prepared to quarrel with the pope in the matter of his own authority
over the Gallican Church, was a bigoted upholder of Catholic orthodoxy,
and Protestants saw in his political ambitions a menace to their
religion. In the case of England there seemed a special danger to
Protestantism; for whatever religious sympathies Charles II. possessed
were with the Roman Catholic faith, and in his annoyance at the
interference of the Commons with his expenditure he was not ashamed to
stoop to become the pensioner of the French king. In 1670 the secret
treaty of Dover was signed. Charles was to receive from Louis £200,000 a
year and the aid of 6000 French troops to enable him to declare himself
a convert, and to obtain special advantages for his religion, whilst he
was also to place the forces of England at Louis's disposal for his
purposes of aggression on the continent of Europe.

  Second Dutch war, and declaration of indulgence.

Charles had no difficulty in stirring up the commercial jealousy of
England so as to bring about a second Dutch war (1672). The next year,
unwilling to face the dangers of his larger plan, he issued a
declaration of indulgence, which, by a single act of the prerogative,
suspended all penal laws against Roman Catholics and dissenters alike.
To the country gentlemen who constituted the cavalier parliament, and
who had long been drifting into opposition to the crown, this was
intolerable. The predominance of the Church of England was the prime
article of their political creed; they dreaded the Roman Catholics; they
hated and despised the dissenters. Under any circumstances an indulgence
would have been most distasteful to them. But the growing belief that
the whole scheme was merely intended to serve the purposes of the Roman
Catholics converted their dislike into deadly opposition. Yet the
parliament resolved to base its opposition upon constitutional grounds.
The right claimed by the king to suspend the laws was questioned, and
his claim to special authority in ecclesiastical matters was treated
with contempt. The king gave way and withdrew his declaration. But no
solemn act of parliament declared it to be illegal, and in due course of
time it would be heard of again.

  The Test Act.

The Commons followed up their blow by passing the Test Act, making the
reception of the sacrament according to the forms of the Church of
England, and the renunciation of the doctrine of transubstantiation, a
necessary qualification for office. At once it appeared what a hold the
members of the obnoxious church had had upon the administration of the
state. The lord high admiral, the lord treasurer, and a secretary of
state refused to take the test. The lord high admiral was the heir to
the throne, the king's brother, the duke of York.

  Danby's ministry.

  The Popish plot.

Charles, as usual, bent before the storm. In Danby (see LEEDS, 1ST DUKE
OF) he found a minister whose views answered precisely to the views of
the existing House of Commons. Like the Commons, Danby wished to silence
both Roman Catholics and dissenters. Like the Commons, too, he wished to
embark on a foreign policy hostile to France. But he served a master who
regarded Louis less as a possible adversary than as a possible
paymaster. Sometimes Danby was allowed to do as he liked, and the
marriage of the duke of York's eldest daughter Mary to her cousin the
prince of Orange was the most lasting result of his administration. More
often he was obliged to follow where Charles led, and Charles was
constantly ready to sell the neutrality of England for large sums of
French gold. At last one of these negotiations was detected, and Danby,
who was supposed to be the author instead of the unwilling instrument of
the intrigue, was impeached. In order to save his minister, Charles
dissolved parliament (1678). He could not have chosen a more unlucky
time for his own quiet. The strong feeling against the Roman Catholics
had been quickened into a flame by a great imposture. The inventors of
the so-called popish plot charged the leading English Roman Catholics
with a design to murder the king. Judges and juries alike were maddened
with excitement, and listened greedily to the lies which poured forth
from the lips of profligate informers. Innocent blood was shed in
abundance.

  The Exclusion Bill.

The excitement had its root in the uneasy feeling caused by the
knowledge that the heir to the throne was a Roman Catholic. Three
parliaments were summoned and dissolved. In each parliament the main
question at issue between the Commons and the crown was the Exclusion
Bill, by which the Commons sought to deprive the duke of York of his
inheritance; and it was notorious that the leaders of the movement
wished the crown to descend to the king's illegitimate son, the duke of
Monmouth.

  Whigs and Tories.

The principles by which the Commons were guided in these parliaments
were very different from those which had prevailed in the first
parliament of the Restoration. Those principles, to which that party
adhered which about this time became known as the Tory party, had been
formed under the influence of the terror caused by militant Puritanism.
In the state the Tory inherited the ideas of Clarendon, and, without
being at all ready to abandon the claims of parliaments, nevertheless
somewhat inconsistently spoke of the king as ruling by a divine and
indefeasible title, and wielding a power which it was both impious and
unconstitutional to resist by force. In the church he inherited the
ideas of Laud, and saw in the maintenance of the Act of Uniformity the
safeguard of religion. But the hold of these opinions on the nation had
been weakened with the cessation of the causes which had produced them.
In 1680 twenty years had passed since the Puritan army had been
disbanded. Many of Cromwell's soldiers had died, and most of them were
growing old. The dissenters had shown no signs of engaging in plots or
conspiracies. They were known to be only a comparatively small minority
of the population, and though they had been cruelly persecuted, they had
suffered without a thought of resistance. Dread of the dissenters,
therefore, had become a mere chimaera, which only those could entertain
whose minds were influenced by prejudice. On the other hand, dread of
the Roman Catholics was a living force. Unless the law were altered a
Roman Catholic would be on the throne, wielding all the resources of the
prerogative, and probably supported by all the resources of the king of
France. Hence the leading principle of the Whigs, as the predominant
party was now called, was in the state to seek for the highest national
authority in parliament rather than in the king, and in the church to
adopt the rational theology of Chillingworth and Hales, whilst looking
to the dissenters as allies against the Roman Catholics, who were the
enemies of both.

  Tory reaction.

Events were to show that it was a wise provision which led the Whigs to
seek to exclude the duke of York from the throne. But their plan
suffered under two faults, the conjunction of which was ruinous to them
for the time. In the first place, their choice of Monmouth as the heir
was infelicitous. Not only was he under the stain of illegitimacy, but
his succession excluded the future succession of Mary, whose husband,
the prince of Orange, was the hope of Protestant Europe. In the second
place, drastic remedies are never generally acceptable when the evil to
be remedied is still in the future. When, in the third of the short
parliaments held at Oxford the Whigs rode armed into the city, the
nation decided that the future danger of a Roman Catholic succession was
incomparably less than the immediate danger of another civil war. Loyal
addresses poured in to the king. For the four remaining years of his
reign he ruled without summoning any parliament. Whigs were brought
before prejudiced juries and partial judges. Their blood flowed on the
scaffold. The charter of the city of London was confiscated. The reign
of the Tories was unquestioned. Yet it was not quite what the reign of
the Cavaliers had been in 1660. The violence of the Restoration had been
directed primarily against Puritanism, and only against certain forms of
government so far as they allowed Puritans to gain the upper hand. The
violence of the Tories was directed against rebellion and disorder, and
only against dissenters so far as they were believed to be the fomenters
of disorder. Religious hatred had less part in the action of the ruling
party, and even from its worst actions a wise man might have predicted
that the day of toleration was not so far off as it seemed.

  James II., 1685-1688.

The accession of James II. (1685) put the views of the opponents of the
Exclusion Bill to the test. A new parliament was elected, almost
entirely composed of decided Tories. A rebellion in Scotland, headed by
the earl of Argyll, and a rebellion in England, headed by the duke of
Monmouth, were easily suppressed. But the inherent difficulties of the
king's position were not thereby overcome. It would have been hard, in
days in which religious questions occupied so large a space in the field
of politics, for a Roman Catholic sovereign to rule successfully over a
Protestant nation. James set himself to make it, in his case,
impossible. It may be that he did not consciously present to himself any
object other than fair treatment for his co-religionists. On the one
hand, however, he alienated even reasonable opponents by offering no
guarantees that equality so gained would not be converted into
superiority by the aid of his own military force and of the assistance
of the French king; whilst on the other hand he relied, even more
strongly than his father had done, on the technical legality which
exalted the prerogative in defiance of the spirit of the law. He began
by making use of the necessity of resisting Monmouth to increase his
army, under the pretext of the danger of a repetition of the late
rebellion; and in the regiments thus levied he appointed many Roman
Catholic officers who had refused to comply with the Test Act. Rather
than submit to the gentlest remonstrance, he prorogued parliament, and
proceeded to obtain from the court of king's bench a judgment in favour
of his right to dispense with all penalties due by law, in the same way
that his grandfather had appealed to the judges in the matter of the
post-nati. But not only was the question put by James II. of far wider
import than the question put by James I., but he deprived the court to
which he applied of all moral authority by previously turning out of
office the judges who were likely to disagree with him, and by
appointing new ones who were likely to agree with him. A court of high
commission of doubtful legality was subsequently erected (1686) to
deprive or suspend clergymen who made themselves obnoxious to the court,
whilst James appointed Roman Catholics to the headship of certain
colleges at Oxford. The legal support given him by judges of his own
selection was fortified by the military support of an army collected at
Hounslow Heath; and a Roman Catholic, the earl of Tyrconnel, was sent as
lord-deputy to Ireland (1687) to organize a Roman Catholic army on which
the king might fall back if his English forces proved insufficient for
his purpose.

  James's declaration of indulgence.

  Trial of the seven bishops.

Thus fortified, James issued a declaration of indulgence (1687) granting
full religious liberty to all his subjects. The belief, that the grant
of liberty to all religions was only intended to serve as a cloak for
the ascendancy of one, was so strong that the measure roused the
opposition of all those who objected to see the king's will substituted
for the law, even if they wished to see the Protestant dissenters
tolerated. In spite of this opposition, the king thought it possible to
obtain a parliamentary sanction for his declaration. The parliament to
which he intended to appeal was, however, to be as different a body from
the parliament which met in the first year of his reign as the bench of
judges which had approved of the dispensing power had been different
from the bench which existed at his accession. A large number of the
borough members were in those days returned by the corporations, and
the corporations were accordingly changed. But so thoroughly was the
spirit of the country roused, that many even of the new corporations
were set against James's declaration, and he had therefore to abandon
for a time the hope of seeing it accepted even by a packed House of
Commons. All, however, that he could do to give it force he did. He
ordered the clergy to read it in all pulpits (1688). Seven bishops, who
presented a petition asking him to relieve the clergy from the burthen
of proclaiming what they believed to be illegal, were brought to trial
for publishing a seditious libel. Their acquittal by a jury was the
first serious blow to the system adopted by the king.

  Revolution of 1688.

Another event which seemed likely to consolidate his power was in
reality the signal of his ruin. The queen bore him a son. There was thus
no longer a strong probability that the king would be succeeded at no
great distance of time by a Protestant heir. Popular incredulity
expressed itself in the assertion that, as James had attempted to gain
his ends by means of a packed bench of judges and a packed House of
Commons, he had now capped the series of falsifications by the
production of a supposititious heir. The leaders of both parties
combined to invite the prince of Orange to come to the rescue of the
religion and laws of England. He landed on the 5th of November at
Brixham. Before he could reach London every class of English society had
declared in his favour. James was deserted even by his army. He fled to
France, and a convention parliament, summoned without the royal writ,
declared that his flight was equivalent to abdication, and offered the
crown in joint sovereignty to William and Mary (1689).

IX. THE REVOLUTION AND THE AGE OF ANNE (1689-1714)

  William III. and Mary II., 1689.

The Revolution, as it was called, was more than a mere change of
sovereigns. It finally transferred the ultimate decision in the state
from the king to parliament. What parliament had been in the 15th
century with the House of Lords predominating, that parliament was to be
again in the end of the 17th century with the House of Commons
predominating. That House of Commons was far from resting on a wide
basis of popular suffrage. The county voters were the freeholders; but
in the towns, with some important exceptions, the electors were the
richer inhabitants who formed the corporations of the boroughs, or a
body of select householders more or less under the control of some
neighbouring landowner. A House so chosen was an aristocratic body, but
it was aristocratic in a far wider sense than the House of Lords was
aristocratic. The trading and legal classes found their representation
there by the side of the great owners of land. The House drew its
strength from its position as a true representative of the effective
strength of the nation in its social and economical organization.

Such was the body which firmly grasped the control over every branch of
the administration. Limiting in the Bill of Rights the powers assumed by
the crown, the Commons declared that the king could not keep a standing
army in time of peace without consent of parliament; and they made that
consent effectual, as far as legislation could go, by passing a Mutiny
Act year by year for twelve months only, so as to prevent the crown from
exercising military discipline without their authority. Behind these
legal contrivances stood the fact that the army was organized in the
same way as the nation was organized, being officered by gentlemen who
had no desire to overthrow a constitution through which the class from
which they sprung controlled the government. Strengthened by the
cessation of any fear of military violence, the Commons placed the crown
in financial dependence on themselves by granting a large part of the
revenue only for a limited term of years, and by putting strictly in
force their right of appropriating that revenue to special branches of
expenditure.

