Volume Vii Part 6 (1/2)

[Sidenote: The rising of 1715.]

The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a leader of a different stamp from these. In September 1715 six thousand Highlanders joined him at Perth, but his cowardice or want of conduct kept his army idle till the Duke of Argyle had gathered forces to meet it in an indecisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who arrived too late for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and incapable leader than Mar: and at the close of the year an advance of six thousand men under General Carpenter drove James over-sea again and dispersed the clans to their hills. In England the danger pa.s.sed away like a dream. The accession of the new king had been followed by some outbreaks of riotous discontent; but at the talk of Highland risings and French invasions Tories and Whigs alike rallied round the throne; while the army, which had bitterly resented the interruption of its victories by the treachery of St. John, and hailed with delight the restoration of Marlborough to its command, went hotly for King George.

The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the arrest of their leader, Sir William Wyndham, cowed the Jacobites; and not a man stirred in the west when Ormond appeared off the coast of Devon and called on his party to rise. Oxford alone, where the University was a hotbed of Jacobitism, showed itself restless; and a few of the Catholic gentry rose in Northumberland, under Lord Derwent.w.a.ter and Mr. Forster. The arrival of two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them by Mar spurred these insurgents to march into Lancas.h.i.+re, where the Catholic party was strongest; but they were soon cooped up in Preston, and driven to a surrender.

[Sidenote: England and France.]

The Ministry availed itself of their triumph to gratify the Nonconformists by a repeal of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts, and to venture on a great const.i.tutional change. Under the Triennial Bill in William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to three years. Now that the House of Commons however was become the ruling power in the State, a change was absolutely required to secure steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 this necessity coincided with the desire of the Whigs to maintain in power a thoroughly Whig Parliament. The duration of Parliament was therefore extended to seven years by the Septennial Bill. But while the Jacobite rising produced these important changes at home, it brought about a yet more momentous change in English policy abroad. The foresight of William the Third in his attempt to secure European peace by an alliance of the three Western powers, France, Holland, and England, was justified by the realization of his policy under George the First. The new triple alliance was brought about by the practical advantages which it directly offered to the rulers in both England and France, as well as by the actual position of European politics. The landing of James in Scotland had quickened the anxiety of King George for his removal to a more distant refuge than Lorraine, and for the entire detachment of France from his cause. In France on the other hand a political revolution had been caused by the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, which took place in September 1715, at the very hour of the Jacobite outbreak. From that moment the country had been ruled by the Duke of Orleans as Regent for the young King Lewis the Fifteenth. The boy's health was weak; and the Duke stood next to him in the succession to the crown, if Philip of Spain observed the renunciation of his rights which he had made in the Treaty of Utrecht. It was well known however that Philip had no notion of observing this renunciation, and that he was already intriguing with a strong party in France against the hopes as well as the actual power of the Duke. Nor was Spain more inclined to adhere to its own renunciations in the Treaty than its king. The constant dream of every Spaniard was to recover all that Spain had given up, to win back her Italian dependencies, to win back Gibraltar where the English flag waved upon Spanish soil, to win back, above all, that monopoly of commerce with her dominions in America which England was now ent.i.tled to break in upon by the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht.

[Sidenote: Their alliance against Spain.]

To attempt such a recovery was to defy Europe; for if the Treaty had stripped Spain of its fairest dependencies, it had enriched almost every European state with its spoils. Savoy had gained Sicily; the Emperor held the Netherlands, with Naples and the Milanese; Holland looked on the Barrier fortresses as vital to its own security; England, if as yet indifferent to the value of Gibraltar, clung tenaciously to the American Trade. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the Spanish Minister, accepted the risk; and while his master was intriguing against the Regent in France, Alberoni promised aid to the Jacobite cause as a means of preventing the interference of England with his designs. In spite of failure in both countries he resolved boldly on an attempt to recover the Italian provinces which Philip had lost. He selected the Duke of Savoy as the weakest of his opponents; and armaments greater than Spain had seen for a century put to sea in 1717, and reduced the island of Sardinia. The blow however was hardly needed to draw England and France together. The Abbe Dubois, a confidant of the Regent, had already met the English King with his Secretary, Lord Stanhope, at the Hague; and entered into a compact, by which France guaranteed the Hanoverian line in England, and England the succession of the house of Orleans should Lewis the Fifteenth die without heirs. The two powers were joined, though unwillingly, by Holland in an alliance, which was concluded on the basis of this compact; and, as in William's time, the existence of this alliance told on the whole aspect of European politics. Though in the summer of 1718 a strong Spanish force landed in Sicily, and made itself master of the island, the appearance of an English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an engagement in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni strove to avenge the blow by fitting out an armament of five thousand men, which the Duke of Ormond was to command, for a revival of the Jacobite rising in Scotland. But the s.h.i.+ps were wrecked in the Bay of Biscay; and the accession of Austria with Savoy to the Triple Alliance, with the death of the king of Sweden, left Spain alone in the face of Europe. The progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at last to give way. Alberoni was dismissed; and the Spanish forces were withdrawn from Sardinia and Sicily. The last of these islands now pa.s.sed to the Emperor, Savoy being compensated for its loss by the acquisition of Sardinia, from which its Duke took the t.i.tle of King; while the work of the Treaty of Utrecht was completed by the Emperor's renunciation of his claims on the crown of Spain, and Philip's renunciation of his claims on the Milanese and the Two Sicilies.

