeed not so much on any natural equilibrium of forces as on a

compromise wrung from warring nations by the exhaustion of a great

struggle; but which, once recognized and established, could be adapted

and readjusted, it was hoped, to the varying political conditions of the

time. Of this balance of power, as recognized and defined in the Treaty

of Utrecht and its successors, England became the special guardian. Her

insular position made her almost the one great state which could have no

dreams of continental aggrandizement; while the main aim of her policy,

that of guarding the throne of the Revolution, secured her fidelity to

the European settlement which offered an insuperable obstacle to a

Jacobite invasion. Her only interest lay in the maintenance of European

peace on the basis of an observance of European treaties.

[Sidenote: Its results.]

Nothing is at first sight more wearisome than the long line of

alliances, triple and quadruple, the endless negotiations, the

interminable congresses, the innumerable treaties, which make up the

history of Europe during the earlier half of the eighteenth century; nor

is it easy to follow with patience the meddlesome activity of English

diplomacy during that period, its protests and interventions, its

subsidies and guarantees, its intrigues and finessings, its bluster and

its lies. But wearisome as it all is, it succeeded in its end, and its

end was a noble one. Of the twenty-five years between the Revolution and

the Peace of Utrecht all but five were years of war, and the five were a

mere breathing-space in which the combatants on either side were girding

themselves for fresh hostilities. That the twenty-five years which

followed were for Europe as a whole a time of peace was due in great

measure to the zeal with which England watched over the settlement that

had been brought about at Utrecht. To a great extent her efforts averted

war altogether; and when war could not be averted she brought it within

as narrow limits and to as speedy an end as was possible. Diplomacy

spent its ingenuity in countless choppings and changings of the smaller

territories about the Mediterranean and elsewhere; but till the rise of

Prussia under Frederick the Great it secured Europe as a whole from any

world-wide struggle. Nor was this maintenance of European peace all the

gain which the attitude of England brought with it. The stubborn policy

of the Georgian statesmen has left its mark on our policy ever since. In

struggling for peace and for the sanctity of treaties, even though the

struggle was one of selfish interest, England took a ply which she has

never wholly lost. Warlike and imperious as is her national temper, she

has never been able to free herself from a sense that her business in

the world is to seek peace alike for herself and for the nations about

her, and that the best security for peace lies in her recognition,

amidst whatever difficulties and seductions, of the force of

international engagements and the sanctity of treaties. The sentiment

has no doubt been deepened by other convictions, by convictions of at

once a higher and a lower stamp, by a growing sense of the value of

peace to an industrial nation, as by a growing sense of the moral evil

and destructiveness of war. But strong as is the influence of both these

sentiments on the peace-loving temper of the English people, that temper

itself sprang from another source. It sprang from the sense of

responsibility for the peace of the world, as a necessary condition of

tranquillity and freedom at home, which grew into life with the earlier

years of the eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: England's intellectual influence.]

Nor was this closer political contact with Europe the only result of the

new attitude of England. Throughout the age of the Georges we find her

for the first time exercising an intellectual and moral influence on the

European world. Hitherto Italian and French impulses had told on English

letters or on English thought, but neither our literature nor our

philosophy had exercised any corresponding influence on the Continent.

It may be doubted whether a dozen Frenchmen or Italians had any notion

that a literature existed in England at all, or that her institutions

were worthy of study by any social or political inquirer. But with the

Revolution of 1688 this ignorance came to an end. William and

Marlborough carried more than English arms across the Channel; they

carried English ideas. The combination of material and military

greatness with a freedom of thought and action hardly known elsewhere,

which was revealed in the England that sprang from the Revolution of

1688, imposed on the imagination of men. For the first time in our

history we find foreigners learning English, visiting England, seeking

to understand English life and English opinion. The main curiosity that

drew them was a political curiosity, but they carried back more than

political conceptions. Religious and philosophical notions crossed the

Channel with politics. The world learned that there was an English

literature. It heard of Shakspere. It wept over Richardson. It bowed,

even in wretched translations, before the genius of Swift. France, above

all, was drawn to this study of a country so near to her, and yet so

utterly unknown. If we regard its issues, the brutal outrage which drove

Voltaire to England in 1726 was one of the most important events of the

eighteenth century. With an intelligence singularly open to new

impressions, he revelled in the freedom of social life he found about

him, in its innumerable types of character, its eccentricities, its

individualities. His "Philosophical Letters" revealed to Europe not only

a country where utterance and opinion were unfettered, but a new

literature and a new science; while his intercourse with Bolingbroke

gave the first impulse to that scepticism which was to wage its

destructive war with the faith of the Continent. From the visit of

Voltaire to the outbreak of the French Revolution, this intercourse with

England remained the chief motive power of French opinion, and told

through it on the opinion of the world. In his investigations on the

nature of government Montesquieu studied English institutions as closely

as he studied the institutions of Rome. Buffon was led by English

science into his attempt at a survey and classification of the animal

world. It was from the works of Locke that Rousseau drew the bulk of his

ideas in politics and education.

[Sidenote: The general temper of Europe.]

Such an influence could hardly have been aroused by English letters had

they not given expression to what was the general temper of Europe at

the time. The cessation of religious wars, the upgrowth of great states

with a new political and administrative organization, the rapid progress

of intelligence, showed their effect everywhere in the same

rationalizing temper, extending not only over theology but over each

department of thought, the same interest in political and social

speculation, the same drift towards physical inquiry, the same tendency

to a diffusion and popularization of knowledge. Everywhere the tone of

thought became secular, scientific, prosaic; everywhere men looked away

from the past with a certain contempt; everywhere the social fusion

which followed on the wreck of the Middle Ages was expressing itself in

a vulgarization of ideas, in an appeal from the world of learning to the

world of general intelligence, in a reliance on the "common sense" of

mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature

of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity

of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in

the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all

delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of

verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped

everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick,

clear instrument of thought in the hands of Addison as in those of

Voltaire.