  Causes in favour of liberty.

  The Toleration Act.

Such a revolution might have ended in the substitution of the despotism
of a class for the despotism of a man. Many causes combined to prevent
this result. The landowners, who formed the majority of the House, were
not elected directly, as was the case with the nobility of the French
states-general, by their own class, but by electors who, though
generally loyal to them, would have broken off from them if they had
attempted to make themselves masters of their fellow citizens. No less
important was the almost absolute independence of the judges, begun at
the beginning of the reign, by the grant of office to them during good
behaviour instead of during the king's pleasure, and finally secured by
the clause in the Act of Settlement in 1701, which protected them
against dismissal except on the joint address of both Houses of
Parliament. Such an improvement, however, finds its full counterpart in
another great step already taken. The more representative a government
becomes, the more necessary it is for the well-being of the nation that
the expression of individual thought should be free in every direction.
If it is not so, the government is inclined to proscribe unpopular
opinion, and to forget that new opinions by which the greatest benefits
are likely to be conferred are certain at first to be entertained by a
very few, and are quite certain to be unpopular as soon as they come
into collision with the opinions of the majority. In the middle ages the
benefits of the liberation of thought from state control had been
secured by the antagonism between church and state. The Tudor sovereigns
had rightfully asserted the principle that in a well-ordered nation only
one supreme power can be allowed to exist; but in so doing they had
enslaved religion. It was fortunate that, just at the moment when
parliamentary control was established over the state, circumstances
should have arisen which made the majority ready to restore to the
individual conscience that supremacy over religion which the medieval
ecclesiastics had claimed for the corporation of the universal church.
Dissenters had, in the main, stood shoulder to shoulder with churchmen
in rejecting the suspicious benefits of James, and both gratitude and
policy forbade the thought of replacing them under the heavy yoke which
had been imposed on them at the Restoration. The exact mode in which
relief should be afforded was still an open question. The idea prevalent
with the more liberal minds amongst the clergy was that of
comprehension--that is to say, of so modifying the prayers and
ceremonies of the church as to enable the dissenters cheerfully to enter
in. The scheme was one which had approved itself to minds of the highest
order--to Sir Thomas More, to Bacon, to Hales and to Jeremy Taylor. It
is one which, as long as beliefs are not very divergent, keeps up a
sense of brotherhood overruling the diversity of opinion. It broke down,
as it always will break down in practice, whenever the difference of
belief is so strongly felt as to seek earnestly to embody itself in
diversity of outward practice. The greater part of the clergy of the
church felt that to surrender their accustomed formularies was to
surrender somewhat of the belief which those formularies signified,
while the dissenting clergy were equally reluctant to adopt the common
prayer book even in a modified form. Hence the Toleration Act, which
guaranteed the right of separate assemblies for worship outside the pale
of the church, though it embodied the principles of Cromwell and Milton,
and not those of Chillingworth and Hales, was carried without
difficulty, whilst the proposed scheme of comprehension never had a
chance of success (1689). The choice was one which posterity can
heartily approve. However wide the limits of toleration be drawn, there
will always be those who will be left outside. By religious liberty
those inside gain as much as those who are without. From the moment of
the passing of the Toleration Act, no Protestant in England performed
any act of worship except by his own free and deliberate choice. The
literary spokesman of the new system was Locke. His _Letters concerning
Toleration_ laid down the principle which had been maintained by
Cromwell, with a wider application than was possible in days when the
state was in the hands of a mere minority only able to maintain itself
in power by constant and suspicious vigilance.

One measure remained to place the dissenters in the position of full
membership of the state. The Test Act excluded them from office. But
the memory of the high-handed proceedings of Puritan rulers was still
too recent to allow Englishmen to run the risk of a reimposition of
their yoke, and this feeling, fanciful as it was, was sufficient to keep
the Test Act in force for years to come.

  Liberty of the press.

The complement of the Toleration Act was the abolition of the censorship
of the press (1695). The ideas of the author of the _Areopagitica_ had
at last prevailed. The attempt to fix certain opinions on the nation
which were pleasing to those in power was abandoned by king and
parliament alike. The nation, or at least so much of it as cared to read
books or pamphlets on political subjects, was acknowledged to be the
supreme judge, which must therefore be allowed to listen to what
counsellors it pleased.

This new position of the nation made itself felt in various ways. It was
William's merit that, fond as he was of power, he recognized the fact
that he could not rule except so far as he carried the goodwill of the
nation with him. No doubt he was helped to an intelligent perception of
the new situation by the fact that, as a foreigner, he cared far more
for carrying on war successfully against France than for influencing the
domestic legislation of a country which was not his own, and by the
knowledge that the conduct of the struggle which lasted till he was able
to treat with France on equal terms at Ryswick (1697) was fairly trusted
to his hands. Nevertheless these years of war called for the united
action of a national government, and in seeking to gain this support for
himself, he hit upon an expedient which opened a new era in
constitutional politics.

  Beginning of cabinet government.

The supremacy of the House of Commons would have been an evil of no
common magnitude, if it had made government impossible. Yet this was
precisely what it threatened to do. Sometimes the dominant party in the
House pressed with unscrupulous rancour upon its opponents. Sometimes
the majority shifted from side to side as the House was influenced by
passing gusts of passion or sympathy, so that, as it was said at the
time, no man could foretell one day what the House would be pleased to
do on the next. Against the first of these dangers William was to a
great extent able to guard by the exercise of his right of dissolution,
so as to appeal to the constituencies, which did not always share in the
the passions of their representatives. But the second danger could not
be met in this way. The only cure for waywardness is responsibility, and
not only was this precisely what the Commons had not learned to feel,
but it was that which it was impossible to make them feel directly. A
body composed of several hundred members cannot carry on government with
the requisite steadiness of action and clearness of insight. Such work
can only fitly be entrusted to a few, and whenever difficult
circumstances arise it is necessary that the action of those few be kept
in harmony by the predominance of one. The scheme on which William hit,
by the advice of the earl of Sunderland, was that which has since been
known as cabinet government. He selected as his ministers the leading
members of the two Houses who had the confidence of the majority of the
House of Commons. In this way, the majority felt an interest in
supporting the men who embodied their own opinions, and fell in turn
under the influence of those who held them with greater prudence or
ability than fell to the lot of the average members of the House. All
that William doubtless intended was to acquire a ready instrument to
enable him to carry on the war with success. In reality he had
refounded, on a new basis, the government of England. His own personal
qualities were such that he was able to dominate over any set of
ministers; but the time would come when there would be a sovereign of
inferior powers. Then the body of ministers would step into his place.
The old rude arrangements of the middle ages had provided by frequent
depositions that an inefficient sovereign should cease to rule, and
those arrangements had been imitated in the cases of Charles I. and
James II. Still the claim to rule had, at least from the time of Henry
III., been derived from hereditary descent, and the interruption,
however frequently it might occur, had been regarded as something
abnormal, only to be applied where there was an absolute necessity to
prevent the wielder of executive authority from setting at defiance the
determined purpose of the nation. After the Revolution not only had the
king's title been so changed as to make him more directly than ever
dependent on the nation, but he now called into existence a body which
derived its own strength from its conformity with the wishes of the
representatives of the nation.

For the moment it seemed to be but a temporary expedient. When the war
came to an end, the Whig party which had sustained William in his
struggle with France split up. The dominant feeling of the House of
Commons was no longer the desire to support the crown against a foreign
enemy, but to make government as cheap as possible, leaving future
dangers to the chances of the future. William had not so understood the
new invention of a united ministry as binding him to take into his
service a united ministry of men whom he regarded as fools and knaves.
He allowed the Commons to reduce the army to a skeleton, to question his
actions, and to treat him as if he were a cipher. But it was only by
slow degrees that he was brought to acknowledge the necessity of
choosing his ministers from amongst the men who had done these things.

  The Spanish succession.

The time came when he needed again the support of the nation. The death
of Charles II., the heirless king of the huge Spanish monarchy, had long
been expected. Since the peace of Ryswick, William and Louis XIV. had
come to terms by two successive partition treaties for a division of
those vast territories in such a way that the whole of them should not
fall into the hands of a near relation either of the king of France or
of the emperor, the head of the house of Austria. When the king of Spain
actually died in 1700, William seemed to have no authority in England
whatever; and Louis was therefore encouraged to break his engagements,
and to accept the whole of the Spanish inheritance for his grandson, who
became Philip V. of Spain. William saw clearly that such predominance of
France in Europe would lead to the development of pretensions unbearable
to other states. But the House of Commons did not see it, even when the
Dutch garrisons were driven by French troops out of the posts in the
Spanish Netherlands which they had occupied for many years (1701).

  The Act of Settlement.

William had prudently done all that he could to conciliate the Tory
majority. In the preceding year (1700) he had given office to a Tory
ministry, and he now (1701) gave his assent to the Act of Settlement,
which secured the succession of the crown to the electress Sophia of
Hanover, daughter of James I.'s daughter Elizabeth, to the exclusion of
all Roman Catholic claimants, though it imposed several fresh
restrictions on the prerogative. William was indeed wise in keeping his
feelings under control. The country sympathized with him more than the
Commons did, and when the House imprisoned the gentlemen deputed by the
freeholders of Kent to present a petition asking that its loyal
addresses might be turned into bills of supply, it simply advertised its
weakness to the whole country.

  The Grand Alliance.

The reception of this Kentish petition was but a foretaste of the
discrepancy between the Commons and the nation, which was to prove the
marked feature of the middle of the century now opening. For the present
the House was ready to give way. It requested the king to enter into
alliance with the Dutch. William went yet further in the direction in
which he was urged. He formed an alliance with the emperor, as well as
with the Netherlands, to prevent the union of the crowns of France and
Spain, and to compel France to evacuate the Netherlands. An unexpected
event came to give him all the strength he needed. James II. died, and
Louis acknowledged his son as the rightful king of England. Englishmen
of both parties were stung to indignation by the insult. William
dissolved parliament, and the new House of Commons, Tory as it was by a
small majority, was eager to support the king. It voted men and money
according to his wishes. England was to be the soul of the Grand
Alliance against France. But before a blow was struck William was thrown
from his horse. He died on the 8th of March 1702. "The man," as Burke
said of him, "was dead, but the Grand Alliance survived in which King
William lived and reigned."

  Queen Anne, 1702-1714.

Upon the accession of Anne, war was at once begun. The Grand Alliance
became, as William would have wished, a league to wrest the whole of the
Spanish dominions from Philip, in favour of the Austrian archduke
Charles. It found a chief of supreme military and diplomatic genius in
the duke of Marlborough. His victory at Blenheim (1704) drove the French
out of Germany. His victory of Ramillies (1706) drove them out of the
Netherlands. In Spain, Gibraltar was captured by Rooke (1704) and
Barcelona by Peterborough (1705). Prince Eugene relieved Turin from a
French siege, and followed up the blow by driving the besiegers out of
Italy.

  Union with Scotland.

The influence of Marlborough at home was the result partly of the
prestige of his victories, partly of the dominating influence of his
strong-minded duchess ("Mrs Freeman") over the queen (see ANNE, queen of
England). The duke cared little for home politics in themselves; but he
had his own ends, both public and private, to serve, and at first gave
his support to the Tories, whose church policy was regarded with favour
by the queen. Their efforts were directed towards the restriction of the
Toleration Act within narrow limits. Many dissenters had evaded the Test
Act by partaking of the communion in a church, though they subsequently
attended their own chapels. An Occasional Conformity Bill, imposing
penalties on those who adopted this practice, twice passed the Commons
(1702, 1703), but was rejected by the House of Lords, in which the Whig
element predominated. The church was served in a nobler manner in 1704
by the abandonment of first-fruits and tenths by the queen for the
purpose of raising the pittances of the poorer clergy (see QUEEN ANNE'S
BOUNTY). In 1707 a piece of legislation of the highest value was carried
to a successful end. The Act of Union, passed in the parliaments of
England and Scotland, joined the legislatures of the two kingdoms and
the nations themselves in an indissoluble bond.

  United Whig ministry.

