XXXIII. THE RULE OF THE WHIGS…

XXXIII. THE RULE OF THE WHIGS

1714-1739.

[Sidenote: =Character of George I.=]

George Lewis, Elector of Hanover, who in virtue of the Act of Settlement now mounted the English throne, was a selfish, hard-hearted, unamiable, and uninteresting man of fifty-four. He was intensely German in all his ideas and prejudices; he could not speak a word of English, nor had he the slightest knowledge of the political and social state of the kingdom that he was called upon to govern. Being a very cautious man, he had never thought himself secure of the English crown, and now that he had obtained it, he always looked upon it as a precarious piece of property, that might some day be taken from him. He was convinced that he might at any moment be forced to return to his native Hanover, so he did not attempt to make himself at home on this side of the North Sea. During his thirteen years of rule he never ceased to feel himself a stranger in his palaces at London or Windsor. He wished to make what profit he could out of England, but he was so ignorant of English politics that he felt himself constrained to rely entirely on his ministers, and let them manage his affairs for him. His sole fixed idea was that the Tory party were irretrievably committed to Jacobitism, and that, if he wished to keep his throne, he must throw himself entirely into the hands of his friends the Whigs. With his accession, therefore, began the political ascendency of that party, which was to last more than half a century [1714-1770].

[Sidenote: =The king and the Whigs.=]

There was no romantic loyalty or mutual respect in the bargain which was thus struck between the Whig party and the new dynasty. The king knew that his ministers looked upon him as a mere political necessity. They could have no liking for their stolid, selfish master. George was indeed most unlovable to those who knew him best. He had placed his wife, Sophia of Celle, in lifelong captivity on a charge of unfaithfulness. But he himself lived in open sin with two mistresses, whom he made Duchess of Kendal and Countess of Darlington when he came to the English throne. He was at bitter enmity with his son George, Prince of Wales; they never met if they could avoid a meeting. George was, in short, the very last person to command either love or respect from any man.

[Sidenote: =The beginning of Cabinet government.=]

With the accession of George I. began the substitution of the prime minister and the Cabinet for the king as the actual ruler of England. Down to Anne's time the sovereign had habitually attended the meetings of the Privy Council, and was in constant contact with all the members of the ministry. They were still regarded as his personal servants, and he would often dismiss one minister without turning the whole ministry out of office. The notion that the Cabinet were jointly responsible for each other's actions, and that the king must accept any combination of ministers that a parliamentary majority chose to impose upon him, had not yet come into being. Even the mild and apathetic Queen Anne had been wont to remove her great officers of state at her own pleasure, without consulting the rest of the Cabinet, much less the Parliament.

But George I. was so absolutely ignorant of English politics, and placed at such a disadvantage by his inability to speak the English language, that he never attempted to interfere with his ministers. He seldom came to their meetings, and usually communicated with them through the prime minister of the day. A single fact gives a fair example of the difficulty which George found in dealing with his new subjects. He knew no English, while Walpole--his chief minister for more than half his reign--knew neither German nor French; they had therefore to discuss all affairs of state in Latin, which both of them spoke extremely ill. It can easily be understood that George was constrained to let all things remain in the hands of the Whig statesmen who had placed him on the throne. He fingered much English money, and he was occasionally able to use the influence of England for the profit of Hanover in continental politics. In other respects he was a perfect nonentity.

The Whig party which now obtained possession of office, and clung to it for two full generations, was no longer led by its old chiefs. Godolphin had died in 1712; Marlborough, though he had returned to England, was not restored to power. His character had been irretrievably injured by the revelations of 1711, and he was suspected (not without foundation) of having renewed his old intrigues with the exiled Stuarts during Harley's tenure of office. The Whigs now gave him the honourable and lucrative post of commander-in-chief, but would not serve under him. Only a year after George's accession he was attacked by paralysis and softening of the brain, and retired to his great palace of Blenheim, in Oxfordshire, where he lingered till 1722, broken in mind and body.

[Sidenote: =The new Whig leaders.=]

The Whigs were now led by the Earl of Sunderland, the son-in-law of Marlborough, by Earl Stanhope--a general who had won some military reputation in Spain during the late war--by Lord Townshend, and Sir Robert Walpole, the youngest and ablest of the party chiefs. They were all four men of considerable ability, too much so for any one of them to be content to act as the subordinate and lieutenant of another. Hence it came that, though they had combined to put George I. on the throne, they soon fell to intriguing against each other, and split the Whig party into factions. These cliques did not differ from each other in principles, but were divided merely by personal grudges that their leaders bore against each other. They were always making ephemeral combinations with each other, and then breaking loose again. But on one thing they were agreed--the Tories should never come into power again, and to keep their enemies out of office they could always rally and present a united front.

[Sidenote: =The supporters of the Whig government.=]

The Whig party drew its main strength from three sources. The first was the strong Protestant feeling in England, which made most men resolve that the Pretender must be kept over-seas at any cost, even at that of submitting to the selfish and stolid George I. The second was the fact that the Whigs had enlisted the support of the mercantile classes all over the country by their care for trade and commerce. While in power in Anne's reign, they had done their best to make the war profitable by concluding commercial treaties with the allies, and by furthering the colonial expansion of England. This was never forgotten by the merchants. The third mainstay of the Whig party was their parliamentary influence. A majority of the House of Lords was on their side, and they contrived to manage the Commons by a judicious mixture of corruption and coercion.

[Sidenote: =Pocket boroughs and crown boroughs.=]

The great peers had many "pocket boroughs" in their power--that is, they possessed such local influence in their own shires that they could rely on returning their own dependents or relatives for the seats that lay in their neighbourhood. Many of these "pocket boroughs" were also "rotten boroughs"--places, that is, which had been important in the middle ages, but had now decayed into mere hamlets with a few score of inhabitants. Over such constituencies the influence of the local landlord was so complete, that he could even sell or barter away the right to represent them in Parliament. The most extraordinary of these rotten boroughs were Old Sarum and Gatton, each of which owned only two voters, men paid to live on the deserted sites by their landlords. Yet they had as many representatives in the House of Commons as Yorkshire or Devon! Besides these nomination boroughs, the Whigs had now control over a number of crown boroughs, places where of late the members had been wont to be chosen by the sovereign; there were many such in Cornwall, where the king, as duke of that county, was supreme landlord. The Tudors had made many Cornish villages into parliamentary constituencies in order to pack the House of Commons with obedient members.

[Sidenote: =Parliamentary influence of the Whigs.=]

Hitherto the crown and the great peers had seldom acted together, and no one had realized how large a portion of the House of Commons could be influenced by their combination. But when, in the days of the two first Georges, the Whig oligarchy wielded the power of the crown as well as their own, they obtained a complete control over the Lower House. Often the Tory opposition shrank to a minority of sixty or eighty votes, and the only semblance of party government that remained was caused by the quarrels and intrigues of the leaders of the Whigs, who fought each other on personal grounds as bitterly as if they had been divided by some important principle.

[Sidenote: =The Jacobites.--Death of Lewis XIV.=]

In the first year of King George, however, the Whigs were still kept together by their fear of the enemy. The Jacobites, who had seemed so near to triumph in Bolingbroke's short tenure of power, did not yield without an appeal to arms. The late prime minister and his chief military adviser, the Duke of Ormonde, both fled to France and joined the Pretender. When safe over-seas they began to organize an insurrection, counting on the active assistance of Lewis XIV., who was always ready to aid his old dependents the Stuarts. But the plot was not yet ready to burst, when the old king died, and his successor in power, the regent Philip of Orleans, refused to risk any step that might lead to a war with England.

[Sidenote: =Bolingbroke and the Tory party.=]

Nevertheless, Bolingbroke and his master persevered. They had so many friends both in England and in Scotland, that they thought that they could hardly fail. They had not realized that most of these friends were lukewarm, and unprepared to take arms in order to give the crown to a Romanist. Two-thirds of the Tory party hated the Pope even more than they hated the Whigs and the Hanoverian king, and would not move unless James Stuart showed some signs of wishing to conform to the Church of England. Their loyalty to the national Church was stronger than their loyalty to the divine right of kings.

[Sidenote: =Disaffection in Scotland.=]

But the wilder and more excitable spirits in the party were ready to follow Bolingbroke. They saw all their hopes of political advancement cut away by George's alliance with the Whigs, and determined to make a bold stroke for power. In Scotland more especially did the emissaries of the Pretender meet with encouragement. The Scots were still very sore over the passing of the Act of Union in 1707, and nursed their ancient grudge against England. But the most active source of discontent was the hatred which the minor clans of the Highlands felt for the powerful tribe of the Campbells.

[Sidenote: =Ascendency of the Campbells.=]

The rule of George I. in England implied the domination of that great Whig clan, and its chief the Duke of Argyle, over the lands north of Forth and Clyde. For now, as in 1645 and 1685, the chief of the Campbells, the MacCallain Mor, as his clansmen called him, was at the head of the Presbyterian or Whig party in Scotland. The chiefs of the other Highland tribes were as bitterly hostile to the present Duke of Argyle as their ancestors had been to his father and grandfather.

[Sidenote: =The Earl of Mar in the Highlands.=]

[Sidenote: =The Lowland Jacobites.=]

[Sidenote: =The English Jacobites.=]

The head of the Jacobite plotters in the north was John Erskine, Earl of Mar, who had been Bolingbroke's Secretary of State for Scotland in the Cabinet of 1714. He was a busy and ambitious man, who was bitterly vexed at seeing his prospects of political advancement at an end. Under the pretence of gathering a great hunting-party, he assembled a number of the leading chiefs of the Highlands at Braemar Castle. On his persuasion they resolved to take arms for King James. Among the clans which joined in the rising were the Gordons, Murrays, Stuarts, Mackintoshes, Macphersons, Macdonalds, Farquharsons, and many more. In the Lowlands a simultaneous rising was arranged by some of the lords of the Border, headed by the Earls of Nithsdale, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure. Meanwhile England was also to be stirred up. The Duke of Ormonde was to land in Devonshire with some refugees from France. Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster, a rich Northumbrian squire, undertook to raise and organize the northern counties. A third rising was to take place in Wales.

[Sidenote: =The Highlanders as a military force.=]

In the autumn of 1715 the Jacobites struck their blow. On September 6th Mar raised the royal standard of Scotland at the Castletown of Braemar. Immediately a score of chiefs joined him, and an army of 5000 or 6000 men was at his disposal. Nor were the Highlanders to be despised as a military force. The ancient Celtic turbulence and tribal feuds yet survived in the lands beyond the Tay, and the clansmen were still reared to arms from their youth up. Their fathers had fought under Dundee, and their grandfathers had served Montrose in the old civil wars of Charles I. The Scottish Government had never succeeded in pacifying the Highlands, and the clans were still wont to lift each other's cattle, and to engage in bloody affrays. They were blindly devoted to their chiefs, and would follow them into any quarrel; the cause in which they armed was indifferent to them--it was enough for them to know their master's will, and to carry it out. When called to arms, they came out with gun, broadsword, and shield. The force and fury of their charge were tremendous, and none but the best of regular troops could stand against them. But they were utterly undisciplined; it was difficult to keep them to their standards, since they were prone to melt home after a battle, to stow away their plunder. Moreover, their tribal pride was so great, and their ancient tribal feuds so many, that it was very hard to induce any two clans to serve side by side, or to help each other loyally.

Mar was a mere politician; he was destitute of force of character, and had earned the dishonourable name of "Bobbing John" by his fickle and shifty conduct. No worse leader could have been found to command the horde of high-spirited, jealous, and quarrelsome mountaineers whom he had called to arms.

[Sidenote: =Failures of the insurrection in the West of England.=]

When the news of Mar's rising was noised abroad, the Jacobites in the Scottish Lowlands and in Northumberland gathered themselves together according to their promise. But the insurrections in Devonshire and Wales, on which the Pretender had been counting, did not take place. The Whig Government had sent most of its available troops to the West of England, and had arrested the chief Jacobites of those parts, so that the Duke of Ormonde, on landing near Plymouth, found no support, and hastily returned to France. But Scotland and Northumberland were all ablaze, and it seemed that the throne of George I. was in great danger, for the army available against the insurgents was less than 10,000 strong, owing to the reductions which the Tories had carried out after the peace of Utrecht.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Preston.=]

But the mistakes and feebleness of the Jacobite leaders sufficed to wreck their enterprise. The insurgents on the English and Scottish Border united, and advanced into Lancashire, where Roman Catholics were many and Toryism strong. But their imbecile and cowardly leader, Thomas Forster, allowed himself to be surrounded at Preston by a force of 1000 cavalry under General Carpenter, and tamely laid down his arms after a slight skirmish, though his men outnumbered the regulars by three to one. He and all his chief supporters, the Earls of Derwentwater, Nithsdale, Nairn, Carnwath and Wintoun, and Lord Kenmure, were sent prisoners to London (November 12, 1715).

[Sidenote: =Battle of Sheriffmuir.=]

Meanwhile Mar had gathered an army of 10,000 men, and had seized Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and the whole of the north of Scotland; but, with an unaccountable sluggishness, he lingered north of the Tay, and made no attempt to capture Edinburgh or to overrun the Lowlands. He allowed the Duke of Argyle, who had taken post at Stirling with 3000 men, to maintain the line of the Forth, and to keep separate the two areas of insurrection. It was only on the very day of the surrender of Preston that Mar at last consented to move southward from Perth. Argyle advanced to meet him, and then ensued the indecisive battle of Sheriffmuir. In this fight each army routed the left wing of the other, and then retired towards its base. Mar's bad generalship and the petty quarrels of the clans had neutralized the vast advantage of numbers which the Jacobites possessed (November 13, 1715).

[Sidenote: =Mar's army disperses.=]

Mar brought his army back to Perth in a mutinous and discontented condition; each chief laid on another the loss of the expected victory, and the Highlanders began to melt away to their homes. It was to no purpose that James Stuart himself at last appeared, to endeavour to rally his dispirited followers. The Pretender was a slow and ungenial young man, with a melancholy face and a hesitating manner. He failed to inspire his followers with the enthusiasm which he did not himself possess, and his cause continued to lose ground. When Argyle, largely reinforced from England, began to move northward, James deserted his army and took ship for France. The remnants of Mar's once formidable host then disbanded themselves; the chiefs fled over-sea or submitted to Argyle, while the clansmen dispersed to their valleys.

Thus ended in ignominious failure the great rising of 1715. The Whigs took no very cruel revenge on the insurgents. Two peers, the Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure,[51] were beheaded, and about 30 persons of meaner rank hanged. As the years went by, most of the Jacobite chiefs were pardoned and returned to England. Even Bolingbroke was allowed to come back from exile in 1722.

[Sidenote: =Second attempt of the Pretender.=]

Even after his lamentable failure in 1715-16, the Pretender still nourished some hopes of exciting another rebellion. When France refused to help him, he turned to Spain, and got some small assistance from Philip V., who, as we shall see, had the best reasons for disliking the Whigs. A few hundred Spanish troops landed in Rosshire in 1719, and were joined by the clans of the neighbourhood; but no general rising took place, and the whole Jacobite force was dispersed or captured by Carpenter--the victor of Preston--at the battle of Glenshiel.

[Sidenote: =War with Spain.--Schemes of Alberoni.=]

The tale of "the Fifteen" is the one stirring incident in the inglorious annals of George I. The domestic interest of the remainder of his reign centred in the quarrels and intrigues of the various Whig parties with each other. The only important constitutional change which dates from this time is the "Septennial Act" of 1716, which fixed the duration of Parliament at seven years. Since 1694 three years had been their legal term, but, on account of the inconvenience of general elections at such short intervals, the longer term was substituted and still prevails. In foreign politics the only notable event was a short war with Spain in 1718-20. This was caused by an attempt of Philip V. and his able minister, Cardinal Alberoni, to reconquer the old Spanish dominions in Sicily and Naples. England, as one of the guarantors of the treaty of Utrecht, interfered to aid the Austrians and the Duke of Savoy, the two powers whom Spain had attacked, and an English fleet under Admiral Byng destroyed off Cape Passaro the Spanish squadron which had accompanied the army that invaded Sicily.

In revenge Cardinal Alberoni gave the Jacobites what help he could, and endeavoured to concert an alliance with Charles XII., the warlike King of Sweden. But he and his helpers were too weak to cope with Austria, France, and England, who were all leagued against him. Alberoni was forced from office, and his master Philip V. signed an ignominious peace, and gave up his ephemeral conquests in Sicily (1720).

The ministry which had carried on the war with Spain had been composed of that section of the Whigs who followed Stanhope and Sunderland. But in the same year in which peace was signed, that cabinet was replaced by another, and England saw the advent to power of the prime minister who was to rule the three kingdoms for the next twenty-two years (1721-42), Sir Robert Walpole.

[Sidenote: =The South Sea Bubble.=]

The Stanhope cabinet was overthrown, not by the strength of its enemies, but by its own misfortune in becoming involved in the great financial panic known as the "South Sea Bubble." The South Sea Company was a trading venture which had been started in 1711 for developing commerce with Spanish America and the countries of the Pacific. The undertaking had been very successful, and the shares of the company were much sought after, and commanded a very heavy premium. But the directors who managed it were venturesome and reckless men, who wished to extend their operations outside the sphere of trade into that of finance and stock-jobbing. They formed a great scheme for offering the Government the huge sum of £7,000,000 for the privilege of taking over the management of the National Debt, which had hitherto been in the hands of the Bank of England. They intended to recoup themselves by inducing the creditors who held the state loans to exchange them for new stock of the South Sea Company, which would thus accumulate a capital sufficient to develop its trade all over the world, and distance all rivals.

Stanhope and Sunderland accepted this wild offer; they were glad to get the burden of the National Debt off their shoulders, and did not stop to think if they were treating the public creditors fairly in handing them over to the mercies of a greedy trading company. Accordingly, the management of the debt was duly transferred to the South Sea Company, and the directors did their best to put off their shares on the late holders of Government stock. For a time they were successful; the exchange was in many cases effected, and on terms very favourable to the Company, whose prospects were so well thought of that a share nominally worth £100 was actually sold for £1000. But this prosperity was purely fictitious; the actual bulk and profit of the Company's trade with the Pacific was not able to bear a quarter of the financial mountain that had been built up upon it. The first shock to credit that occurred was sufficient to expose the fraud that had been perpetrated on the public. The success of the South Sea Company had led to the starting of many other companies, some of them genuine but hazardous ventures, some mere swindling devices for robbing the investor. A general madness seemed to have fallen upon the nation, and in the haste to make money quickly and without exertion, all classes rushed into the whirl of speculation and stock-jobbing. It is said that subscribers were found for schemes "to discover perpetual motion, and utilize it for machinery," "to make salt water fresh," "to render quicksilver malleable," "to fatten hogs by a new process," and even "to engage in a secret undertaking which shall hereafter be made public." Of course, all these bubble companies began to burst before they were many months old, and to ruin those who had engaged in them. The financial crisis which was brought about by these failures, led to a general panic, which affected all speculative enterprises, great and small. None suffered more than the South Sea Company itself, whose shares gradually sank from 1000 down to 135. This ruined thousands of investors, and finally broke the company itself, which proved unable to pay the Government the £7,000,000 that it had covenanted to give for the privilege of managing the National Debt.

[Sidenote: =Fall of the Stanhope cabinet.=]

On the suspension of the South Sea Company, a cry of wrath arose all over the country against the Stanhope cabinet, which had taken the venture under its patronage and entrusted it with such important public duties. It was whispered that some of the ministers had been induced to lend their aid to the scheme by corrupt influences, and that others had made money by using their official information to aid them in speculation. These suspicions were mooted in Parliament, and, when investigated, proved to be not without foundation. When an inquiry was pressed for, Craggs, the Postmaster-General, committed suicide; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expelled from the House as "guilty of notorious and infamous corruption;" Stanhope, the prime minister, was being attacked in the Lords for the doings of his subordinates, when he fell down dead in an apoplectic fit. His colleague Sunderland resigned his post of First Lord of the Treasury, though he was personally acquitted of all blame in the matter of the South Sea Company.