[Sidenote: Creation of a literary class.]

How strongly this had become the bent of English letters was seen in the

instance of Dryden. In the struggle of the Revolution he had struck

fiercely on the losing side, and England had answered his blows by a

change of masters which ruined and beggared him. But it was in these

later years of his life that his influence over English literature

became supreme. He is the first of the great English writers in whom

letters asserted an almost public importance. The reverence with which

men touched in after-time the hand of Pope, or listened to the voice of

Johnson, or wandered beside his lakes with Wordsworth, dates from the

days when the wits of the Revolution clustered reverently round the old

man who sate in his armchair at Will's discussing the last comedy, or

recalling his visit to the blind poet of the "Paradise Lost." It was by

no mere figure that the group called itself a republic of letters, and

honoured in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more

than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by

his pen that first raised literature into a profession. In the stead of

gentlemen amusing a curious leisure with works of fancy, or Dependants

wringing bread by their genius from a patron's caprice, Dryden saw that

the time had come for the author, trusting for support to the world of

readers, and wielding a power over opinion which compensates for the

smallness of his gains. But he was not only the first to create a

literary class; he was the first to impress the idea of literature on

the English mind. Master as he was alike of poetry and of prose,

covering the fields both of imagination and criticism, seizing for

literary treatment all the more prominent topics of the society about

him, Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new

power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world.

[Sidenote: The new poetry.]

And to this power he gave for nearly a century its form and direction.

In its outer shape as in its inner spirit our literature obeyed the

impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century

till near its close. His influence told especially on poetry. Dryden

remained a poet; even in his most argumentative pieces his subject

seizes him in a poetic way, and prosaic as much of his treatment may be,

he is always ready to rise into sudden bursts of imagery and fancy. But

he was a poet with a prosaic end; his aim was not simply to express

beautiful things in the most beautiful way, but to invest rational

things with such an amount of poetic expression as may make them at once

rational and poetic, to use poetry as an exquisite form for argument,

rhetoric, persuasion, to charm indeed, but primarily to convince. Poetry

no longer held itself apart in the pure world of the imagination, no

longer concerned itself simply with the beautiful in all things, or

sought for its result in the sense of pleasure which an exquisite

representation of what is beautiful in man or nature stirs in its

reader. It narrowed its sphere, and attached itself to man. But from all

that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from

Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that

had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to

man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his

politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides;

with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the

use of words and phrases, a clearer and more perspicuous style, a new

sense of order, of just arrangement, of propriety, of good taste. But

with it came a sense of uniformity, of monotony, of dulness. In Dryden

indeed this was combated if not wholly beaten off by his amazing force;

to the last there was an animal verve and swing about the man that

conquered age. But around him and after him the dulness gathered fast.

[Sidenote: The new prose.]

Of hardly less moment than Dryden's work in poetry was his work in

prose. In continuity and grandeur indeed, as in grace and music of

phrase, the new prose of the Restoration fell far short of the prose of

Hooker or Jeremy Taylor, but its clear nervous structure, its handiness

and flexibility, its variety and ease, fitted it far better for the work

of popularization on which literature was now to enter. It fitted it for

the work of journalism, and every day journalism was playing a larger

part in the political education of Englishmen. It fitted it to express

the life of towns. With the general extension of prosperity and trade

the town was coming into greater prominence as an element of national

life; and London above all was drawing to it the wealth and culture

which had till now been diffused through the people at large. It was

natural that this tendency should be reflected in literature; from the

age of the Restoration indeed literature had been more and more becoming

an expression of the life of towns; and it was town-life which was now

giving to it its character and form. As cities ceased to be regarded

simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes

for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and

freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the

mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social

intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy,

its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer

of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist.

[Sidenote: The Essayists.]

What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk.

The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but

already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The

popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the

new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from

the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the

brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary

charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a

gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped

and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest

and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short;

essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the

sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage.

Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all

necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary

conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious

display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had

to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of

imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of

phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he

touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their

more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold

is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a

puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its

fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of

a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer

passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity,

his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter,

his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's

fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would

startle the group in a modern drawing-room.

[Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]

But if deeper and grander themes were denied him the essayist had still

a world of his own. He felt little of the pressure of those spiritual

problems that had weighed on the temper of his fathers, but the removal

of the pressure left him a gay, light-hearted, good-humoured observer of

the social life about him, amused and glad to be amused by it all,

looking on with a leisurely and somewhat indolent interest, a quiet

enjoyment, a quiet scepticism, a shy reserved consciousness of their

beauty and poetry, at the lives of common men and common women. It is to

the essayist that we owe our sense of the infinite variety and

picturesqueness of the human world about us; it was he who for the first

time made every street and every house teem with living people for us,

who found a subtle interest in their bigotries and prejudice, their

inconsistencies, their eccentricities, their oddities, who gave to their

very dulness a charm. In a word it was he who first opened to men the

world of modern fiction. Nor does English literature owe less to him in

its form. Humour has always been an English quality, but with the

essayist humour for the first time severed itself from farce; it was no

longer forced, riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness,

adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of

playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with

passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into

love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand

with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour,

whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary

courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and

phrase. It was in the hands of the town-bred essayist that our

literature first became urbane.