The ministry in office at the time of the passing of the Act of Union
had suffered important changes since the commencement of the reign. The
Tories had never been as earnest in the prosecution of the war as the
Whigs; and Marlborough, who cared above all things for the furtherance
of the war, gradually replaced Tories by Whigs in the ministry. His
intention was doubtless to conciliate both parties by admitting them
both to a share of power; but the Whigs were determined to have all or
none, and in 1708 a purely Whig ministry was formed to support the war
as the first purely Whig ministry had supported it in the reign of
William. The years of its power were the years of the victories of
Oudenarde (1708) and of Malplaquet (1709), bringing with them the entire
ruin of the military power of Louis XIV.

Such successes, if they were not embraced in the spirit of moderation,
boded no good to the Whigs. It was known that even before the last
battle Louis had been ready to abandon the cause of his grandson, and
that his offers had been rejected because he would not consent to join
the allies in turning him out of Spain. A belief spread in England that
Marlborough wished the endless prolongation of the war for his own
selfish ends. Spain was far away, and, if the Netherlands were safe,
enough had been done for the interests of England. The Whigs were
charged with refusing to make peace when an honourable and satisfactory
peace was not beyond their reach.

  Tory Ministry.

As soon as the demand for a vigorous prosecution of the war relaxed, the
Whigs could but rely on their domestic policy, in which they were
strongest in the eyes of posterity but weakest in the eyes of
contemporaries. It was known that they looked for the principle on which
the queen's throne rested to the national act of the Revolution, rather
than to the birth of the sovereign as the daughter of James II., whilst
popular feeling preferred, however inconsistently, to attach itself to
some fragment of hereditary right. What was of greater consequence was,
that it was known that they were the friends of the dissenters, and
that their leaders, if they could have had their way, would not only
have maintained the Toleration Act, but would also have repealed the
Test Act. In 1709 a sermon preached by Dr Sacheverell (q.v.) denounced
toleration and the right of resistance in tones worthy of the first days
of the Restoration. Foolish as the sermon was, it was but the reflection
of folly which was widely spread amongst the rude and less educated
classes. The Whig leaders unwisely took up the challenge and impeached
Sacheverell. The Lords condemned the man, but they condemned him to an
easy sentence. His trial was the signal for riot. Dissenting chapels
were sacked to the cry of High Church and Sacheverell. The queen, who
had personal reasons for disliking the Whigs, dismissed them from office
(1710), and a Tory House of Commons was elected amidst the excitement to
support the Tory ministry of Harley and St John.

  Peace of Utrecht.

  Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act.

After some hesitation the new ministry made peace with France, and the
treaty of Utrecht (1713), stipulating for the permanent separation of
the crowns of France and Spain, and assigning Milan, Naples and the
Spanish Netherlands to the Austrian claimant, accomplished all that
could reasonably be desired, though the abandonment to the vengeance of
the Spanish government of her Catalan allies, and the base desertion of
her continental confederates on the very field of action, brought
dishonour on the good name of England. The Commons gladly welcomed the
cessation of the war. The approval of the Lords had been secured by the
creation of twelve Tory peers. In home politics the new ministry was in
danger of being carried away by its more violent supporters. St John,
now Viscount Bolingbroke, with unscrupulous audacity placed himself at
their head. The Occasional Conformity Bill was at last carried (1711).
To it was added the Schism Act (1714), forbidding dissenters to keep
schools or engage in tuition. Bolingbroke went still farther. He engaged
in an intrigue for bringing over the Pretender to succeed the queen upon
her death. This wild conduct alienated the moderate Tories, who, much as
they wished to see the throne occupied by the heir of the ancient line,
could not bring themselves to consent to its occupation by a Roman
Catholic prince. Such men, therefore, when Anne died (1714) joined the
Whigs in proclaiming the elector of Hanover king as George I.

X. THE HANOVERIAN KINGS (1714-1793)

  Accession of the House of Hanover.

  Repeal of Occasional Conformity Act and Schism Act.

The accession of George I. brought with it the predominance of the
Whigs. They had on their side the royal power, the greater part of the
aristocracy, the dissenters and the higher trading and commercial
classes. The Tories appealed to the dislike of dissenters prevalent
amongst the country gentlemen and the country clergy, and to the
jealousy felt by the agricultural classes towards those who enriched
themselves by trade. Such a feeling, if it was aroused by irritating
legislation, might very probably turn to the advantage of the exiled
house, especially as the majority of Englishmen were to be found on the
Tory side. It was therefore advisable that government should content
itself with as little action as possible, in order to give time for old
habits to wear themselves out. The landing of the Pretender in Scotland
(1715), and the defeat of a portion of his army which had advanced to
Preston--a defeat which was the consequence of the apathy of his English
supporters, and which was followed by the complete suppression of the
rebellion--gave increased strength to the Whig government. But they were
reluctant to face an immediate dissolution, and the Septennial Act was
passed (1716) to extend to seven years the duration of parliaments,
which had been fixed at three years by the Triennial Act of William and
Mary. Under General Stanhope an effort was made to draw legislation in a
more liberal direction. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act
were repealed (1719); but the majorities on the side of the government
were unusually small, and Stanhope, who would willingly have repealed
the Test Act so far as it related to dissenters, was compelled to
abandon the project as entirely impracticable. The Peerage Bill,
introduced at the same time to limit the royal power of creating peers,
was happily thrown out in the Commons. It was proposed, partly from a
desire to guard the Lords against such a sudden increase of their
numbers as had been forced on them when the treaty of Utrecht was under
discussion, and partly to secure the Whigs in office against any change
in the royal councils in a succeeding reign. It was in fact conceived by
men who valued the immediate victory of their principles more than they
trusted to the general good sense of the nation. The Lords were at this
time, as a matter of fact, not merely wealthier but wiser than the
Commons; and it is no wonder that, in days when the Commons, by passing
the Septennial Act, had shown their distrust of their own constituents,
the peers should show, by the Peerage Bill, their distrust of that House
which was elected by those constituencies. Nevertheless, the remedy was
worse than the disease, for it would have established a close oligarchy,
bound sooner or later to come into conflict with the will of the nation,
and only to be overthrown by a violent alteration of the constitution.

  Walpole's ministry.

The excitement following on the bursting of the South Sea Bubble (q.v.),
and the death or ruin of the leading ministers, brought Sir Robert
Walpole to the front (1721). As a man of business when men of business
were few in the House of Commons, he was eminently fit to manage the
affairs of the country. But he owed his long continuance in office
especially to his sagacity. He clearly saw, what Stanhope had failed to
see, that the mass of the nation was not fitted as yet to interest
itself wisely in affairs of government, and that therefore the rule must
be kept in the hands of the upper classes. But he was too sensible to
adopt the coarse expedient which had commended itself to Stanhope, and
he preferred humouring the masses to contradicting them.

The struggle of the preceding century had left its mark in every
direction on the national development. Out of the reaction against
Puritanism had come a widely-spread relaxation of morals, and also, as
far as the educated class was concerned, an eagerness for the discussion
of all social and religious problems. The fierce excitement of political
life had quickened thought, and the most anciently received doctrines
were held of little worth until they were brought to the test of reason.
It was a time when the pen was more powerful than the sword, when a
secretary of state would treat with condescension a witty pamphleteer,
and when such a pamphleteer might hope, not in vain, to become a
secretary of state.

It was in this world of reason and literature that the Whigs of the
Peerage Bill moved. Walpole perceived that there was another world which
understood none of these things. With cynical insight he discovered that
a great government cannot rest on a clique, however distinguished. If
the mass of the nation was not conscious of political wants, it was
conscious of material wants. The merchant needed protection for his
trade; the voters gladly welcomed election days as bringing guineas to
their pockets. Members of parliament were ready to sell their votes for
places, for pensions, for actual money. The system was not new, as Danby
is credited with the discovery that a vote in the House of Commons might
be purchased. But with Walpole it reached its height.

Such a system was possible because the House of Commons was not really
accountable to its constituents. The votes of its members were not
published, and still less were their speeches made known. Such a silence
could only be maintained around the House when there was little interest
in its proceedings. The great questions of religion and taxation which
had agitated the country under the Stuarts were now fairly settled. To
reawaken those questions in any shape would be dangerous. Walpole took
good care never to repeat the mistake of the Sacheverell trial. When on
one occasion he was led into the proposal of an unpopular excise he at
once drew back. England in his days was growing rich. Englishmen were
bluff and independent, in their ways often coarse and unmannerly. Their
life was the life depicted on the canvas of Hogarth and the pages of
Fielding. All high imagination, all devotion to the public weal, seemed
laid asleep. But the political instinct was not dead, and it would one
day express itself for better ends than an agitation against an excise
bill or an outcry for a popular war. A government could no longer employ
its powers for direct oppression. In his own house and in his own
conscience, every Englishman, as far as the government was concerned,
was the master of his destiny. By and by the idea would dawn on the
nation that anarchy is as productive of evil as tyranny, and that a
government which omits to regulate or control allows the strong to
oppress the weak, and the rich to oppress the poor.

  George II. 1727-1760.

Walpole's administration lasted long enough to give room for some feeble
expression of this feeling. When George I. was succeeded by George II.
(1727), Walpole remained in power. His eagerness for the possession of
that power which he desired to use for his country's good, together with
the incapacity of two kings born and bred in a foreign country to take a
leading part in English affairs, completed the change which had been
effected when William first entrusted the conduct of government to a
united cabinet. There was now for the first time a prime minister in
England, a person who was himself a subject imposing harmonious action
on the cabinet. The change was so gradually and silently effected that
it is difficult to realize its full importance. So far, indeed, as it
only came about through the incapacity of the first two kings of the
house of Hanover, it might be undone, and was in fact to a great extent
undone by a more active successor. But so far as it was the result of
general tendencies, it could never be obliterated. In the ministries in
which Somers and Montagu on the one hand and Harley and St John on the
other had taken part, there was no prime minister except so far as one
member of the administration dominated over his colleagues by the force
of character and intelligence. In the reign of George III., even North
and Addington were universally acknowledged by that title, though they
had little claim to the independence of action of a Walpole or a Pitt.

The change was, in fact, one of the most important of those by which the
English constitution has been altered from an hereditary monarchy with a
parliamentary regulative agency to a parliamentary government with an
hereditary regulative agency. In Walpole's time the forms of the
constitution had become, in all essential particulars, what they are
now. What was wanting was a national force behind them to set them to
their proper work.

  The Opposition.

  War with Spain.

The growing opposition which finally drove Walpole from power was not
entirely without a nobler element than could be furnished by personal
rivalry, or ignorant distrust of commercial and financial success. It
was well that complaints that a great country ought not to be governed
by patronage and bribery should be raised, although, as subsequent
experience showed, the causes which rendered corruption inevitable were
not to be removed by the expulsion of Walpole from office. But for one
error, indeed, it is probable that Walpole's rule would have been still
further prolonged. In 1739 a popular excitement arose for a declaration
of war against Spain. Walpole believed that war to be certainly unjust,
and likely to be disastrous. He had, however, been so accustomed to give
way to popular pressure that he did not perceive the difference between
a wise and timely determination to leave a right action undone in the
face of insuperable difficulties, and an unwise and cowardly
determination to do that which he believed to be wrong and imprudent. If
he had now resigned rather than demean himself by acting against his
conscience, it is by no means unlikely that he would have been recalled
to power before many years were over. As it was, the failures of the war
recoiled on his own head, and in 1742 his long ministry came to an end.

  Ministry of Henry Pelham.

After a short interval a successor was found in Henry Pelham. All the
ordinary arts of corruption which Walpole had practised were continued,
and to them were added arts of corruption which Walpole had disdained
to practise. He at least understood that there were certain principles
in accordance with which he wished to conduct public affairs, and he had
driven colleague after colleague out of office rather than allow them to
distract his method of government. Pelham and his brother, the Thomas
Pelham, duke of Newcastle, had no principles of government whatever.
They offered place to every man of parliamentary skill or influence.
There was no opposition, because the ministers never attempted to do
anything which would arouse opposition, and because they were ready to
do anything called for by any one who had power enough to make himself
dangerous; and in 1743 they embarked on a useless war with France in
order to please the king, who saw in every commotion on the continent of
Europe some danger to his beloved Hanover.

  The Rebellion of 1745.

