But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in himself not

this or that side of the new movement, but the movement itself. Even at

Oxford, where he resided as a fellow of Lincoln, he had been looked upon

as head of the group of Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic

mission to the Indians of Georgia he again took the lead of the little

society, which had removed in the interval to London. In power as a

preacher he stood next to Whitefield; as a hymn-writer he stood second

to his brother Charles. But while combining in some degree the

excellences of either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly

deficient; an indefatigable industry, a cool judgement, a command over

others, a faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and

moderation with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of

men. He had besides a learning and skill in writing which no other of

the Methodists possessed; he was older than any of his colleagues at the

start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed almost

covers the century. He was born in 1703 and lived on till 1791, and the

Methodist body had passed through every phase of its history before he

sank into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been

impossible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not shared

the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his disciples.

Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At times he lived

on bread only, and he often slept on the bare boards. He lived in a

world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a miracle if the rain

stopped and allowed him to set forward on a journey. It was a judgement

of heaven if a hailstorm burst over a town which had been deaf to his

preaching. One day, he tells us, when he was tired and his horse fell

lame, "I thought cannot God heal either man or beast by any means or

without any?--immediately my headache ceased and my horse's lameness in

the same instant." With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his

conduct, whether in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life,

by drawing lots or watching the particular texts at which his Bible

opened.

[Sidenote: His organization of Methodism.]

But with all this extravagance and superstition Wesley's mind was

essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at

the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary.

In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the

narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began

his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself

to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of

laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to

preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of England, and

looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society in full communion

with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had been the earliest friends

of the new movement, when they endangered its safe conduct by their

contempt of religious forms. He broke with Whitefield when the great

preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvinism. But the same practical

temper of mind which led him to reject what was unmeasured, and to be

the last to adopt what was new, enabled him at once to grasp and

organize the novelties he adopted. He became himself the most unwearied

of field preachers, and his journal for half-a-century is little more

than a record of fresh journeys and fresh sermons. When once driven to

employ lay helpers in his ministry he made their work a new and

attractive feature in his system. His earlier asceticism only lingered

in a dread of social enjoyments and an aversion from the gayer and

sunnier side of life which links the Methodist movement with that of the

Puritans. As the fervour of his superstition died down into the calm of

age, his cool common sense discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic

outbursts which marked the opening of the revival. His powers were bent

to the building up of a great religious society which might give to the

new enthusiasm a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped

into classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of

unworthy members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers

and wandering preachers; while the whole body was placed under the

absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as he

lived, the direction of the new religious society remained with Wesley

alone. "If by arbitrary power," he replied with charming simplicity to

objectors, "you mean a power which I exercise simply without any

colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt in it."

[Sidenote: Results of the movement.]

The great body which he thus founded numbered a hundred thousand members

at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by

millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the

Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later,

broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the

"Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their

duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at

large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and

wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave-trade, and gave the

first impulse to popular education.

[Sidenote: Revival of France.]

From the new England which was springing up about him, from that new

stir of national life and emotion of which the Wesleyan revival was but

a part, Walpole stood utterly aloof. National enthusiasm, national

passion, found no echo in his cool and passionless good sense. The

growing consciousness in the people at large of a new greatness, its

instinctive prevision of the coming of a time when England was to play a

foremost part in the history of the world, the upgrowth of a nobler and

loftier temper which should correspond to such a destiny, all were alike

unintelligible to him. In the talk of patriotism and public virtue he

saw mere rant and extravagance. "Men would grow wiser," he said, "and

come out of that." The revival of English religion he looked on with an

indifference lightly dashed with dread as a reawakening of fanaticism

which might throw new obstacles in the way of religious liberty. In the

face of the growing excitement therefore he clung as doggedly as ever to

his policy of quiet at home and peace abroad. But peace was now

threatened by a foe far more formidable than Spain. What had hitherto

enabled England to uphold the settlement of Europe as established at the

Peace of Utrecht was above all the alliance and backing of France. But

it was clear that such an alliance could hardly be a permanent one. The

Treaty of Utrecht had been a humiliation for France even more than for

Spain. It had marked the failure of those dreams of European supremacy

which the House of Bourbon had nursed ever since the close of the

sixteenth century, and which Lewis the Fourteenth had all but turned

from dreams into realities. Beaten and impoverished, France had bowed to

the need of peace; but her strange powers of recovery had shown

themselves in the years of tranquillity that peace secured; and with

reviving wealth and the upgrowth of a new generation which had known

nothing of the woes that followed Blenheim and Ramillies the old

ambition started again into life.

[Sidenote: Its union with Spain.]