[Sidenote: The brutality of Politics.]

It is strange to contrast this urbanity of literature with the savage

ferocity which characterized political controversy in the England of the

Revolution and the Georges. Never has the strife of warring parties been

carried on with so utter an absence of truth or fairness; never has the

language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and

scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest

statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only

worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of

attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary

of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set

the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise of highwaymen

and pickpockets. "It is difficult to determine," said the witty

playwright, "whether the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the

road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen." Much of this

virulence sprang, no doubt, from a real contempt of the selfishness and

corruption which disgraced the politics of the time, but it was far from

being wholly due to this. In selfishness and corruption indeed the

statesmen of the Georgian era were no worse than their predecessors;

while in fidelity to principles and a desire for the public good they

stood immeasurably above them. The standard of political action had

risen with the Revolution. Cynic as was Walpole, jobber as was

Newcastle, it would be absurd to compare their conception of public

duty, their conduct of public affairs, with that of the Danbys and

Sunderlands of the Restoration.

[Sidenote: Public opinion.]

What had really happened was a change not in the attitude of statesmen

towards the nation, but in the attitude of the nation at large towards

the class that governed it. From the triumph of Puritanism in 1640 the

supreme, irresistible force in English politics had been national

opinion. It created the Long Parliament. It gave it its victory over the

Church and the Crown. When a strange turn of events placed Puritanism in

antagonism to it, it crushed Puritanism as easily as it had crushed

Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no

sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in

the Popish Plot and swept them from the country in the Revolution. The

stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of

sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest

with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it

acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general

course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed

there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in

politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at

critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it

could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation

roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts

indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to

public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish

Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this

lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his

opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two

great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Petitioners

and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that

then for the first time the masses of the people were stirred to a more

prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups

of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.

[Sidenote: Becomes powerless.]

The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.

But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the

national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless

to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to

vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of

the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in

the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the

Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the

Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the

Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of

administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse

from Nonconformity or the toleration of Nonconformity. That the nation

at large remained Tory in sentiment was seen from the fact that in every

House of Commons elected after the Revolution the majority was commonly

Tory; it was only indeed when their opposition to the war and the

patriotic feeling which it aroused rendered a Tory majority impossible

that the House became Whig. And even in the height of Whig rule and

amidst the blaze of Whig victories, England rose in the Sacheverell

riots, forced Tories again into power, and ended the Whig war by what it

deemed a Tory peace. And yet every Englishman knew that from the moment

of the Revolution the whole system of government had not been Tory but

Whig. Passionate as it was for peace and for withdrawal from all

meddling in foreign affairs, England found itself involved abroad in

ever-widening warfare and drawn into a guardianship of the whole state

of Europe. At home it was drifting along a path that it hated even more.

Every year saw the Crown more helpless, and the Church becoming as

helpless as the Crown. The country hated a standing army, and the

standing army existed in spite of its hate; it revolted against debt and

taxation, and taxes and debt grew heavier and heavier in the teeth of

its revolt. Its prejudice against Nonconformists remained as fanatical

as ever, and yet Nonconformists worshipped in their chapels and served

as aldermen or mayors with perfect security. What made this the bitterer

was the fact that neither a change of ministers nor of sovereign brought

about any in the system of government. Under the Tory Anne the policy of

England remained practically as Whig as under the Whig William.

Nottingham and Harley did as little to restore the monarchy or the

Church as Somers or Godolphin.

[Sidenote: Helplessness of the Tories.]

In driving James to a foreign land, indeed, in making him dependent on a

foreign Court, the Revolution had effectually guarded itself from any

undoing of its work. So long as a Stuart Pretender existed, so long as

he remained a tool in the hands of France, every monarch that the

Revolution placed on the English throne, and every servant of such a

monarch, was forced to cling to the principles of the Revolution and to

the men who were most certain to fight for them. With a Parliament of

landed gentry and Churchmen behind him Harley could not be drawn into

measures which would effectively alienate the merchant or the Dissenter;

and if Bolingbroke's talk was more reckless, time was not given to show

whether his designs were more than talk. There was in fact but one

course open for the Tory who hated what the Revolution had done, and

that was the recall of the Stuarts. Such a recall would have brought him

much of what he wanted. But it would have brought him more that he did

not want. Tory as he might be, he was in no humour to sacrifice English

freedom and English religion to his Toryism, and to recall the Stuarts

was to sacrifice both. None of the Stuart exiles would forsake their

faith; and, promise what they might, England had learned too well what

such pledges were worth to set another Catholic on the throne. The more

earnest a Catholic he was indeed, and no one disputed the earnestness of

the Stuarts, the more impossible was it for him to reign without

striving to bring England over to Catholicism; and there was no means of

even making such an attempt save by repeating the struggle of James the

Second and by the overthrow of English liberty. It was the

consciousness that a Stuart restoration was impossible that egged

Bolingbroke to his desperate plans for forcing a Tory policy on the

monarchs of the Revolution. And it was the same consciousness that at

the crisis which followed the death of Anne made the Tory leaders deaf

to the frantic appeals of Bishop Atterbury. To submit again to Whig rule

was a bitter thing for them; but to accept a Catholic sovereign was an

impossible thing. And yet every Tory felt that with the acceptance of

the House of Hanover their struggle against the principles of the

Revolution came practically to an end. Their intrigues with the

Pretender, the strife which they had brought about between Anne and the

Electress Sophia, their hesitation if not their refusal to frankly

support the succession of her son, were known to have sown a deep

distrust of the whole Tory party in the heart of the new sovereign; and

though in the first ministry which he formed a few posts were offered to

the more moderate of their leaders, the offer was so clearly a delusive

one that they refused to take office.