At most times in the history of England such a ministry would have been
driven from office by the outcry of an offended people. In the days of
the Pelhams, government was regarded as lying too far outside the
all-important private interests of the community to make it worth while
to make any effort to rescue it from the degradation into which it had
fallen; yet the Pelhams had not been long in power before this serene
belief that the country could get on very well without a government in
any real sense of the word was put to the test. In 1745 Charles Edward,
the son of the Pretender, landed in Scotland. He was followed by many of
the Highland clans, always ready to draw the sword against the
constituted authorities of the Lowlands; and even in the Lowlands, and
especially in Edinburgh, he found adherents, who still felt the sting
inflicted by the suppression of the national independence of Scotland.
The British army was in as chaotic a condition as the British
government, and Charles Edward inflicted a complete defeat on a force
which met him at Prestonpans. Before the end of the year the victor, at
the head of 5000 men, had advanced to Derby. But he found no support in
England, and the mere numbers brought against him compelled him to
retreat, to find defeat at Culloden in the following year (1746). The
war on the continent had been waged with indifferent success. The
victory of Dettingen (1743) and the glorious defeat of Fontenoy (1745)
had achieved no objects worthy of English intervention, and the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle put an end in 1748 to hostilities which should never
have been begun. The government pursued its inglorious career as long as
Henry Pelham lived. He had at least some share in the financial ability
of Walpole, and it was not till he died in 1754 that the real
difficulties of a system which was based on the avoidance of
difficulties had fairly to be faced.

  Moral and religious atmosphere.

  Wesley and Whitefield.

The change which was needed was not any mere re-adjustment of the
political machine. Those who cared for religion or morality had
forgotten that man is an imaginative and emotional being. Defenders of
Christianity and of deism alike appealed to the reason alone. Enthusiasm
was treated as a folly or a crime, and earnestness of every kind was
branded with the name of enthusiasm. The higher order of minds dwelt
with preference upon the beneficent wisdom of the Creator. The lower
order of minds treated religion as a kind of life assurance against the
inconvenience of eternal death. Upon such a system as this human nature
was certain to revenge itself. The preaching of Wesley and Whitefield
appealed direct to the emotions, with its doctrine of "conversion," and
called upon each individual not to understand, or to admire, or to act,
but vividly to realize the love and mercy of God. In all this there was
nothing new. What was new was that Wesley added an organization,
Methodism (q.v.), in which each of his followers unfolded to one another
the secrets of their heart, and became accountable to his fellows. Large
as the numbers of the Methodists ultimately became, their influence is
not to be measured by their numbers. The double want of the age, the
want of spiritual earnestness and the want of organized coherence, would
find satisfaction in many ways which would have seemed strange to
Wesley, but which were, nevertheless, a continuance of the work which he
began.

  Ministry of Newcastle.

  Ministry of Pitt and Newcastle.

As far as government was concerned, when Henry Pelham died (1754) the
lowest depth of baseness seemed to have been reached. The duke of
Newcastle, who succeeded his brother, looked on the work of corruption
with absolute pleasure, and regarded genius and ability as an awkward
interruption of that happy arrangement which made men subservient to
flattery and money. Whilst he was in the very act of trying to drive
from office all men who were possessed of any sort of ideas, he was
surprised by a great war. In America, the French settlers in Canada and
the English settlers on the Atlantic coast were falling to blows for the
possession of the vast territories drained by the Ohio and its
tributaries. In India, Frenchmen and Englishmen had striven during the
last war for authority over the native states round Pondicherry and
Madras, and the conflict threatened to break out anew. When war began in
earnest, and the reality of danger came home to Englishmen by the
capture of Minorca (1756), there arose a demand for a more capable
government than any which Newcastle could offer. Terrified by the storm
of obloquy which he aroused, he fled from office. A government was
formed, of which the soul was William Pitt. Pitt was, in some sort, to
the political life of Englishmen what Wesley was to their religious
life. He brought no new political ideas into their minds, but he ruled
them by the force of his character and the example of his purity. His
weapons were trust and confidence. He appealed to the patriotism of his
fellow-countrymen, to their imaginative love for the national greatness,
and he did not appeal in vain. He perceived instinctively that a large
number, even of those who took greedily the bribes of Walpole and the
Pelhams, took them, not because they loved money better than their
country, but because they had no conception that their country had any
need of them at all. It was a truth, but it was not the whole truth. The
great Whig families rallied under Newcastle and drove Pitt from office
(1757). But if Pitt could not govern without Newcastle's corruption,
neither could Newcastle govern without Pitt's energy. At last a
compromise was effected, and Newcastle undertook the work of bribing,
whilst Pitt undertook the work of governing (see CHATHAM, WILLIAM PITT,
1ST EARL OF).

  The Seven Years' War.

The war which had already broken out, the Seven Years' War (1756-1763),
was not confined to England alone. By the side of the duel between
France and England, a war was going on upon the continent of Europe, in
which Austria--with its allies, France, Russia and the German
princes--had fallen upon the new kingdom of Prussia and its sovereign
Frederick II. England and Prussia therefore necessarily formed an
alliance. Different as the two governments were, they were both alike in
recognizing, in part at least, the conditions of progress. Even in
Pitt's day England, however imperfectly, rested its strength on the
popular will. Even in Frederick's day Prussia was ruled by
administrators selected for their special knowledge. Neither France nor
Austria had any conception of the necessity of fulfilling these
requirements. Hence the strength of England and of Prussia. The war
seemed to be a mere struggle for territory. There was no feeling in
either Pitt or Frederick, such as there was in the men who contended
half a century later against Napoleon, that they were fighting the
battles of the civilized world. There was something repulsive as well in
the enthusiastic nationalism of Pitt as in the cynical nationalism of
Frederick. Pitt's sole object was to exalt England to a position in
which she would fear no rival. But in so doing he exalted that which, in
spite of all that had happened, best deserved to be exalted. The habits
of individual energy fused together by the inspiration of patriotism
conquered Canada. The unintelligent over-regulation of the French
government could not maintain the colonies which had been founded in
happier times. In 1758 Louisburg was taken, and the mouth of the St
Lawrence guarded against France. In 1759 Quebec fell before Wolfe, who
died at the moment of victory. In the same year the naval victories of
Lagos and Quiberon Bay established the supremacy of the British at sea.
The battle of Plassey (1757) had laid Bengal at the feet of Clive; and
Coote's victory at Wandiwash (1760) led to the final ruin of the relics
of French authority in southern India. When George II. died (1760)
England was the first maritime and colonial power in the world (see
SEVEN YEARS' WAR; CANADA: _History_; INDIA: _History_).

  George III., 1760-1820.

  Pitt's resignation.

In George III. the king once more became an important factor in English
politics. From his childhood he had been trained by his mother and his
instructors to regard the breaking down of the power of the great
families as the task of his life. In this he was walking in the same
direction as Pitt. If the two men could have worked together, England
might have been spared many misfortunes. Unhappily, the king could not
understand Pitt's higher qualities, his bold confidence in the popular
feeling, and his contempt for corruption and intrigue. And yet the
king's authority was indispensable to Pitt, if he was to carry on his
conflict against the great families with success. When the war came to
an end, as it must come to an end sooner or later, Pitt's special
predominance, derived as it was from his power of breathing a martial
spirit into the fleets and armies of England, would come to an end too.
Only the king, with his hold upon the traditional instincts of loyalty
and the force of his still unimpaired prerogative, could, in ordinary
times, hold head against the wealthy and influential aristocracy.
Unfortunately, George III. was not wise enough to deal with the
difficulty in a high-minded fashion. With a well-intentioned but narrow
mind, he had nothing in him to strike the imagination of his subjects.
He met influence with influence, corruption with corruption, intrigue
with intrigue. Unhappily, too, his earliest relations with Pitt involved
a dispute on a point on which he was right and Pitt was wrong. In 1761
Pitt resigned office, because neither the king nor the cabinet were
willing to declare war against Spain in the midst of the war with
France. As the war with Spain was inevitable, and as, when it broke out
in the following year (1762), it was followed by triumphs for which Pitt
had prepared the way, the prescience of the great war-minister appeared
to be fully established. But it was his love of war, not his skill in
carrying it on, which was really in question. He would be satisfied with
nothing short of the absolute ruin of France. He would have given
England that dangerous position of supremacy which was gained for France
by Louis XIV. in the 17th century, and by Napoleon in the 19th century.
He would have made his country still more haughty and arrogant than it
was, till other nations rose against it, as they have three times risen
against France, rather than submit to the intolerable yoke. It was a
happy thing for England that peace was signed (1763).

  Bute and Grenville.

Even as it was, a spirit of contemptuous disregard of the rights of
others had been roused, which would not be easily allayed. The king's
premature attempt to secure a prime minister of his own choosing in Lord
Bute (1761) came to an end through the minister's incapacity (1763).
George Grenville, who followed him, kept the king in leading strings in
reliance upon his parliamentary majority. Something, no doubt, had been
accomplished by the incorruptibility of Pitt. The practice of bribing
members of parliament by actual presents in money came to an end, though
the practice of bribing them by place and pension long continued. The
arrogance which Pitt displayed towards foreign nations was displayed by
Grenville towards classes of the population of the British dominions. It
was enough for him to establish a right. He never put himself in the
position of those who were to suffer by its being put in force.

  The American colonies.

The first to suffer from Grenville's conception of his duty were the
American colonies. The mercantile system, which had sprung up in Spain
in the 16th century, held that colonies were to be entirely prohibited
from trading, except with the mother country. Every European country had
adopted this view, and the acquisition of fresh colonial dominions by
England, at the peace of 1763, had been made not so much through lust of
empire as through love of trade. Of all English colonies, the American
were the most populous and important. Their proximity to the Spanish
colonies in the West Indies had naturally led to a contraband trade. To
this trade Grenville put a stop, as far as lay in his power. Obnoxious
as this measure was in America, the colonists had acknowledged the
principle on which it was founded too long to make it easy to resist it.
Another step of Grenville's met with more open opposition. Even with all
the experience of the century which followed, the relations between a
mother country and her colonies are not easy to arrange. If the burthen
of defence is to be borne in common, it can hardly be left to the mother
country to declare war, and to exact the necessary taxation, without the
consent of the colonies. If, on the other hand, it is to be borne by the
mother country alone, she may well complain that she is left to bear
more than her due share of the weight. The latter alternative forced
itself upon the attention of Grenville. The British parliament, he held,
was the supreme legislature, and, as such, was entitled to raise taxes
in America to support the military forces needed for the defence of
America. The act (1765) imposing a stamp tax on the American colonies
was the result.

  The Rockingham ministry.

As might have been expected, the Americans resisted. For them, the
question was precisely that which Hampden had fought out in the case of
ship-money. As far as they were concerned, the British parliament had
stepped into the position of Charles I. If Grenville had remained in
office he would probably have persisted in his resolution. He was driven
from his post by the king's resolve no longer to submit to his
insolence, and a new ministry was formed under the marquess of
Rockingham, composed of some of those leaders of the Whig aristocracy
who had not followed the Grenville ministry. They were well-intentioned,
but weak, and without political ability; and the king regarded them with
distrust, only qualified by his abhorrence of the ministry which they
superseded.

  The Declaratory Act and repeal of Stamp Act.

As soon as the bad news came from America, the ministry was placed
between two recommendations. Grenville, on the one hand, advised that
the tax should be enforced. Pitt, on the other, declared that the
British parliament had absolutely no right to tax America, though he
held that it had the right to regulate, or in other words to tax, the
commerce of America for the benefit of the British merchant and
manufacturer. Between the two the government took a middle course. It
obtained from parliament a total repeal of the Stamp Act, but it also
passed a Declaratory Act, claiming for the British parliament the
supreme power over the colonies in matters of taxation, as well as in
matters of legislation.

  Burke's political theory.

It is possible that the course thus adopted was chosen simply because it
was a middle course. But it was probably suggested by Edmund Burke, who
was then Lord Rockingham's private secretary, but who for some time to
come was to furnish thought to the party to which he attached himself.
Burke carried into the world of theory those politics of expediency of
which Walpole had been the practical originator. He held that questions
of abstract right had no place in politics. It was therefore as absurd
to argue with Pitt that England had a right to regulate commerce, as it
was to argue with Grenville that England had a right to levy taxes. All
that could be said was, that it was expedient in a widespread empire
that the power of final decision should be lodged somewhere, and that it
was also expedient not to use that power in such a way as to irritate
those whom it was the truest wisdom to conciliate.

  Arguments of Pitt and Burke.