[Sidenote: =Walpole and Townshend in office.=]

Thus the Stanhope-Sunderland cabinet had disappeared, and the other section of the Whigs, headed by Walpole and Townshend, came into office. The former became Chancellor of the Exchequer and took charge of home affairs, while Townshend was entrusted with the foreign relations of the country. Entering into power under pledges to stay the financial crisis and save all that could be rescued from the wreck of the South Sea Company, they executed their task with success. The company was let off the payment of £7,000,000 which it had promised to the state, but deprived of the charge of the National Debt. By confiscating the estates of its fraudulent directors, enough money was obtained to pay all its debtors, and thus the crisis proved less disastrous than had at first been expected.

[Sidenote: =Supremacy of Walpole.=]

Sir Robert Walpole was the ruling spirit of the new cabinet; he showed his masterful mind by keeping his brother-in-law Townshend in the second place, and ultimately turned him out of the ministry. "The firm," he said, "must be Walpole and Townshend, not Townshend and Walpole." He soon got the king into complete subjection, for George asked for nothing more than a liberal civil list and frequent opportunities of visiting his beloved Hanover. Nor was he less masterful with the two Houses, where the Tory opposition and the Whigs of the rival faction were equally unable to make any head against him.

[Sidenote: Walpole as a statesman.]

Walpole was a strange example of the height to which the practical power of dealing with other men may raise one who is neither intellectually nor morally the superior of his fellows. He was a wealthy county gentleman from Norfolk, who had entered parliament early, and had already made himself a place in politics before the death of Queen Anne. The one subject of which he had a competent knowledge was finance; in most of the other spheres of politics he was grossly ignorant, and most of all was he deficient in a grasp of European politics. He did not understand a word of French or any other modern tongue, a fact which is enough by itself to account for his inadequate foreign policy. His morals and his language were alike coarse; he affected a shameless cynicism, which is well reflected in the saying that "every man has his price" which was put into his mouth by his enemies.

[Sidenote: =Government by corruption.=]

This phrase, indeed, well expresses his political methods; his one end was to maintain himself in office, and for that purpose he kept his party in a state of complete subjection. Good service he rewarded by good pay, whether in the form of office and preferment, or in the grosser shape of hard cash. He was always prepared to buy any member or group of members by open bribery, and the taint of corruption dating from the times of Charles II. was still so strong in English politics that he seldom failed to secure his prize. He was impatient of opposition, and gradually turned out of office any colleague who would not obey his slightest nod; even his own brother-in-law Townshend and Lord Carteret, the ablest diplomatist of the day, were forced to leave his cabinet by his unreasoning jealousy. He preferred to work with nonentities, because they feared and obeyed him.

Walpole was a thoroughly bad influence in English politics; he lowered the moral tone of a whole generation by his constant sneers at probity and patriotism. He promoted a host of unworthy men to power. Most especially did he injure the national Church by his practice of bestowing bishoprics and other high preferments on mere political partisans, without any thought as to their spiritual fitness.

Though the Whigs professed to be the party of liberty, enlightenment, and toleration, Walpole did not pass one important bill to improve the constitution or the social state of the nation in his twenty-two years of power. He only took thought for the material prosperity of England, and cared nothing for her moral welfare. Hence it comes that his whole term of office is almost a blank in our political history.

[Sidenote: =Death of George I.=]

So firm a grasp had Walpole on the helm of power, that his position was not in the least shaken by the death of his master George I. [1727]. The king died suddenly while absent on one of his periodical visits to Hanover, and was succeeded by his son and bitter enemy, George, Prince of Wales. The new sovereign disliked Walpole on principle, because he had been his father's confidant, but found himself quite unable to turn him out of power. Immediately on hearing of his predecessor's death, George II. bade Walpole give up his seals of office, but a few days later he had to ask him to resume them, after finding that no one else would undertake to construct a cabinet. For fifteen years more he was constrained to keep his father's old minister (1727-1742).

[Sidenote: =Character of George II.=]

George II. was a man of much greater force of character than George I. He was a busy, consequential, irascible little man, who would have liked to play a considerable part in English politics if the Whigs had only allowed him. He was a keen if not an able soldier, and had served with some distinction under Marlborough in the Low Countries. He took a great interest in foreign affairs, and chafed bitterly at the way in which Walpole persisted in keeping out of all European complications. He spoke English fluently with a vile German accent: every one has heard of his famous dictum, "I don't like Boetry, and I don't like Bainting." His tastes were coarse, and his private life indifferent. But he was wise enough to let himself be guided in many things by his clever wife, Caroline of Anspach, who possessed the very qualities in which he was most wanting, was a judicious patroness of arts and letters, and knew how to win popularity both for her husband and herself. It was mainly by her advice that King George was induced to keep Walpole in power, instead of rushing into the turmoil that would have followed his dismissal.

[Sidenote: =The Excise Bill.=]

Walpole went on, for the first twelve years of the reign of George II., ruling the country in the same unostentatious way as before. He only made one attempt to introduce a measure of importance in the whole time; this was his Excise Bill of 1733, a financial scheme for suppressing smuggling, and encouraging the use of England as a central depôt by other nations, by means of a system of free trade. Tobacco, wine, and spirits were to be imported without paying any customs duty at the port of entry, and were to be permitted to be re-exported without any charge. But the retailers of these commodities were to pay the duty on each quantity as they sold it, so that the tax should be paid inland if not at the seaport. When a great cry was raised against the bill, as inquisitorial and tyrannous, Walpole tamely dropped it rather than risk his hold on power.

[Sidenote: =The War of the Polish Succession.=]

Meanwhile the continent was much disturbed by the "War of the Polish Succession" (1733-1735), in which Austria fought unsuccessfully against Spain, France, and Turkey. But Walpole would not interfere to aid our old ally, and saw her lose Naples and Sicily without stirring a hand. Much was to be said in favour of keeping England out of foreign wars in which she had no direct interest; but the new union of France and Spain boded ill for England. Already these two powers had secretly formed a union, afterwards known as the "Family Compact," by which the uncle and nephew, Philip V. and Lewis XV., bound themselves to do their best to put an end to England's naval supremacy, and to crush her commercial greatness (1733).

[Sidenote: =Commercial hostility of Spain.=]

This treaty was carefully kept dark, but the spirit which had inspired it could not be concealed. The Spanish government began to redouble its vexatious pretensions to a monopoly of the trade of South America, and to interfere with the commercial rights which England possessed under the treaty of Utrecht. The governors of the Spanish colonies and their custom-house officials waxed more and more tyrannous and insolent to the English merchants who endeavoured to carry on a trade with America. The state of public feeling in England grew very bitter over this matter--all the more so because Walpole refused to listen to any complaints, or to remonstrate with the Spaniards.

[Sidenote: =The case of Captain Jenkins.=]

At last the case of a merchant captain named Jenkins brought the national anger to boiling-point. His vessel had been boarded, and he himself maltreated by a Spanish guarda-costa. He asserted that the officer who searched his ship had cut off his ear, and told him to take it back and show it to his masters. And he certainly produced the severed ear in a box, and exhibited it freely. His story may have been exaggerated, but it was universally believed, and Walpole was attacked on all sides for his tame submission to Spanish insults.

[Sidenote: =War with Spain declared.=]

Determined to keep himself in power at all costs, the prime minister demanded reparation from Spain, and, on failing to obtain it, reluctantly declared war. The public joy on the news of the rupture was unbounded. Only Walpole was sad at the end of twenty years of peace and prosperity that his inglorious rule had given to the land. "Ring your bells now," he is reported to have said when he heard the rejoicings of London, "but you will soon be wringing your hands."

Thus England embarked on the first of four great continental wars, which were to cover the greater part of the eighteenth century.

THE HOUSE OF HANOVER.

GEORGE I. = Sophia of Celle. 1714-1727. | | GEORGE II. = Caroline of Anspach. 1727-1760. | | | +------------------+-------------------------+ | | Frederick, Prince of Wales = Augusta of William, Duke | Saxe Gotha. of Cumberland. | | GEORGE III. = Charlotte of 1760-1820. | Mecklenburg Strelitz. | +----------------------+---------------+--+-----------+ | | | | GEORGE IV. = Caroline Frederick, WILLIAM IV. | 1820-1830. | of Duke of York 1830-1837. | | Brunswick. and Albany. | | | | | | | Princess Charlotte = Leopold of | died 1816. Saxe Coburg-Gotha. | | +--------------------------+ | | +--------------+---------------+ | | Edward, Ernest, Duke Duke of Kent = Victoria of Cumberland; | of Saxe King | Coburg. of Hanover | 1830-1851. VICTORIA = Albert 1837. of Saxe Coburg- Gotha.

FOOTNOTE:

[51] Mr. Forster and Lord Nithsdale would have shared the fate of Derwentwater and Kenmure, but for the fact that they escaped from prison. How the latter got away by the ingenuity and devotion of his wife is a well-known story.

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XXXIV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLONIAL EMPIRE OF BRITAIN

1739-1760.

When the unwilling Walpole was driven into war with Spain in 1739 by the clamours of the nation, he believed that he was about to become responsible for a very dangerous struggle, for he had private knowledge of the existence of the "Family Compact," and knew that France was ready to back up Spain. England, on the other hand, was entirely without allies, having gone to war in defence of her maritime commerce, a subject in which no other power felt any interest. As a matter of fact, however, the war was necessary and wise, for we were bound to come into collision with France and Spain sooner or later on the matter of trade. They could not endure to look upon the rapid expansion of England's commercial and colonial power, which had been increasing at a prodigious rate since the peace of Utrecht. Our merchants were beginning to seize an ever-growing share of the trade of the world, and to oust the French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese from all the more distant markets, especially those of Africa, India, and the remoter East. In India the East India Company was making advances which exasperated its French rivals. In South America the Spaniards felt that their ancient monopoly was gradually slipping from their hands. In North America the prodigious growth in strength and population of our seaboard colonies threatened a speedy end to the French settlement in Canada. Since the acquisition of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland by the treaty of Utrecht, the English dominions seemed to shut out from the sea the vast but sparsely peopled tracts along the St. Lawrence which still belonged to King Lewis. In the West Indies, Jamaica and Barbados were gradually drawing away the wealth of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico, and Hispaniola, the old centres of the sugar and tobacco trade.

[Sidenote: =Feeble conduct of the war.--Fall of Walpole.=]

The French and Spaniards, therefore, had good reason to fear and hate England, and if we wished to keep our control of the commerce of the world, we were bound to fight for it. It was a misfortune, however, that we were committed to the struggle while Walpole was still minister. Disliking the war, he would not throw himself heartily into it, grudged spending money, and refused to undertake any serious operations. A few expeditions to Spanish America were all that he sent out. The first under Admiral Vernon, though composed of no more than six ships of war, took Porto Bello, one of the chief harbours of the Spanish Main (1739). But a second and much larger armament under the same leader failed disastrously before Cartagena, partly owing to mismanagement, partly to the marsh fever, which struck down the English in their trenches (1741). Walpole bore the discredit of his sluggish action and his failures; he was bitterly attacked in Parliament by all the Whigs whom he had been excluding from office for the last twenty years, and gradually saw the reins of power slipping from his hands. In time of war all his bribery and jobbing could not avail to save him; his bought majority dwindled away, and early in 1742 he was defeated in the House of Commons, and forced to resign. He retired into private life, and died three years later, making no further show in politics.

[Sidenote: =The Carteret-Pelham ministry.=]

He was succeeded by a coalition of all the Whig factions, under the nominal premiership of Lord Wilmington, the greatest nonentity in the whole cabinet. The real chiefs of the new ministry were Lord Carteret, an able diplomatist with a vast knowledge of European politics, and the two Pelhams--Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, and Henry, his younger brother. These two kinsmen were a pair of busy and ambitious mediocrities, who stuck like limpets to office. They had been reared in Walpole's school, understood all his arts of management and corruption, and had served under him to the last, though for a year or more they had been quietly intriguing for his fall, in order that they might succeed to his power.

[Sidenote: =The "War of the Austrian Succession."=]

The Carteret-Pelham ministry had to face a much larger problem in European politics than the mere struggle with Spain. During the last year the whole continent had been set ablaze by the "War of the Austrian Succession." In 1740 died the Emperor Charles VI., the Archduke Charles who had been a claimant for the Spanish throne in the days before the peace of Utrecht. He was the last male of the house of Hapsburg, and his death opened a question somewhat resembling that of the Spanish succession in 1702. Charles had determined that his broad dominions--the Austrian archduchies, the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands, and the duchies of Milan and Parma in Italy--should pass in a body to his daughter Maria Theresa. He chose to ignore the fact that his own elder brother, Joseph I., had left two daughters, who on any principle of hereditary succession had a better claim to the Hapsburg inheritance than their younger cousin. The elder princess Maria Amelia was the wife of Charles, the reigning Elector of Bavaria. Charles VI. spent the last twenty years of his life in arranging for his daughter's quiet succession. He drew up an instrument called the "Pragmatic Sanction," by which she was recognized as his heiress, and got it ratified by the estates of the various principalities of his realm. He also induced most of the powers of Europe at one time and another to guarantee this settlement; England, France, Spain, Prussia, and Russia had all been brought to assent to it by concessions of some sort. Only the Elector of Bavaria, the prince whose rights were infringed by the "Pragmatic Sanction," had consistently refused to accept any compensation for abandoning his wife's claims.

[Sidenote: =Frederic II. seizes Silesia.=]

But when Charles died in 1740, it was seen how little the promises of most of the European powers were worth. The accession to the Hapsburg heritage of a young princess with a doubtful title was too great an opportunity to be lost by the greedy neighbours of Austria. When Charles of Bavaria laid claim to his uncle's dominions, and presented himself as a candidate for the imperial throne, he got prompt assistance from many quarters. The first to stir was Frederic II., the able and unscrupulous King of Prussia. Frederic had some ancient claims to certain parts of the duchy of Silesia. He had also a devouring ambition and the best-disciplined army in Europe, an army which his eccentric father Frederic William had spent a whole lifetime in organizing. Without any formal declaration of war, Frederic II. threw himself on Silesia and swept out of it the armies which Maria Theresa hastily sent against him (1741).

[Sidenote: =France and Spain join the Elector of Bavaria.=]

Then France and Spain threw in their lot with the Elector of Bavaria. Lewis XV. had his eye on the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, while the old Philip V. wanted the duchies of Parma and Milan for his younger son. Thus beset by France, Spain, Prussia, and Bavaria, it seemed certain that Maria Theresa must succumb. Her rival Charles was chosen Emperor by a majority of the electors, and it seemed as if the imperial sceptre was about to pass from the house of Hapsburg. The Austrian Netherlands, Silesia, Bohemia, and the Milanese were all invaded at once, and the armies of Maria Theresa could not make head at so many points against the numerical superiority of their foes. The only ally to whom she could look for aid was England, who was already the open enemy of Spain, and who could not tolerate the conquest of the Netherlands by France.

[Sidenote: =Policy of Carteret.--England joins Maria Theresa.=]

An appeal for aid to this quarter met with a ready response. George II. was anxious to help the Queen of Hungary because he disliked his nephew Frederic II., and did not wish to see a Bavarian Emperor. Carteret, the leading spirit in the ministry, was even more eager for the fight. He was a far-sighted man who had realized the fact that England must inevitably come into collision with France from their rivalry in trade and colonization, and he therefore held that France's enemies were our friends. It was his wish to see England embark boldly in the strife, and send a large army to Germany to aid the Austrians. If France were involved in an exhausting continental war, he held that she would be unable at the same time to keep up a maritime struggle with England. Accordingly, the ministry promised the Austrians a large subsidy, took 16,000 Hanoverian troops into British pay, and sent all the available strength of the national army to Germany. George II., who was burning for the fray, placed himself at the head of the Anglo-Hanoverian forces and moved rapidly down to the Main, to attack the flank of the French army which was invading Austria.

The fortunes of Maria Theresa now began to look more prosperous. Carteret got her to buy off the ablest of her assailants, the King of Prussia, by ceding him Silesia. When Frederic had withdrawn from the struggle, the French and Bavarians were driven back from Austria, and retreated up the Danube. It was against their flank that George was operating in 1743, when his rather rash advance into the midst of foes very superior in numbers brought on the battle of Dettingen (July 27, 1743).

[Sidenote: =Battle of Dettingen.=]

Finding that he was beset by forces nearly double the strength of his own 30,000 men, the king faced about, to retire up the banks of the Main. But the van of the French army of the Duc de Noailles outmarched him, and threw itself across his path at the village of Dettingen, while the main body of the enemy was rapidly coming up on his flank. George hastily formed up his troops as they arrived, and dashed forward to cut his way through, leading the advance in person. He was entirely successful, drove the French into the Main with great loss, and completely extricated himself from his difficulties. This was the last occasion on which a king of England has ever been under fire.

[Sidenote: =The Congress at Worms.=]

Further successes followed the victory of Dettingen. The Austrians overran Bavaria, and the Emperor Charles was obliged to lay down his arms and ask for peace. Carteret, who had followed the king to Germany, called together a congress at Worms, at which the representatives of England, Holland, Sardinia, and Saxony, guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, and the integrity of the dominions of the house of Hapsburg. Next spring the allies pledged themselves to invade France, and Carteret, in his moment of triumph, drank to the restoration of Alsace to Germany--a wish not to be fulfilled for another 127 years.

[Sidenote: =Renewal of the war.=]

But England and Austria were still far from their goal. The attack on France had to be postponed, because the unscrupulous Frederic of Prussia renewed the war in the North, and fell upon the rear of the Austrians. They withdrew great bodies of troops to face him, and were left comparatively weak on their western front.

[Sidenote: =Carteret driven from office.=]

Not long afterwards Carteret, the soul of the continental war, lost his place at the head of the ministry. His jealous colleagues, the two Pelhams, were anxious to get rid of him, and took a mean advantage of his long absences in Germany. They allowed him to be attacked as favouring a Hanoverian, not an English policy, and as consulting the wishes of the king rather than those of the Parliament. Carteret was violently assailed by a young politician named William Pitt, whose cry was always that France should be assailed at sea and in her colonies, not on her continental frontiers. The Pelhams would not defend him, and suffered him to be loaded with many ungrounded accusations. The opposition called his ministry "the drunken administration," because he was somewhat flighty in his demeanour, and was known to love his bottle of port over-well. They accused him of lavishing on German allies money that should have gone to our own fleet, and raised such a storm of words against him that the Pelhams had their excuse for throwing him over--a feat which they accomplished in the end of 1744, to the great detriment of England. William Pitt, when a minister himself in later years, confessed that he had discovered in the course of time that Carteret's plans were excellent, and that he had himself put them into practice with success, after having so often denounced them as ruinous and reckless.

[Sidenote: =Ministry of Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle.=]

The Pelhams thus became supreme in the conduct of affairs, and stuck to office as closely as their master Walpole. Henry, the younger of the two--"a fretful, suspicious, industrious mediocrity"--was prime minister till he died in 1754. His elder brother the duke then succeeded him, and kept his feeble hand on the helm of state till he lost office in 1756. English policy under these two narrow and shifty borough-mongers soon lost the vigour that the guidance of Carteret had imparted to it.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Fontenoy.=]

The war with France continued, but no longer with the same success as before. In the spring of 1745 the armies of Lewis XV., under the able Maurice of Saxony, the Maréchal de Saxe as the French called him, fell upon the Austrian Netherlands. Maria Theresa had so few troops in this quarter that the defence of the Belgian provinces fell entirely upon the English and Dutch. The allied armies did not act together with much success, and the Dutch general, the Count of Waldeck, quarrelled with his colleague, George Duke of Cumberland, the younger son of George II. It was this want of co-operation which led to the loss of the bloody battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). The French army was besieging Tournay, when Waldeck and Cumberland came up to relieve it, and found the enemy drawn up along a line of woods strengthened with redoubts on their flanks--a position much like the neighbouring field of Malplaquet, where Marlborough had won his last fight thirty-six years before.