[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Tories.]

The refusal not only deepened the chasm between party and party; it

placed the Tories in open opposition to the Hanoverian kings. It did

even more, for it proclaimed a temper of despair which withdrew them as

a whole from any further meddling with political affairs. "The Tory

party," Bolingbroke wrote after Anne's death, "is gone." In the first

House of Commons indeed which was called by the new king, the Tories

hardly numbered fifty members; while a fatal division broke their

strength in the country at large. In their despair the more vehement

among them turned to the Pretender. Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond

fled from England to take office under the son of King James, James the

Third, as he was called by his adherents. At home Sir William Wyndham

seconded their efforts by building up a Jacobite faction out of the

wreck of the Tory party. The Jacobite secession gave little help to the

Pretender, while it dealt a fatal blow to the Tory cause. England was

still averse from a return of the Stuarts; and the suspicion of Jacobite

designs not only alienated the trading classes, who shrank from the blow

to public credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring

about, but deadened the zeal even of the parsons and squires. The bulk

however of the Tory party were far from turning Jacobites, though they

might play at disloyalty out of hatred of the House of Hanover, and

solace themselves for the triumph of their opponents by passing the

decanter over the water-jug at the toast of "the King." What they did

was to withdraw from public affairs altogether; to hunt and farm and

appear at quarter-sessions, and to leave the work of government to the

Whigs.

[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Church.]

While the Whigs were thus freed from any effective pressure from their

political opponents they found one of their great difficulties becoming

weaker with every year that passed. Up to this time the main

stumbling-block to the Whig party had been the influence of the Church.

But predominant as that influence seemed at the close of the Revolution,

the Church was now sinking into political insignificance. In heart

indeed England remained religious. In the middle class the old Puritan

spirit lived on unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious

revival burst forth at the close of Walpole's administration which

changed after a time the whole tone of English society. But during the

fifty years which preceded this outburst we see little save a revolt

against religion and against churches in either the higher classes or

the poor. Among the wealthier and more educated Englishmen the progress

of free inquiry, the aversion from theological strife which had been

left behind them by the Civil Wars, the new political and material

channels opened to human energy were producing a general indifference to

all questions of religious speculation or religious life. In the higher

circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England,

"if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the

greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and

distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives.

Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later

prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with

his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were

sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his

son, instructs him in the art of seduction as part of a polite

education.

[Sidenote: Sloth of the clergy.]

At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They

were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for

the increase of population which followed on the growth of towns and the

developement of commerce had been met by no effort for their religious

or educational improvement. Not a new parish had been created. Hardly a

single new church had been built. Schools there were none, save the

grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. The rural peasantry, who were

fast being reduced to pauperism by the abuse of the poor-laws, were left

without much moral or religious training of any sort. "We saw but one

Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said Hannah More at a far later time,

"and that was used to prop a flower-pot." Within the towns things were

worse. There was no effective police; and in great outbreaks the mob of

London or Birmingham burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and

pillaged at their will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers

in the face of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of

society, laws which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree,

and which strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of

Newgate; while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to

drunkenness. In the streets of London gin-shops at one time invited

every passer-by to get drunk for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence.

Much of this social degradation was due without doubt to the apathy and

sloth of the priesthood. A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer, Bishop

Burnet, brands the English clergy of his day as the most lifeless in

Europe, "the most remiss of their labours in private and the least

severe of their lives." A large number of prelates were mere Whig

partizans with no higher aim than that of promotion. The levees of the

Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop avowed that he

had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided at the lakes of

Westmoreland. The system of pluralities which enabled a single clergyman

to hold at the same time a number of livings turned the wealthier and

more learned of the clergy into absentees, while the bulk of them were

indolent, poor, and without social consideration.

[Sidenote: The clergy lose political power.]

Their religious inactivity told necessarily on their political

influence; but what most weakened their influence was the severance

between the bulk of the priesthood and its natural leaders. The bishops,

who were now chosen exclusively from among the small number of Whig

ecclesiastics, were left politically powerless by the estrangement and

hatred of their clergy; while the clergy themselves, drawn by their

secret tendencies to Jacobitism, stood sulkily apart from any active

interference with public affairs. The prudence of the Whig statesmen

aided to maintain this ecclesiastical immobility. The Sacheverell riots

had taught them what terrible forces of bigotry and fanaticism lay

slumbering under this thin crust of inaction, and they were careful to

avoid all that could rouse these forces into life. When the Dissenters

pressed for a repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Walpole openly

avowed his dread of awaking the passions of religious hate by such a

measure, and satisfied them by an annual act of indemnity for any breach

of these penal statutes. By a complete abstinence from all

ecclesiastical questions no outlet was left for the bigotry of the

people at large, while a suspension of the meetings of Convocation

deprived the clergy of their natural centre of agitation and opposition.

[Sidenote: The Whigs and the Crown.]