The weak side of this view was the weak side of all Burke's political
philosophy. Like all great innovators, he was intensely conservative
where he was not an advocate of change. With new views on every subject
relating to the exercise of power, he shrank even from entertaining the
slightest question relating to the distribution of power. He recommended
to the British parliament the most self-denying wisdom, but he could not
see that in its relation to the colonies the British parliament was so
constituted as to make it entirely unprepared to be either wise or
self-denying. It is true that if he had thought out the matter in this
direction, he would have been led further than he or any other man in
England or America was at that time prepared to go. If the British
parliament was unfit to legislate for America, and if, as was
undoubtedly the case, it was impossible to create a representative body
which was fit to legislate, it would follow that the American colonies
could only be fairly governed as practically independent states, though
they might possibly remain, like the great colonies of our own day, in a
position of alliance rather than of dependence. It was because the
issues opened led to changes so far greater than the wisest statesman
then perceived, that Pitt's solution, logically untenable as it was, was
preferable to Burke's. Pitt would have given bad reasons for going a
step in the right direction. Burke gave excellent reasons why those who
were certain to go wrong should have the power to go right.

  Ministry of Lord Chatham.

Scarcely were the measures relating to America passed when the king
turned out the ministry. The new ministry was formed by Pitt, who was
created earl of Chatham (1766), on the principle of bringing together
men who had shaken themselves loose from any of the different Whig
cliques. Whatever chance the plan had of succeeding was at an end when
Chatham's mind temporarily gave way under stress of disease (1767).
Charles Townshend, a brilliant, headstrong man, led parliament in the
way which had been prepared by the Declaratory Act, and laid duties on
tea and other articles of commerce entering the ports of America.

  Wilkes and "The North Briton."

It was impossible that the position thus claimed by the British
parliament towards America should affect America alone. The habit of
obtaining money otherwise than by the consent of those who are required
to pay it would be certain to make parliament careless of the feelings
and interests of that great majority of the population at home, which
was unrepresented in parliament. The resistance of America to the
taxation imposed was therefore not without benefit to the people of the
mother country. Already there were signs of a readiness in parliament to
treat even the constituencies with contempt. In 1763, in the days of the
Grenville ministry, John Wilkes, a profligate and scurrilous writer, had
been arrested on a general warrant--that is to say, a warrant in which
the name of no individual was mentioned--as the author of an alleged
libel on the king, contained in No. 45 of _The North Briton_. He was a
member of parliament, and as such was declared by Chief Justice Pratt to
be privileged against arrest. In 1768 he was elected member for
Middlesex. The House of Commons expelled him. He was again elected, and
again expelled. The third time, the Commons gave the seat to which
Wilkes was a third time chosen to Colonel Luttrell, who was far down in
the poll. Wilkes thus became the representative of a great
constitutional principle, the principle that the electors have a right
to choose their representatives without restriction, save by the
regulations of the law.

For the present the contention of the American colonists and of the
defenders of Wilkes at home was confined within the compass of the law.
Yet in both cases it might easily pass beyond that compass, and might
rest itself upon an appeal to the duty of governments to modify the law,
and to enlarge the basis of their authority, when law and authority have
become too narrow.

  Lord North's ministry.

As regards America, though Townshend died, the government persisted in
his policy. As resistance grew stronger in America, the king urged the
use of compulsion. If he had not the wisdom of the country on his side,
he had its prejudices. The arrogant spirit of Englishmen made them
contemptuous towards the colonists, and the desire to thrust taxation
upon others than themselves made the new colonial legislation popular.
In 1770 the king made Lord North prime minister. He had won the object
on which he had set his heart. A new Tory party had sprung up, not
distinguished, like the Tories of Queen Anne's reign, by a special
ecclesiastical policy, but by their acceptance of the king's claim to
nominate ministers, and so to predominate in the ministry himself.

Unhappily the opposition, united in the desire to conciliate America,
was divided on questions of home policy. Chatham would have met the new
danger by parliamentary reform, giving increased voting power to the
freeholders of the counties. Burke from principle, and his noble patrons
mainly from lower motives, were opposed to any such change. As Burke had
wished the British parliament to be supreme over the colonies, in
confidence that this supremacy would not be abused, so he wished the
great landowning connexion resting on the rotten boroughs to rule over
the unrepresented people, in confidence that this power would not be
abused. Amid these distractions the king had an easy game to play. He
had all the patronage of the government in his hands, and beyond the
circle which was influenced by gifts of patronage, he could appeal to
the ignorance and self-seeking of the nation, with which, though he knew
it not, he was himself in the closest sympathy.

  The American War of Independence.

No wonder resistance grew more vigorous in America. In 1773 the
inhabitants of Boston threw ship-loads of tea into the harbour rather
than pay the obnoxious duty. In 1774 the Boston Port Bill deprived
Boston of its commercial rights, whilst the Massachusetts Government
Bill took away from that colony the ordinary political liberties of
Englishmen. The first skirmish of the inevitable war was fought at
Lexington in 1775. In 1776 the thirteen colonies united in the
continental congress issued their Declaration of Independence. England
put forth all its strength to beat down resistance; but the task, which
seemed easy at a distance, proved impossible. It might have been so even
had the war been conducted on the British side with greater military
skill and with more insight into the conditions of the struggle, which
was essentially a civil contest between men of the same race. But the
initial difficulties of the vast field of operations were greatly
increased by the want of skill of the British leaders in adapting
themselves to new conditions, while even loyalist sentiment was shocked
by the employment of German mercenaries and Red Indian savages against
men of English blood. Even so, the issue of the struggle was for long
doubtful, and there were moments when it might have ended by a policy of
wise concession; but the Americans, though reduced at times to desperate
straits, had the advantage of fighting in their own country, and above
all they found in George Washington a leader after the model of the
English country gentleman who had upheld the standard of liberty against
the Stuarts, and worthy of the great cause for which they fought. In
1777 a British army under Burgoyne capitulated at Saratoga; and early in
1778 France, eager to revenge the disasters of the Seven Years' War,
formed an alliance with the revolted colonies as free and independent
states, and was soon joined by Spain.

Chatham, who was ready to make any concession to America short of
independence, and especially of independence at the dictation of France,
died in 1778. The war was continued for some years with varying results;
but in 1781 the capitulation of a second British army under Cornwallis
at Yorktown was a decisive blow, which brought home to the minds of the
dullest the assurance that the conquest of America was an impossibility.

Before this event happened there had been a great change in public
feeling in England. The increasing weight of taxation gave rise in 1780
to a great meeting of the freeholders of Yorkshire, which in turn gave
the signal for a general agitation for the reduction of unnecessary
expense in the government. To this desire Burke gave expression in his
bill for economical reform, though he was unable to carry it in the
teeth of interested opposition. The movement in favour of economy was
necessarily also a movement in favour of peace; and when the surrender
of Yorktown was known (1782), Lord North at once resigned office.

  The second Rockingham ministry.

The new ministry formed under Lord Rockingham comprised not only his own
immediate followers, of whom the most prominent was Charles Fox, but the
followers of Chatham, of whom Lord Shelburne was the acknowledged
leader. A treaty of peace acknowledging the independence of the United
States of America was at once set on foot; and the negotiation with
France was rendered easy by the defeat of a French fleet by Rodney, and
by the failure of the combined forces of France and Spain to take
Gibraltar.

  The coalition.

Already the ministry on which such great hopes had been placed had
broken up. Rockingham died in July 1782. The two sections of which the
government was composed had different aims. The Rockingham section,
which now looked up to Fox, rested on aristocratic connexion and
influence; the Shelburne section was anxious to gain popular support by
active reforms, and to gain over the king to their side. Judging by past
experience, the combination might well seem hopeless, and honourable men
like Fox might easily regard it with suspicion. But Fox's allies took
good care that their name should not be associated with the idea of
improvement. They pruned Burke's Economical Reform Bill till it left as
many abuses as it suppressed; and though the bill prohibited the grant
of pensions above £300, they hastily gave away pensions of much larger
value to their own friends before the bill had received the royal
assent. They also opposed a bill for parliamentary reform brought in by
young William Pitt. When the king chose Shelburne as prime minister,
they refused to follow him, and put forward the incompetent duke of
Portland as their candidate for the office. The struggle was thus
renewed on the old ground of the king's right to select his ministers.
But while the king now put forward a minister notoriously able and
competent to the task, his opponents put forward a man whose only claim
to office was the possession of large estates. They forced their way
back to power by means as unscrupulous as their claim to it was
unjustifiable. They formed a coalition with Lord North, whose politics
and character they had denounced for years. The coalition, as soon as
the peace with America and France had been signed (1783), drove
Shelburne from office. The duke of Portland became the nominal head of
the government, Fox and North its real leaders.

  The India Bill.

Such a ministry could not afford to make a single blunder. The king
detested it, and the assumption by the Whig houses of a right to
nominate the head of the government without reference to the national
interests, could never be popular. The blunder was soon committed.
Burke, hating wrong and injustice with a bitter hatred, had descried in
the government of British India by the East India Company a disgrace to
the English name. For many of the actions of that government no
honourable man can think of uttering a word of defence. The helpless
natives were oppressed and robbed by the company and its servants in
every possible way. Burke drew up a bill, which was adopted by the
coalition government, for taking all authority in India out of the hands
of the company, and even placing the company's management of its own
commercial affairs under control. The governing and controlling body was
naturally to be a council appointed at home. The question of the
nomination of this council at once drew the whole question within the
domain of party politics. The whole patronage of India would be in its
hands, and, as parliament was then constituted, the balance of parties
might be more seriously affected by the distribution of that patronage
than it would be now. When, therefore, it was understood that the
government bill meant the council to be named in the bill for four
years, or, in other words, to be named by the coalition ministry, it was
generally regarded as an unblushing attempt to turn a measure for the
good government of India into a measure for securing the ministry in
office. The bill of course passed the Commons. When it came before the
Lords, it was thrown out in consequence of a message from the king, that
he would regard any one who voted for it as his enemy.

  Ministry of the younger Pitt.

The contest had thus become one between the influence of the crown and
the influence of the great houses. Constitutional historians, who treat
the question as one of merely theoretical politics, leave out of
consideration this essential element of the situation, and forget that,
if it was wrong for the king to influence the Lords by his message, it
was equally wrong for the ministry to acquire for themselves fresh
patronage with which to influence the Commons. But there was now, what
there had not been in the time of Walpole and the Pelhams, a public
opinion ready to throw its weight on one side or the other. The county
members still formed the most independent portion of the
representation, and there were many possessors of rotten boroughs, who
were ready to agree with the county members rather than with the great
landowners. In choosing Pitt, the young son of Chatham, for his prime
minister, as soon as he had dismissed the coalition, George III. gave
assurance that he wished his counsels to be directed by integrity and
ability. After a struggle of many weeks, parliament was dissolved
(1784), and the new House of Commons was prepared to support the king's
minister by a large majority.

As far as names go, the change effected placed the new Tory party in
office for an almost uninterrupted period of forty-six years. It so
happened, however, that after the first eight years of that period had
passed by, circumstances occurred which effected so great a change in
the composition and character of that party as to render any statement
to this effect entirely illusive. During eight years, however, Pitt's
ministry was not merely a Tory ministry resting on the choice of the
king, but a Liberal ministry resting on national support and upon
advanced political knowledge.

  Material progress.

The nation which Pitt had behind him was very different from the
populace which had assailed Walpole's Excise Bill, or had shouted for
Wilkes and liberty. At the beginning of the century the intellect of
thoughtful Englishmen had applied itself to speculative problems of
religion and philosophy. In the middle of the century it applied itself
to practical problems affecting the employment of industry. In 1776 Adam
Smith published the _Wealth of Nations_. Already in 1762 the work of
Brindley, the Bridgewater canal, the first joint of a network of inland
water communication, was opened. In 1767 Hargreaves produced the
spinning-jenny; Arkwright's spinning machine was exhibited in 1768;
Crompton's mule was finished in 1779; Cartwright hit upon the idea of
the power-loom in 1784, though it was not brought into profitable use
till 1801. The Staffordshire potteries had been flourishing under
Wedgwood since 1763, and the improved steam-engine was brought into
shape by Watt in 1768. During these years the duke of Bedford, Coke of
Norfolk, and Robert Bakewell were busy in the improvement of stock and
agriculture.

The increase of wealth and prosperity caused by these changes went far
to produce a large class of the population entirely outside the
associations of the landowning class, but with sufficient intelligence
to appreciate the advantages of a government carried on without regard
to the personal interests and rivalries of the aristocracy. The mode in
which that increase of wealth was effected was even more decisive on the
ultimate destinies of the country. The substitution of the organization
of hereditary monarchy for the organization of wealth and station would
ultimately have led to evils as great as those which it superseded. It
was only tolerable as a stepping-stone to the organization of
intelligence. The larger the numbers admitted to influence the affairs
of state, the more necessary is it that they respect the powers of
intellect. It would be foolish to institute a comparison between an
Arkwright or a Crompton and a Locke or a Newton. But it is certain that
for one man who could appreciate the importance of the treatise _On the
Human Understanding_ or the theory of gravitation, there were thousands
who could understand the value of the water-frame, or the power-loom.
The habit of looking with reverence upon mental power was fostered in no
slight measure by the industrial development of the second half of the
18th century.