While Waldeck skirmished feebly with the French wings, the stubborn and reckless young duke pushed into the centre of the hostile army with a solid column of English and Hanoverian infantry. He broke through two lines of the French, and cut their host in twain, but failed for want of support on the flanks. He was encompassed by the French reserves, and forced back with fearful loss to his old position, but the enemy were too maltreated to molest him further.

[Sidenote: =The rebellion of '45.=]

The campaign of 1745 was still undecided, when the greater part of the English army was suddenly called home to face a new and unexpected danger. The ministers of Lewis XV. had determined to try the effect of stirring up a Jacobite rebellion, hoping to distract the strength of England even if the house of Hanover could not be overthrown. James Stuart, the "Old Pretender," was now elderly and had always been apathetic, but his son Charles Edward Stuart was a young prince of a very different character. Reckless, adventurous, and light-hearted, he was the very man to lead a desperate venture. The French gathered an army of 15,000 men at Dunkirk, and promised to put it at his disposal if he would invade Scotland. But a storm scattered the transports, and the troops were ultimately drawn off to the war in Flanders.

[Sidenote: =The Young Pretender lands in Scotland.=]

Nevertheless, Charles Edward resolved to persevere, and, on hearing of the fight of Fontenoy, slipped off on a small privateer and landed in Invernesshire with no more than seven companions, "the Seven Men of Moidart," as the Jacobites called them. His arrival was quite unexpected, and he had nothing more to rely upon than the traditional attachment of the Highlanders to the house of Stuart. The chiefs of the West were dismayed at the recklessness of the venture, and it was with difficulty that the enthusiasm and personal charm of the young prince induced them to take arms. At first only a few hundreds of the Camerons and Macdonalds joined him, but the absolute imbecility displayed by the English Government encouraged him more and more to make the venture. The Marquis of Tullibardine, an exile since 1715, roused the Perthshire clans, and the insurrection spread to South and East.

[Sidenote: =Sir John Cope marches northward.=]

The Pelham cabinet only got news of the prince's coming three weeks after his landing in Moidart. They were in no small degree alarmed, for well-nigh the whole army was over-sea in Flanders, and no one knew how far disaffection might have extended in England and the Scottish Lowlands. The only troops in the North were four battalions of foot and two newly raised regiments of dragoons. This small army of 3000 men was entrusted to Sir John Cope, one of the incompetent men whom the Pelhams loved to employ, because they were pliant and docile. Cope hurried north, hoping to relieve the two isolated military posts of Fort William and Fort Augustus, the sole garrisons of the West Highlands. But finding the insurgents in possession of the pass of Corry-Arrack, over which his road ran, he swerved eastward to execute a long circular march by way of Inverness. Thus he was no longer placed between the enemy and the Lowlands, and left the way to Edinburgh open.

[Sidenote: =Charles Edward in Edinburgh.=]

The prince's generalship was always bold even to recklessness; the moment that Cope had passed north of him, he dashed down into Perthshire and struck at the capital of Scotland. He met with no resistance till he was quite close to Edinburgh, when 600 dragoons, the only force left in the Lowlands, fled before him at the skirmish of Colt-Brig. The Scots of the South, Whigs and Presbyterians though they were, showed an extraordinary apathy. They did not join the prince, but they refused to take arms for King George. The militia of Edinburgh, whom the half-hearted magistrates had called to arms, dispersed when the Highlanders appeared at their gates. Thus Prince Charles was able to seize the city, to proclaim his father king at the market cross, and to hold his court at Holyrood.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Preston Pans.=]

Soon, however, he had to fight to preserve his conquest. Cope, on hearing that the Highland army had passed southward, had hurried to the coast and taken ship with his men, hoping to reach Edinburgh before the prince. But on landing at Dunbar he found that he was three days late, and that he must fight if he wished to recapture the city. Advancing to Preston Pans, he camped there in a strong position covered by a marsh. But the Highland army crossed the difficult ground in the dusk of dawn, and fell upon him in the early morning. Cope threw his men into line, and waited to be attacked. The result was a disgraceful rout; the wild rush of the clansmen carried all before it. The bayonets of the regulars proved no match for target and claymore, and the dragoons on the flanks fled in wild panic. Cope left the field among the first, and brought the news of his own defeat to Dunbar (September 21, 1745).

[Sidenote: =Panic in England.=]

The news of the fall of Edinburgh and the battle of Preston Pans came like a thunderclap to the English Government. There was hardly a soldier in the land save the royal guards in London; the militia had not been called out, and the temper of the people was unknown. The imbecile Pelhams were at their wits' end, and it is said that Newcastle even made secret overtures to the Pretender. If Charles Edward could have marched forward the morning after his victory, there is no knowing where his success would have ended.

[Sidenote: =Inactivity of the prince.=]

But the prince halted for five weeks, to allow the Highlanders to stow away their plunder, and to raise and arm new levies. This delay was fatal to him; it gave the ministry time to summon over the English troops from Flanders, and to call out the militia--a numerous if not a very serviceable body.

[Sidenote: =Return of English troops from Flanders.=]

When Charles Edward moved forward again on November 3, his chance was already gone. Marshal Wade lay at Newcastle with 10,000 veterans; the Duke of Cumberland with the rest of the army of Flanders was ten days behind him. The guards and the militia of the southern counties lay on Finchley Common to protect London.

[Sidenote: =The advance to Derby.=]

The prince, ignorant of the fact that Jacobitism had almost disappeared in England during Walpole's peaceful rule, imagined that Wales and the North would rise in his favour, if only he were to show himself beyond the Tweed with an army at his back. Leaving 4000 men to garrison Scotland, he crossed the border with 6000 picked clansmen, routed the Cumbrian militia at Carlisle, and pushed rapidly southward into Lancashire. Before he had been ten days in England, he saw that he had been deceived as to the temper of the country. Hardly a man joined him--not 200 recruits were found for him in the Tory county of Lancaster, which had put 2000 men in the field in the old days of "the Fifteen." Hoping against hope, the prince pushed on still further, skilfully eluding the armies of Wade and Cumberland, who tried in vain to enclose him between them. But the Highlanders began to melt away from him, to drive home the cattle they had lifted, and the Jacobite chiefs were dismayed at the utter apathy of the English Tories. By the time that Derby was reached the rebel army had dwindled down to 3000 men, and it seemed likely that if Charles Edward persisted in advancing, he would arrive at London alone. Overborne by the arguments of his followers, he gave the order to retreat (December 6, 1745).

He was ignorant of the effect that his advance had caused in the South. Panic prevailed in London, and on the "Black Friday" when the news of his arrival at Derby arrived, the timid ministers had been preparing for the worst. The king's plate had been sent on shipboard, the Bank of England had paid away every guinea in its reserve, and the militia at Finchley were fully persuaded that they were to be attacked on the next day by 10,000 wild clansmen.

[Sidenote: =The prince retreats to Scotland.--Battle of Falkirk.=]

The Highland army slipped back to Scotland with little difficulty, evading both Wade and Cumberland, whose heavy regiments could make no speed over the snowy December roads. On recrossing the Border Charles called up his reserves, and was soon at the head of 10,000 men. He trusted to maintain his hold on Scotland, even if England was unassailable. When the royal troops advanced, he inflicted a smart check on their vanguard at the battle of Falkirk (January 17, 1746). But the English came pouring northward in numbers which he could not hope to resist; the fiery Duke of Cumberland had more than 30,000 men on the march by the spring of the New Year, and fresh levies were forming behind him. The Jacobite leaders saw that the day was lost, though hitherto all the fighting had been in their favour. Their undisciplined bands began to disperse once more, and the prince must have known that, unless the French came to his aid, the ruin of his cause was at hand. He was constrained to retire northward, first to Perth, then to Inverness, with an ever-dwindling host. Cumberland pushed on in his rear with 8000 picked men, resolved to revenge the disgraceful days of Preston Pans and Falkirk; the rest of the English army followed at leisure.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Culloden.=]

Charles Edward would not yield without one final blow. With the 5000 men who still followed his standard, he marched out from Inverness, and attacked the Duke on Culloden Moor (April 16, 1746). Cumberland was ready for the fight; he had warned his troops to receive the Highland rush as if it were a cavalry charge, doubling the files and presenting a triple line of bayonets by making the front ranks kneel, while cannon were placed in the intervals between the regiments. The clansmen charged with their usual fury, but were staggered by the artillery fire, and almost blown to pieces by the triple volley of three ranks of infantry delivered at a distance of only fifty paces. The survivors straggled up only to perish on the bayonets. The prince's left wing, where the Macdonald clan had held back on a foolish point of tribal jealousy, was still intact; but when the English cavalry advanced, Charles saw that the day was lost, and bade his followers disperse. Cumberland tarnished the glory of his victory by the savage cruelty which he displayed. He gave no quarter, shot 200 prisoners in cold blood, and burnt every dwelling in the glens of the rebel clans. A price of £30,000 was put upon the head of Charles Edward, who lurked for five months in the West Highlands before he could find a ship to take him to France. He passed through countless perils in safety, and found no man among his unfortunate followers mean enough to betray him in the day of adversity. The story of his romantic escape to Skye in the disguise of the maidservant of Flora Macdonald is well known to all.

After this gallant if reckless expedition, Charles Edward never appeared again in English politics. He did not at first despair of striking another blow, and in 1750 paid a secret visit to Britain to see if a second insurrection were possible. But in England the Jacobites were almost extinct, while in Scotland they had been so sorely crushed that they had no power to stir again. The prince had to return, having accomplished nothing. Hope long deferred makes the heart sick, and in middle life Charles Edward grew apathetic, took to drinking, and became only the wreck of his old self. When his father died in 1765, he proclaimed himself king as Charles III., but never made another attempt to disturb the peace of England down to his death in 1788. With his brother Henry, a cardinal of the Roman Church, the male line of the Stuarts expired in 1807.

[Sidenote: =Suppression of Scottish Jacobitism.=]

The English Government dealt very hardly with the insurgents of 1745-6. Three Scottish peers, the Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat, were beheaded, as was Colonel Townley, the only Englishman of rank who had joined the prince. Many scores of men of less note were hanged or shot. A series of bills was passed in Parliament for weakening the clans and sapping their loyalty to their chiefs. One forbade the wearing of the Highland dress with its tribal tartans. Another abolished the feudal jurisdiction, which gave the chiefs power over their followers. Another made the possession of arms a penal offence. Good roads were pushed up into the remoter valleys, and an attempt was made to get rid of the Gaelic language by making English compulsory in schools. A few years later William Pitt took the wise step of endeavouring to turn the restless military energy of the Highlanders into patriotic channels, and raised several of the kilted regiments which have since distinguished themselves on so many British battle-fields. By the end of the century the Highlands were as quiet as any English shire, and Jacobitism had faded away into a romantic sentiment.

[Sidenote: =Progress of the war in Europe.--1745-1747.=]

The war with France and Spain dragged on for three years more, under very indifferent management on both sides. The withdrawal of the English army from Flanders in 1745 had given the French an advantage in the Netherlands, from which they had greatly profited. They had overrun the whole of the Austrian provinces, and in 1746 threatened the frontier of Holland. Cumberland and his army were recalled, after the suppression of the Scottish rising, to check the advance of the Maréchal de Saxe. But the duke suffered at Lawfeldt, in front of Maestricht, a defeat of much the same character as that of Fontenoy (July 2, 1747). Nevertheless, the French in the following winter consented to treat for peace; they had fared badly along their frontier on the Rhine and in Italy, and looked upon their successes in Belgium as only sufficient to entitle them to ask for a mutual restitution of all conquests. Moreover, their maritime trade had been completely ruined by the war, and several of their colonies had fallen into English hands.

[Sidenote: =The treaty of Aachen.=]

Hence came the treaty of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle), signed in the spring of 1748, to which all the powers who had been engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession gave their assent. Maria Theresa had finally to acquiesce in the loss of Silesia to the King of Prussia, and to make smaller territorial concessions in Italy to Spain and Sardinia, giving Parma to one, and a long slip of the duchy of Milan to the other. The remainder of her vast dominions she maintained intact, while her husband, Francis of Lorraine, was acknowledged by all parties as Emperor, in succession to the unfortunate Charles of Bavaria, who had died in 1745.

[Sidenote: =The maritime contest.--Anson's voyage.=]

England, France, and Spain restored to each other all that each had taken--no very considerable amount--and left the great question of their colonial and commercial rivalry quite unsettled. Another and a greater war was required to decide it. The results of the fighting beyond the seas between 1739 and 1748 had not been very important. We have already mentioned how the English had failed at Cartagena in 1741. On the other hand, they had captured the French island of Cape Breton, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in 1744, and had maintained with success a desultory struggle with the enemy along the inland frontier of Canada. One hazardous expedition against the Pacific ports of Spanish America had been carried to a brilliant end by Commodore Anson, who followed in the steps of Drake by capturing the great Acapulco galleon, with the yearly hoard of the mines of Mexico on board (1743). Like Drake, too, Anson returned to Europe by the Cape route, and brought his ship, the Centurion, back to Spithead in 1744, thus completing the circumnavigation of the world in three years.

[Sidenote: =India.--Breakup of the Mogul Empire.=]

While these comparatively unimportant events had been happening on the American side of the globe, the first war waged between England and France in India had been giving promise of more serious results. Down to the commencement of the eighteenth century the great empire of the Moguls had dominated Hindostan, and the traders of the English and French East India Companies had been no more than visitors to the coast, allowed to build factories at convenient ports by the bounty of the Great Mogul. But in 1707 had died Aurungzebe, the last powerful monarch of that house, and since his death the vast Mohammedan empire which his ancestors had built up was falling rapidly to pieces. Everywhere the Mogul viceroys, or "nawabs," were making themselves independent of their imperial master at Delhi. The native tribes of India also, more especially the brave Mahrattas of the Western Deccan, had been throwing off the Mussulman yoke and starting on a career of conquest. The European settlers in the ports of Southern India profited immensely by this relaxation of the central control which the Mogul government had been wont to exercise, and assumed a much less deferential tone when dealing with the revolted nawabs who now ruled in the Carnatic, Bengal, and the Deccan.

[Sidenote: =Collision between the English and French settlers.=]

It was first during the War of the Austrian Succession that the English and French ventured to engage in hostilities with each other, without paying attention to the native powers, whose sovereign rights they were thereby impugning. The factories of the two powers were scattered along the Coromandel coast in curious alternation, and it was here that the struggle took place. The English were based on their chief settlement at Madras, the French on their stronghold of Pondicherry.

[Sidenote: =Successes of Dupleix.=]

Four years of fighting gave a decided superiority to the French, who were headed by Dupleix, a man of great energy and far-reaching views. He was the first to discover the part that might be played in Indian politics by native troops officered and drilled by Europeans. These Sepoys (Sipahis is the more correct form) had originally been small armed guards employed by the governors of the factories. Dupleix discovered, from a chance encounter at St. Thomé (1746), that a small body of these disciplined mercenaries could defeat whole hordes of native cavalry, and used his discovery with skill and promptitude. Raising large numbers of Sepoys, he built up the first regular army that had been seen in India. In his struggle with the English he was very successful. Madras and almost all the other English factories fell into his hands, and it looked as if the French were to be the sole power in Southern Hindostan. The complete triumph of Dupleix was only prevented by his quarrels with his colleague Labourdonnais, the governor of the Mauritius, who had come to his aid at the head of a fleet. They were both energetic and arbitrary, refused to fall in with each other's plans, and so failed to completely expel the English from the Coromandel coast. The other settlements of the East India Company--the island port of Bombay, the old dowry of Catherine of Portugal, and the factory of Fort William at Calcutta in Bengal--were not molested.

To the intense disgust of Dupleix, the treaty of Aachen stipulated the mutual restoration of conquests, and the English settlements were all given back in 1748. In India, as in America, all was left unsettled, and the struggle for supremacy had to be deferred for a space.

[Sidenote: =The "Broad-Bottomed Administration."=]

Eight years of uneasy peace followed the indecisive and vague treaty of Aachen (1748-1756). England, under the feeble rule of the two Pelhams, seemed to have sunk back into the same condition of prosperous lethargy which had been her lot in the uneventful days of Walpole. In her political history there is nothing of moment to relate; the Pelhams had almost silenced opposition by the simple expedient of finding places in the cabinet or the public service for any one who might have made himself dangerous to them. Even the eloquent and energetic William Pitt, the consistent denouncer of all ministers, had been quieted for a time by the gift of the lucrative post of Paymaster of the Forces. Room was found for so many and diverse persons in the Pelham cabinet, that it was known as the "Broad-Bottom Administration."

[Sidenote: =Conversion of the National Debt.--"Consols."=]

The Pelhams, though using the old Whig catchwords about liberty and reform, were, like Walpole, only anxious to keep things quiet and to preserve themselves in office. Hence there is little or nothing to record of their doings. We may mention, however, the creation of our celebrated 3 per cents. by Henry Pelham, who was somewhat of a financier, his sole accomplishment. The National Debt, then a sum of £78,000,000, was paying 4 per cent. at the time of the treaty of Aachen. The premier, seeing that the public credit was good, and money cheap, resolved to reduce the rate of interest. This he accomplished by borrowing money at 3 per cent. to pay off all those national creditors who would not accept the new scale. The conversion was accomplished with ease, and relieved the revenue of some £500,000 a year of expenses. The debt, thus reduced and simplified, received its new name of "Consols," all the old loans having been consolidated into one (1750).

[Sidenote: =The reform of the Calendar.=]

A word may be also given to the reform of the Calendar in 1752. England up to this time had used the "Old Style," or Julian Calendar, invented by Julius Cæsar eighteen centuries before. A slight error in the calculation of the great Roman had made the year too short, and in the lapse of the ages this error had grown by accumulation into as much as eleven days. England, later than most nations, adopted the reformed or Gregorian Calendar--named after Pope Gregory XIII.--during the Pelham administration. Thus, the change being made on September 2, 1752, the day that followed became the 14th instead of the 3rd. This bewildered the multitude, and was made a serious charge against the minister by many ignorant folks, who complained that they had been defrauded of eleven days of their lives!

In such comparatively trifling events the middle years of the eighteenth century passed away. The stagnant times of the old Whig oligarchy were drawing towards their close, and the movements which were to stir England so deeply in the next generation were beginning to develop.

[Sidenote: =Beginning of the industrial revolution.=]

We have already spoken of the increasing commercial supremacy of England in the period. This growth in foreign trade was now beginning to be supplemented by an increased activity in manufacturing industry, which was to be the distinguishing mark of the second half of the century. But the first signs of it were already apparent before 1750. The earliest attempt for the improvement of the inland communications of the kingdom may be traced to 1720, when the Irwell canal was opened to Manchester. As important a landmark is the discovery of the process of smelting iron by means of coal in 1740. Up to this time iron had always been worked with charcoal, and the manufacture of it had been almost confined to the wooded districts of southern England, most especially to the Sussex Weald. But the new process opened up the Yorkshire iron mines, which were to completely supersede those of the South, for in the North iron and coal are found together in most convenient proximity. All this development, however, belongs to the times of George III. rather than those of George II.

[Sidenote: =The Church under the Whig rule.=]

Even more important in the history of the social life of England than the expansion of her commercial resources, was another change which began about the middle of the eighteenth century, in the sphere of spiritual things. The Whig supremacy in the State, which had begun in 1714, had the most deplorable results on the Church. Walpole and his disciples were men quite out of sympathy with any religious impulse; their lives and morals would not bear looking into, and they openly scoffed at religion. To them the Church was simply a field of patronage for friends and dependents, and a machine for supplementing the working of the State. Down to the time of Anne's death the Tory party had been supreme within the bounds of the establishment, and the Whigs therefore viewed the whole body of the clergy with suspicion. They stopped in 1717 the meetings of Convocation, which had existed from time immemorial, wishing to prevent the clerical body from finding a mouthpiece. They systematically officered the Church with Whig bishops, of whom nothing was asked but political orthodoxy. As was likely, men chosen on this principle were often most unfit pastors of the Church. A Walpole or a Pelham was not likely to select men whose characteristics were fervour or enthusiasm. The Whig bishops were generally of two classes--either they were prominent political clergy, court chaplains and the like, who laid themselves out to win preferment by their sermons, or they were "Greek-play bishops"--to use an expressive phrase--mere scholars, whose title to promotion was to have edited a classic author or ruled a public school. Both classes were, as a rule, very inefficient; many were scandalous non-residents, and seldom went near their dioceses, dwelling in London all the year round and haunting the court. Remote sees like Bangor or Carlisle hardly knew the face of their bishops. Some of these prelates were more notable for their political than their religious orthodoxy; of these "Latitudinarian" bishops perhaps the best known is Hoadley, whom the Whigs promoted to four sees one after another, in spite of the fact that his views on the Trinity were hardly consistent with his position as a member of the Church.