[Sidenote: Resignation of Townshend.]

Successful as the Ministry had been in its work of peace, the struggle had disclosed the difficulties which the double position of its new sovereign was to bring upon England. George was not only King of England; he was Elector of Hanover; and in his own mind he cared far more for the interests of his Electorate than for the interests of his kingdom. His first aim was to use the power of his new monarchy to strengthen his position in North Germany. At this moment that position was mainly threatened by the hostility of the king of Sweden. Denmark had taken advantage of the defeat and absence of Charles the Twelfth to annex Bremen and Verden with Schleswig and Holstein to its dominions; but in its dread of the Swedish king's return it secured the help of Hanover by ceding the first two towns to the Electorate on a promise of alliance in the war against him. The despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic with the purpose of overawing Sweden identified England with the policy of Hanover; and Charles, who from the moment of his return bent his whole energies to regain what he had lost, retorted by joining in the schemes of Alberoni, and by concluding an alliance with the Russian Czar, Peter the Great, who for other reasons was hostile to the court of Hanover, for a restoration of the Stuarts. Luckily for the new dynasty his plans were brought to an end at the close of 1718 by his death at the siege of Frederickshall; but the policy which provoked them had already brought about the dissolution of the Whig Ministry. When George pressed on his cabinet a treaty of alliance by which England s.h.i.+elded Hanover and its acquisitions from any efforts of the Swedish King, Townshend and Walpole gave a reluctant a.s.sent to a measure which they regarded as sacrificing English interests to that of the Electorate, and as entangling the country yet more in the affairs of the Continent. For the moment indeed they yielded to the fact that Bremen and Verden were not only of the highest importance to Hanover, which was brought by them in contact with the sea, but of hardly less value to England itself, as they placed the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser, the chief inlets for British commerce into Germany, in the hands of a friendly state. But they refused to take any further steps in carrying out a Hanoverian policy; and they successfully withstood an attempt of the king to involve England in a war with the Czar, when Russian troops entered Mecklenburg. The resentment of George the First was seconded by intrigues among their fellow-ministers; and in 1717 Townshend and Walpole were forced to resign their posts.

[Sidenote: The Stanhope Ministry.]

The want of their good sense soon made itself felt. In the reconst.i.tuted cabinet Lords Sunderland and Stanhope remained supreme; and their first aim was to secure the maintenance of the Whig power by a const.i.tutional change. Firm as was the hold of the Whigs over the Commons, it might be shaken by a revulsion of popular feeling, it might be ruined, as it was destined to be ruined afterwards, by a change in the temper of the king.

Sunderland sought a permanence of public policy which neither popular nor royal government could give in the changelessness of a fixed aristocracy with its centre in the Lords. Harley's creation of twelve peers to ensure the sanction of the Lords to the Treaty of Utrecht showed that the Crown possessed a power of swamping the majority and changing the balance of opinion in the House of Peers. In 1720 therefore the Ministry introduced a bill, suggested as was believed by Lord Sunderland, which professed to secure the liberty of the Upper House by limiting the power of the Crown in the creation of fresh Peers. The number of Peers was permanently fixed at the number then sitting in the House; and creations could only be made when vacancies occurred.

Twenty-five hereditary Scotch Peers were subst.i.tuted for the sixteen elected Peers for Scotland. The bill however was strenuously opposed by Robert Walpole. Not only was it a measure which broke the political quiet which he looked on as a necessity for the new government, but it jarred on his good sense as a statesman. It would in fact have rendered representative government impossible. For representative government was now coming day by day more completely to mean government by the will of the House of Commons, carried out by a Ministry which served as the mouthpiece of that will. But it was only through the prerogative of the Crown, as exercised under the advice of such a Ministry, that the Peers could be forced to bow to the will of the Lower House in matters where their opinion was adverse to that of the Commons; and the proposal of Sunderland would have brought legislation and government to a dead lock.

[Sidenote: South Sea Bubble.]

It was to Walpole's opposition that the Peerage Bill owed its defeat; and this success forced his rivals again to admit him, with Townshend, to a share in the Ministry, though they occupied subordinate offices.