And while the Church thus ceased to be a formidable enemy, the Crown

became a friend. Under Anne the throne had regained much of the older

influence which it lost through William's unpopularity; but under the

two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of the Crown lay absolutely

dormant. They were strangers, to whom loyalty in its personal sense was

impossible; and their character as nearly approached insignificance as

it is possible for human character to approach it. Both were honest and

straightforward men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of

constitutional kings. But neither had any qualities which could make

their honesty attractive to the people at large. The temper of George

the First was that of a gentleman usher; and his one care was to get

money for his favourites and himself. The temper of George the Second

was that of a drill-sergeant, who believed himself master of his realm

while he repeated the lessons he had learned from his wife, and which

his wife had learned from the Minister. Their Court is familiar enough

in the witty memoirs of the time; but as political figures the two

Georges are almost absent from our history. William of Orange, while

ruling in most home matters by the advice of his Ministers, had not only

used the power of rejecting bills passed by the two Houses, but had kept

in his own hands the control of foreign affairs. Anne had never yielded

even to Marlborough her exclusive right of dealing with Church

preferment, and had presided to the last at the Cabinet Councils of her

ministers. But with the accession of the Georges these reserves passed

away. No sovereign since Anne's death has appeared at a Cabinet Council,

or has ventured to refuse his assent to an Act of Parliament. As

Elector of Hanover indeed the king still dealt with Continental affairs:

but his personal interference roused an increasing jealousy, while it

affected in a very slight degree the foreign policy of his English

counsellors.

England, in short, was governed not by the king but by the Whig

Ministers. But their power was doubled by the steady support of the very

kings they displaced. The first two sovereigns of the House of Hanover

believed they owed their throne to the Whigs, and looked on the support

of the Whigs as the true basis of their monarchy. The new monarchs had

no longer to dread the spectre of republicanism which had haunted the

Stuarts and even Anne, whenever a Whig domination threatened her; for

republicanism was dead. Nor was there the older anxiety as to the

prerogative to sever the monarchy from the Whigs, for the bounds of the

prerogative were now defined by law, and the Whigs were as zealous as

any Tory could be in preserving what remained. From the accession of

George the First therefore to the death of George the Second the whole

influence of the Crown was thrown into the Whig scale; and if its direct

power was gone, its indirect influence was still powerful. It was indeed

the more powerful that the Revolution had put an end to the dread that

its influence could be used in any struggle against liberty. "The

generality of the world here," said the new Whig Chancellor, Lord

Cowper, to King George, "is so much in love with the advantages a king

of Great Britain has to bestow without the least exceeding the bounds of

law, that 'tis wholly in your majesty's power, by showing your power in

good time to one or other of them, to give which party you please a

clear majority in all succeeding parliaments."

[Sidenote: The Whigs and Parliament.]

It was no wonder therefore that in the first of the new king's

parliaments an overwhelming majority appeared in support of the Whigs.

But the continuance of that majority for more than thirty years was not

wholly due to the unswerving support which the Crown gave its Ministers

or to the secession of the Tories. In some measure it was due to the

excellent organization of the Whig party. While their adversaries were

divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real

eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the Revolution

and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. They submitted

with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot of great nobles, to

the houses of Bentinck, Manners, Campbell, and Cavendish, to the

Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells and Grenvilles, families whose

resistance to the Stuarts, whose share in the Revolution, whose energy

in setting the line of Hanover on the throne, gave them a claim to

power. It was due yet more largely to the activity with which the Whigs

devoted themselves to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the

House of Commons. The support of the commercial classes and of the great

towns was secured not only by a resolute maintenance of public credit,

but by the special attention which each ministry paid to questions of

trade and finance. Peace and the reduction of the land-tax conciliated

the farmers and the landowners, while the Jacobite sympathies of the

bulk of the squires, and their consequent withdrawal from all share in

politics, threw even the representation of the shires for a time into

Whig hands. Of the county members, who formed the less numerous but the

weightier part of the lower House, nine-tenths were for some years

relatives and dependents of the great Whig families. Nor were coarser

means of controlling Parliament neglected. The wealth of the Whig houses

was lavishly spent in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt

constituencies which made up a large part of the borough representation.

It was spent yet more unscrupulously in parliamentary bribery.

Corruption was older than Walpole or the Whig Ministers, for it sprang

out of the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had

begun with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was

supreme in the State; but while freeing itself from the control of the

Crown, it was as yet imperfectly responsible to the people. It was only

at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. The

secrecy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful as a

safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a safeguard

against interference on the part of constituencies. This strange union

of immense power with absolute freedom from responsibility brought about

its natural results in the bulk of members. A vote was too valuable to

be given without recompense, and parliamentary support had to be bought

by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash.

But dexterous as was their management, and compact as was their

organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs owed

their long rule over England. Factious and selfish as much of their

conduct proved, they were true to their principles, and their principles

were those for which England had been struggling through two hundred

years. The right to free government, to freedom of conscience, and to

freedom of speech, had been declared indeed in the Revolution of 1688.

But these rights owe their definite establishment as the recognized

basis of national life and national action to the age of the Georges. It

was the long and unbroken fidelity to free principles with which the

Whig administration was conducted that made constitutional government a

part of the very life of Englishmen. It was their government of England

year after year on the principles of the Revolution that converted

these principles into national habits. Before their long rule was over

Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for

difference of opinion, or to put down the liberty of the press, or to

tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a

Parliament.

[Sidenote: Robert Walpole.]