[Sidenote: =Decline of religious feeling.=]

It was not to be expected that such prelates would be in touch with their subordinates the country clergy, who still for the most part remained Tory in their views, looked on the least measure for the political emancipation of Dissenters or Romanists with horror, and nourished a strong personal dislike for the two first Georges and their ministers. Hence came such a breach in the unity and organization of the Church as had never been seen before. The upper clergy were careless and unspiritual, the lower clergy grew lethargic and apathetic under the neglect of their superiors. There was a general tendency to praise common sense and morality, and to sneer at theological learning or evangelical fervour.

[Sidenote: =The Methodist movement.--John Wesley.=]

This general deadness in the Church could not long continue without causing a reaction. The great feature in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was the appearance of the "Methodist" movement, of which John Wesley was the originator. Shocked by the want of energy and enthusiasm among the clergy, Wesley, a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, devoted himself to active evangelical work, and especially to public preaching. He is first heard of as preaching to the poor of neglected Oxford parishes, and to the prisoners in the jail (1729). A few years later he went out as a missionary to America, and laboured in the backwoods of Georgia. Returning in 1738, he resumed his work in England, passing from place to place, and addressing large congregations of all sorts and conditions of men. His fervent eloquence and enthusiasm came as a revelation to the neglected masses of the cities, or to congregations condemned to many years of sermons on dry morality. He spoke of sin and conversion with an earnestness which had not been seen since the days of early Puritan enthusiasm. Wesley and the numerous followers who sprang up to join him might have inspired the Church with a new spirit of fervour, if they had but been permitted to do so. But, unfortunately, the Latitudinarian bishops disliked his emotional harangues and his clear-cut dogma, and the parish clergy often treated him as an intruder when he appeared inside their cures. Hence, though a strong Churchman at first, he was gradually driven into schism, and became the founder of a new Nonconformist sect, instead of the restorer of the spirituality of the Church from within. Towards the end of his sixty years of labour (1729-91), he took the final step of ordaining preachers and allowing them to celebrate the sacraments, thus committing his followers to abandoning the national Church. His work, however, was not without its effect inside the Church of England; many who sympathized with him remained Churchmen, and from them came the Evangelical, or newer Low-Church party, within the establishment.

[Sidenote: =Growth of a higher morality.=]

From Wesley and his contemporaries began a decided improvement in the moral life of England. After remaining at its lowest ebb in the eighty years that followed the Restoration, it began to mend about the middle of the century. The change is marked in all the most characteristic spheres of action, by an increased humanity to prisoners, paupers, and slaves, an improved tone in literature and the drama, and a growing demand for the observation of a higher standard of morals by public men. Political corruption and ostentatious ill living, which had been the rule in the beginning of the eighteenth century, had become the exception at its end.

But if England was more serious and more moral by the end of the century, no small share in that result must be attributed to the sobering effect of three long and desperate wars, which more than once seemed about to be the ruin of the realm. Between 1756 and 1815 there were to be thirty-six years of war to twenty-three of peace, and two whole generations were bred up in times of stress and trouble, which developed the sterner virtues, and taught men no longer to sneer at fervour, whether displayed in patriotism or in religion.

[Sidenote: =The Seven Years' War.=]

The "Seven Years' War" into which England was plunged in 1756, while still under the imbecile guidance of the elder Pelham, was the most important struggle in which she had engaged since the days of the Spanish Armada. It definitely settled all the points which had been left undetermined by the peace of Aachen, and gave her the empire of the seas and the lion's share of the commerce of the world. Her hold on these gains was to be shaken in later wars, but never lost.

The Seven Years' War, like the War of the Austrian Succession, had two sides--the Colonial and the European. In 1756, as in 1742, England, while contending for her own objects beyond seas, was also subsidizing a powerful continental ally, who had his own interests to serve, in order to distract the attention of France from the more distant struggle. The new war resembled the old in another respect. In each case it was the colonial quarrel which first came to the front; the European strife was a later development. The causes which provoked the Seven Years' War were to be found both in America and in India. In both of these quarters the representatives of England and of France came to blows before the mother countries had resolved on war. The quarrel was the result of natural causes which made it inevitable, and not the deliberate work of the timid Newcastle or the selfish Lewis XV.

[Sidenote: =Supremacy of Dupleix in Southern India.=]

It was in India that the first hostilities broke out, not very long after the peace of Aachen had been signed. We have already mentioned how the French governor Dupleix had raised an army of Sepoys, and resolved to employ it for the furtherance of French interests in Southern India. He was enabled to do this by the fact that a war of succession had broken out in each of the two great native states which were neighbours to the European settlements on the Coromandel coast. In the Deccan two princes of the Nizam family, an uncle and a nephew, were disputing for the throne of Hyderabad. In the Carnatic a rebellious minister was trying to usurp his master's throne. Dupleix resolved to sell the aid of his army to one pretender for use against the other. The appearance of his disciplined battalions in the field settled the fortune of war at once. He gained for his ally Mozuffer Jung the whole of the Hyderabad dominions. Then he turned against the Carnatic, slew the old nawab in battle, and drove his son, Mohammed Ali, into Trichinopoly, his last stronghold. The rebel minister, Chunda Sahib, was then saluted as ruler of the land. The two new nawabs soon became the mere creatures of Dupleix, whose military strength completely overawed their motley armies. They lavished millions of rupees upon him, and Mozuffer Jung gave him the title of Supreme Vizier of all India south of the river Kistnah, and appointed him permanent chief of his army.

[Sidenote: =Clive seizes and holds Arcot.=]

Dupleix was in truth master of Southern India, a fact viewed with dismay by the English settlers along the Coromandel coast. They had, in rivalry with him, espoused the cause of the two nawabs whom he had crushed. One of these princes was now dead, the other besieged in his last stronghold. The rulers of Madras despaired, but a single bold spirit persuaded them to venture a blow against the power of the Frenchman. Robert Clive, the scapegrace son of a Shropshire squire, had been sent out to Madras as a clerk in the East India Company's service to keep him out of mischief. But he changed his pen for the sword, and became a captain in the Company's army. Now he persuaded Governor Saunders to entrust him with a few hundred men, to make a diversion in favour of the besieged nawab, Mohammed Ali. To draw away the army which was beleaguering Trichinopoly, Clive resolved to strike at the capital of the Carnatic, the town of Arcot. Marching by night and with great speed, he seized the place and fortified himself in its citadel. He was at once attacked by the forces of the Chunda Sahib, aided by a division of the army of Dupleix. But he contrived to inspire his 500 men with such obstinate courage, that they repulsed all the assaults of 10,000 enemies, and finally compelled the nawab's army to withdraw foiled (1751).

[Sidenote: =Further successes of Clive.--Dupleix recalled.=]

After thus winning Arcot, Clive was entrusted by the Madras Council with all their disposable troops--200 Europeans and 700 English Sepoys. With these reinforcements he took the field against Dupleix and Chunda Sahib, routed a number of French detachments, and finally recovered the whole of the Carnatic for Mohammed Ali, the protégé of the English. Chunda Sahib surrendered to his enemy, who had him murdered. Dupleix played a losing game against his greater rival for two more years, and was finally recalled in disgrace by the French Government (1754). Thus the English carried out the lesson which the great Frenchman had taught them, that India might be conquered with Indian arms, and that its princes might be made the vassals of the mere traders who had paid them humble tribute a few years before. With the establishment of the English suzerainty over the nawab Mohammed Ali and his realm of the Carnatic begins the English empire in Hindostan.

[Sidenote: =The struggle for the Mississippi valley.=]

Clive and Dupleix had posed as the mere auxiliaries of the nawabs, and their struggle was not supposed to commit the mother country to war. But a less disguised form of hostilities between England and France commenced somewhat later in America. Its cause was the want of any definite boundary between the settlements of the two nations. It was the ambition of the English colonists to push westward from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and gradually to colonize all the waste lands, sparsely inhabited by savage Indian tribes, which lay between them and the Mississippi. But the French had another and a no less ambitious scheme. Besides their dominions in Canada, they possessed another colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, round the town of New Orleans. They claimed that this territory of Louisiana stretched up to the head-waters of the great river, and it was their object to connect it with Canada by a string of forts placed along the Mississippi and its tributary the Ohio. If they could have carried out this gigantic and wide-stretching plan, they would have shut in the English colonies between the Alleghany mountains and the sea, and prevented them from extending into the interior of the continent. The weak point of the plan was that the French were far too few in numbers to execute any such project. Though they counted among them many hardy backwoodsmen and fur-traders, who had explored all the waterways of the West, they could not back these pioneers up with solid masses of population. There were not more than 180,000 French emigrants in America, while the English colonies boasted at this time nearly 2,000,000 sturdy settlers.

[Sidenote: =Outbreak of hostilities.--Braddock's defeat.=]

In spite of this disparity of numbers, the French governors were set on executing their venturous scheme. It was their active advance into the wilderness that lay between Canada and the English colonies, that brought about the first collisions with the English outposts. The three northern links of the chain that was to join Canada with Louisiana were Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain, Fort Niagara, near the Great Falls between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and Fort Duquesne, at the head-waters of the Ohio. The first and last of these were a very few miles from the English back-settlements, and their establishment in 1754-55 was looked upon as a direct challenge by the inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 1754 a party of Virginian militia, headed by Major George Washington, of whom we shall hear much later on, made a dash on Fort Duquesne. But they were beaten and forced to surrender after a fight at Great Meadows. This provoked the colonies, and at their request General Braddock repeated the attack in the next year with a force of 2200 men, part of whom were British regulars. But he was drawn into an ambuscade by a very inferior force of French and Indians, his force was disgracefully routed, and he himself was slain. The fighting at once began to spread, and both England and France sent out reinforcements to America. Yet the two nations were still nominally at peace, and the French, who were just about to engage in a great war in Germany, were not anxious to commence hostilities with England at this particular moment. Newcastle, however, precipitated the outbreak of the struggle by a characteristic half-measure. He sent out Admiral Boscawen with orders not to attack all French ships, but to intercept a particular squadron carrying troops to Canada. Boscawen met it, and took two vessels after a fight; this made war inevitable. It broke out in the spring of 1756, and opened with a series of disasters for England, a fact which causes no surprise when we remember that her forces were under the direction of the imbecile Newcastle.

[Sidenote: =European coalition against Prussia.=]

Just at the same moment another struggle was commencing on the Continent. The Empress Maria Theresa had never forgiven the King of Prussia for robbing her of Silesia in the hour of her distress, fourteen years before. She had devoted much time and trouble to forming a great coalition for the purpose of punishing the plunderer, and had secretly enlisted in her alliance France, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and most of the smaller German states. For the unscrupulous and rapacious Frederic was not viewed with love by his neighbours, and it was easy to combine them against him. His venomous pen had made enemies of two vindictive women, Elizabeth Empress of Russia, and Madame de Pompadour, the all-powerful mistress of Lewis XV., and though political expediency did not prescribe war with Prussia to either Russia or France, yet personal resentment brought it about.

[Sidenote: =Frederic II. overruns Saxony.=]

The open war between England and France had broken out in the spring of 1756. In the autumn of the same year the continental struggle began. Getting secret intelligence of the plot that was maturing against him, Frederic resolved to strike before his numerous adversaries were ready, and invaded Saxony. He overran the whole electorate and annihilated the Saxon army in a fortnight. But Austria, Russia, Sweden, and France immediately fell upon him, and he had much ado to avoid being crushed by brute force of numbers; for Prussia was but a small state of 5,000,000 souls, while the confederacy ranged against her counted half Europe in its ranks.

[Sidenote: =Alliance between England and Prussia.=]

Alone among a host of foes, Frederic was desperately in need of an ally. And only one ally was possible--England. For both England and Prussia were now at war with France, and it was obvious that they ought to aid each other against their common foe.

[Sidenote: =The loss of Minorca.=]

Moreover, the English Government was itself sadly in need of assistance, for the war had opened with a series of disasters in more than one quarter of the world. The most serious loss had been suffered in the Mediterranean: a French fleet and army under the Duc de Richelieu had slipped out of Toulon and fallen on Minorca, the Spanish island which had formed part of England's plunder at the peace of Utrecht. The English garrison was weak, for it had always been supposed that we were strong enough at sea to prevent the enemy from approaching this important possession, which was to us then what Malta is now. But when the Mediterranean fleet under Admiral Byng came up to relieve the troops beleaguered in the citadel of Port Mahon, a disgraceful sight was seen. The English admiral, finding that the French squadron was slightly superior to his own, refused to fight, and fled away to Gibraltar, though his second in command urged him hotly to risk everything in order to save the island. The deserted garrison held out a month longer, and then was forced to surrender (June, 1756).

[Sidenote: =Successes of Montcalm in Canada.=]

Nor was this the only disaster with which the Seven Years' War opened. Montcalm, the French commander in Canada, made a dash against the frontier garrisons of the British colonists in America, and took Forts Oswego and William Henry, our outposts on the North-West.

[Sidenote: =The Black Hole of Calcutta.=]

Still more shocking news was on its way home from India. The Nawab of Bengal, a cruel and debauched tyrant named Suraj-ud-Dowlah, had picked a quarrel with the governor of Calcutta, the English factory near the mouth of the Ganges. Suddenly declaring war in June, 1756, the same month that Minorca was lost, he captured Calcutta with ease. In his hour of triumph, he bade his guards thrust all his captives into the "Black Hole," a small dungeon not much more than twenty feet square, which had been wont to serve as the prison of the factory. No less than 146 persons--merchants, officials, soldiers, and women--were driven into this confined space, and locked in for the night. They were tightly wedged together, had no air save from two narrow barred windows, and could not move. In the stifling heat of a Bengal June, nearly the whole of them perished of suffocation. Only twenty-three--one of whom was a woman--were found alive next morning. The horrors of the Black Hole were soon to be revenged, but long ere the news of the punishment which Clive wreaked on the nawab came home, the Newcastle ministry had been driven from office.

[Sidenote: =Trial of Admiral Byng.--Fall of Newcastle.=]

The popular outcry at the mismanagement of the war, and above all at the loss of Minorca, had been too great for the feeble Newcastle to withstand. It was in vain that he arrested Byng and promised to try him for cowardice. For Byng could not be made the scapegoat for disasters in America or India, and the universal indignation against Newcastle's administration of the war forced him to resign in November, 1756. Shortly after the admiral was tried by court-martial, condemned, and shot, for disobedience to orders and for criminal feebleness, though he was acquitted of any treasonable intent or personal cowardice. His death served, as Voltaire remarked at the time, "pour encourager les autres," and English admirals since then have never shirked an engagement with an enemy of only slightly superior force.

[Sidenote: =Pitt and Devonshire take office.=]

The king summoned the opposition Whigs to form a cabinet, and William Pitt and the Duke of Devonshire took office. Pitt, as we have already had occasion to remark, was the fighting man of the Whig party, and the advocate of a vigorous colonial and commercial policy. He was the one statesman of the day who commanded the confidence of the nation, because he was the only one whose reputation was entirely free from the stain of political corruption. He was an able, eloquent man, whose scathing denunciations of the errors and feebleness of the late ministry were convincing to all who heard them. It remained to be seen if his own administration would prove more successful. At first, however, it seemed likely that Pitt would have small opportunity of trying his hand at the helm. Though he was trusted by the nation, he was not trusted by the House of Commons. Newcastle set himself to overthrow his successor, by bidding his hirelings in the Lower House to vote consistently against the new ministers. Moreover, King George disliked Pitt for his vehemence and his pompous language.

[Sidenote: =Pitt dismissed.--His compact with Newcastle.=]

Hence came a vexatious crisis in April, 1757, when Pitt found himself in a minority in the House of Commons, and was dismissed from office by the king. But the public outcry against the proposed resumption of office by Newcastle was so loud, that a curious and not very satisfactory compromise was arranged. The duke offered to take Pitt as his colleague, and to give him a free hand in the management of the war and all foreign policy, if he himself were permitted to retain the direction of domestic affairs. Pitt believed himself to be necessary to his country; he thought that he could bring the war to a successful conclusion, and that no one else could do so. Hence, though he was thoroughly acquainted with the mean and intriguing spirit of the duke, he took his offer. Newcastle wanted no more than the power of managing Parliament and dispensing patronage--his ideas of government went no further. In return he placed his subservient parliamentary majority at Pitt's disposal. The result was, as a shrewd contemporary observer remarked, that "Mr. Pitt does everything, and the Duke of Newcastle gives everything."

[Sidenote: =The Convention of Closter-Seven.=]

The Pitt-Newcastle ministry lasted nearly six years, and its excellent results almost justified the ignominious compact on which it was founded. Soon after Pitt got the control of affairs, the fortune of war began to mend. His first attempts at launching expeditions against France were, it is true, unsuccessful. The Duke of Cumberland was sent to Hanover to defend the electorate against the French. But he suffered the same misfortune as at Fontenoy and Lawfeldt, once more showing himself a brave soldier, but a bad strategist. At Hastenbeck he was defeated, and, retiring northward, was pressed back against the North Sea near Stade, and forced to sign the Convention of Closter-Seven, by which the Hanoverian army laid down its arms (June, 1757).

[Sidenote: Battles of Rossbach and Leuthen.]

This disaster exposed the western frontier of Prussia to the French, and might have proved the ruin of King Frederic. But that marvellous general saved himself by the rapid blows which he dealt to West and East. Flying into central Germany, he routed the French at Rossbach (November 5); and then, returning to Silesia before the Austrians had missed him, he defeated the troops of the Empress at Leuthen (December 5). Thus he won himself six months' respite, and during that time Pitt raised another army for service in Germany, which was placed under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, a distant cousin of the royal family, but a general of very different order from the unlucky George of Cumberland. This force effectually protected the western borders of Prussia and the electorate of Hanover from the French during the remainder of the war.

[Sidenote: =War-policy of Pitt.=]

With the opening of the year 1758 began a succession of victories all over the world, which effectually justified the claims of Pitt to be the restorer of the greatness of Britain. He had everywhere put new vigour into the struggle, by placing young generals, chosen by himself, at the head of his expeditions, and by raising loans for war expenses with a profusion which appalled more timid financiers. Part of this wealth was lavished on the King of Prussia, whose aid was invaluable in distracting the forces of France. "I am conquering Canada on the plains of Germany," observed Pitt to those who reproached him for the vast subsidies which he sent to Frederic. And the epigram was true, for the reinforcements which were absolutely necessary if France was to retain her American possessions, were being sent across the Rhine to join in the great European struggle. Pitt, in fact, was working out to a glorious end the policy which Carteret had sketched nearly twenty years before.

[Sidenote: =The struggle for Canada.=]

While Ferdinand of Brunswick with his Anglo-Hanoverian army beat the French at Crefeldt, and kept them back on the Rhine (June, 1758), still more important things were being effected in America. A general advance was made along the whole front of the French possessions in America. In the north Admiral Boscawen and the young General Wolfe captured Louisbourg, the strongly fortified capital of the island of Cape Breton. In the south Fort Duquesne was occupied by a force consisting mainly of colonial militia, and thus the line of French communications between Canada and Louisiana was effectually cut. The jubilant colonists changed the name of the place to Pittsburg in honour of the great minister. Only in the centre of the advance was a reverse sustained; there the French commander, the gallant Montcalm, had collected the bulk of his forces behind the ramparts of Ticonderoga, to bar the line of advance up the Hudson. General Abercrombie was repulsed with fearful loss when he attempted to take the place by assault, though his men did all that could be done, and Pitt's new Highland regiments absolutely filled the ditch with their bodies ere they could be forced to retire. But the fall of Canada was only delayed a few months by this check to the British arms.