  Pitt's India Bill.

The supremacy of intelligence in the political world was, for the time,
represented in Pitt. In 1784 he passed an India Bill, which left the
commerce and all except the highest patronage of India in the hands of
the East India Company, but which erected a department of the home
government, named the board of control, to compel the company to carry
out such political measures as the government saw fit. A bill for
parliamentary reform was, however, thrown out by the opposition of his
own supporters in parliament, whilst outside parliament there was no
general desire for a change in a system which for the present produced
such excellent fruits. Still more excellent was his plan of legislation
for Ireland. Irishmen had taken advantage of the weakness of England
during the American War to enforce upon the ministry of the day, in 1780
and 1782, an abandonment of all claim on the part of the English
government and the English judges to interfere in any way with Irish
affairs. From 1782, therefore, there were two independent legislatures
within the British Isles--the one sitting at Westminster and the other
sitting in Dublin. With these political changes Fox professed himself to
be content. Pitt, whose mind was open to wider considerations, proposed
to throw open commerce to both nations by removing all the restrictions
placed on the trade of Ireland with England and with the rest of the
world. The opposition of the English parliament was only removed by
concessions continuing some important restrictions upon Irish exports,
and by giving the English parliament the right of initiation in all
measures relating to the regulation of the trade which was to be common
to both nations. The Irish parliament took umbrage at the superiority
claimed by England, and threw out the measure as an insult, though, even
as it stood, it was undeniably in favour of Ireland. The lesson of the
incompatibility of two coordinate legislatures was not thrown away upon
Pitt.

In 1786 the commercial treaty with France opened that country to English
trade, and was the first result of the theories laid down by Adam Smith
ten years previously. The first attack upon the horrors of the
slave-trade was made in 1788; and in the same year, in the debates on
the Regency Bill caused by the king's insanity, Pitt defended against
Fox the right of parliament to make provision for the exercise of the
powers of the crown when the wearer was permanently or temporarily
disabled from exercising his authority.

When the king recovered, he went to St Paul's to return thanks on the
23rd of April 1789. The enthusiasm with which he was greeted showed how
completely he had the nation on his side. All the hopes of liberal
reformers were now with him. All the hopes of moral and religious men
were on his side as well. The seed sown by Wesley had grown to be a
great tree. A spirit of thoughtfulness in religious matters and of moral
energy was growing in the nation, and the king was endeared to his
subjects, as much by his domestic virtues as by his support of the great
minister who acted in his name. The happy prospect was soon to be
overclouded. On the 4th of May, eleven days after the appearance of
George III. at St Paul's, the French states-general met at Versailles.

  The French Revolution; English feeling.

By the great mass of intelligent Englishmen the change was greeted with
enthusiasm. It is seldom that one nation understands the tendencies and
difficulties of another; and the mere fact that power was being
transferred from an absolute monarch to a representative assembly led
superficial observers to imagine that they were witnessing a mere
repetition of the victory of the English parliament over the Stuart
kings. In fact, that which was passing in France was of a totally
different nature from the English struggle of the 17th century. In
England, the conflict had been carried on for the purpose of limiting
the power of the king. In France, it was begun in order to sweep away an
aristocracy in church and state which had become barbarously oppressive.
The French Revolution was not, therefore, a conflict for the reform of
the political organization of the state, but one for the reorganization
of the whole structure of society; and in proportion as it turned away
from the path which English ignorance had marked out for it, Englishmen
turned away from it in disgust. As they did not understand the aims of
the French Revolutionists, they were unable to make that excuse for even
so much of their conduct as admits of excuse. Three men, Fox, Burke and
Pitt, however, represented three varieties of opinion into which the
nation was very unequally divided.

Fox, generous and trustful towards the movements of large masses of men,
had very little intellectual grasp of the questions at issue in France.
He treated the struggle as one simply for the establishment of free
institutions; and when at last the crimes of the leaders became patent
to the world, he contented himself with lamenting the unfortunate fact,
and fell back on the argument that though England could not sympathize
with the French tyrants, there was no reason why she should go to war
with them.

Burke, on the other hand, while he failed to understand the full
tendency of the Revolution for good as well as for evil, understood it
far better than any Englishman of that day understood it. He saw that
its main aim was equality, not liberty, and that not only would the
French nation be ready, in pursuit of equality, to welcome any tyranny
which would serve its purpose, but would be the more prone to acts of
tyranny over individuals. This would arise from the remodelling of
institutions, with the object of giving immediate effect to the will of
the masses, which was especially liable to be counterfeited by designing
and unscrupulous agitators. There is no doubt that in all this Burke was
in the right, as he was in his denunciation of the mischief certain to
follow when a nation tries to start afresh, and to blot out all past
progress in the light of simple reason, which is often most fallible
when it believes itself to be most infallible. Where he went wrong was
in his ignorance of the special circumstances of the French nation, and
his consequent blindness to the fact that the historical method of
gradual progress was impossible where institutions had become so utterly
bad as they were in France, and that consequently the system of starting
afresh, to which he reasonably objected, was to the French a matter not
of choice but of necessity. Nor did he see that the passion for
equality, like every great passion, justified itself, and that the
problem was, not how to obtain liberty in defiance of it, but how so to
guide it as to obtain liberty by it and through it.

Burke did not content himself with pointing out speculatively the evils
which he foreboded for the French. He perceived clearly that the effect
of the new French principles could no more be confined to French
territory than the principles of Protestantism in the 16th century could
be confined to Saxony. He knew well that the appeal to abstract reason
and the hatred of aristocracy would spread over Europe like a flood,
and, as he was in the habit of considering whatever was most opposed to
the object of his dislike to be wholly excellent, he called for a
crusade of all established governments against the anarchical principles
of dissolution which had broken loose in France.

Pitt occupied ground apart from either Fox or Burke. He had neither
Fox's sympathy for popular movements, nor Burke's intellectual
appreciation of the immediate tendencies of the Revolution. Hence,
whilst he pronounced against any active interference with France, he was
an advocate of peace, not because he saw more than Fox or Burke, but
because he saw less. He fancied that France would be so totally occupied
with its own troubles that it would cease for a long time to be
dangerous to other nations.

  Beginning of the revolutionary wars.

This view was soon to be stultified by the effect of the coalition
against France in 1792 of Prussia and Austria. The proclamation of the
allies calling on the French to restore the royal authority was answered
by a passionate outburst of defiance. The king himself was suspected of
complicity with the invaders of his country, and the rising of the 10th
of August was followed by the proclamation of the republic and by the
awful "September massacres" of helpless prisoners, guilty of no crime
but noble birth, and therefore presumably of attachment to the old
régime, and treason towards the new. This passionate attachment to the
Revolution, which in France displayed itself in a carnival of insane
suspicion and cruelty, inspired on the frontiers an astonishing
patriotic resistance. Before the end of the year the invasion was
repulsed, and the ragged armies of the Revolution had overrun Savoy and
the Austrian Netherlands, and were threatening the aristocratic Dutch
republic.

  Change of feeling in England.

Very few governments in Europe were so rooted in the affections of their
people as to be able to look without terror on the challenge thus thrown
out to them. The English government was one of those very few. No mere
despotism was here exercised by the king. No broad impassable line here
divided the aristocracy from the people. The work of former generations
of Englishmen had been too well done to call for that breach of
historical continuity which was a dire necessity in France. There was
much need of reform. There was no need of a revolution. The whole of the
upper and middle classes, with few exceptions, clung together in a
fierce spirit of resistance; and the mass of the lower classes,
especially in the country, were too well off to wish for change. The
spirit of resistance to revolution quickly developed into a spirit of
resistance to reform, and those who continued to advocate changes, more
or less after the French model, were treated as the enemies of mankind.
A fierce hatred of France and of all that attached itself to France
became the predominating spirit of the nation.

  Division of the Whig party.

Such a change in the national mind could not but affect the constitution
of the Whig party. The reasoning of Burke would, in itself, have done
little to effect its disruption. But the great landowners, who
contributed so strong an element in it, composed the very class which
had most to fear from the principles of the Revolution. The old
questions which had divided them from the king and Pitt in 1783 had
dwindled into nothing before the appalling question of the immediate
present. They made themselves the leaders of the war party, and they
knew that that party comprised almost the whole of the parliamentary
classes.

What could Pitt do but surrender? The whole of the intellectual basis of
his foreign policy was swept away when it became evident that the
continental war would bring with it an accession of French territory. He
did not abandon his opinions. His opinions rather abandoned him. A wider
intelligence might have held that, let France gain what territorial
aggrandizement it might upon the continent of Europe, it was impossible
to resist such changes until the opponents of France had so purified
themselves as to obtain a hold upon the moral feelings of mankind. Pitt
could not take this view; perhaps no man in his day could be fairly
expected to take it. He did not indeed declare war against France; but
he sought to set a limit to her conquests in the winter, though he had
not sought to set a limit to the conquests of the allied sovereigns in
the preceding summer. He treated with supercilious contempt the National
Convention, which had dethroned the king and proclaimed a republic.
Above all, he took up a declaration by the Convention, that they would
give help to all peoples struggling for liberty against their respective
governments, as a challenge to England. The horror caused in England by
the trial and execution of Louis XVI. completed the estrangement between
the two countries, and though the declaration of war came from France
(1793), it had been in great part brought about by the bearing of
England and its government.     (S. R. G.)

XI. THE REVOLUTIONARY EPOCH, THE REACTION, AND THE TRIUMPH OF REFORM
(1793-1837)

  The government and the "revolutionary" agitation.

In appearance the great Whig landowners gave their support to Pitt, and
in 1794 some of their leaders, the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam,
and Windham, entered the cabinet to serve under him. In reality it was
Pitt who had surrendered. The ministry and the party by which it was
supported might call themselves Tory still; but the great reforming
policy of 1784 was at an end, and the government, unconscious of its own
strength, conceived its main function to be at all costs to preserve the
constitution, which it believed to be in danger of being overwhelmed by
the rising tide of revolutionary feeling. That this belief was idle it
is now easy enough to see; at the time this was not so obvious. Thomas
Paine's _Rights of Man_, published in 1791, a brilliant and bitter
attack on the British constitution from the Jacobin point of view, sold
by tens of thousands. Revolutionary societies with high-sounding names
were established, of which the most conspicuous were the Revolution
Society, the Society for Constitutional Information, the London
Corresponding Society, and the Friends of the People. Of these, indeed,
only the two last were directly due to the example of France. The
Revolution Society, founded to commemorate the revolution of 1688, had
long carried on a respectable existence under the patronage of cabinet
ministers; the Society for Constitutional Information, of which Pitt
himself had been a member, was founded in 1780 to advocate parliamentary
reform; both had, however, developed under the influence of the events
in France in a revolutionary direction. The London Corresponding
Society, composed mainly of working-men, was the direct outcome of the
excitement caused by the developments of the French Revolution. Its
leaders were obscure and usually illiterate men, who delighted to
propound their theories for the universal reformation of society and the
state in rhetoric of which the characteristic phrases were borrowed from
the tribune of the Jacobin Club. Later generations have learned by
repeated experience that the eloquence of Hyde Park orators is not the
voice of England; there were some even then--among those not immediately
responsible for keeping order--who urged the government "to trust the
people";[6] but with the object-lesson of France before them it is not
altogether surprising that ministers refused to believe in the
harmlessness of societies, which not only kept up a fraternal
correspondence with the National Convention and the Jacobin Club, but,
by attempting to establish throughout the country a network of
affiliated clubs, were apparently aiming at setting up in Great Britain
the Jacobin idea of popular control.