That this policy was so firmly grasped and so steadily carried out was

due above all to the genius of Robert Walpole. Walpole was born in 1676;

and he had entered Parliament two years before the death of William of

Orange as a young Norfolk landowner of fair fortune, with the tastes and

air of the class from which he sprang. His big, square figure, his

vulgar good-humoured face were those of a common country squire. And in

Walpole the squire underlay the statesman to the last. He was ignorant

of books, he "loved neither writing nor reading," and if he had a taste

for art, his real love was for the table, the bottle, and the chase. He

rode as hard as he drank. Even in moments of political peril, the first

despatch he would open was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the

temper of the Norfolk fox-hunter in the "doggedness" which Marlborough

noted as his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared

"If I had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of

Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardness of

his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter

attacks of a host of enemies. There was the same temper in the genial

good-humour which became with him a new force in politics. No man was

ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he brought in

no "gagging Act" for the press; and though the lives of most of his

assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the Pretender,

he made little use of his power over them.

[Sidenote: His policy.]

Where his country breeding showed itself most, however, was in the

shrewd, narrow, honest character of his mind. Though he saw very

clearly, he could not see far, and he would not believe what he could

not see. His prosaic good sense turned sceptically away from the poetic

and passionate sides of human feeling. Appeals to the loftier or purer

motives of action he laughed at as "schoolboy nights." For young members

who talked of public virtue or patriotism he had one good-natured

answer: "You will soon come off that and grow wiser." But he was

thoroughly straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as

they went. "Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned

in later years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents: "he is

for King George and I am for King James, but those men with long cravats

only desire place either under King George or King James." What marked

him off from his fellow-Whigs however was not so much the clearness with

which Walpole saw the value of the political results which the

Revolution had won, or the fidelity with which he carried out his

"Revolution principles"; it was the sagacity with which he grasped the

conditions on which alone England could be brought to a quiet acceptance

of both of them. He never hid from himself that, weakened and broken as

it was, Toryism, lived on in the bulk of the nation as a spirit of

sullen opposition, an opposition that could not rise into active revolt

so long as the Pretender remained a Catholic, but which fed itself with

hopes of a Stuart who would at last befriend English religion and

English liberty, and which in the meanwhile lay ready to give force and

virulence to any outbreak of strife at home. On a temper such as this

argument was wasted. The only agency that could deal with it was the

agency of time, the slow wearing away of prejudice, the slow upgrowth of

new ideas, the gradual conviction that a Stuart restoration was

hopeless, the as gradual recognition of the benefits which had been won

by the Revolution, and which were secured by the maintenance of the

House of Hanover upon the throne.

[Sidenote: The Townshend Ministry.]

Such a transition would be hindered or delayed by every outbreak of

political or religious controversy that changes or reforms, however wise

in themselves, must necessarily bring with them; and Walpole held that

no reform was as important to the country at large as a national

reunion and settlement. Not less keen and steady was his sense of the

necessity of external peace. To provoke or to suffer new struggles on

the Continent was not only to rouse fresh resentment in a people who

still longed to withdraw from all part in foreign wars; it was to give

fresh force to the Pretender by forcing France to use him as a tool

against England, and to give fresh life to Jacobitism by stirring fresh

hopes of the Pretender's return. It was for this reason that Walpole

clung steadily to a policy of peace. But it was not at once that he

could force such a policy either on the Whig party or on the king.

Though his vigour in the cause of his party had earned him the bitter

hostility of the Tories in the later years of Anne, and a trumped-up

charge of peculation had served in 1712 as a pretext for expelling him

from the House and committing him to the Tower, at the accession of

George the First Walpole was far from holding the commanding position he

was soon to assume. The stage indeed was partly cleared for him by the

jealousy with which the new sovereign regarded the men who had till now

served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was

drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found

themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power,

time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715,

and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The

man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new

Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay

in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which

the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of

fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war,

on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of

Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support

of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of

Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.

Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both

as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It

was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his

actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of

Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of

the Treasury, in the new administration.

[Sidenote: The rising of 1715.]

The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of

the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for

the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and

dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as

Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had

secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis

the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But

at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from

France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of

Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without

informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the

signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs

meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival

Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they

had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a

leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand

Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct

kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet

it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who

arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and

incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of

six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and

dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger passed away

like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some

outbreaks of riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings

and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne;

while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its

victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the

restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George.

The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader,

Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the

west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party

to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism,

showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in

Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster. The arrival of

two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred

these insurgents to march into Lancashire, where the Catholic party was

strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a

surrender.

[Sidenote: England and France.]

The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the

Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts,

and to venture on a great constitutional change. Under the Triennial

Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to

three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling

power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure

steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 this necessity

coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly

Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to

seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising

produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more

momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the

Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the

three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the

realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple

alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly

offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the

actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland

had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more

distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France

from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had

been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in

September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that

moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for

the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the

Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of

Spain observed the renunciation of his rights which he had made in the

Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion

of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with

a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power

of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own

renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every

Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her

Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved

upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce

with her dominions in America which England was now entitled to break in

upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.

[Sidenote: Their alliance against Spain.]

To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had

stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every

European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor

held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on

the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet

indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American

Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish

Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against

the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a

means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In

spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to

recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the

Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater

than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the

island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England

and France together. The Abbe Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had

already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the

Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the

Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of

Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers

were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was

concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the

existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European

politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in

Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an

English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement

in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to

avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which

the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising

in Scotland. But the ships were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the

accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death

of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The

progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at

last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were

withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now passed

to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition

of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the title of King; while the work

of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of

his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his

claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.

[Sidenote: Resignation of Townshend.]

Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle

had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new

sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of

England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far

more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his

kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to

strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position

was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark

had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to

annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions;

but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it secured the help of

Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of

alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into

the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with

the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return

bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining

in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the

Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the

court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new

dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his

death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them

had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When

George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England

shielded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish

King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant assent to a measure which

they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the

Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the

Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen

and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was

brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to

England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the

chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands of a

friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying

out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of

the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops

entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by

intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and

Walpole were forced to resign their posts.

