Volume Vii Part 7 (1/2)
France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the recovery of Gibraltar.
[Sidenote: England and Spain.]
The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of 1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled; while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the peace; and in 1738 the ill humour of the trading cla.s.ses was driven to madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have enabled Walpole to deal with it.
[Sidenote: War with Spain.]
But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies a.s.sailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to the crowd on ”the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain.” His position had been weakened by the death of the queen; and it was now weakened yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the ”Patriots” had grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the trading cla.s.ses. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of the trading cla.s.s failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham, who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.
But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.
[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession.]
”They may ring their bells now,” the great minister said bitterly, as peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender; ”but they will soon be wringing their hands.” His foresight was at once justified. No sooner had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for finis.h.i.+ng the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it was idle to expect her to pa.s.s it by. If once the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the ma.s.s of dominion which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of a danger which the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European struggle.
[Sidenote: Fall of Walpole.]
The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous a.s.sailant of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria claimed the Austrian Duchies, which pa.s.sed with the other hereditary dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria stood in such peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its const.i.tutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria, and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.
Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his dread of harm to his hereditary state averted the entry of a French army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still repelled the attacks of the ”Patriots” with wonderful spirit; but in a new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.
”He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow,” writes his son, ”now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed for an hour together.” The end was in fact near; and in the opening of 1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.
[Sidenote: Carteret.]
His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.
The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office, and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in continental affairs. Carteret mainly followed the system of his predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor; and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.
One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anch.o.r.ed in the bay of Naples and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the French alliance.
[Sidenote: Dettingen.]
The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.
Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsa.s.s and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second, who warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head of a force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing 31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all that was needed to secure the results already gained.
[Sidenote: Fall of Carteret.]
But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples, with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pa.s.s in return to Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh att.i.tude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the war on the cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.
His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of Carteret's weakness in a.s.senting to a change in the character of the struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its head.
[Sidenote: The Pelham Ministry.]
Of the reconst.i.tuted ministry which followed Henry Pelham became the head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.
Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and ”the Boys,” all found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the first breach in the system of purely party government established on the accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of Hanover with Prussia for a heads.h.i.+p of North Germany found expression in the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the superiority of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of c.u.mberland.
Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians, and Dutch--for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged into the war, though by English subsidies--the Duke on the 31st of May 1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column, doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of July.
[Sidenote: Charles Edward Stuart.]
The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.
But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed ”James the Eighth” at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the 21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.
Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.
His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through Lancas.h.i.+re, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his support as he pa.s.sed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.
Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancas.h.i.+re, but only a single squire took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand Highlanders.