The danger, of course, was absurdly exaggerated; as indeed was proved by
the very popularity of the repressive measures to which the government
thought it necessary to resort, and which gave to the vapourings of a
few knots of agitators the dignity of a widespread conspiracy for the
overthrow of the constitution. On the 1st of December 1792 a
proclamation was issued calling out the militia on the ground that a
dangerous spirit of tumult and disorder had been excited by
evil-disposed persons, acting in concert with persons in foreign parts,
and this statement was repeated in the king's speech at the opening of
parliament on the 13th. In spite of the protests of Sheridan and other
members of the opposition, a campaign of press and other prosecutions
now began which threatened to extinguish the most cherished right of
Englishmen--liberty of speech. The country was flooded with government
spies and informers, whose efforts were seconded by such voluntary
societies as the Association for preserving Liberty and Property against
Republicans and Levellers, founded by John Reeves, the historian of
English law. No one was safe from these zealous and too often credulous
defenders of the established order; and a few indiscreet words spoken in
a coffee house were enough to bring imprisonment and ruin, as in the
case of John Frost, a respectable attorney, condemned for sedition in
March 1793. In Scotland the panic, and the consequent cruelty, were
worse than in England. The meeting at Edinburgh of a "convention of
delegates of the associated friends of the people," at which some
foolish and exaggerated language was used, was followed by the trial of
Thomas Muir, a talented young advocate whose brilliant defence did not
save him from a sentence of fourteen years' transportation (August 30,
1793), while seven years' transportation was the punishment of the Rev.
T. Fyshe Palmer for circulating an address from "a society of the
friends of liberty to their fellow-citizens" in favour of a reform of
the House of Commons. These sentences and the proceedings which led up
to them, though attacked with bitter eloquence by Sheridan and Fox, were
confirmed by a large majority in parliament.

It was not, however, till late in the session of 1794 that ministers
laid before parliament any evidence of seditious practices. In May
certain leaders of democratic societies were arrested and their papers
seized, and on the 13th a king's message directed the books of certain
corresponding societies to be laid before both Houses. The committee of
the House of Commons at once reported that there was evidence of a
conspiracy to supersede the House of Commons by a national convention,
and Pitt proposed and carried a bill suspending the Habeas Corpus Act.
This was followed by further reports of the committees of both Houses,
presenting evidence of the secret manufacture of arms and of other
proceedings calculated to endanger the public peace. A series of state
prosecutions followed. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie for
high treason (August and September 1794) actually revealed a treasonable
plot on the part of a few obscure individuals at Edinburgh, who were
found in the possession of no less than fifty-seven pikes of home
manufacture, wherewith to overthrow the British government. The
execution of Watt gave to this trial a note of tragedy which was absent
from that of certain members of the Corresponding Society, accused of
conspiring to murder the king by means of a poisoned arrow shot from an
air-gun. The ridicule that greeted the revelation of the "Pop-gun Plot"
marked the beginning of a reaction that found a more serious expression
in the trials of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall
(October and November 1794). The prisoners were accused of high treason,
their chief offence consisting in their attempt to assemble a general
convention of the people, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining
parliamentary reform, but really--as the prosecution urged--for
subverting the constitution. This latter charge, though proved to the
satisfaction of the committees of both Houses of Parliament, broke down
under the cross-examination of the government witnesses by the counsel
for the defence, and could indeed only have been substantiated by a
dangerous stretching of the doctrine of constructive treason. Happily
the jury refused to convict, and its verdict saved the nation from the
disgrace of meting out the extreme penalty of high treason to an attempt
to hold a public meeting for the redress of grievances.

The common sense of a British jury had preserved, in spite of parliament
and ministry, that free right of meeting which was to be one of the
strongest instruments of future reform. The government, however, saw
little reason in the events of the following months for reversing their
coercive policy. The year 1795 was one of great suffering and great
popular unrest; for the effect of the war upon industry was now
beginning to be felt, and the distress had been aggravated by two bad
harvests. The sudden determination of those in power, who had hitherto
advocated reform, to stereotype the existing system, closed the avenues
of hope to those who had expected an improvement of their lot from
constitutional changes, and the disaffected temper of the populace that
resulted was taken advantage of by the London Corresponding Society,
emboldened by its triumph in the courts, to organize open and really
dangerous demonstrations, such as the vast mass meeting at Copenhagen
House on the 26th of October. On the 29th of October the king, on his
way to open parliament, was attacked by an angry mob shouting, "Give us
bread," "No Pitt," "No war," "No famine,"; and the glass panels of his
state coach were smashed to pieces.

The result of these demonstrations was the introduction in the House of
Lords, on the 4th of November, of the Treasonable Practices Bill, the
main principle of which was that it modified the law of treason by
dispensing with the necessity for the proof of an overt act in order to
secure conviction; and in the House of Commons, on the 10th, of the
Seditious Meetings Bill, which seriously limited the right of public
meeting, making all meetings of over fifty persons, as well as all
political debates and lectures, subject to the previous consent and
active supervision of the magistrates. In spite of the strenuous
resistance of the opposition, led by Fox, and of numerous meetings of
protest held outside the walls of parliament, both bills passed into law
by enormous majorities. The inevitable result followed. The London
Corresponding Society and other political clubs, deprived of the right
of public meeting, became secret societies pledged to the overthrow of
the existing system by any means. United Englishmen and United Scotsmen
plotted with United Irishmen for a French invasion, and sedition was
fomented in the army and the navy. Their baneful activities were exposed
in the inquiries that followed the Irish rebellion of 1798, and the
result was the Corresponding Societies Bill, introduced by Pitt on the
19th of April 1799, which completed the series of repressive measures
and practically suspended the popular constitution of England. The right
of public meeting, of free speech, of the free press had alike ceased
for the time to exist.

  The Revolutionary War.

The justification of the government in all this was the life and death
struggle in which Great Britain was engaged with the power of republican
France in Europe. Yet Pitt's conduct of the war, so far as the continent
was concerned, had hitherto led to nothing but failure after failure. In
1794, in spite of the presence of an English army under the duke of
York, the Austrian Netherlands had been finally conquered and annexed to
the French republic; in 1795 the Dutch republic was affiliated to that
of France, and the peace of Basel between Prussia and the French
republic left Austria to continue the war alone with the aid of British
subsidies. On the sea Great Britain had been more successful, Howe's
victory of the 1st of June 1794 being the first of the long series of
defeats inflicted on the French navy, while in 1795 a beginning was made
of the vast expansion of the British Empire by the capture of Ceylon and
the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch (see FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS).
The war, however, had become so expensive, and its results were
evidently so small, that there was a growing feeling in England in
favour of peace, especially as the Reign of Terror had come to an end in
1794, and a regular government, the Directory, had been appointed in
1795. At last Pitt was forced to yield to the popular clamour, and in
1796 Lord Malmesbury was sent to France to treat for peace. The
negotiation, however, was at once broken off by his demand that France
should abandon the Netherlands.

  Hoche's expedition to Ireland.

The French government, assured now of the assistance of Spain and
Holland, and freed of the danger from La Vendée, now determined to
attempt the invasion of Ireland. On the 16th of December a fleet of 17
battle-ships, 13 frigates and 15 smaller vessels set sail from Brest,
carrying an expeditionary force of some 13,000 men under General Hoche.
The British fleet, under Lord Bridport, was wintering at Spithead; and
before it could put to sea the French had slipped past. Before it
reached the coast of Ireland, however, the French fleet had already
suffered serious losses, owing partly to the attacks of British frigate
detachments, partly to the bad seamanship of the French crews and the
rottenness of the ships. Only a part of the fleet succeeded in reaching
Bantry Bay on the 20th of December, and of these a large number were
scattered by a storm on the 23rd. Hoche himself, with the French
admiral, had been driven far to the westward in an effort to avoid
capture; the attempt of Grouchy, in his absence, to land a force was
defeated by the weather, and by the end of the month the whole
expedition was in full retreat for Brest. A French diversion on the
coast of Pembroke was even less successful; a force of 1500 men, under
Colonel Tate, an American adventurer, landed in Cardigan Bay on the 22nd
of February 1797, but was at once surrounded by the local militia and
surrendered without a blow.

  Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore.

  Battle of Camperdown.

A more serious attempt was now made to renew the enterprise by means of
a junction of the French, Spanish and Dutch fleets. The victory of
Jervis over the Spanish fleet at St Vincent on the 14th of February
postponed the imminence of the danger; but this again became acute owing
to the general disaffection in the fleet, which in April and May found
vent in the serious mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. The mutiny at
Spithead, which was due solely to the intolerable conditions under which
the seamen served at the time, was ended on the 17th of May by
concessions: an increase of pay, the removal of officers who had abused
their power of discipline, and the promise of a general free pardon.
More serious was the outbreak at the Nore. The disaffection had spread
practically to the whole of Admiral Duncan's fleet, and by the beginning
of June the mutineers were blockading the Thames with no less than 26
vessels. The demands of the seamen were more extensive than at Spithead;
their resistance was better organized; and they were suspected, though
without reason, of harbouring revolutionary designs. The return of the
Channel fleet to its duty emboldened the admiralty to refuse any
concessions, and the vigorous measures of repression taken proved
effective. One by one the mutinous crews surrendered; and the arrest of
the ringleader, Richard Parker, on board the "Sandwich," on the 14th of
June, brought the affair to an end.[7] The seamen regained their
reputation, and those who had been imprisoned their liberty, by Duncan's
victory over the Dutch fleet at Camperdown (October 11), by which the
immediate danger was averted. Though the French attempt at a concerted
invasion had failed, however, the Directory did not abandon the
enterprise, and commissioned Bonaparte to draw up fresh plans.

At the close of the year 1797 the position of Great Britain was indeed
sufficiently alarming. On the 18th of April, during the very crisis of
the mutiny at Spithead, Austria had signed with Bonaparte the
humiliating terms of the preliminary peace of Leoben, which six months
later were embodied in the treaty of Campo Formio (October 17). On the
10th of August Portugal had concluded a treaty with the French Republic;
and Great Britain was left without an ally in Europe. The mutiny at the
Nore, the threat of rebellion in Ireland, the alarming fall in consols,
argued strongly against continuing the war single-handed, and in July
Lord Malmesbury had been sent to Lille to open fresh negotiations with
the plenipotentiaries of France. The negotiations broke down on the
refusal of England to restore the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch. But
though forced, in spite of misgivings, to continue the struggle, the
British government in one very important respect was now in a far better
position to do so. For though Great Britain was now isolated and her
policy in Europe advertised as a failure, the temper of the British
people was less inclined to peace in 1798 than it had been three years
before. The early enthusiasm of the disfranchised classes for French
principles had cooled with the later developments of the Revolution; the
attempted invasions had roused the national spirit; and in the public
imagination the sinister figure of Bonaparte, the rapacious conqueror,
was beginning to loom large to the exclusion of lesser issues.
Henceforth, in spite of press prosecutions and trials for political
libel, the government was supported by public opinion in its vigorous
prosecution of the war.

  The Act of Union with Ireland.

  Resignation of Pitt.

If the danger of French invasion was a reality, it was so mainly owing
to the deplorable condition of Ireland, where the natural disaffection
of the Roman Catholic majority of the population--deprived of political
and many social rights, and exposed to the insults and oppression of a
Protestant minority corrupted by centuries of ascendancy--invited the
intervention of a foreign enemy. The full measure of the intolerable
conditions prevailing in the country was revealed by the horrors of the
rebellion of 1798, and after this had been suppressed Pitt decided that
the only way to deal with the situation was to establish a union between
Great Britain and Ireland, similar to that which had proved so
successful in the case of England and Scotland. He saw that to establish
peace in Ireland the Roman Catholics would have to be enfranchised; he
realized that to enfranchise them in a separated Ireland would be to
subject the proud Protestant minority to an impossible domination, and
to establish not peace but war. The Union, then, was in his view the
necessary preliminary to Catholic emancipation, which was at the same
time the reward held out to the majority of the Irish people for the
surrender of their national quasi-independence. It was a bribe little
likely to appeal to the Protestant minority which constituted the Irish
parliament, and to them other inducements had to be offered if the
scheme was to be carried through. These inducements were not all
corrupt. Those members who stood out were, indeed, bought by a lavish
distribution of money and coronets; but the advantages to Ireland which
might reasonably be expected from the Union were many and obvious; and
if all the promises held out by the promoters of the measure have even
now not been realized, the fault is not theirs. The Act of Union was
placed on the statute-book in 1800; Catholic emancipation was to have
been accomplished in the following session, the first of the united
parliament. But Pitt's policy broke on the stubborn obstinacy of George
III., who believed himself bound by his coronation oath to resist any
concession to the enemies of the Established Church. The disadvantage of
the possession of too strait a conscience in politics was never more
dismally illustrated. To the Irish people it was the first breach of
faith in connexion with the Union, and threw them into opposition to a
settlement into which they believed themselves to have been drawn under
false pretences. Pitt, realizing this, had no option but to resign.

  Bonaparte breaks up the coalition.