[Sidenote: =Battles of Lagos and Quiberon.=]

The next year, 1759, was even more fertile in successes. The naval strength of France received its final blow in two decisive battles. The French Mediterranean fleet ran out of Toulon and tried to escape into the Atlantic, but Admiral Boscawen met them off Lagos in Portugal, and took or destroyed most of the vessels. Some months later Admiral Hawke attacked the French Atlantic fleet, which had come out of Brest and was lying in Quiberon Bay. Though a fierce storm was raging, he ran into the bay and forced the enemy to engage. In the heat of the fight many of their ships were driven ashore and lost, while Hawke carried off two prizes, and only a few out of the hostile fleet escaped into the mouth of the river Vilaine. After the battles of Lagos and Quiberon Bay, the enemy never attempted to appear at sea in any force during the remaining four years of the war. Indeed, the French marine was almost entirely destroyed, for sixty-four line-of-battle ships had been sunk or taken in 1758-1759.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Minden.=]

In the same year a great victory had been gained in Germany. When the French reinforced their army of the Rhine and again pushed forward toward Hanover, Prince Ferdinand gave them battle at Minden, and inflicted on them a defeat which sent them back in haste towards their own borders. The chief honour of the fight fell to seven regiments of English infantry, which received and repelled the fierce charges of the whole of the cavalry of the French army; but a slur was cast on the victory by the misconduct of Lord George Sackville, the general of the English horse, who refused--out of temper or cowardice--to charge the broken enemy and complete their rout. Nevertheless the fight did its work, and proved the salvation of our ally, Frederic II., who was just at this moment in the depths of despair. He had suffered a fearful defeat at the hands of the Russians at Künersdorf, on the Oder, and was only saved from complete destruction by being able to draw aid from the victorious army of Prince Ferdinand.

[Sidenote: =Montcalm and Wolfe.--Battle of Quebec.=]

But events of far greater import had happened in America during this summer. Pitt had sketched out a concentric attack on Canada from three sides. General Amherst had taken Ticonderoga, the fort that had baffled Abercrombie in the previous year, while another expedition captured Fort Niagara and the other western strongholds of the French. But the main blow was struck in the North. An English fleet appeared in the St. Lawrence and put ashore General Wolfe, Pitt's favourite officer, with an army of 8000 men. Montcalm hurried to the spot with all the French regulars in the province, and a horde of Canadian militia, and hastened to the defence of Quebec, the capital of the land. The place was very strongly placed, being protected on two sides by the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and watched by Montcalm's entrenched camp at Beauport. After failing to break the French lines, Wolfe ventured on a hazardous flank attack. The cliffs overhanging the St. Lawrence were believed to be inaccessible, as there was only a single precipitous goat-track which mounted them, and this was protected by a guard. But Wolfe resolved to risk the danger of assaulting them. His men dropped down the river in boats under cover of the night, reached the foot of the crags, and crept up one after another on hands and knees, pulling themselves up by the aid of trees and shrubs. The French picket at the top was surprised and fled. Thus Wolfe had 4000 men in line on the ground above the cliffs, "the Heights of Abraham," before the day dawned. When they became visible to Montcalm, he was forced to come out of his impregnable lines and fight in the open, under pain of losing Quebec. There followed a short sharp conflict, in which the English had from the first the advantage. The Canadian militia fled in panic, the French regulars were cut to pieces, and Montcalm himself was mortally wounded. But Wolfe had also been struck down in the moment of victory; he lived just long enough to hear that the battle was won, and died on the field (September 13, 1759). He was only thirty-three, and, had he survived, would have had a long career of glory before him. But to have conquered America for England was in itself a sufficient title to immortality. For the battle of Quebec was the decisive day in the history of the continent.

[Sidenote: =Canada surrenders to the English.=]

The wrecks of the French army evacuated the capital, and fell back on Montreal. Thither they were followed in the next spring both by the forces under Amherst, which had ascended the Hudson, and by Wolfe's army from Quebec. Surrounded by vastly superior numbers, de Vaudreuil, the viceroy of Canada, was forced to lay down his arms, and surrender the remnant of the French possessions in the north. Thus ended in ignominious failure the great scheme which Montcalm had formed for securing inland America for his king, and penning the English colonists between the ocean and the Alleghanies. The British flag now waved without a rival from the North Pole to the boundary of Spanish America.

[Sidenote: =Clive retakes Calcutta.=]

Meanwhile events of importance had been happening in the far East. While England was laying her hand on the Western Continent, she was also winning her first territorial dominions in India. We have already told the tale of the Black Hole and the fall of Calcutta. Its sequel has yet to be related. Just when the news of Suraj-ud-Dowlah's wicked doings reached Madras, Clive chanced to return from England, where he had been for two years on leave. The task of chastising the nawab was at once made over to him. He was entrusted with one regiment of British troops, the 39th, which bears on its colours the honourable legend Primus in Indis, and with 2000 Madras sepoys. With this small force he did not hesitate to invade the vast but unwarlike province of Bengal. He forced his way up the Hoogly and recovered Calcutta with ease. But he hesitated some time before advancing into the interior, to strike at the nawab's capital of Moorshedabad.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Plassey.--The English masters of Bengal.=]

Soon, however, he learnt that Suraj-ud-Dowlah was hated by his subjects, and that his own ministers were ready to betray him. Armed with this knowledge, Clive advanced from Calcutta as far as the village of Plassey, where he found himself in face of the nawab's hordes, 50,000 irregular horse and foot of the worst quality. The English were attacked but feebly and half-heartedly, for the enemy had no confidence in their prince. Moreover, Mir Jaffar, who commanded one wing of his army, had sold himself to Clive for the promise of his master's throne, and held aloof all day, like Northumberland at Bosworth Field. At the hour of noon Clive bade his men charge, and the contemptible soldiery of Suraj-ud-Dowlah fled before the assault, though they outnumbered the English by eighteen to one. Only the nawab's French artillerymen stood firm, and were bayoneted at their guns. This battle, which gave England the rich realm of Bengal, was won with a loss of only 72 men to the victors. Clive soon seized Moorshedabad and installed Mir Jaffar as nawab in his master's room. The deposed tyrant was caught by his successor and promptly strangled. Mir Jaffar ruled for the future as the dependent of England, paid the East India Company a tribute, and acted as their vassal. Thus Bengal, though not annexed, was for all practical purposes made a part of the British empire.

Clive sullied his laurels by two acts which show the unscrupulous character that was allied with his great talents. Before Plassey, a Bengali named Omichund discovered the intrigue with Mir Jaffar, and threatened to reveal it to the nawab. Clive bought him off by a forged promise of money signed with the name of Admiral Watson. When the danger was over, he avowed his forgery to the traitor, who thereupon went mad with rage and disappointed greed. After Plassey Clive committed his second fault, by accepting for his private use huge sums of gold which Mir Jaffar offered him. When taunted with this, he only replied that "he was astonished at his own moderation, considering the enormously larger amount that he might have asked and received" (1757). After settling Bengal and defeating an attempt to reconquer it made by Shah Alum, the heir of the Great Moguls, Clive returned to England in 1759, to be saluted as the conqueror of the East.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Wandewash. Capture of Pondicherry.=]

While Clive was overrunning Bengal, the English armies in the Carnatic were making an end of the small remnants of the French power in India. The operations were protracted, till in January, 1760, Sir Eyre Coote routed the last French army at Wandewash, and, ere another year was out, Pondicherry and all the other strongholds of the enemy were in his hands.

[Sidenote: =Death of George II.=]

While England was thus triumphant alike in Europe, India, and America, and Pitt was at the height of his glory, the old king, George II., died suddenly in his seventy-eighth year (October 25, 1760). His death made an instant change in the national politics both at home and abroad, for his successor was not one of those sovereigns who were contented to obey their ministers and meekly bear the yoke of the great Whig oligarchy.

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XXXV. GEORGE III. AND THE WHIGS--THE AMERICAN WAR

1760-1783.

In the last two centuries of English history the accession of a new king has not often caused a complete revolution in politics. The change of sovereigns often gives us an unfortunate and misleading cross-division, cutting periods in two that are really one, or making us dream that there is a unity in periods which are really divided in their interest and meaning.

This was not the case, however, when George III. succeeded his grandfather George II. For the last time in English history, the change of kings implied a real break in the continuity of the politics of the time. The new monarch was only twenty-two years of age, and was totally unversed in affairs of state. George II. had lived in bitter enmity with his feeble and factious son, Frederic Prince of Wales, the nonentity of whom the contemporary satirist wrote--

"Since it's only Fred who was alive and is dead, There's no more to be said."

[Sidenote: =Education and political aims or George III.=]

After the prince's death, the old king had transferred his dislike to his son's widow and his grandson. George III. had therefore been brought up almost in seclusion. The most notable point in his education was that his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, had taught him to despise his grandfather and his grandfather's position in the State. He had been told from his earliest years that the position of a sovereign who allowed himself to be led and governed by his ministers was degrading. "When you come to the throne," we are told that his mother said, "George, be king." The idea had taken root, and the young prince had made up his mind that he should rule his ministers, not his ministers him. That the cabinet should be responsible to the king as well as to Parliament, was the keystone of his theory. He would have the choice of his ministers lie in his own hands, not in those of the great Whig houses. George did not wish to rule unconstitutionally, to fly in the face of Parliament, or to govern without it, as the Stuarts had tried to do. He had, indeed, such a belief in his own good intentions, that he thought that they must coincide with the nation's will, and there were circumstances which for some time bore him out in his view.

[Sidenote: =His character.=]

George's main bent was to assert his individuality, and take the chief share in the governance of the country. The other features of his character are easy to describe. His tastes were frugal, and his private life strictly virtuous, a thing which had not been known in an English king for more than a century. He was sincerely pious, though, as some critics observed, he was better at scenting out other persons' sins than his own. He had an enormous capacity for hard work, though no very great brain-power to guide him through it. He had a great share of self-restraint and reticence, so that it was not easy to guess what plans he had in hand when he did not wish them to be known. Above all, he was terribly obstinate, with the obstinacy of a good-hearted man, who feels he is in the right, and believes that he will be doing wrong if he gives up his own opinion. Lastly, though he had no power of appreciating greatness of any kind (he called Shakespeare "sad stuff, only one must not say so," and thought Pitt a bombastic old actor), yet he had great penetration in measuring littleness in others. This made him exceedingly fitted to cope with the average Whig statesmen of his day.

[Sidenote: =His popularity.=]

When George came to the throne he was greeted with the usual popularity which attends a new and untried sovereign. He showed himself affable and good-tempered, a model of decorum and respectability, and won all hearts by his English habits and prejudices. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Germans in mind and language. George III. took the first opportunity of declaring that he was English born and bred, and that "he gloried in the name of Briton." By so doing he won all men's hearts. Thus in the beginning of his struggle with the Whigs he had the inestimable advantage of personal popularity with the nation.

[Sidenote: =The "King's Friends."=]

The king had, as we have already said, passed his youth in seclusion, with few friends and no organized band of retainers. He had to build up his own party, if he wished to carry out his schemes. This he at once began to do. Descending into the arena of politics, he set to work to make himself a following, much as Newcastle or Walpole had done in a previous generation. But George, unlike those statesmen, had not to rely on bribery or borough-mongering alone. He could count on all the prestige and attraction which surrounds the crown, to draw men into his net. Some of the "King's Friends" (as his followers grew to be called) were politicians bought by pensions or titles, but many were honest supporters, who found their pleasure in displaying their loyalty to the crown.

[Sidenote: =The king and the Tories.=]

In especial George won to himself from the first the very considerable remnants of the old Tory party. Jacobitism had now become such a thing of the past, that the vast majority of the Tories were ready to accept with enthusiasm a king whose views exactly coincided with their own old doctrines. For George was a stout defender of the Church of England, in which his godless old grandfather had never professed any interest. He held the ancient Tory doctrine that the royal prerogative should be actively exercised in the affairs of the nation. Most important of all, he hated the Whig oligarchy, a fact which could not fail to recommend him to their long-oppressed rivals. Hence it came that the most prominent element among the "King's Friends" was drawn from the Tory party. One condition was demanded of all who joined that body--implicit obedience to George's will, the will of a man of limited abilities and narrow mind. This fact sufficiently accounts for the result that the "King's Friends" never included any men of marked talent; to obey George in all things would have been too trying for any one of real genius or breadth of spirit.

[Sidenote: =The rise of Lord Bute.=]

The king's first and most injudicious way of attempting to interfere in politics was worked out through the medium of Lord Bute. That nobleman was a Scottish peer of respectable character, moderate abilities, and a rather pedantic disposition. He had aided the Princess of Wales in giving George such instruction in statecraft as he had received. Bute was almost absolutely unacquainted with Parliament or practical politics. Yet a few months after his accession, the king insisted that the Pitt-Newcastle cabinet should take his old tutor into partnership. Bute was made one of the Secretaries of State, and at once began to show a great independence of the nominal prime minister. He rebuked Newcastle for keeping the details of his political jobbing from the king, and for filling posts without consulting royalty. At the same time he spoke strongly against the continuance of the war with France, and most particularly against the lavish subsidies with which the great war-minister was maintaining our much-tried ally, the King of Prussia. The fact was that George had observed that the Whig ministry depended for its strength on the combination of Newcastle's corrupt influence over Parliament with Pitt's hold on the nation, secured by successful war. To end it he wished to deprive the duke of his patronage, and to close the war, so as to make Pitt no longer indispensable.

[Sidenote: =Pitt's war-policy thwarted.--He resigns.=]

In this matter the king's private designs clashed most unhappily with the interests of England, for Pitt's vigorous policy was still bearing the best of fruits. Ere King George had been a year upon the throne, Pitt could announce to him that Pondicherry, the last French fortress in India; Belleisle, a large island off the coast of Brittany; and Dominica, a rich West-Indian island, had fallen into his hands. After these last disasters the ministers of Lewis XV. began to make overtures for peace, which Bute wished to accept; but Pitt withstood him, partly because he thought that England had yet more to gain, partly because he had secret knowledge that France was trying to create a diversion by stirring up Spain against us. Charles III., the king of that country, was an old enemy of England, and had offered to renew with his cousin, Lewis XV., the "Family Compact" of 1733--the old pact of the Bourbon princes for the checking of English maritime supremacy. Having news of this transaction, Pitt advised instant war with Spain. But Bute opposed him, and when the king openly gave his support to his old tutor, Pitt was forced to resign the office which he had held for five years with such credit and distinction (October 5, 1761).

[Sidenote: =Newcastle forced to resign.=]

The king received the great minister's resignation with joy, and next set himself to get rid of Pitt's unworthy colleague, Newcastle. That old jobber clung to his place till May, 1762: but, finding that the king was determined to strip him of his crown patronage, and thwart him in his management of the House of Commons, he was finally forced to follow Pitt into retirement. Thus Bute became the chief minister of the realm.

[Sidenote: =Spain joins France.--English maritime successes.=]

The king's favourite was to hold power for less than two years, but into that short space many important events were compressed. The war with Spain, which Pitt had declared to be imminent, broke out in 1762, and the French hoped for a moment that they might be saved by their new ally. But Spain's power proved to have declined so low, that her interference made no difference to the fate of the war. The able generals and admirals whom Pitt had discovered and promoted, made short work of the Spanish fleets and armies. Ere he had been a year at war with England, Charles III. saw two of his greatest colonies fall into the hands of his enemy. Havanna, the richest city of the West Indies, and Manilla, the capital of the Philippine Islands in the far East, were both in English hands by the end of 1762. In the same space of time Admiral Rodney captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and all the rest of the French West Indies. Meanwhile Ferdinand of Brunswick, with the Anglo-Hanoverian army in Germany, had maintained his old superiority over the French army of the Rhine.

Stripped of her colonies, with her fleet entirely destroyed, her armies on the continent beaten back, and her exchequer completely drained dry, France was now compelled to sue for any terms that Bute and King George would grant her. Her ally Spain, equally disheartened by the turn which the war had taken, followed her example.

[Sidenote: =The Peace of Paris.=]

Nothing could please the English king better than the conclusion of peace. He gave Bute a free hand, and readily consented to the conclusion of the treaty of Paris (February, 1763). By this agreement France ceded to England the vast province of Canada, and all her American claims east of the Mississippi, retaining only some fishing rights on the coast of Newfoundland, which have proved very troublesome in our own day. At the same time, the West Indian Islands of St. Vincent, Tobago, Grenada, and Dominica were surrendered, as well as the African settlement of Senegal. France also undertook to keep no garrisons in her factories in Hindostan, when they should be restored to her. She gave back Minorca, which she had held since Byng's disaster, and withdrew her armies from Germany. But she received back much that she had lost, and had no power of recovering--Belleisle in Europe, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadaloupe in the West Indies, Goree in Africa, and all her Indian establishments. In a similar way Spain ceded to us the swampy and uninhabited peninsula of Florida, which rounded off the line of our North American colonies; but she received back the two wealthy settlements of Havanna and Manilla, which she could never have regained by force of arms.

The peace of Paris was not received with enthusiasm in England. It was said, and truly, that Pitt would have asked and obtained much better terms, and that it was weak and futile to restore to France and Spain their lost colonies. Yet, looking at our enormous gains, it seems absurd to complain. The treaty made England supreme in America and in Hindostan, and ratified her permanent ascendency at sea. When so much was secured, it appeared greedy to ask for yet more, for never by any previous treaty had England won so much or brought a war so triumphantly to a close.

[Sidenote: =The treaty of Hubertsburg.=]

But one blot on Bute's reputation can not be passed over. He deserted, most shamelessly, our useful if unscrupulous ally, King Frederic of Prussia. Having gained what England required, he left Frederic to shift for himself, withdrawing our armies from Germany, and stopping the liberal subsidies which had maintained the king's famishing exchequer. If fortune had not favoured him, Frederic might have been ruined by the loss of his only ally. He was saved, however, by the unexpected withdrawal of Russia from the hostile ranks. He proved able to hold his own against Austria, his one remaining foe, and brought the Seven Years' War to an end by the treaty of Hubertsburg ere the year 1763 had expired. But he never forgave England for the mean trick which Bute had played him, and would never again make an alliance with her.

[Sidenote: =Resignation of Bute.=]

When the war was over, Bute found his position as prime minister quite unbearable. He was clamoured at by Pitt's numerous admirers for making peace on too easy terms. At the same time the Whig borough-mongers, who followed Newcastle, took their revenge on him in Parliament by rejecting all his bills. He was decried as an upstart Scot, a mere court favourite, "the Gaveston of the eighteenth century," and the enemy of the greatness of England. Though he lavished the public money and the crown patronage on all sides, even more shamelessly than Newcastle had done, he could not hold his own. Bute was a sensitive man, and apparently could not bear up against the odium which his position as a court-minister, disliked both by the nation and the Houses of Parliament, brought upon him. In April, 1763, he laid down the seals of office, much to the regret of his royal master.

[Sidenote: =Divisions of the Whig party.=]

Thus King George had been defeated in his first contest with the Whigs. He was compelled to draw back for a moment and to rearrange his plans. His next scheme was to try the effect of playing off the various clans and factions of the Whigs one against another. For the fall of the great Pitt-Newcastle cabinet had split the Whig party into a complicated series of family groups and alliances--divided by no difference in principle, but only by matters of personal interest. The king thought that he could make and unmake ministries by the unscrupulous use of the votes of his "friends" in Parliament, and so hold the balance between the various sections of his enemies, till he could reduce them all to powerlessness.

[Sidenote: =The Grenville-Bedford ministry.=]

To succeed the Earl of Bute, George made choice of the Whig leader whom he thought least objectionable, a narrow-minded statesman named George Grenville, who had hitherto shown himself fairly amenable to the royal influence. But the king had made a mistake; Grenville was as obstinate as himself, and when he found his master interfering in his patronage and intriguing with his followers, he allied himself with one of the great Whig clans, that headed by the Duke of Bedford--a faction which was jocosely called the "Bloomsbury Gang," because it centred at the duke's residence, Bedford House, Bloomsbury.