[Sidenote: The Stanhope Ministry.]

The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconstituted

cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first

aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a constitutional

change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be

shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was

destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king.

Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular

nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed

aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve

peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht

showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and

changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore

the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord

Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by

limiting the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The

number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the

House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred.

Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were substituted for the sixteen

elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by

Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political

quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it

jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered

representative government impossible. For representative government was

now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of

the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the

mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the

Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers

could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where

their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of

Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.

[Sidenote: South Sea Bubble.]

It was to Walpole's opposition that the Peerage Bill owed its defeat;

and this success forced his rivals again to admit him, with Townshend,

to a share in the Ministry, though they occupied subordinate offices.

But this arrangement was soon to yield to a more natural one. The sudden

increase of English commerce begot at this moment the mania of

speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of

Spanish America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of

Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which

promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of

the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions

of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England

the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of

despatching a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite

of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for

new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a

million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the

country against this "dream." Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company

followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general

ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his

colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea

Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of

terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,

was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert

Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the

Treasury, while his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, returned to his

post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now

reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in

this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that

"the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and

Walpole."

[Sidenote: Walpole's Ministry.]

But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the

head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared

worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness

has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His

qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full

justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man;

nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to

do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque

or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe,

was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on

this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone

it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced

every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among

English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of

our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in

which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while

it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the

honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won

victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his

negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the

very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced

his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and

a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is

the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he

was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our

Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later

statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing

both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense

to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a

statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in

the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he

can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national

wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his

rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more

conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of

our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the

manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be."

[Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]

The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties

from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of

importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the

prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother

country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their

rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of

America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise

Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English

Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom

of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material

progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our

exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the

century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.

It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England

a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of

Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica

at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the

Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at L15,000. At his death

they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth century

the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were

estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a

quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose

manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.

Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new

prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the

West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the

kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with

them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country

gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year

threescore years ago," said Burke in 1766, "are at three thousand at

present."

[Sidenote: His policy of inaction.]

Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than

the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole

swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a

diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First

the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in

economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other

fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than

tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had

specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his

Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the

quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.

His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the

Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry,

which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by

any effort to repeal the laws against Nonconformity. His temper was

naturally vigorous and active; and yet the years of his power are years

without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long

administration indeed is almost without a history. All legislative and

political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after

year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry

there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction

gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of

the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly

presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was

absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of commerce and

accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and

temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave

government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone

to enjoy their new freedom and develope their new industries. And

Walpole let them alone. On the other hand, the forces which opposed the

Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour

which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted

idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but

their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of

opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on

friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing

its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole

trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite

of every temptation he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the

laws that oppressed the Catholic or the Dissenter, he took care that

they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered.

Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the Nonconformists from the

consequences of their infringement of the Test Act. There was no

tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and

action were alike left free. No Minister was ever more foully slandered

by journalists and pamphleteers; but Walpole never meddled with the

press.

[Sidenote: Fresh efforts of Spain.]

Abroad as well as at home the difficulties in the way of his policy were

enormous. Peace was still hard to maintain. Defeated as her first

attempt had been, Spain remained resolute to regain her lost provinces,

to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and to restore her old monopoly of

trade with her American colonies. She had learned that she could do

this only by breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her

isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league

in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the

Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he

provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his

daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to

guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching

the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support the

Pragmatic Sanction in return for a pledge on the part of Charles to aid

in wresting Gibraltar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a

Spanish prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A grant

of the highest trading privileges in her American dominions to a

commercial company which the Emperor had established at Ostend, in

defiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England

and Holland, revealed this secret alliance; and there were fears of the

adhesion of Russia, which still remained hostile to England through the

quarrel with Hanover. The danger was met for a while by an alliance of

England, France, and Prussia, in 1725; but the withdrawal of the last

Power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727 the Spaniards

besieged Gibraltar while Charles threatened an invasion of Holland. The

moderation of Walpole alone averted a European war. While sending

British squadrons to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he

succeeded by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the Emperor to

inaction; after weary negotiations Spain was brought in 1729 to sign the

Treaty of Seville and to content herself with the promise of a

succession of a Spanish prince to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany; and

the discontent of Charles the Sixth at this concession was allayed in

1731 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic Sanction.

[Sidenote: George the Second.]

The patience and even temper which Walpole showed in this business were

the more remarkable that in the course of it his power received what

seemed a fatal shock from the death of the king. George the First died

on a journey to Hanover in 1727; and his successor, George the Second,

was known to have hated his father's Minister hardly less than he had

hated his father. But hate Walpole as he might, the new king was

absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, Caroline of Anspach;

and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the

Ministry. After a few days of withdrawal therefore Walpole again

returned to office; and the years which followed were those in which his

power reached its height. He gained as great an influence over George

the Second as he had gained over his father: and in spite of the steady

increase of his opponents in the House of Commons, his hold over it

remained unshaken. The country was tranquil and prosperous. The

prejudices of the landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce

the land-tax, whose pressure was half the secret of their hostility to

the Revolution that produced it. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites

were too hopeless to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept

quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols

showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value

enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be

in the English tongue.

[Sidenote: Excise Bill.]