It was fired to action by a new rivalry. The naval supremacy of Britain

was growing into an empire of the sea; and not only was such an empire

in itself a challenge to France, but it was fatal to the aspirations

after a colonial dominion, after aggrandizement in America, and the

upbuilding of a French power in the East, which were already vaguely

stirring in the breasts of her statesmen. And to this new rivalry was

added the temptation of a new chance of success. On the Continent the

mightiest foe of France had ever been the House of Austria; but that

House was now paralyzed by a question of succession. It was almost

certain that the quarrels which must follow the death of the Emperor

would break the strength of Germany, and it was probable that they might

be so managed as to destroy for ever that of the House of Hapsburg.

While the main obstacle to her ambition was thus weakened or removed,

France won a new and invaluable aid to it in the friendship of Spain.

Accident had hindered for a while the realization of the forebodings

which led Marlborough and Somers so fiercely to oppose a recognition of

the union of the two countries under the same royal house in the Peace

of Utrecht. The age and death of Lewis the Fourteenth, the minority of

his successor, the hostility between Philip of Spain and the Duke of

Orleans, the personal quarrel between the two Crowns which broke out

after the Duke's death, had long held the Bourbon powers apart. France

had in fact been thrown on the alliance of England, and had been forced

to play a chief part in opposing Spain and in maintaining the European

settlement. But at the death of George the First this temporary

severance was already passing away. The birth of children to Lewis the

Fifteenth settled all questions of succession; and no obstacle remained

to hinder their family sympathies from uniting the Bourbon Courts in a

common action. The boast of Lewis the Fourteenth was at last fulfilled.

In the mighty struggle for supremacy which France carried on from the

fall of Walpole to the Peace of Paris her strength was doubled by the

fact that there were "no Pyrenees."

[Sidenote: The Family Compact.]

The first signs of this new danger showed themselves in 1733, when the

peace of Europe was broken afresh by disputes which rose out of a

contested election to the throne of Poland. Austria and France were

alike drawn into the strife; and in England the awakening jealousy of

French designs roused a new pressure for war. The new king too was eager

to fight, and her German sympathies inclined even Caroline to join in

the fray. But Walpole stood firm for the observance of neutrality. He

worked hard to avert and to narrow the war; but he denied that British

interests were so involved in it as to call on England to take a part.

"There are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe," he boasted as

the strife went on, "and not one Englishman." Meanwhile he laboured to

bring the quarrel to a close; and in 1736 the intervention of England

and Holland succeeded in restoring peace. But the country had watched

with a jealous dread the military energy that proclaimed the revival of

the French arms; and it noted bitterly that peace was bought by the

triumph of both branches of the House of Bourbon. A new Bourbon monarchy

was established at the cost of the House of Austria by the cession of

the Two Sicilies to a Spanish Prince in exchange for his right of

succession to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany. On the other hand,

Lorraine, so long coveted by French ambition, passed finally into the

hands of France. The political instinct of the nation at once discerned

in these provisions a union of the Bourbon powers; and its dread of such

a union proved to be a just one. As early as the outbreak of the war a

Family Compact had been secretly concluded between France and Spain, the

main object of which was the ruin of the maritime supremacy of Britain.

Spain bound herself to deprive England gradually of its commercial

privileges in her American dominions, and to transfer them to France.

France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the

recovery of Gibraltar.

[Sidenote: England and Spain.]

The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered

this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon

courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of

1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made

inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve

to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions

on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish

sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the

struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The

trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely

through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance

of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a

legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow

restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its

old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled;

while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which

rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip

however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with

his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single

merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the

moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a

fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the

peace; and in 1738 the ill humour of the trading classes was driven to

madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar

of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the

Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst

taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do

justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry

for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as

it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the

Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the

Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the

highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every

means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her

hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great

crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have

enabled Walpole to deal with it.

[Sidenote: War with Spain.]

But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy

of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies

assailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their

pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to

the crowd on "the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position

had been weakened by the death of the queen; and it was now weakened

yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred

of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as

George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of

the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were

slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a

hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the "Patriots" had

grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was

slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his

support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested

therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the

trading classes. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of

the trading class failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had

driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this

juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham,

who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from

their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.

But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and

that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.

[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession.]

"They may ring their bells now," the great minister said bitterly, as

peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender; "but they will soon be

wringing their hands." His foresight was at once justified. No sooner

had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an

English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication

of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that

she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South

America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was

plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the

protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as

France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her

pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving

Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she

confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for

finishing the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the

Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it

was idle to expect her to pass it by. If once the hereditary dominions

of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the

dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the mass of dominion

which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without

a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of

a danger which the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of

Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the

Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from

the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had

given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when

in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European

struggle.

[Sidenote: Fall of Walpole.]

The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of

Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as

destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had

played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous assailant

of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria

claimed the Austrian Duchies, which passed with the other hereditary

dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as

she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the

Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the

annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and

Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the

summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of

Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria

stood in such peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its

dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria

the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the

Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still

true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against

France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was

wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held

aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the

Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her

full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by

this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with

France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused

to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its

constitutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the

head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria,

and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On

England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.

Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged

with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the

selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his

dread of harm to his hereditary state averted the entry of a French

army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the

step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the

minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still

repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful spirit; but in a

new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to

sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant

temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.

"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his

son, "now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at

dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless

than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed

for an hour together." The end was in fact near; and in the opening of

1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.

[Sidenote: Carteret.]

His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.

The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office,

and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of

the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of

foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in

continental affairs. Carteret mainly followed the system of his

predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked

for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in

Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor;

and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at

Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace

with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The

peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to

drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new

minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.

One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples

and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude

a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the

French alliance.

[Sidenote: Dettingen.]

The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set

up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.

Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsass

and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to

the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove

the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second,

who warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head of a

force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and

marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and

finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with

a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing

31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the

battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not

only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of

the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held

their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small

as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated

Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a

league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all

that was needed to secure the results already gained.

[Sidenote: Fall of Carteret.]

But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of

Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples,

with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian

Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to

Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh

attitude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the war on the

cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than

suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.

His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of

the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the

Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while

the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally

itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment

that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the

Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of

Carteret's weakness in assenting to a change in the character of the

struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack

became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led

an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against

him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger

at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now

became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to

his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not

only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the

king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its

head.

[Sidenote: The Pelham Ministry.]

Of the reconstituted ministry which followed Henry Pelham became the

head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity

disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.

Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and "the Boys," all

found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had

given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the

first breach in the system of purely party government established on the

accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by

the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of

Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of

Hanover with Prussia for a headship of North Germany found expression in

the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in

accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of

Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs

remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots

into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests

should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an

accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams

forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could

be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be

given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the

superiority of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of Cumberland.

Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians,

and Dutch--for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged

into the war, though by English subsidies--the Duke on the 31st of May

1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and

redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into

this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column,

doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the

moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in

their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and

orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of

Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and

by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of

July.

[Sidenote: Charles Edward Stuart.]

The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and

as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was

placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.

But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which

wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had

sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young

adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and

landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood

almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his

standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen

hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair

Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed "James the

Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched

against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the

21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.

Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now

at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the

people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the

utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.

His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after

skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through

Lancashire, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here

all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his

support as he passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of

its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.

Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single squire

took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English

towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand

pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred

men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of

Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency

of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories

into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere

Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles

Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand

Highlanders.

[Sidenote: Conquest of the Highlands.]

He soon learned too that forces of double his own strength were closing

on either side of him, while a third army under the king and Lord Stair

covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were away,

quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its allegiance to

the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms

for King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though roused by a

small French force which landed at Montrose. To advance further south

was impossible, and Charles fell rapidly back on Glasgow; but the

reinforcements which he found there raised his army to nine thousand

men, and on the 23rd January 1746 he boldly attacked an English army

under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped

near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for

the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces

dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly

back to the north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the 16th of April

the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward

of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they

were starving and dispirited, while Cumberland's force was nearly double

that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung

themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were

received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke

through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few

moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a mass of hunted

fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.

In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords,

Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty

persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures

of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were

abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and

transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was

forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which

followed them, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the

clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the

Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Widening of the War.]

Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the

Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.

When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for

weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal

therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded

the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and

withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however

the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were

balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe

inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.

The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at last

brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by

which England surrendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on

land. But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during which both

parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier contest which they saw

impending. The war was in fact widening far beyond the bounds of Germany

or of Europe. It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to settle the

destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the valleys of the

Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great question whether the

fortunes of the New World were to be moulded by Frenchmen or Englishmen.

Already too French adventurers were driving English merchants from

Madras, and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add India

to the dominions of France.

[Sidenote: Clive.]

The intercourse of England with India had as yet given little promise of

the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of

Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco de Gama had crept round the

Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese settlement on the Goa

Coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The trade,

profitable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three early

factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during the century

which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of but six

fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by

the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza; while Fort

William, with the mean village which has since grown into Calcutta, owes

its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of these forts was

built simply for the protection of the Company's warehouses, and guarded

by a few "sepahis," sepoys, or paid native soldiers; while the clerks

and traders of each establishment were under the direction of a

President and a Council. One of these clerks in the middle of the

eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near

Market Drayton in Shropshire, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his

friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's

service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of

wretchedness and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by

the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by

home-sickness. Twice he attempted suicide; and it was only on the

failure of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which

baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.

[Sidenote: Dupleix.]

A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the

war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French

in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.

Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius,

besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and

merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but

he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his

clerkship for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was

busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the

repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of

Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in

India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods

to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first

time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the

line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne,

the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised

themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor

founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the

Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a

race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan

invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the

capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known

under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom

conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands

along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and

finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.

[Sidenote: Arcot.]

Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered

his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced

his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled

with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made

himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and seated a

creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one

town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but

brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came forward with a daring

scheme for its relief. With a few hundred English and sepoys he pushed

through a thunderstorm to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital,

entrenched himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days

against thousands of assailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas,

who had never before believed that Englishmen would fight, advanced and

broke up the siege. But Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal

vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran away at the

first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the

cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their

Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the ground a

pompous pillar which the French governor had set up in honour of his

earlier victories.

[Sidenote: The American Colonies.]

Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the

struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while

France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with

even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West.

From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England

States, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to

those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in

North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still

came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia

received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war

with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by

the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which

was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New

York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the

colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed

William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primaeval forest,

and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among

which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed

before a new settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the

reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General

Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the

persecuted Protestants of Germany.

[Sidenote: Their progress.]

Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in

numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we

have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of

negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother

country. Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia

were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Massachusetts saw

five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a

century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their

numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia

boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their

maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with,

the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod

fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction

indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an

industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and

the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as

many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the

Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the

central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New

England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an

aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the

system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of

Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives

in houses such as those of Fairfax and Washington. Throughout New

England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their

piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry,

their love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions, remained

unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was

general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said

Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay,

have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their

estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political

activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the

settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the

establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of

America. "Every township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath

increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to

teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase

to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar

school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New

England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able

to read and write.

[Sidenote: Their political condition.]

Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their

influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main

features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood

fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them

contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first

time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious

freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been

brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had

never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all

the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and

the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large

part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.

Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to

colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among

the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds

religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer

diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and

organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the

Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother

country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she

had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But

the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the

worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at

home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in

all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and

members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual

re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and

immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English

Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and

invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of

their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater

loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the

colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government

was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the

projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save

in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen

into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly

elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected,

sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the

Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.

[Sidenote: English control.]

With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference

on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The

superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and

Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the

Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was

included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to

themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost

America because he read the American despatches, which none of his

predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any

interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were

secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of

internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt

afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I

have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you

think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to

England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.

It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she

might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own

products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture

in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the

mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small

import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of

smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain

was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the

Americans enjoyed as British subjects.

[Sidenote: French aggression.]

As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the

colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French

aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English

settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for

only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before

the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the

lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the

pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English

statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in

Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of

the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English

settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or

Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the

inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke

of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was

stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven

from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose

settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax,

the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company was formed, and its

agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky;

while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance

between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor

were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia.

A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort.

A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers

from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a

fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at

once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless

attack on it under George Washington, a young Virginian, who had been

despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were

forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was

left in the hands of France.

[Sidenote: Rout of Braddock.]

It was natural that at such a crisis the mother country should look to

the united efforts of the colonies, and Halifax pressed for a joint

arrangement which should provide a standing force and funds for its

support. A plan for this purpose on the largest scale was drawn up by

Benjamin Franklin, who, from a printer's boy, had risen to supreme

influence in Pennsylvania; but in the way of such a union stood the

jealousies which each state entertained of its neighbour, the

disinclination of the colonists to be drawn into an expensive struggle,

and, above all, suspicion of the motives of Halifax and his colleagues.

The delay in furnishing any force for defence, the impossibility of

bringing the colonies to any agreement, and the perpetual squabbles of

their legislatures with the governors appointed by the Crown, may have

been the motives which induced Halifax to introduce a Bill which would

have made orders by the king in spite of the colonial charters law in

America. The Bill was dropped in deference to the constitutional

objections of wiser men; but the governors fed the fear in England of

the "levelling principles" of the colonists, and every official in

America wrote home to demand that Parliament should do what the colonial

legislatures seemed unable to do, and establish a common fund for

defence by a general taxation. Already plans were mooted for deriving a

revenue from the colonies. But the prudence of Pelham clung to the

policy of Walpole, and nothing was done; while the nearer approach of a

struggle in Europe gave fresh vigour to the efforts of France. The

Marquis of Montcalm, who was now governor of Canada, carried out with

even greater zeal than his predecessor the plans of annexation; and the

three forts of Duquesne on the Ohio, of Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and

of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, were linked together by a chain of

lesser forts, which cut off the English colonists from all access to the

west. Montcalm was gifted with singular powers of administration; he

had succeeded in attaching the bulk of the Indian tribes from Canada as

far as the Mississippi to the cause of France; and the value of their

aid was shown in 1755, when General Braddock led a force of English

soldiers and American militia to a fresh attack upon fort Duquesne. The

force was utterly routed and Braddock slain.

[Sidenote: State of Europe.]

The defeat woke England to its danger; for it was certain that war in

America would soon be followed by war in Europe itself. Newcastle and

his fellow-ministers were still true in the main to Walpole's policy.