But this arrangement was soon to yield to a more natural one. The sudden increase of English commerce begot at this moment the mania of speculation. Ever since the age of Elizabeth the unknown wealth of Spanish America had acted like a spell upon the imagination of Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of despatching a single s.h.i.+p to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the country against this ”dream.” Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the Treasury, while his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, returned to his post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that ”the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and Walpole.”

[Sidenote: Walpole's Ministry.]

But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man; nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe, was in itself a n.o.ble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of our Peace Ministers. ”The most pernicious circ.u.mstances,” he said, ”in which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends.” It was not that the honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more conduce to the extension of commerce ”than to make the exportation of our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be.”

[Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]

The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom of Walpole was rewarded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.

It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at 15,000. At his death they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth century the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.

Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country gentleman, rose fast. ”Estates which were rented at two thousand a year threescore years ago,” said Burke in 1766, ”are at three thousand at present.”

[Sidenote: His policy of inaction.]

Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other fields of statesmans.h.i.+p Walpole was forbidden from taking more than tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.

His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry, which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by any effort to repeal the laws against Nonconformity. His temper was naturally vigorous and active; and yet the years of his power are years without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long administration indeed is almost without a history. All legislative and political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after year pa.s.sed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of the nation at large. It was popular with the cla.s.s which commonly presses for political activity. The energy of the trading cla.s.s was absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of commerce and acc.u.mulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone to enjoy their new freedom and develope their new industries. And Walpole let them alone. On the other hand, the forces which opposed the Revolution lost year by year somewhat of their energy. The fervour which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but their wrath against the House of Hanover ebbed away for want of opportunities of exerting itself. And meanwhile on opponents as on friends the freedom which the Revolution had brought with it was doing its work. It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that in spite of every temptation he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the laws that oppressed the Catholic or the Dissenter, he took care that they should remain inoperative. Catholic wors.h.i.+p went on unhindered.

Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the Nonconformists from the consequences of their infringement of the Test Act. There was no tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and action were alike left free. No Minister was ever more foully slandered by journalists and pamphleteers; but Walpole never meddled with the press.

[Sidenote: Fresh efforts of Spain.]

Abroad as well as at home the difficulties in the way of his policy were enormous. Peace was still hard to maintain. Defeated as her first attempt had been, Spain remained resolute to regain her lost provinces, to recover Gibraltar and Minorca, and to restore her old monopoly of trade with her American colonies. She had learned that she could do this only by breaking the alliance of the Four Powers, which left her isolated in Europe; and she saw at last a chance of breaking this league in the difficulties of the House of Austria. The Emperor Charles the Sixth was without a son. He had issued a Pragmatic Sanction by which he provided that his hereditary dominions should descend unbroken to his daughter, Maria Theresa, but no European state had as yet consented to guarantee her succession. Spain seized on this opportunity of detaching the Emperor from the Western powers. She promised to support the Pragmatic Sanction in return for a pledge on the part of Charles to aid in wresting Gibraltar and Minorca from England, and in securing to a Spanish prince the succession to Parma, Piacenza, and Tuscany. A grant of the highest trading privileges in her American dominions to a commercial company which the Emperor had established at Ostend, in defiance of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England and Holland, revealed this secret alliance; and there were fears of the adhesion of Russia, which still remained hostile to England through the quarrel with Hanover. The danger was met for a while by an alliance of England, France, and Prussia, in 1725; but the withdrawal of the last Power again gave courage to the confederates, and in 1727 the Spaniards besieged Gibraltar while Charles threatened an invasion of Holland. The moderation of Walpole alone averted a European war. While sending British squadrons to the Baltic, the Spanish coast, and America, he succeeded by diplomatic pressure in again forcing the Emperor to inaction; after weary negotiations Spain was brought in 1729 to sign the Treaty of Seville and to content herself with the promise of a succession of a Spanish prince to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany; and the discontent of Charles the Sixth at this concession was allayed in 1731 by giving the guarantee of England to the Pragmatic Sanction.

[Sidenote: George the Second.]

The patience and even temper which Walpole showed in this business were the more remarkable that in the course of it his power received what seemed a fatal shock from the death of the king. George the First died on a journey to Hanover in 1727; and his successor, George the Second, was known to have hated his father's Minister hardly less than he had hated his father. But hate Walpole as he might, the new king was absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, Caroline of Ans.p.a.ch; and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the Ministry. After a few days of withdrawal therefore Walpole again returned to office; and the years which followed were those in which his power reached its height. He gained as great an influence over George the Second as he had gained over his father: and in spite of the steady increase of his opponents in the House of Commons, his hold over it remained unshaken. The country was tranquil and prosperous. The prejudices of the landed gentry were met by a steady effort to reduce the land-tax, whose pressure was half the secret of their hostility to the Revolution that produced it. The Church was quiet. The Jacobites were too hopeless to stir. A few trade measures and social reforms crept quietly through the Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols showed that social thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value enacted that all proceedings in courts of justice should henceforth be in the English tongue.