[Sidenote: =The "North Briton."--General warrants declared illegal.=]

The Grenville-Bedford ministry only lasted two years (1763-1765), and was overthrown by another Whig alliance, whose principal leaders were the Duke of Grafton and the Marquis of Rockingham. But short though its tenure of office was, it left its mark on history. In England itself the act of this cabinet which made most noise was the prosecution of Wilkes. John Wilkes was a member of Parliament, a party journalist of gross scurrility and a man of scandalous private life, but he had the good fortune to be made twice in his life a martyr to oppressive government. He had grossly libelled Lord Bute in his newspaper, the North Briton, but his chief offence in the eyes of Grenville was that he had, in No. 45 of that publication, made abusive comments on the royal speech at the end of the session of 1763. For this he was illegally seized and imprisoned, under a "general warrant," a document issued by Grenville, not against him by name, but against "the authors, printers, and publishers of No. 45 of the North Briton." He was acquitted when put on his trial, under the plea that he had been illegally arrested. "A general warrant is no warrant, because it names no one," was the decision of Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice; and so this dangerous and tyrannical form of arrest was declared illegal. Wilkes posed as a victim of arbitrary government, and obtained great popularity in spite of his infamous character. But Grenville then prosecuted him for publishing a blasphemous and obscene poem. Feeling sure that he would be condemned, Wilkes absconded to France, and lived there four years; he was accounted by many a victim of malicious political persecution, and never lost his favour with the mob of London.

But while raising this storm in a teacup about the worthless Wilkes, George Grenville was committing another and a very different mistake in a matter of the highest importance. It is to him that we must attribute the first beginnings of the quarrel between England and her North-American colonies.

[Sidenote: =The Stamp Act.=]

The Seven Years' War had left behind it a heavy burden of debt and taxation, and George Grenville, while searching around for new sources of revenue, was struck with the bright idea that he might tax the colonies. Accordingly, he brought forward in 1764, and passed in 1765, a bill which asserted the right of Parliament to lay imposts on our possessions over-seas, and proceeded to prescribe that certain stamp duties on legal documents were in future to be paid by our American colonies. The proceeds were to go to maintain the British troops quartered among them.

[Sidenote: =The North American colonies.=]

The Stamp Act was bitterly resented by the inhabitants of America. It was the first circumstance that really taught the thirteen colonies, which lay scattered along the coast from Massachusetts to Georgia, to combine in a common movement. Hitherto they had been without any formal bond of union between themselves. Legally, New York had no more to do with Virginia than in our own day Jamaica has with Tasmania. Each was administered as a separate unity depending immediately on the English crown. Their origins and the character of their population were very different. The Puritan farmers and seamen of Massachusetts, the slave-owning planters of Virginia, the Anglo-Dutch of New York, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania had few sympathies in common. Hitherto they had been jealous of each other; colony quarrelled fiercely with colony, and the chief tie that had kept them together was the common dread which all felt, of the aggression of the enterprising French governors at Quebec. It was this fear of the French which had enabled William Pitt to induce them to join loyally in his great scheme for the conquest of Canada.

[Sidenote: =They unite to resist the Stamp Act.=]

Now that the restraining influence of their dread of France was removed, the colonies were no longer compelled to lean so closely on England. They were rapidly growing in population, wealth, and national spirit. It only required some common provocation to make them forget their petty local jealousies and turn fiercely to defend what they believed to be their rights. This provocation the pedantic George Grenville now proceeded to supply.

[Sidenote: =The case for the Stamp Act.=]

Grenville had much to say on his side. It was quite fair that the colonies should pay something towards the expenses of the Seven Years' War, which had largely been incurred for their benefit. It was rational that they should be asked to maintain the troops still quartered in America for their protection. And the Stamp Act imposed on them a very small tax, only some few thousands a year. Moreover, Grenville had studied the old precedents, and could show clear instances of imperial taxation levied in the past from various possessions over-sea. But, above the letter of the law, statesmen are responsible to the nation for the wisdom as well as for the legality of their actions. It is no excuse for the unwise minister to plead that he has the statute-book on his side, if it can be proved that he has common sense against him. It is for this reason that Grenville and his two successors, Grafton and North, are held to have incurred a graver load of responsibility than any other British statesman has ever borne.

[Sidenote: =Grounds of the colonial opposition.=]

The main line of protest which the colonists adopted was grounded on a favourite maxim of William Pitt, that "there should be no taxation without representation"; that is, that any persons taxed ought to be represented in Parliament, and allowed a share in voting their own contributions. It was, of course, impossible in those days to ask that American representatives should appear in the House of Commons, an idea which the remoteness of their country and the slowness of communication with it rendered absurd. What the colonists therefore meant was that, being unrepresented, they ought not to be taxed. They were growing so strong that they would no longer endure to be treated as mere dependencies, and governed solely for the benefit of England.

[Sidenote: =The Rockingham ministry.--Repeal of the Stamp Act.=]

Serious trouble would have ensued if George Grenville had been able to persist in his schemes. But he was overthrown in 1765 by the machinations of George III., who bade the eighty or ninety "King's Friends" in the Commons to vote against him, and combine with the Opposition Whigs to turn him out of office. Grenville was evicted and dismissed. He was replaced by a new combination of Whig clans. The new cabinet was formed by the junction of the Marquis of Rockingham and the Duke of Grafton, to whom the old Duke of Newcastle was for the moment allied. Lord Rockingham was a more moderate man than Grenville, though a less able one. He disliked trouble, and, to silence American complaints, took the very wise step of repealing the Stamp Act. But the Rockingham administration lasted only a year, for in 1766 the "King's Friends" once more received orders from their master to overthrow the cabinet of the day. Rockingham was left in a minority, and forced to lay down his seals, and a second Whig faction had felt the weight of King George's hand.

[Sidenote: =The Pitt-Grafton ministry.=]

The next ministry marked a new shifting of the political kaleidoscope. Pitt, who had been out of place since 1761, was now invited by the king to take office. He consented, believing (as he always did) that he was the one man able to administer the British empire. To fill up his cabinet he chose some of the younger Whig leaders, who were ready to serve under him from their admiration for his personality. The chief of them were the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne. But the Pitt-Grafton ministry lasted for a few months only. Pitt was growing old, and his powers were weakening. He felt the hard work of the House of Commons too much for him, and on taking office retired to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham (July, 1766). But even there the strain over-taxed his strength. Less than a twelvemonth after he had taken office he was stricken down by illness, which took the form of brain-trouble. He grew incompetent to transact any business, and the cabinet which he had formed passed entirely under the control of his colleague, the Duke of Grafton.

[Sidenote: =Renewed attempt to tax the colonies.=]

The ministry of the Duke of Grafton proved the most disastrous that England has ever known, with the single exception of that of Grafton's immediate successor, Lord North. It was this Whig administration that finally renewed the struggle with America, which had been suspended since the repeal of the Stamp Act. With the duke's assent, Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, brought in a bill for raising in America duties on tea, glass, paper, and painter's colours. The whole was to bring in about £40,000 a year. Like the Stamp Act, this measure distinctly affirmed the right of England to tax her colonies without their consent. The Americans remembered that their previous resistance had been crowned with success, and commenced an agitation against the new act. A brisk fire of petitions was kept up by the houses of representatives of the various colonies, who besought the king--both publicly and privately--the House of Commons, and the ministers to remove the tax, restating their old theory of "No taxation without representation." Moreover, the colonies began formally to correspond with each other, and to find that the same spirit of discontent prevailed in all, a fact very ominous for the home government.

[Sidenote: =Rioting in Boston.=]

At the head of the thirteen colonies was Massachusetts, whose capital Boston was the largest town in America, and a very thriving port. Its seafaring population had the greatest objection to the new customs duties. Mobs were continually filling the streets to demonstrate against England, and as early as 1768 the rioting grew serious. In 1770 Boston saw the first bloodshed in the American quarrel. A party of soldiers, stoned by a mob till they could no longer keep their temper, fired and shot four or five rioters. This "massacre," as the colonists called it, brought the bitter feeling against England to a head.

The Grafton cabinet at home could not at all understand the feelings of the Americans. They supposed that it was the mere amount of the tax that was causing discontent, and contented themselves with pointing out that it was insignificant, not seeing that it was the principle of taxation, not the small sum actually levied, that was exasperating the colonists.

But the duke and his followers were not to see the end of the matter. In 1770 their day of reckoning with their master, the king, had arrived. George III. had been perpetually increasing his band of followers in the Commons, and the new Tory party was grown large enough, not only to hold the balance between two Whig cliques, but to make a bid for power on its own account.

[Sidenote: =Wilkes and the Middlesex election.=]

The Grafton ministry fell before a double assault. Pitt, whose health had now recovered so far that he was able to appear in his seat in the House of Lords, was thundering at them for their misconduct of American affairs. But another difficulty was far more actively operative in their overthrow. The irrepressible John Wilkes had returned from France, had stood for the county of Middlesex, and had been elected. The cabinet declared him ineligible, on account of his old outlawry, and made the House of Commons expel him. Nothing daunted, Wilkes appeared as a candidate again, and was re-elected. Then Grafton and his majority enacted that the defeated opponent of Wilkes, who had received only three hundred votes, was the legitimate member for Middlesex. This iniquitous step roused public feeling; it was said that liberty was at an end if the ministry could appoint members of Parliament in defiance of the votes of the electors. Even Charles I. in his worst days had not falsified the results of elections, as the Whigs of Grafton's party were doing.

[Sidenote: =Fall of the Grafton ministry.=]

Stormed at by Pitt, scurrilously libelled by the able but malignant political writer who signed himself Junius, hooted down by the mob of London, and abandoned by the "King's Friends" in his moment of distress, Grafton resigned. It was generally thought that another Whig ministry would appear on the scene, probably an alliance between Pitt and Lord Rockingham. This, however, was not to be so. The king had been counting up his forces. Having upset in succession four different Whig ministries, he now thought himself strong enough to renew the experiment which he had tried in Bute's day.

[Sidenote: =Lord North Prime Minister.=]

Accordingly, the nation was surprised by the news that George had made Lord North prime minister. North was a parliamentary jobber of the same type as Newcastle. He was a good-natured, indolent man, of limited intelligence, but shrewd and business-like. He made his bargain with the king, and undertook to carry out his policy. He was the tool, George the hand that guided it.

[Sidenote: =Impotence of the Whigs in Parliament.=]

For the next twelve years (1770-82) George ruled the nation according to his own ideas, and led it into the most slippery paths. His compact body of "King's Friends," aided by mercenary helpers from among the Whigs, preserved a constant majority in Parliament under the astute management of North. The old Whig clans raged in impotent wrath, but could not shake the ministry. Their expulsion from power had one good effect--it taught them to put some reality into their old assertion that they were the people's friends and the guardians of constitutional liberty. In their day of adversity they began to advocate real reforms, though in fifty years of power they had executed none. The younger men among them, such as the eloquent Edmund Burke, began to stir the questions of constitutional reform which were to be brought into play later on, as the new principles of the Whig party. They denounced parliamentary corruption, ministerial jobbing, and attacks on the liberty of the press, or the rights of the constituencies. Hints were dropped that the old rotten boroughs might be abolished, and more members given to the populous counties and cities.

[Sidenote: =The tea duties.--Further riots in Boston.=]

But while the Whigs were talking of reforms, North and his master were actually engaged in bringing a much more exciting topic to the front. In four years they succeeded in plunging England into a desperate war with her Transatlantic colonies. The new ministry was determined to persevere with the old scheme of the Grenville and Grafton cabinets for taxing America. North, under his master's orders, remitted the taxes on paper and glass, but insisted on retaining that on tea. His persistence led to open violence in America. In 1773, a mob disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the tea-ships in Boston harbour, and cast the chests into the sea. The local authorities pretended that they could not discover the rioters. In high wrath, the Government resolved to punish the whole city of Boston. North produced a bill for closing its harbour to all commerce, and compelling the ships that had been wont to trade with it to go to the neighbouring port of Salem.

[Sidenote: =The Massachusetts Government Act.=]

This unwise and arbitrary bill was followed by another yet more high-handed, which annulled the charter of the State of Massachusetts, depriving it of its house of representatives, and making it a crown colony, to be administered by government officials and judges sent out from England. This punishment far exceeded anything that the people of Boston had earned by their rioting, and made all the other colonies tremble for their own liberties.

[Sidenote: =The Congress at Philadelphia.=]

The Massachusetts Government Act was the last straw which broke down the patience of the Americans. The representative bodies of all the colonies passed votes of sympathy with the people of Boston, and ordered a general fast. Soon after, they all resolved to send deputies to a "General Congress" at Philadelphia, in order to concert common measures for their defence against arbitrary government. This body, which had no legal status in the eye of the law, proceeded to act as if it were the central authority in North America. It issued a "Declaration of Rights," which set forth the points in which the liberties of the colonies were supposed to have been infringed. But it also took the strong step of declaring a kind of blockade against English commerce, by forbidding Americans to purchase any goods imported from the mother-country.

[Sidenote: =Outbreak of war.=]

In view of this threatening aspect of affairs, Lord North began to send over troops to America, foreseeing that a collision might occur at any moment. He was not wrong; while fruitless attempts were being made to pacify the offended colonists without giving in to their demands, actual war broke out.

[Sidenote: =The skirmish of Lexington.=]

The House of Representatives of Massachusetts, when abolished by royal mandate, had migrated to Concord, and resumed its sittings there. Seeing that this act of contumacy must lead to an attempt to dissolve it by force, it called out the local militia, and began to collect munitions of war. General Gage, the governor of Boston, on hearing of this, sent out 800 men to seize and destroy these stores. This force was fired on by a small body of Massachusetts militia at Lexington, where the first blood shed in the war was spilt. After burning the stores, the British troops started to march back, but were set upon by the levies of the district, who kept up a running fight for several hours, and drove the regulars into Boston with a loss of 200 men (April 19, 1775).

[Sidenote: =George Washington.=]

This skirmish proved the beginning of a general war. When the news spread, all the colonies sent their militia into the field, and the Congress at Philadelphia formally assumed supreme authority, and named a commander-in-chief. This was George Washington, a Virginian planter, who had seen much service in the last French war, and was almost the only colonist who possessed a good military reputation. No choice could have been better; Washington was a staid, upright, energetic man, very different from the windy demagogues who led the rebellion in most of the colonies. His integrity and honesty of purpose made him respected by all, and his readiness of resource and unfailing cheerfulness and perseverance made him the idol of the willing but undisciplined bands who followed him to the field.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Bunker's Hill.=]

Ere Washington reached the seat of war in Massachusetts, a battle had been fought. The colonists were defeated, but not discouraged, for at the fight of Bunker's Hill (June 17, 1775), they maintained their entrenchments for some time against the regulars, and were only beaten out of them after a very stiff combat. General Gage, a very unenterprising man, was so disheartened by the losses of his troops that he did not follow up his victory, and allowed Washington to reorganize the beaten colonists and blockade Boston.

[Sidenote: =The "Olive Branch Petition."=]

The struggle was now bound to be fought out to the end. When the Congress sent to London the "Olive Branch Petition," a last attempt at a peaceful settlement, the king bade Lord North return it unanswered, as coming from a body which had no legal existence. The small regular army of England--some 40,000 men scattered all over the world--was obviously unable to cope with so great a rebellion, so the government had to begin raising new regiments, and enlisting Hessian and Hanoverian auxiliaries in Germany.

[Sidenote: =The Declaration of Independence.=]

While these new forces were being got ready--a whole year was consumed in preparation--the Americans had all their own way. In March, 1776, the royal troops were forced to evacuate Boston, the only stronghold that they held in the colonies. Three months later the Congress took the decisive step of throwing off all allegiance to England, by publishing the "Declaration of Independence," and forming the thirteen colonies into a federal republic (July 4, 1776).

[Sidenote: =English victory at Brooklyn.=]

Very shortly after, the English reinforcements began to appear, and General Howe with 20,000 men landed on Long Island, in the State of New York. For a moment it appeared as if the rebellion would collapse before this formidable army. Howe beat Washington at the battle of Brooklyn (August, 1776). He retook New York, and then landed on the mainland and overran New Jersey. The colonial army disbanded in utter dismay, and only four or five thousand men kept together under Washington.

[Sidenote: =Difficulties of the English.=]

But in the moment of victory the English began to realize the difficulty of their task. The land was everywhere hostile, and could only be held down by garrisons scattered broadcast. But America was so vast that enough men could not be found to garrison every port and city. When Howe began to distribute his men in small bodies, Washington swept down upon these isolated regiments and destroyed them. The English general was forced to halt, and to send home for yet further reinforcements.

[Sidenote: =Burgoyne's expedition.=]

He was not denied them, for George III. had set his heart on teaching the rebellious colonists that he could not be defied with impunity. While Howe was sent fresh regiments, and ordered to take Philadelphia, a new army of 8000 men was despatched to Canada under General Burgoyne, and bidden to march by Lake Champlain and the Hudson river, to attack the colonies in the rear. Meanwhile a third force from New York was to ascend the Hudson and lend a helping hand to Burgoyne.

[Sidenote: =Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga.=]

Half of this plan only was executed. Howe won the battle of Brandywine over Washington and took Philadelphia, but Burgoyne failed lamentably. The distance he had to cover was too great; after struggling with difficulty across the wilderness that divided Canada from the States, he found himself with a half-starved army at Saratoga. Here he was beset by all the militia of the New England States under General Gates. They outnumbered him by two to one, and held strong positions in woods and hills which he could not force. The troops from New York failed to come to his aid, his retreat on Canada was cut off, and after hard fighting he laid down his arms, with 5000 starving men, the remnant of his much-tried army (October 17, 1777).

[Sidenote: =France and Spain declare war on England.=]

The news of the surrender at Saratoga flew all round the world, and had the most disastrous consequences. Judging that England had at last involved herself in a fatal struggle, her old enemy France resolved to take her revenge for all that she had suffered in the Seven Years' War. The ministers of the young king, Lewis XVI., thought that they might now win back Canada and India, and shatter the commercial and colonial supremacy that Britain had gained by the treaty of Paris. In December, 1777, France recognized the independence of America. In February, 1778, she declared war on England. Spain, bound as of old by the "Family Compact" of the Bourbons, and eager to win back Minorca and Gibraltar, followed suit in the next year. Holland was added to our enemies in 1780.

The interference of France profoundly modified the face of the war. Instead of a mere local struggle between England and her colonists, it became a general contention all over the world for the same prize that had been disputed in the Seven Years' War--the empire of the sea. But this time England had not only to fight her old foes, but her own children. Moreover, she was deprived of the aid of Frederic of Prussia, the most useful of allies in the old contest; for, disgusted by the conduct of Bute and George III. in 1762, he refused to hear of any renewed alliance with England.

[Sidenote: =Critical position of England.=]

Nothing could have been more difficult than the problem which England had now to face. With all her disposable army over-sea in America, she found herself threatened by an invasion at home, and saw her possessions all over the world beset by France and Spain. Gibraltar and Minorca, the West Indies, and all our other outlying posts, were held by garrisons of wholly inadequate strength. The fleet, which, owing to the continental character of the American struggle, had been hitherto neglected, was suddenly called upon to act as our main line of defence, and proved too small for its task.

[Sidenote: =Last speech and death of Pitt.=]

King George was as obstinate and courageous as he was narrow-minded. With a firm resolution that was admirable but unwise, he stood forth to face the whole world in arms, without yielding an inch. It was in vain that the aged William Pitt, whom the news of foreign war called out from his retirement, came down to the House of Lords to speak for reconciliation with America at all costs. He urged that we must not fight our own kith and kin, but seek peace with them, and turn all our forces against the foreign foe. After an impassioned harangue he fainted in his seat in the House, and was carried home to die (May 11, 1778).