They looked on a league with Prussia as indispensable to the formation

of any sound alliance which could check France. "If you gain Prussia,"

wrote the veteran Lord Chancellor, Hardwicke, to Newcastle in 1748, "the

Confederacy will be restored and made whole, and become a real strength;

if you do not, it will continue lame and weak, and much in the power of

France." Frederick however held cautiously aloof from any engagement.

The league between Prussia and the Queen of Hungary, which England

desired, Frederick knew in fact to be impossible. He knew that the

Queen's passionate resolve to recover Silesia must end in a contest in

which England must take one part or the other; and as yet, if the choice

had to be made, Austria seemed likely to be the favoured ally. The

traditional friendship of the Whigs for that power combined with the

tendencies of George the Second to make an Austrian alliance more

probable than a Prussian one. The advances of England to Frederick only

served therefore to alienate Maria Theresa, whose one desire was to

regain Silesia, and whose hatred and jealousy of the new Protestant

power which had so suddenly risen into rivalry with her house for the

supremacy of Germany blinded her to the older rivalry between her house

and France. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still bound by

the Family Compact, and eager for allies in the strife with England

which the struggles in India and America were bringing hourly nearer. It

was as early as 1752 that by a startling change of policy Maria Theresa

drew to their alliance. The jealousy which Russia entertained of the

growth of a strong power in North Germany brought the Czarina Elizabeth

to promise aid to the schemes of the Queen of Hungary; and in 1755 the

league of the four powers and of Saxony was practically completed. So

secret were these negotiations that they remained unknown to Henry

Pelham and to his brother the Duke of Newcastle, who succeeded him on

his death in 1754 as the head of the ministry. But they were detected

from the first by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who saw himself

fronted by a line of foes that stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg.

[Sidenote: Alliance with Prussia.]

The danger to England was hardly less; for France appeared again on the

stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis the

Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of the French government were

screened for a time by the daring and scope of its plans, as by the

ability of the agents it found to carry them out. In England, on the

contrary, all was vagueness and indecision. The action of the king

showed only his Hanoverian jealousy of the House of Brandenburg. It was

certain that France, as soon as war broke out in the West, would attack

his Electorate; and George sought help not at Berlin but at St.

Petersburg. He concluded a treaty with Russia, which promised him the

help of a Russian army on the Weser in return for a subsidy. Such a

treaty meant war with Frederick, who had openly announced his refusal to

allow the entry of Russian forces on German soil; and it was vehemently

though fruitlessly opposed by William Pitt. But he had hardly withdrawn

with Grenville and Charles Townshend from the Ministry when Newcastle

himself recoiled from the king's policy. The Russian subsidy was

refused, and Hanoverian interests subordinated to those of England by

the conclusion of the treaty with Frederick of Prussia for which Pitt

had pressed. The new compact simply provided for the neutrality of both

Prussia and Hanover in any contest between England and France. But its

results were far from being as peaceable as its provisions. Russia was

outraged by Frederick's open opposition to her presence in Germany;

France resented his compact with and advances towards England; and Maria

Theresa eagerly seized on the temper of both those powers to draw them

into common action against the Prussian king. With the treaty between

England and Frederick indeed began the Seven Years' War.

[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War.]

No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought

greater triumphs to England: but few have had more disastrous

beginnings. Newcastle was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and

yet too greedy of power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable

men. His preparations for the gigantic struggle before him may be

guessed from the fact that there were but three regiments fit for

service in England at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was

quick in her attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the key of the

Mediterranean, was besieged by the Duke of Richelieu and forced to

capitulate. To complete the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief

under Admiral Byng fell back before the French. In Germany Frederick

seized Dresden at the outset of the war and forced the Saxon army to

surrender; and in 1757 a victory at Prague made him master for a while

of Bohemia; but his success was transient, and a defeat at Kolin drove

him to retreat again into Saxony. In the same year the Duke of

Cumberland, who had taken post on the Weser with an army of fifty

thousand men for the defence of Hanover, fell back before a French army

to the mouth of the Elbe, and engaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven

to disband his forces. In America things went even worse than in

Germany. The inactivity of the English generals was contrasted with the

genius and activity of Montcalm. Already masters of the Ohio by the

defeat of Braddock, the French drove the English garrison from the forts

which commanded Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, and their empire

stretched without a break over the vast territory from Louisiana to the

St. Lawrence.

[Sidenote: William Pitt.]

A despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our

coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair,

"We are no longer a nation." But the nation of which Chesterfield

despaired was really on the eve of its greatest triumphs, and the

incapacity of Newcastle only called to the front the genius of William

Pitt. Pitt was the grandson of a wealthy governor of Madras, who had

entered Parliament in 1735, as member for one of his father's pocket

boroughs. A group of younger men, Lord Lyttelton, the Grenvilles,

Wilkes, and others, gradually gathered round him, and formed a band of

young "patriots," "the Boys," as Walpole called them, who added to the

difficulties of that minister. Pitt was as yet a cornet of horse, and

the restless activity of his genius was seen in the energy with which

he threw himself into his military duties. He told Lord Shelburne long

afterwards that "during the time he was cornet of horse there was not a

military book he did not read through." But the dismissal from the army

with which Walpole met his violent attacks threw this energy wholly into

politics. His fiery spirit was hushed in office during the "broad-bottom

administration" which followed Walpole's fall, and he soon attained

great influence over Henry Pelham. "I think him," wrote Pelham to his

brother, "the most able and useful man we have amongst us; truly

honourable and strictly honest." He remained under Newcastle after

Pelham's death, till the Duke's jealousy of power not only refused him

the Secretaryship of State and admission to the Cabinet, but entrusted

the lead of the House of Commons to a mere dependent. Pitt resisted the

slight by an attitude of opposition; and his denunciation of the treaty

with Russia served as a pretext for his dismissal. When the disasters of

the war however drove Newcastle from office, in November 1756, Pitt

became Secretary of State, bringing with him into office his relatives,

George Grenville and Lord Temple, as well as Charles Townshend. But

though his popularity had forced him into office, and though the

grandeur of his policy at once showed itself by his rejection of all

schemes for taxing America, and by his raising a couple of regiments

amongst the Highlanders, he found himself politically powerless. The

House was full of Newcastle's creatures, the king hated him, and only

four months after taking office he was forced to resign. The Duke of

Cumberland insisted on his dismissal in April 1757, before he would

start to take the command in Germany. In July however it was necessary

to recall him. The failure of Newcastle's attempt to construct an

administration forced the Duke to a junction with his rival, and while

Newcastle took the head of the Treasury, Pitt again became Secretary of

State.

[Sidenote: His lofty spirit.]

Fortunately for their country, the character of the two statesmen made

the compromise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted, for the general

direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the

administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor

inclination. On the other hand his skill in parliamentary management was

unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living man

the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. What he

cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribution of

patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt turned

disdainfully away. "I borrow the Duke of Newcastle's majority," his

colleague owned with cool contempt, "to carry on the public business."

"Mr. Pitt does everything," wrote Horace Walpole, "and the Duke gives

everything. So long as they agree in this partition they may do what

they please." Out of the union of these two strangely-contrasted

leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as it was the last, of the purely

Whig administrations. But its real power lay from beginning to end in

Pitt himself. Poor as he was, for his income was little more than two

hundred a year, and springing as he did from a family of no political

importance, it was by sheer dint of genius that the young cornet of

horse, at whose youth and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a

power which the Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their

grasp. The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the

national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save from his

"popularity," but this popularity showed that the political torpor of

the nation was passing away, and that a new interest in public affairs

and a resolve to have weight in them was becoming felt in the nation at

large. It was by the sure instinct of a great people that this interest

and resolve gathered themselves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious,

his ambition had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he

took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men

from France can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once

breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he

communicated something of his own grandeur to the men who served him.

"No man," said a soldier of the time, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet

who did not feel himself braver when he came out than when he went in."

Ill-combined as were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his

failures, he roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate

defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed

Frederick of Prussia as he recognised a greatness like his own, "but she

has at last brought forth a man."

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we

look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out

in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society

critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of

simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and

of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of

itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his

passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy,

his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his

haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more

puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he

appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he

turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of

politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the

grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. "I know that I

can save the country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry

into the Ministry, "and I know no other man can." The groundwork of

Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride

which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long

held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the

Restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was

his love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted it

with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. "I will not go

to Court," he replied to an offer which was made him, "if I may not

bring the Constitution with me." For the corruption about him he had

nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the

purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to

the most lucrative office in his administration, that of Paymaster of

the Forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was,

Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never

appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards the

people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than "the great

commoner," as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who

commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to

flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for

"Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and

when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily

declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to

enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which

flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and

grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far

greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an

opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single

word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political

party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly

numbered half a dozen members.

[Sidenote: His patriotism.]

His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament but in the people at

large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a political revolution.

"It is the people who have sent me here," Pitt boasted with a haughty

pride when the nobles of the Cabinet opposed his will. He was the first

to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased,

and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great

middle class, which no longer found its representatives in the

legislature. "You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt

sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to

look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of

Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into

power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him

with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. "For weeks,"

laughs Horace Walpole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him

through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English

merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political

lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the

temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its

energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its

moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural

attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish,

whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection

for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their

enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which his country has

borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an intense and personal

love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till

England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,

her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought

of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions who

rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public! I set

you the example!" His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he

held England. But even the faults which chequered his character told for

him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had

been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence

of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in

the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in

full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was,

are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day

to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance

which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his

crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing

into the House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage." But

the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by

faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was

borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of the gout, or carried into

the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national

dishonour.

[Sidenote: His eloquence.]