Only once did Walpole break this tranquillity by an attempt at a great

measure of statesmanship; and the result of his attempt proved how wise

was the inactivity of his general policy. No tax had from the first

moment of its introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its

origin was due to Pym and the Long Parliament, who imposed duties on

beer, cyder, and perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual

income of more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war with France at

the Revolution brought with it the imposition of a malt-tax and

additional duties on spirits, wine, tobacco, and other articles. So

great had been the increase in the public wealth that the return from

the Excise amounted at the death of George the First to nearly two

millions and a half a year. But its unpopularity remained unabated, and

even philosophers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue

should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the other

hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of winning over the

country gentry to the new dynasty of the Revolution by freeing the land

from all burdens whatever. He saw too a means of diminishing the loss

suffered by the revenue from the Customs through smuggling and fraud.

These losses were immense; that on tobacco alone amounted to a third of

the whole duty. In 1733 therefore he introduced an Excise Bill, which

met this evil by the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the

collection of the duties from the inland dealers in the form of Excise

and not of Customs. The first measure would have made London a free

port, and doubled English trade. The second would have so largely

increased the revenue, without any loss to the consumer, as to enable

Walpole to repeal the land-tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the

change in the mode of levying the duty was estimated to bring in an

additional hundred thousand pounds a year. The necessaries of life and

the raw materials of manufacture were in Walpole's plan to remain

absolutely untaxed. The scheme was in effect an anticipation of the

principles which have guided English finance since the triumph of free

trade, and every part of it has now been carried into effect. But in

1733 Walpole stood ahead of his time. The violence of his opponents was

hacked by an outburst of popular prejudice; riots almost grew into

revolt; and in spite of the Queen's wish to put down resistance by

force, Walpole withdrew the bill. "I will not be the Minister," he said

with noble self-command, "to enforce taxes at the expense of blood."

[Sidenote: The Patriots.]

What had fanned popular prejudice into a flame during the uproar over

the Excise Bill was the violence of the so-called "Patriots." In the

absence of a strong opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a

party breaks readily into factions; and the weakness of the Tories

joined with the stagnation of public affairs to breed faction among the

Whigs. Walpole too was jealous of power; and as his jealousy drove

colleague after colleague out of office they became leaders of a party

whose sole aim was to thrust him from his post. Greed of power indeed

was the one passion which mastered his robust common sense. Townshend

was turned out of office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield in 1733; and though

he started with the ablest administration the country had known, Walpole

was left after twenty years of supremacy with but one man of ability in

his cabinet, the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke. With the single exception

of Townshend, the colleagues whom his jealousy dismissed plunged into an

opposition more factious and unprincipled than has ever disgraced

English politics. The "Patriots," as they called themselves, owned

Pulteney, a brilliant speaker and unscrupulous intriguer, as their head;

they were reinforced by a band of younger Whigs--the "Boys," as Walpole

named them--whose temper revolted alike against the inaction and

cynicism of his policy, and whose fiery spokesman was a young cornet of

horse, William Pitt; and they rallied to these the fragment of the Tory

party which still took part in politics, a fragment inconsiderable in

numbers but of far greater weight as representing a large part of the

nation, and which was guided for a while by the virulent ability of

Bolingbroke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom

he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. Inside

Parliament indeed the invectives of the "Patriots" fell dead before

Walpole's majorities and his good-humoured contempt; so far were their

attacks from shaking his power that Bolingbroke abandoned the struggle

in despair to return again into exile, while Pulteney with his party

could only take refuge in a silly secession from Parliament. But on the

nation at large their speeches and pamphlets, with the brilliant

sarcasms of their literary allies, such as Pope or Johnson, did more

effective work. Unjust indeed as their outcry was, the growing response

to it told that the political inactivity of the country was drawing to

an end. It was the very success of Walpole's policy which was to bring

about his downfall; for it was the gradual closing of the chasm which

had all but broken England into two warring peoples that allowed the

political energy of the country to return to its natural channels and to

give a new vehemence to political strife. Vague too and hollow as much

of the "high talk" of the Patriots was, it showed that the age of

political cynicism, of that unbelief in high sentiment and noble

aspirations which had followed on the crash of Puritanism, was drawing

to an end. Rant about ministerial corruption would have fallen flat on

the public ear had not new moral forces, a new sense of social virtue, a

new sense of religion been stirring, however blindly, in the minds of

Englishmen.

[Sidenote: The Methodists.]

The stir showed itself markedly in a religious revival which dates from

the later years of Walpole's ministry; and which began in a small knot

of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious deadness of their

times expressed itself in ascetic observances, an enthusiastic devotion,

and a methodical regularity of life which gained them the nickname of

"Methodists." Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon

as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by

the fervour and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his

special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led

it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast

masses of population which lay concentrated in the towns or around the

mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor

of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech

was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was

shown when a dread of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the

pulpits of the Established Church, and forced them to preach in the

fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous

corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the

dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his

labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's

preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical,

extravagant, often commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense

reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the

sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring

gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious

Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at

Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits,

and see as he preached the tears "making white channels down their

blackened cheeks."

[Sidenote: The religious revival.]

On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke the effect of

Whitefield and his fellow Methodists was mighty both for good and ill.

Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in their opponents. Their

lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they

were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they

aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong

men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by

bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of

strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange

and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a

conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms

at once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student,

came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was the

"sweet singer" of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery conviction

of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its more

extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric enthusiasm

passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new musical impulse was

aroused in the people which gradually changed the face of public

devotion throughout England.

[Sidenote: John Wesley.]