[Sidenote: =France sends aid to the colonists.=]

The French commenced the war by sending supplies and money to America. Soon after, they despatched a fleet and an army to the same quarter. This had a marked effect on the face of the war. The English lost, in 1778, all their strongholds in the colonies except the island city of New York. But this reverse only led the king to try a new attack on the Americans. The southern states of Georgia and Carolina were known to be less zealous for the cause of American independence than the other colonies, and to contain many loyalists. It was resolved to transfer the English army to this quarter (1779).

[Sidenote: =Expedition of Cornwallis.=]

Accordingly Lord Cornwallis, an able and active officer, was charged with the invasion of the South. For a time the English carried all before them. They took Savannah and Charleston, and overran all Georgia and South Carolina. Many of the loyal colonists took arms in their favour, and it seemed that England would save at least a part of her ancient inheritance. The American Government was much alarmed, and sent southward all its disposable troops, headed by Gates, the victor of Saratoga. But Cornwallis beat this large army at Camden (August, 1780), and added North Carolina to his previous conquests. But with a mere 10,000 men scattered all over three vast States, he was unable to maintain any very firm hold on the country, and his flanks and rear were harassed by predatory bands of partisans, who slipped round to raise trouble behind him. He treated these guerillas as brigands, and shot some of them when captured, a proceeding which served no end but to exasperate the Americans.

[Sidenote: =Cornwallis at Yorktown.=]

Persevering in his ideas of conquest, Cornwallis in 1781 collected his army, and, leaving a very scanty garrison behind him, set out to invade Virginia. He beat the Americans at Guildford Court House (March 15), and chased La Fayette, a young French officer who was commanding the colonists in this quarter, into the interior of Virginia. But finding his army worn out with long marches and incessant fighting, he dropped down on to Yorktown, a seaport on the peninsula of the same name, to recruit himself with food and reinforcements from the English fleet, which had been ordered to meet him there.

[Sidenote: =De Grasse drives off the English fleet.=]

This march to Yorktown ended in a fearful disaster. Cornwallis found no ships to welcome him. A French squadron had intercepted Admiral Graves when he set out from New York. Outnumbered by three to two, Graves retired after a slight engagement, and it was the Frenchman De Grasse who now appeared off Yorktown, to blockade instead of to succour the harassed English troops. At the same time Washington, with a powerful American army, reinforced by 6000 French, appeared on the land side, and seized the neck which joins the York peninsula to the Virginian mainland.

[Sidenote: =Cornwallis capitulates.=]

Thus Cornwallis was caught in a trap, between Washington's army and the fleet of De Grasse. He made a desperate attempt to escape by breaking through the American lines, but, when it failed, was forced to surrender for want of food and ammunition, with 4500 men, the remnants of the victorious army of the South. With him fell all hopes of the retention of Georgia and Carolina by the British. The feeble garrisons which he had left behind him were swept away, and the fortress of Charleston alone remained of all the conquests which he had made (October, 1781). New York, in a similar way, was now left as the only British post in the North.

[Sidenote: =Reverses in the Mediterranean and the West and East Indies.=]

Under this disaster it seemed as if England must succumb, more especially as it was but one of a simultaneous batch of defeats suffered in all corners of the empire. Minorca was captured by the French in the same autumn, after a vigorous defence. All the West India islands, save Jamaica and Barbados, suffered the same fate. In India a French fleet under De Suffren was hovering off the coast of Madras, while at the same time Haider Ali, a famous military adventurer who had made himself ruler of Mysore, invaded the Carnatic from the inland, cut an English army to pieces, and ravaged the country up to the gates of Madras.

[Sidenote: =The Gordon Riots.=]

At home too matters were looking very dark. The dull and reactionary government of North had been suffering a stormy trial. In 1780 the strange and fantastic Gordon Riots had seemed for a moment to shake the foundations of society in London. Lord George Gordon, a fanatical and half-crazed member of Parliament, had stirred up an agitation against some bills for the relief of Romanists which had come before the Lower House. He raised a mob which burnt many Catholic chapels, destroyed the houses of unpopular persons, and then turned to indiscriminate plunder. The ministry and the magistrates showed a strange weakness before this outburst of anarchy, and it was left to King George himself to order the troops to act against the mob, and get the streets cleared by the prompt shooting of plunderers.

[Sidenote: =The Irish volunteers.=]

In Ireland things were far more dangerous. In the absence of the regular army, the ministry had permitted the Protestants of Ireland to form volunteer corps for the protection of the island from French invasion. But the volunteers, finding themselves the only force in the land, proceeded to follow the example of America, by agitating for the complete parliamentary freedom of Ireland, and the repeal of Poynings' Act, which subjected the Irish to the British legislature. It was only their fear of their own Catholic countrymen which kept them from demanding separation, and all through 1781-82 an open rebellion seemed possible at any moment; nor had England a single soldier to spare to repress such a rising. Indeed, the trouble only ended by the complete surrender of the English Government. North's successors in May, 1782, granted the Irish the Home Rule they demanded, and for eighteen years (1782-1800) the Irish legislature was completely independent of that of Great Britain.

[Sidenote: =Rodney's victory.--Relief of Gibraltar.=]

The general break-up of the British empire seemed possible and even probable in 1782. But two great victories saved it. Admiral Rodney on April 12 met the French fleet in the West Indies, and inflicted a crushing defeat on it off St. Lucia, capturing his opponent, De Grasse. This restored English maritime supremacy in America, and led to the recovery of most of the lost West India Islands. A similar triumph in waters nearer home followed in the autumn of the same year. A great French and Spanish army and fleet had been besieging Gibraltar since 1779. It made its final attack in September, 1782, bringing up vast floating batteries to compete with the artillery of the Rock. But General Eliott, the indefatigable governor of the place, destroyed all these cumbrous structures with red-hot shot; and a few days later an English fleet under Lord Howe arrived and relieved the long-beleaguered garrison.

[Sidenote: =Lord North resigns.--The Whigs make peace with the colonies.=]

Six months before the relief of Gibraltar, Lord North, seeing all things round him in disaster, and sensible that the king's policy was no longer possible, laid down office. To his grief and humiliation, George III. was forced to call his enemies the Whigs into power, and to surrender the administration of affairs to them. A Whig cabinet under Lord Rockingham was formed, which immediately made overtures of peace to the United Colonies, conceding complete independence. The Americans were half bankrupt and wholly tired of the war; they accepted the terms with alacrity, and, to the disgust of their French allies, made peace in April, 1783.

[Sidenote: =The Treaty of Versailles.=]

This left France and Spain committed to a war which was no longer going in their favour. England had reasserted her old maritime supremacy, and seemed very far from crushed. But she was so disheartened that it was well known that she would make vast concessions to end the war. The allies consented to treat, and granted the new Whig ministry comparatively easy terms. England ceded Minorca and Florida to Spain, and St. Lucia and Tobago, Senegal, and Goree to France, besides restoring the Indian factories of the French. So by the treaty of Versailles (September, 1783) ended the disastrous "War of American Independence."

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XXXVI. THE YOUNGER PITT, AND THE RECOVERY OF ENGLISH PROSPERITY

1782-1793.

[Sidenote: =Results of the war.=]

When England bowed before the force of circumstances, and concluded peace with America, France, Spain, and Holland in 1783, she had touched the lowest point of weakness which had been her lot since the fifteenth century. Peace had been imposed by victorious enemies, after a fruitless struggle of eight years. English armies had grown accustomed to defeat; English fleets could barely hold their own upon the seas. Money had been spent with a lavish hand, and the National Debt was doubled. As a result of all her efforts, England had not only to surrender smaller possessions all over the world, but to witness the loss of her great Western empire, the thirteen colonies which had been the pride of her statesmen, and one of the main outlets of her commerce. A blow such as the loss of America seemed likely to be fatal to England. Not only was her prestige gone, and her pride humbled, but she was left with her finances in an apparently hopeless condition of exhaustion, and her internal politics in a state of complete disintegration. King George's great experiment in autocratic government had completely failed; he had led the nation into disaster and bankruptcy. His ministry had been struck down by the course of events, the irrefutable logic of the American war. Lord North had retired; his master had been forced to own himself beaten, and to make over the conduct of the realm to a Whig ministry. But the Rockingham cabinet was evidently a mere stop-gap. George's skilful policy of the last twenty years had so divided and broken up the Whig party, that it was difficult to reconstitute a strong cabinet from its remnants. When peace with America and France had been secured--that peace being the one great mandate which the nation had given to the Whigs--it seemed likely that the perennial jealousies of their cliques and clans would once more wreck the party, and that the king, with his steady power of intrigue, his pension list, and his power of patronage, would succeed in placing some second North in office.

[Sidenote: =Changed character of the Whigs.=]

The Whigs, however, were no longer their old selves. The great effect of their twelve years' exile from power had been to teach the better men of the party to detest the old methods of parliamentary corruption and family jobbery which they had learnt from Walpole and Newcastle. The Whigs had failed to realize the hatefulness of these practices when employed by themselves, but when their own engine was turned against them by the king, they began to see its shame. That the party which professed to represent the people and to forward the immortal principles of the Revolution, should ground its power on official bribery and corruption, was humiliating to the better men in the Whig camp. Hence it came that the nobler spirits among them resolved to protest against the old methods, and to claim that the victory of their party over the king in 1782 should result in something more than a distribution of the loaves and fishes of office among their partisans. Unhappily, however, much of the old leaven of corruption still hung about the Whigs, and the section which represented it was just about to perpetrate the worst piece of jobbery which their party ever committed.

[Sidenote: =Death of Lord Rockingham.--The Shelburne ministry.=]

The one thing in which all sections of the Whigs could agree, was dislike of the royal influence, as employed by George III. The first end, therefore, which the Rockingham cabinet set before itself, was to cut down the means of corruption which the king possessed. The pension list was diminished, no single person was to be allowed to draw more than £300, the "secret service" funds in the royal hands were cut down, and a certain number of the useless and expensive offices about the court abolished. This was all very well so far as it went, but much more was needed, and it was very uncertain how much time would be granted to the new Whig ministers to carry out further reforms. Their leader, Lord Rockingham, died suddenly in July, 1782, long ere the formal treaties of peace with France and Spain had been signed. He was a man of slender abilities, but honest and popular, and able to keep his party together. On his death the old clan rivalries of his followers burst once more into life. The king sent for Lord Shelburne, the leader of the liberal and reforming party among the Whigs, and offered him the premiership. But Shelburne was viewed with bitter dislike by many of the Whig chiefs; his sharp tongue and his love of intrigue made him many foes, and when he took office they refused to serve under him. On the mere ground of personal jealousy and resentment, the larger half of the party went into opposition and joined the Tories. Not only the old family cliques that represented the corrupt and selfish Whigs of an earlier day, but many of the younger men, who called themselves the friends of liberty and reform, took this suicidal step. Among them was Charles James Fox, the most able and open-minded man in the party, but irregular in his private life, a gambler and a lover of the bottle, somewhat tainted with the failings of a political adventurer, and too factious to be altogether honest in his actions. Fox had been a Tory in his earlier years, but had quarrelled with Lord North in 1772, and after that date had joined the opposition, become one of its chiefs, and been the first to favour peace with America.

[Sidenote: =William Pitt the younger.=]

Shelburne took office, therefore, with a comparatively weak following. So many of the old leaders had refused to aid him, that he was constrained to give the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons to a young man of twenty-three, William Pitt, the second son of the great Earl of Chatham. This appointment, startling though it appeared, was a very wise one. The younger Pitt was the most remarkable man of his age. He had inherited from his father high principles, an enthusiastic belief in the future of England, and a sympathy for the cause of reform. He had been reared as a Whig, but had no sympathies for the old parliamentary jobbing and corruption of the party. His personal integrity was as great as that of his father, and his hatred of intrigue and bribery even greater. Though quite new to the House of Commons, he made a sensation on his first appearance in it, which showed that men saw that the mantle of his father had fallen upon his shoulders. His self-confidence and belief in his own powers were as great as those of Chatham had been, but he was devoid of the theatrical pomposity which had sometimes marred the effect of his parent's eloquence. As Chatham had believed himself the destined saviour of England from the dangers of foreign war, so it was his son's aim and end to deliver England from internal faction, and to build up a great constitutional party which should combine loyalty to the crown with liberal and progressive legislation. This party, as Pitt imagined, would consist of the more enlightened Whigs, the section of the party which had once followed his father, and now obeyed Shelburne. That it would ever grow to be known as the "Tory party," would at this moment have been beyond his comprehension.

[Sidenote: =Fall of Shelburne.=]

The Shelburne ministry only held office for nine months (July, 1782, to April, 1783). From the first it was doomed to fall before the hostility of the Whig opposition. It survived long enough to ratify the final conclusion of the peace negotiations which the Rockingham cabinet had begun. But it fell before a factious motion of Fox, who moved a vote of censure on the very reasonable and moderate terms on which peace had been bought from France. This motion was supported by the ominous combination of the old Tory supporters of Lord North with the discontented sections of the Whig party. It drove Shelburne to instant resignation.

[Sidenote: =Fox and North combine.=]

But no one could have foreseen the strange sequel to this vote. To the surprise of all save those who were in the secret, it was suddenly announced that Fox and North were about to unite their forces, not for a single division, but for a permanent alliance. Lord North seems to have imbibed in his long tenure of power--from 1770 to 1782--a craving for office at any price. Seeing that the king was too weak for the moment to replace him in his old seat, he plotted an unnatural union with his foes the Whig clans. He could command the allegiance of that section of the Tories who cared more for place and power than for their loyalty towards the crown, of the men who had aided King George from purely personal and corrupt motives. Now he offered Fox and the Duke of Portland, the Whig leaders, the invaluable aid of this solid phalanx of votes, if they would admit him into their alliance. Having no political aims or principles of his own save a desire to possess power and patronage, he could undertake to fall in with any schemes that they might desire. To their great discredit the Whigs closed eagerly with this immoral proposal, and took North into partnership, though they had been spending the last ten years in vehement abuse of his methods of government and his mean subservience to the king.

[Sidenote: =The Coalition Ministry.=]

Hence came into existence the "Coalition Ministry" of April, 1783, in which the followers of North and Fox sat together under the nominal control of the Duke of Portland, one of the chiefs of the old Whig families. The cynical immorality of the combination displeased every one. The king was enraged with his old hireling North for leading away half the Tories to join the hated Whig oligarchs. The nation was puzzled and disgusted to see men who had so often abused each other, combining from no better motive than mere lust for power and office. But unpopular though the new cabinet was, it was for the moment supreme in Parliament by means of its overwhelming majority of votes.

[Sidenote: =Pitt's Reform Bill rejected.=]

The continued existence of the Coalition Government would probably have led to a return to the ancient corruption of Walpole and Newcastle. What the principles of the new Whig administration were, was sufficiently shown by the fate of a Reform Bill, to abolish rotten boroughs and increase the representation of populous districts, which William Pitt brought forward in the summer of 1783. The ministry frowned on a measure which would diminish their power to buy votes, and the bill was rejected by a majority of 144.

But, fortunately for England, the Coalition was not to last for long. It fell partly because of its unpopularity with the nation, and partly because the king tried against it the last of his autocratic methods of interfering with politics.

[Sidenote: =Fox's India Bill.=]

In November, 1783, Fox brought in a bill for rearranging the government of our Indian possessions, a measure which had become necessary in consequence of changes in that country which we shall have to narrate a few pages later on. The manifest failure of the East India Company to provide for the good administration of the growing empire which was falling into its hands, rendered the interference of the Home Government imperative. Fox produced a bill for taking the rule of our Indian possessions entirely out of the power of the Company, which was in the future to confine its activity to commerce alone. All the English officials in India, from the governors of presidencies down to ensigns in the army and clerks, were to be selected by a council of seven commissioners in London, nominated by Parliament. The names of the seven were given, and they were all violent partisans of Fox and North. The bill, good in many ways, was liable to censure in the one point that it gave the ministry a fund of patronage which was certain to be abused. The Fox-North cabinet was nothing if not unscrupulous, and when it got control of the £300,000 of annual patronage which the East India Company possessed, there is no doubt that it would have employed it to forward Whig family jobs and political corruption. An opponent of the bill complained that "it took the diadem off the king's head to place it on that of Mr. Fox." Much was also said as to the injustice of stripping the Company of its chartered rights.

[Sidenote: =The King and Fox's bill.=]

The India Bill, however, passed the Commons, and then came before the Lords. To throw it out, the king now took the unprecedented step of sending down to the House a paper written with his own hand, which Lord Temple was to show to such of the peers as he thought fit. It was to the effect that "whoever voted for the bill was not only not his Majesty's friend, but would be considered as his enemy." This notice was given to all who wavered, or who did not wish to incur the king's personal enmity. It led so many of the weaker Whig peers to abstain from voting, that the bill was thrown out by a majority of nineteen. George's conduct was quite unconstitutional; if it were possible for the king to engage in such an underhand intrigue against his own cabinet, the system of government by responsible ministers became impossible.

[Sidenote: =The Coalition resigns.=]

The Whigs revenged themselves by passing a vote through the Commons stigmatizing Lord Temple's conduct in showing the paper as a high crime and misdemeanour. Nevertheless they had to quit office, though they boasted that they would soon be back again, since George could not find any other ministry to put in their place (December, 1783).

[Sidenote: =Pitt takes office.=]

They were mistaken, however. The king, ready to dare any expedient that would keep the hated Coalition out of power, had offered the position of prime minister to William Pitt. The ambitious young statesman accepted the charge, and took office, though he could only rely on the support of the Shelburne Whigs, the reforming section of the party, aided by the "King's Friends," as those of the Tory party who had not followed North were once again styled.

[Sidenote: =The General Election.=]

The sight of a prime minister of twenty-four, backed by a weak minority, moved the derision of the partisans of Fox and North. They said that they would drive him to resign in three weeks, and at once threw out all the bills which he brought before the House. But, instead of resigning, Pitt was resolved to dissolve Parliament and to face a general election. He knew that his own name was great with the nation, and that the Coalition was universally detested and condemned. His policy was crowned with enormous success. Almost every borough and county where the election was free and the voters numerous, declared against the candidates whom Fox and North recommended. No less than 160 supporters of the Coalition lost their seats, and Pitt came back to Parliament with a clear working majority in his favour (March, 1784).

[Sidenote: =Pitt and the king.=]

Thus began the long and eventful ministry which was to last for the next seventeen years. With the triumph of Pitt English politics are lifted to a higher level, and lose the mean and petty aspect which they had displayed ever since the days of Walpole. For the first time since the century began, England was in the hands of a minister of a spotless personal integrity, who possessed broad views and a definite political programme. His power was enormous, for, in return for having delivered the king from his hated enemies the Whigs, Pitt was granted the royal support even for measures which his narrow-minded sovereign hardly understood and could not love. George tolerated in him a policy which would have maddened him if it had been pursued by the Whigs. In return the minister treated the king with a loyalty and a personal regard which were perhaps hardly deserved by his master.

[Sidenote: =The new Tory party.=]

Pitt took from the elder Tories the loyalty which they had degraded into subservience, and from the Whigs the liberal and reforming principles and hatred of corruption which they had preached but not practised. On the basis of the two combined, he strove to build up a party, new in fact if not in name, from the scattered knots and sections of politicians who had united to oppose the iniquitous coalition of Fox and North. The wonderful success of the earlier years of his administration fixed him firmly in his seat, and enabled him to carry out his policy.

[Sidenote: =The financial situation.=]

He found the country still in the depths of the depression caused by the American war, with a deficit of £12,000,000, and a National Debt which had just mounted up to what was then considered the crushing sum of £200,000,000. So low was public credit that Consols only stood at 60. Yet in five years Pitt could show a prosperous balance-sheet, a revenue rapidly increasing without any additional taxation, a scheme--if a faulty one--for extinguishing the National Debt, and the 3 per cents. at par.

The fact was that in 1784 the state of England was not so bad as it appeared. Financially, the American war failed to ruin the country, because new sources of wealth were developed exactly at the moment when they were wanted. To replace the comparatively small commercial profit which we had been wont to draw from our lost Western colonies, a sudden increase of wealth came flooding in from our new Eastern empire in India. Nor was this all. Even more important were the new channels of profit opened by the development of our home manufactures.