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power

of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the Long

Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and

theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of

the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see

ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression,

precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of

business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of

statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole,

no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were

always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect,

his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the

front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of

his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the

earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must sit still," he

whispered once to a friend, "for when once I am up everything that is in

my mind comes out." But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by

a large and poetic imagination, an imagination so strong that--as he

said himself--"most things returned to him with stronger force the

second time than the first," and by a glow of passion which not only

raised him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front

rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the

common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy

with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a

command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an

effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the

keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by

the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one

having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words

were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at

large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in

detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt

reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in

these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate

appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we

have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in

the men of his own.

[Sidenote: His statesmanship.]

But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a

statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his

greater struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against

arbitrary imprisonment under "general warrants," of the liberty of the

press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against

the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against

England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of

Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of

Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India

by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded as insane.

Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of

England, its "Calvinistic Creed and Arminian Clergy"; he was the first

to sound the note of Parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures

shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by

employing its Jacobites in the service of their country and by raising

Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst

as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge

of men.

[Sidenote: Plassey.]

But it was rather Fortune than his genius that showered on Pitt the

triumphs which signalized the opening of his ministry. In the East the

daring of a merchant-clerk made a company of English traders the

sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous career of conquest which

has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon to the Himalayas, to the

dominions of the British crown. Recalled by broken health to England,

Clive returned at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War to win for

England a greater prize than that which his victories had won for it in

the supremacy of the Carnatic. He had been only a few months at Madras

when a crime whose horror still lingers in English memories called him

to Bengal. Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest and most

fertile of all the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its silk,

and the produce of its looms, were famous in European markets. Its

Viceroys, like their fellow-lieutenants, had become practically

independent of the Emperor, and had added to Bengal the provinces of

Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the master of this vast domain, had

long been jealous of the enterprise and wealth of the English traders;

and, roused at this moment by the instigation of the French, he appeared

before Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust a hundred and fifty

of them into a small prison called the Black Hole of Calcutta. The heat

of an Indian summer did its work of death. The wretched prisoners

trampled each other under foot in the madness of thirst, and in the

morning only twenty-three remained alive. Clive sailed at the news with

a thousand Englishmen and two thousand sepoys to wreak vengeance for the

crime. He was no longer the boy-soldier of Arcot; and the tact and skill

with which he met Surajah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the

Viceroy strove to avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental

falsehood and treachery to which he stooped. But his courage remained

unbroken. When the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey

the odds were so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of

war counselled retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an

hour's lonely musing gave the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all

that was needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who

were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June 1757 were

soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and broke in headlong

rout before the English charge. The death of Surajah Dowlah enabled the

Company to place a creature of its own on the throne of Bengal; but his

rule soon became a nominal one. With the victory of Plassey began in

fact the Empire of England in the East.

[Sidenote: Pitt and Frederick.]

The year of Plassey was the year of a victory hardly less important in

the West. In Europe Pitt wisely limited himself to a secondary part.

There was little in the military expeditions which marked the opening of

his ministry to justify the trust of the country; for money and blood

were lavished on buccaneering expeditions against the French coasts

which did small damage to the enemy. But incidents such as these had

little weight in the minister's general policy. His greatness lies in

the fact that he at once recognised the genius of Frederick the Great,

and resolved without jealousy or reserve to give him an energetic

support. On his entry into office he refused to ratify the Convention of

Closter-Seven, which had reduced Frederick to despair by throwing open

his realm to a French advance; protected his flank by gathering an

English and Hanoverian force on the Elbe, and on the counsel of the

Prussian king placed the best of his generals, the Prince of Brunswick,

at its head; while subsidy after subsidy was poured into Frederick's

exhausted treasury. Pitt's trust was met by the most brilliant display

of military genius which the modern world had as yet witnessed. In

November 1757, two months after his repulse at Kolin, Frederick flung

himself on a French army which had advanced into the heart of Germany,

and annihilated it in the victory of Rossbach. Before another month had

passed he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, and by a yet more signal

victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the Austrians. The victory of

Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of the world by creating

the unity of Germany; its immediate effect was to force the French army

on the Elbe to fall back on the Rhine. Here Ferdinand of Brunswick,

reinforced with twenty thousand English soldiers, held them at bay

during the summer of 1758; while Frederick, foiled in an attack on

Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zorndorf.

His defeat however by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch proved the

first of a series of terrible misfortunes; and the year 1759 marks the

lowest point of his fortunes. A fresh advance of the Russian army forced

the king to attack it at Kunersdorf in August, and Frederick's repulse

ended in the utter rout of his army. For the moment all seemed lost, for

even Berlin lay open to the conqueror. A few days later the surrender

of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians; and at the close of the year an

attempt upon them at Plauen was foiled with terrible loss. But every

disaster was retrieved by the indomitable courage and tenacity of the

king, and winter found him as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony

save the ground which Daun's camp covered.