[Sidenote: =Improved communications.=]

We have already spoken of the symptoms of an approaching development in our domestic industries which were beginning to be felt toward the end of the reign of George II. This movement came to maturity in the earlier years of George III. While the king was wrangling with the Whigs, and sowing the seeds of the American war, a revolution was quietly transforming the character of English trade. Between 1760 and 1780 a network of canals had been constructed to connect the centres of manufacturing life. The muddy lanes, which England had hitherto called roads, began at last to disappear, and a multitude of turnpike Acts created new highways along which traffic could readily make its way. The fast-travelling coach superseded the lumbering stage-waggons, which had crept from town to town.

[Sidenote: =Development of the North.=]

Along the new roads and canals rolled a vastly increased volume of trade. The great discovery of the last reign, that iron might be smelted with coal, made Northern England, where coal and iron lie side by side, a great manufacturing district instead of a thinly peopled range of moors, and before the century was out Yorkshire and Lancashire had become the most important industrial centres in the realm.

[Sidenote: =Mechanical inventions.=]

A few years after the expansion of the iron industry came the growth of textile manufactures, fostered by the new discoveries made by Watt and Arkwright. The former, a Glasgow instrument-maker, began the application of steam to the setting of machinery in motion. The latter, a barber at Bolton, perfected the details of that machinery, and showed that it was possible to do quickly and accurately with iron what had hitherto been done slowly and more clumsily with human fingers. Where previously the spinner and weaver co-operated with the precarious motive-power of running water, the new mills, working by steam and able to establish themselves wherever coal was to be found, made their appearance. Thus the price of production was enormously lessened, and English woven goods became able to underbid any others in the markets of the world. For as yet no other nation had learnt the use of steam and machinery, and England had a monopoly of the new inventions. Our linen, woollen, and cotton manufactures were increasing with an astounding rapidity, and wealth and population mounted up by leaps and bounds. It is true that the new factory system was to lead to many social troubles and miseries. In the haste to grow rich, the mill-owners took little thought of the bodily or moral welfare of their workmen. In the new centres of population the lower classes were crowded together in narrow and unhealthy streets, forced to work too many hours a day, and grievously stinted in their wages as competition grew fierce. But these evils were only beginning to develop, while the rush of wealth produced in the new industries was apparent at once.

[Sidenote: =Improved agriculture.=]

Moreover, the growth of manufactures had stimulated other sources of prosperity. The increased population called for a larger food-supply, and therefore forced agriculture to develop. Waste and moor were everywhere being ploughed up, to raise corn for the new thousands who annually swelled our ranks. It is said that more new ground was taken into cultivation in the years between 1760 and 1780 than in the whole century which preceded them. Thus the landholding classes shared in the prosperity of the manufacturers. Nor was it only in the quantity of new corn-bearing land that progress was seen; the older acres also were cultivated with improved methods, and brought forth double their former produce.

[Sidenote: =Growth of wealth.=]

The growth of manufactures and the development of agriculture were enough in themselves to account for the marvellous ease with which England bore the burdens imposed upon her by the American war. So greatly was the national wealth increased, that losses which had seemed ruinous at the time were forgotten in ten years. The £120,000,000 of debt incurred in the struggle were no longer a nightmare to Chancellors of the Exchequer; it became evident that the country had suffered no incurable wound in the disastrous struggle with America, France, and Spain.

[Sidenote: =Pitt's financial and commercial policy.=]

Pitt, then, fell upon a fortunate time when he took office in December, 1783. But we must not deprive him of the full credit of restoring the prosperity of English finance. It is a great title to praise that he saw the bright side of things when other men were hopeless. And it must be remembered that his own enlightened conduct of affairs had much to do with the improved condition of the country. For he was far ahead of his contemporaries in his knowledge of finance and political economy. First of all English statesmen, he had studied the laws of wealth and the workings of international commerce. He had found an inspiration in Adam Smith's celebrated book, the "Wealth of Nations," published in 1776, and from it had convinced himself that Free Trade was the true policy of England, and that the old and narrow commercial policy of restriction and Protection was radically unsound. In all his legislation he bore this principle in mind, and the realm profited thereby to no small extent.

[Sidenote: =Peace abroad.=]

The first ten years of Pitt's rule (1783-1792) were a time of profound peace both at home and abroad. Though his foreign policy was not weak or vacillating, the young premier avoided all collisions with our neighbours. A slight difficulty with Spain in 1789 about our colony on Vancouver's Island, in the North Pacific, is hardly worth mention.

[Sidenote: =The Whigs powerless.=]

Meanwhile Pitt's ascendency at home was complete. The disgrace of the Coalition still hung over the Parliamentary opposition. There seemed to be hardly any reason for the longer existence of the old Whig party, which followed Fox, Burke, and Sheridan. The popular principles on which they had always pretended to rest had now been adopted by the opponent whom they styled a Tory. The opposition in the years 1783-1793 was factious rather than honest. The Whigs had to see measures, which they could not but approve, carried by their political enemy, or else to withstand them on the inadequate ground of pure party spite. The spectacle of a conscientious and enlightened minister opposed by men who could find no real fault with his principles or measures, disgusted the nation, and the Whig party sunk into a disrepute which proceeded from a general belief that it was insincere. Not least among the causes of its ill odour with the country was the close connection of its leaders, Fox and Sheridan--neither of them men of a high moral reputation--with the Prince of Wales. For the young prince's dissolute habits, wanton thriftlessness, and unfilial conduct towards his father rendered him a byword among right-minded men. Yet the only hope of the Whigs returning to office lay in the help of the younger George. He had promised to dismiss Pitt and call Fox to office if ever he were able, and when in 1788 his father was stricken down with a temporary fit of insanity, it seemed that he might be able to carry out his design. But the king recovered before his son had been formally named regent, and the Whigs lost their opportunity.

[Sidenote: =Pitt and foreign trade.=]

The early years of Pitt's domination were a period of active legislation. He took in hand many schemes, and brought most of them to a successful end. His enlightened views on Free Trade were shown by a commercial treaty with France which took off many prohibitive duties, and much increased the commerce between the two countries (1786). He also attempted to remove all trade restrictions between England and Ireland, but was foiled by the factious Irish parliament, which refused to ratify the terms which he offered. Smuggling he succeeded in reducing to a low ebb, by lessening the exorbitant duties on tea and spirits; so that the excess of profit on smuggled goods was no longer large enough to tempt men to incur the risk of capture.

[Sidenote: =Domestic reforms.=]

We find Pitt abolishing the shocking scandals of public executions at Tyburn, supporting measures for the abolition of the Slave Trade, repealing most of the ancient legislation against Romanists, and opening the bar and the army to them. He turned the ancient punishment of being sold into slavery on a tropical plantation, which had hitherto been the lot of convicts, into the comparatively mild form of transportation to Botany Bay, the penal settlement in Australia established in 1788 as our first possession in that continent.

[Sidenote: =The Canada Bill.=]

Of wise and liberal dealing with the colonies Pitt set an example, which has ever since been followed, in his Canada Bill of 1790. This measure gave a liberal grant of responsible government to that great colony, where so many of the exiled loyalists from the United States had settled down after the war. But perhaps the most important of all the measures of the years 1783-1793 were those dealing with India. Pitt had to face, not only the problems which had called forth Fox's India Bill, but some further difficulties of a personal kind.

A word as to the history of our Indian Empire is required to carry it on from the point where we left it, after Clive's conquest of Bengal and the final rout of the French at Wandewash (1760).

[Sidenote: =Indian politics.=]

It was impossible for the English to halt in the position which they had then reached. Most especially was it unlikely that they would long bear with the unsatisfactory state of affairs in Bengal and the Carnatic, where the East India Company had taken the nawabs under their protection and made vassals of them, but had not thought out any scheme for making those princes govern in accordance with English interests and ideas. It was intolerable that we should be responsible for the misrule of effete oriental despots, while keeping no real control over them; for, except in the suburbs of Madras and Calcutta, we made no pretence to territorial sovereignty.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Buxar.=]

The feeble Mohammed Ali in the Carnatic did no worse than pile up mountains of debt, and quibble with the Governor of Madras. But Mir Kasim, the Nawab of Bengal, was made of sterner stuff. Resenting all interference of his suzerains in the governance of his realm, he rebelled against the Company, and sealed his own fate by massacring 150 English merchants of the factory of Patna. This brought down prompt chastisement. He was driven out of Bengal, and forced to take refuge with his neighbour Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Oude, who consented to espouse his cause. But at Buxar, Major Munro, with a handful of sepoys, defeated the united armies of the two Mohammedan princes (1763). This important victory gave England the control of all North-Eastern India: she enthroned a new nawab in Bengal, but made him a mere puppet and tool, with no real authority. For the future the Company administered Bengal and Bahar in its own name, under the authority of a grant from Shah Alum, the powerless Grand Mogul of the day. At the same time Oude came within the sphere of British influence, for Suraj-ud-Dowlah was forced to become our ally and to pay us a subsidy.

[Sidenote: =Clive's reforms.=]

Shortly after this pacification, Lord Clive came out again to India, to act as Governor of Bengal. His second tenure of power lasted two years (1765-1767), and was notable for great improvements which he introduced into the governance of the land. Hitherto the English officials and military commanders had received very low pay, while placed in positions where money-making was easy. Many succumbed to the temptation, and accumulated fortunes by blackmailing the natives, by selling their patronage, or by engaging in private trade. Clive wisely stopped these sources of corruption, by raising the salaries of his subordinates, but forbidding them to trade with the country or to receive gifts from natives. His reforms were much resented, and almost led to sedition among the military; but he carried them through with a strong hand, and left the army and civil service much improved and purified. Ill-health forced him to return to England in 1767, where some years after he put an end to himself in a fit of depression.

[Sidenote: =Warren Hastings, Governor-General.=]

For the next six years our Indian possessions were ruled by men of lesser fame, and were unvexed by foreign wars. But in 1773 a new era began. In that year a Governor-General was for the first time appointed, and entrusted with the command of all the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. The first man placed in this office was the greatest who has ever held it--the able and undaunted Warren Hastings. For twelve years this stern ruler maintained the prestige of the English name in India, though he had to face the fearful storm of the American war, which shook the foundations of the British empire in every part of the world. Not the least of his achievements was that he asserted his own will in every crisis against the strenuous opposition of his factious council, who, headed by Philip Francis--the virulent writer of the "Letters of Junius"--did their best to thwart every scheme that he took in hand.

[Sidenote: =Execution of Nandukumar.=]

Hastings began his rule by placing in English hands all the posts in the administration of justice and the collection of the taxes, which had hitherto been in the charge of natives. This led to increased revenue and pure law. But the Bengalis did not at first understand the methods of the new courts, which in some ways worked harshly enough. When Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice, hung for forgery the great Calcutta banker, Nandukumar (Nuncomar), they could only believe that he suffered because he had offended the Governor-General by intriguing with Francis and the other discontented members of council. Hence came a most unjust accusation against Hastings and Impey, of having committed a judicial murder.

[Sidenote: =The Rohilla war.=]

The worst trouble which Hastings experienced was the continual cry for increased dividends with which the directors of the East India Company kept plaguing him. They were not particular as to the way in which money was to be earned, and the Governor-General sometimes tried strange expedients to satisfy them. The worst was the hiring out to Asaf-ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Oude, of English troops for use in wars with his neighbours. By such aid that prince subdued the Rohillas, an Afghan tribe on his northern frontier. The only excuse that Hastings could plead for this undignified traffic was that the Rohillas were a race of plunderers and a public nuisance to Northern India (1774).

[Sidenote: =The Mahratta war, 1778.=]

A little later an attempt to extend the English influence in Western India involved Hastings in a dangerous war. The Bombay government wished to acquire over its neighbours the Mahrattas the same sort of suzerainty which Madras exercised over the Nawab of the Carnatic, and Bengal over the Nawab of Oude. With this object a treaty was concluded with a prince named Raghonath Rao, who claimed to be Peishwa, or head of the Mahratta confederacy, by which he was to be lent troops, and to pay in return a large subsidy to the Company. But the other Mahratta chiefs, headed by Scindiah, the most powerful of their race, refused to acknowledge Raghonath, and attacked the Company. They utterly defeated the Bombay army, and the credit of the British arms was only saved by a daring experiment of Hastings, who made an English army march from Bengal right across Northern India. This force took Gwalior, Scindiah's capital, and overran the province of Gujarat. The Mahrattas made peace, ceding to Hastings the island of Salsette; but the attempt to make them into vassals had distinctly failed, and had to be postponed for twenty years.

[Sidenote: =Haider Ali.=]

But the greatest danger which Hastings had to face came from the outbreak of the war with France in 1778. It is true that his troops easily captured Pondicherry and the other French settlements, but they could not prevent their enemies from stirring up against them a very dangerous enemy. This was Haider Ali, a Mohammedan military adventurer who had built up an empire for himself in Southern India. He had usurped the throne of his master, the Rajah of Mysore, and had conquered all his neighbours by the aid of a great mercenary army of fanatical Mussulmans. While Hastings was still engaged in the dangerous Mahratta war, the French easily induced the ruler of Mysore to interfere in the struggle, for he coveted the rich dominions of our vassal, the Nawab of the Carnatic.

[Sidenote: =Hastings' extortions.=]

Haider Ali poured his hordes of predatory horse down from the plateau of Mysore into the Carnatic. They swept over the whole country, and burnt the villages at the very gates of Madras. Hastings, already involved in one war, and vexed by a French fleet under De Suffren which was hovering about, felt himself at his wits' end for troops and money to resist the 100,000 men whom Haider had sent against the southern presidency. To raise new resources he harshly fined Cheyte Singh, Rajah of Benares, a vassal prince who was slack in contributing to the war. For failing to give £50,000, the unfaithful rajah was mulcted in the sum of £500,000. When this was unpaid, Cheyte Singh was deposed from his throne. More funds were procured from our ally, the Nawab of Oude, in a not very reputable way. When Hastings asked him for aid, Asaf-ud-Dowlah answered that he was penniless at the moment, because his late father had illegally left the state-treasure to the Begums, his widow and mother. He asked permission from Hastings to extract the hoard from the old ladies, and did so by the cruel imprisonment and torture of their servants. Of course the Governor-General was not responsible for the Nawab's methods. But he profited by them: more than £1,000,000 was torn from the Begums, and served to pay the expenses of the Mysore war.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Porto Novo.=]

That struggle, which had begun under such unfavourable circumstances, was finally carried to a glorious end. The veteran Sir Eyre Coote, who had won the Carnatic at Wandewash twenty years before, now saved it by the victory of Porto Novo (July, 1781). Haider's multitudes were routed, and he was driven back into the hills. Next year he died, and the throne of Mysore fell to his son, Tippoo Sultan, a cruel and fanatical prince of talents very inferior to those of his father. After two years of war, Tippoo was constrained to make peace, and to cease from molesting the Carnatic (1784).

Hastings' work was now done; he had saved our Indian empire by his hard fighting with the Mahrattas and the rulers of Mysore, at a time when England, oppressed by war in Europe and America, could give him no aid. He had organized the administration, increased the revenue, and set justice on a firm basis. If some of his acts had been harsh, yet all should have been pardoned him when his difficulties were taken into consideration.

[Sidenote: =Trial of Hastings.=]

But when Hastings came home in 1785, hoping to receive the thanks of the nation and to be rewarded with a peerage, he was woefully undeceived. His enemy Francis had returned from India before him, and had laid before Fox and Burke, the leaders of the Whig opposition, all the doings of the last ten years painted in the darkest colours. He persuaded them that Hastings was a tyrant and a monster, and moreover that a damaging blow could be dealt to Pitt by impeaching the great governor. For if the prime minister defended him, as was likely, he might be accused of protecting guilt and malfeasance. The Whigs therefore demanded with loud cries the impeachment of Hastings; but Pitt--rather to their surprise--granted it. Then began the famous trial of the Governor-General before the House of Lords, which lasted fully six years. Accused of having judicially murdered Nandukumar, of having illegally sold British troops to the Nawab Asaf-ud-Dowlah, and of having cruelly oppressed Cheyte Singh and the Begums of Oude, Hastings was acquitted on every point. But the law expenses had ruined him, and the nation's indifference had soured him, so that he died an unhappy and disappointed man.

[Sidenote: =Pitt's India Bill.=]

Hastings was succeeded as Governor-General by Lord Cornwallis, the victor of Camden and the vanquished of Yorktown. This honest and brave man was set the task of governing India under a new constitution. In 1784 Pitt had passed an "India Bill" not very unlike that of Fox. It gave the Crown the supreme power over the Company, making the Governor-General and the Board of Control in London nominees of the Crown. But the Company was still left its patronage, its monopoly of trade, and a certain undefined power over the Governor-General which led to much trouble in the future.

[Sidenote: =Cornwallis' Indian policy.=]

Cornwallis ruled British India for seven years (1786-1793), and, though he had gone out with no intention of engaging in wars or aggrandizing the Company's dominions, was driven by the force of circumstances into a policy which was practically identical with that of Warren Hastings.

[Sidenote: =War with Tippoo of Mysore.=]

The Sultan Tippoo of Mysore, always restless and quarrelsome, made war on all his neighbours, till at last, in 1789, he attacked the Rajah of Travancore, a vassal of the Company. Resolved to crush the Sultan, Cornwallis built up a great alliance with the Nizam, the Mohammedan ruler of the Hyderabad state, and with the chiefs of the Mahrattas. Standing at the head of this confederacy, the English appeared for the first time as asserting a predominance over the whole peninsula. Neither the Mahrattas nor the Nizam gave any very material aid towards the suppression of Tippoo, but Cornwallis proved able to accomplish it without their assistance. His first advance into Mysore was foiled by lack of provisions, but in the next year (1791) he forced his way into the heart of Tippoo's realm, beat him at the battle of Arikera, and then stormed the lines of Seringapatam, which covered the Sultan's capital. A few more days' fighting would have put it in the hands of Cornwallis; but when Tippoo humbled himself and asked for peace, he was spared. Nearly half his dominions were taken from him--part to be added to the Madras Presidency, part to be given to the Nizam and the Mahrattas. It was fortunate that Tippoo did not delay his attack on the allies for a few years; if he had waited a little longer, he would have found England deep in her struggle with the French Revolution. As it was, he was so crushed that he gave no trouble for eight years more.

[Sidenote: =The "Perpetual Settlement."=]

Hardly less important than the Mysore war was Cornwallis's well-intentioned but ill-judged measure, the "Perpetual Settlement" of Bengal. This was a scheme for permanently fixing the land revenue of that province, by assessing a fair rent to be paid to the Company--as supreme lord of the soil--which should not vary from year to year, but remain for ever at the moderate figure at which it was now settled. But unfortunately Cornwallis did not make the bargain with the ryots, or peasants, the real owners of the land, but with the zemindars, a class of hereditary tax-collectors who were one of the legacies left to us by the old Mogul rulers of India. As the Government made its contract with the zemindar for the rent of each group of villages, and undertook never to ask more from him than a certain fixed amount, it became the interest of this tax-collecting class to screw up the contributions of the villagers to the highest point, as the whole profit went into their own pockets. The rack-renting led to a general strike among the peasantry, who agreed to withhold their rents, and to go to law with the zemindars en masse, knowing that they could choke the law-courts for years by sending in thousands of appeals at the same moment. The result of this conspiracy--much like one that was seen in Ireland only a few years ago--was to ruin most of the zemindars, who became liable for the land-tax to the Government, and could not raise it while the ryots were fighting them in the courts. In any other country than Bengal this crisis must have led to agrarian civil war, but the Bengalis preferred litigation to outrages, and affairs ultimately settled down. Later legislation has wisely taken note of the rights of the ryot as well as those of the zemindar, but the pledge of the "Perpetual Settlement" has never been broken, and to this day the lands of Bengal pay no more to the crown than the moderate assessment of 1793--a standing proof that the British Government keeps its word.

Cornwallis came home in 1794, to find England plunged in the greatest war that she has ever known--that with the French Revolution.

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