[Sidenote: Minden and Quiberon.]

The year which marked the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes was the

year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year of Minden and Quiberon and

Quebec. France aimed both at a descent upon England and at the conquest

of Hanover; for the one purpose she gathered a naval armament at Brest,

while fifty thousand men under Contades and Broglie united for the other

on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty thousand met them (August

1) on the field of Minden. The French marched along the Weser to the

attack, with their flanks protected by that river and a brook which ran

into it, and with their cavalry, ten thousand strong, massed in the

centre. The six English regiments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French

horse, and, mistaking their general's order, marched at once upon them

in line regardless of the batteries on their flank, and rolling back

charge after charge with volleys of musketry. In an hour the French

centre was utterly broken. "I have seen," said Contades, "what I never

thought to be possible--a single line of infantry break through three

lines of cavalry, ranked in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin!"

Nothing but the refusal of Lord John Sackville to complete the victory

by a charge of the horse which he headed saved the French from utter

rout. As it was, their army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the

Rhine. The project of an invasion of England met with the like success.

Eighteen thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet,

when Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of November at the

mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast where the

French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals and granite reefs that

the pilot remonstrated with the English admiral against his project of

attack. "You have done your duty in this remonstrance," Hawke coolly

replied; "now lay me alongside the French admiral." Two English ships

were lost on the shoals, but the French fleet was ruined and the

disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped away.

[Sidenote: Pitt in America.]

It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and Quiberon

brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt had wisely limited

his efforts to the support of Prussia, but across the Atlantic the field

was wholly his own, and he had no sooner entered office than the

desultory raids, which had hitherto been the only resistance to French

aggression, were superseded by a large and comprehensive plan of

attack. The sympathies of the colonies were won by an order which gave

their provincial officers equal rank with the royal officers in the

field. They raised at Pitt's call twenty thousand men, and taxed

themselves heavily for their support. Three expeditions were

simultaneously directed against the French line--one to the Ohio valley,

one against Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, while a third under General

Amherst and Admiral Boscawen sailed to the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

The last was brilliantly successful. Louisburg, though defended by a

garrison of five thousand men, was taken with the fleet in its harbour,

and the whole province of Cape Breton reduced. The American militia

supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the forts;

and though Montcalm, with a far inferior force, was able to repulse

General Abercromby from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia and

Virginia, guided and inspired by the courage of George Washington, made

itself master of Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to

their new conquest still commemorates the enthusiasm of the colonists

for the great Minister who first opened to them the West. The failure at

Ticonderoga only spurred Pitt to greater efforts. The colonists again

responded to his call with fresh supplies of troops, and Montcalm felt

that all was over. The disproportion indeed of strength was enormous. Of

regular French troops and Canadians alike he could muster only ten

thousand, while his enemies numbered fifty thousand men. The next year

(1759) saw Montcalm's previous victory rendered fruitless by the

evacuation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Amherst, and by the

capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian force which

marched to its relief. The capture of the three forts was the close of

the French effort to bar the advance of the colonists to the valley of

the Mississippi, and to place in other than English hands the destinies

of North America.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Canada.]

But Pitt had resolved not merely to foil the designs of Montcalm, but to

destroy the French rule in America altogether; and while Amherst was

breaking through the line of forts, an expedition under General Wolfe

entered the St. Lawrence and anchored below Quebec. Wolfe was already a

veteran soldier, for he had fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Laffeldt,

and had played the first part in the capture of Louisburg. Pitt had

discerned the genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward

manner and occasional gasconade of the young soldier of thirty-three

whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the war. But for a while his

sagacity seemed to have failed. No efforts could draw Montcalm from the

long line of inaccessible cliffs which borders the river, and for six

weeks Wolfe saw his men wasting away in inactivity while he himself lay

prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his resolution was fixed,

and in a long line of boats the army dropped down the St. Lawrence to a

point at the base of the Heights of Abraham, where a narrow path had

been discovered to the summit. Not a voice broke the silence of the

night save the voice of Wolfe himself, as he quietly repeated the

stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," remarking as he

closed, "I had rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec." But

his nature was as brave as it was tender; he was the first to leap on

shore and to scale the narrow path where no two men could go abreast.

His men followed, pulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes

and the crags, and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army

stood in orderly formation before Quebec. Montcalm hastened to attack,

though his force, composed chiefly of raw militia, was far inferior in

discipline to the English; his onset however was met by a steady fire,

and at the first English advance his men gave way. Wolfe headed a charge

which broke the French line, but a ball pierced his breast in the moment

of victory. "They run," cried an officer who held the dying man in his

arms--"I protest they run." Wolfe rallied to ask who they were that ran,

and was told "the French." "Then," he murmured, "I die happy!" The fall

of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat completed the victory; and the

submission of Canada, on the capture of Montreal by Amherst in 1760, put

an end to the dream of a French empire in America.