The resignation of the great minister who had so long held the reins of
power coincided with a critical situation in Europe. The isolation of
Bonaparte in Egypt, as the result of Nelson's victory of the Nile
(1798), had enabled the allies to recover some of the ground lost to
France. But this had merely increased Bonaparte's prestige, and on his
return in 1799 he found no difficulty in making himself master of France
by the _coup d'état_ of the 18th Brumaire. The campaign of Marengo
followed (1800) and the peace of Lunéville, which not only once more
isolated Great Britain, but raised up against her new enemies, to the
list of whom she added by using her command of the sea to enforce the
right of search in order to seize enemies' goods in neutral vessels.
Russia joined with Sweden and Denmark, all hitherto friendly powers, in
resistance to this claim.

  Addington ministry.

  The peace of Amiens.

Such was the position when Addington became prime minister. He was a man
of weak character and narrow intellect, whose main claim to succeed Pitt
was that he shared to the full the Protestant prejudices of king and
people. His tenure of power was, indeed, marked by British successes
abroad; by Nelson's victory at Copenhagen, which broke up the northern
alliance, and by Abercromby's victory at Alexandria, which forced the
French to evacuate Egypt; but these had been prepared by the previous
administration. Addington's real work was the peace of Amiens (1802), an
experimental peace, as the king called it, to see if the First Consul
could be contented to restrain himself within the very wide limits by
which his authority in Europe was still circumscribed.

  Renewal of the war.

  Pitt returns to office.

In a few months Great Britain was made aware that the experiment would
not succeed. Interference and annexation became the standing policy of
the new French government; and Britain, discovering how little intention
Bonaparte had of carrying out the spirit of the treaty, refused to
abandon Malta, as she had engaged to do by the terms of peace. The war
began again, no longer a war against revolutionary principles and their
propaganda, but against the boundless ambitions of a military conqueror.
This time the British nation was all but unanimous in resistance. This
time its resistance would be sooner or later supported by all that was
healthy in Europe. The news that Bonaparte was making preparations on a
vast scale for the invasion of England roused a stubborn spirit of
resistance in the country. Volunteers were enrolled, and the coast was
dotted with Martello towers, many of which yet remain as monuments of
the time when the "army of England" was encamped on the heights near
Boulogne within sight of the English cliffs. To meet so great a crisis
Addington was not the man. He had been ceaselessly assailed, in and out
of parliament, by the trenchant criticism, and often unmannerly wit, of
"Pitt's friends," among whom George Canning was now conspicuous. Pitt
himself had remained silent; but in view of the seriousness of the
crisis and of a threatened illness of the king, which would have
necessitated a regency and--in view of the prince of Wales's dislike for
him--his own permanent exclusion from office, he now put himself forward
once more. The government majorities in the House now rapidly dwindled;
on the 26th of April 1804, Addington resigned; and Pitt, after his
attempt to form a national coalition ministry had broken down on the
king's refusal to admit Fox, became head of a government constructed on
a narrow Tory basis. Of the members of the late government Lord Eldon,
the duke of Portland, Lord Westmorland, Lord Castlereagh and Lord
Hawkesbury retained office, the latter surrendering the foreign office
to Lord Harrowby and going to the home office. Dundas, now Lord
Melville, became first lord of the admiralty, and the cabinet further
included Lord Camden, Lord Mulgrave and the duke of Montrose. Canning,
Huskisson and Perceval were given subordinate offices.

  Battle of Trafalgar.

  Austerlitz.

Save for the commanding personality of Pitt, the new government was
scarcely stronger than that which it had replaced. It had to face the
same Whig opposition, led by Fox, who scoffed at the French peril, and
reinforced by Addington and his friends; and the whole burden of meeting
this opposition fell upon Pitt; for Castlereagh, the only other member
of the cabinet in the House of Commons, was of little use in debate.
Nevertheless, fresh vigour was infused into the conduct of the war. The
Additional Forces Act, passed in the teeth of a strenuous opposition,
introduced the principle of a modified system of compulsion to
supplement the deficiencies of the army and reserve, while the navy was
largely increased. Abroad, Pitt's whole energies were directed to
forming a fresh coalition against Bonaparte, who, on the 14th of May
1804, had proclaimed himself emperor of the French; but it was a year
before Russia signed with Great Britain the treaty of St Petersburg
(April 11, 1805), and the accession to the coalition of Austria, Sweden
and Naples was not obtained till the following September. In the
following month (October 21) Nelson's crowning victory at Trafalgar over
the allied fleets of France and Spain relieved England of the dread of
invasion. It served, however, to precipitate the crisis on the continent
of Europe; the great army assembled at Boulogne was turned eastwards; by
the capitulation of Ulm (October 19) Austria lost a large part of her
forces; and the last news that reached Pitt on his death-bed was that of
the ruin of all his hopes by the crushing victory of Napoleon over the
Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz (December 2).

  Death of Pitt. "Ministry of all the Talents."

  Abolition of the slave-trade.

Pitt died on the 23rd of January, and the refusal of Lord Hawkesbury to
assume the premiership forced the king to summon Lord Grenville, and to
agree to the inclusion of Fox in the cabinet as secretary for foreign
affairs. Several members of Pitt's administration were admitted to this
"Ministry of all the Talents," including Addington (now Lord Sidmouth),
who had rejoined the ministry in December 1804 and again resigned, owing
to a disagreement with Pitt as to the charges against Lord Melville
(q.v.) in July 1805. The new ministry remained in office for a year, a
disastrous year which saw the culmination of Napoleon's power: the
crushing of Prussia in the campaign of Jena, the formation of the
Confederation of the Rhine and the end of the Holy Roman Empire. In the
conduct of the war the British government had displayed little skill,
frittering away its forces on distant expeditions, instead of
concentrating them in support of Prussia or Russia, and the chief title
to fame of the Ministry of all the Talents is that it secured the
passing of the bill for the abolition of the slave-trade (March 25,
1807).

  Catholic question.

The death of Fox (September 13, 1806) deprived the ministry of its
strongest member, and in the following March it fell on the old question
of concessions to the Roman Catholics. True to his principles, Fox had
done his best to negotiate terms of peace with Napoleon; but the
breakdown of the attempt had persuaded even the Whigs that an
arrangement was impossible, and in view of this fact Grenville thought
it his duty to advise the king that the disabilities of Roman Catholics
and dissenters in the matter of serving in the army and navy should be
removed, in order that all sections of the nation might be united in
face of the enemy. The situation, moreover, was in the highest degree
anomalous; for by an act passed in 1793 Roman Catholics might hold
commissions in the army in Ireland up to the rank of colonel, and this
right had not been extended to England, though by the Act of Union the
armies had become one. The king, however, was not to be moved from his
position; and he was supported in this attitude not only by public
opinion, but by a section of the ministry itself, of which Sidmouth made
himself the mouthpiece. The demand of George III. that ministers should
undertake never again to approach him on the subject of concessions to
the Catholics was rejected by Grenville, rightly, as unconstitutional,
and on the 18th of March 1807 he resigned.

  Portland ministry.

  The continental system.

  The Orders in Council.

  War with America.

The new ministry, under the nominal headship of the valetudinarian duke
of Portland, included Perceval as chancellor of the exchequer, Canning
as foreign secretary and Castlereagh as secretary for war and the
colonies. It had given the undertaking demanded by the king; those of
its members who, like Canning, were in favour of Catholic emancipation,
arguing that, in view of greater and more pressing questions, it was
useless to insist in a matter which could never be settled so long as
the old king lived. Of more importance to Great Britain, for the time
being, than any constitutional issues, was the life-and-death struggle
with Napoleon, which had now entered on a new phase. Defeated at sea,
but master now of the greater part of the continent of Europe, the
French emperor planned to bring Great Britain to terms by ruining her
commerce with the vast territories under his influence. In November 1806
he issued from Berlin the famous decree prohibiting the importation of
British goods and excluding from the harbours under his control even
neutral ships that had touched at British ports. The British government
replied by the famous Orders in Council of 1807, which declared all
vessels trading with France liable to seizure, and that all such vessels
clearing from France must touch at a British port to pay customs duties.
To this Napoleon responded with the Milan decree (December 17),
forbidding neutrals to trade in any articles imported from the British
dominions. The effects of these measures were destined to be
far-reaching. The Revolution had made war on princes and privilege, and
the common people had in general gained wherever the Napoleonic régime
had been substituted for their effete despotisms; but the "Continental
System" was felt as an oppression in every humble household, suddenly
deprived of the little imported luxuries, such as sugar and coffee,
which custom had made necessaries; and from this time date the
beginnings of that popular revolt against Napoleon that was to culminate
in the War of Liberation. Great Britain, too, was to suffer from her own
retaliatory policy. The Americans had taken advantage of the war to draw
into their own hands a large part of the British carrying trade, a
process greatly encouraged by the establishment of the Continental
System. This brought them into conflict with the British acting under
the Orders in Council, and the consequent ill-feeling culminated in the
war of 1812.

  Treaty of Tilsit.

  French Invasion of Spain and Portugal.

  Peninsular War.

It was not only the completion of the Continental System, however, that
made the year 1807 a fateful one for Great Britain. On the 7th of July
the young emperor Alexander I. of Russia, fascinated by Napoleon's
genius and bribed by the offer of a partition of the world, concluded
the treaty of Tilsit, which not only brought Russia into the Continental
System, but substituted for a coalition against France a formidable
coalition against England. A scheme for wresting from the British the
command of the sea was only defeated by Canning's action in ordering the
English fleet to capture the Danish navy, though Denmark was still
nominally a friendly power (see CANNING, GEORGE). Meanwhile, in order to
complete the ring fence round Europe against British commerce, Napoleon
had ordered Junot to invade Portugal; Lisbon was occupied by the French,
and the Portuguese royal family migrated to Brazil. In the following
year Napoleon seized the royal family of Spain, and gave the crown,
which Charles VI. resigned on behalf of himself and his heir, to his
brother Joseph, king of Naples. The revolt of the Spanish people that
followed was the first of the national uprisings against his rule by
which Napoleon was destined to be overthrown. In England it was greeted
with immense popular enthusiasm, and the government, without realizing
the full import of the step it was taking, sent an expedition to the
Peninsula. It disembarked, under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley, at
Figueras on the 1st of August. It was the beginning of the Peninsular
War, which was destined not to end until, in 1814, the British troops
crossed the Pyrenees into France, while the Allies were pressing over
the Rhine. The political and military events on the continent of Europe
do not, however, belong strictly to English history, though they
profoundly affected its development, and they are dealt with elsewhere
(see EUROPE: _History_; NAPOLEON; NAPOLEONIC CAMPAIGNS; PENINSULAR WAR;
WATERLOO CAMPAIGN).

  Walcheren expedition. Cabinet crisis.

  Perceval ministry.

  The regency.

The war, while it lasted, was of course the main preoccupation of
British ministers and of the British people. It entailed enormous
sacrifices, which led to corresponding discontents; and differences as
to its conduct produced frequent friction within the government itself.
A cabinet crisis was the result of the outcome of the unfortunate
Walcheren expedition of 1809. It had been Castlereagh's conception and,
had it been as well executed as it was conceived, it might have dealt a
fatal blow at Napoleon's hopes of recovering his power at sea, by
destroying his great naval establishments at Antwerp. It failed, and it
became the subject of angry dispute between Canning and Castlereagh, a
dispute embittered by personal rivalry and the friction due to the
ill-defined relations of the foreign secretary to the secretary for war;
the quarrel culminated in a duel, and in the resignation of both
ministers (see LONDONDERRY, 2ND MARQUESS OF, and CANNING, GEORGE). The
duke of Portland resigned at the same time, and in the reconstruction of
the ministry, under Perceval as premier, Lord Wellesley became foreign
secretary, while Lord Liverpool, with Palmerston as his under-secretary,
succeeded Castlereagh at the war office. The most conspicuous member of
this government was Wellesley, whose main object in taking office was to
second his brother's efforts in the Peninsula. In this he was, however,
only partially successful, owing to the incapacity of his colleagues to
realize the unique importance of the operations in Spain. In November
1810 the old king's mind gave way, and on the 11th of February 1811, an
act of parliament bestowed the regency, under certain restrictions, upon
the prince of Wales. The prince had been on intimate terms with the Whig
leaders, and it was assumed that his accession to power would mean a
change of government. He had, however, been offended by their attitude
on the question of the restriction of his authority as regent, and he
continued Perceval in office. A year later, the king's insanity being
proved incurable, the regency was definitively established (February
1812). Lord Wellesley took advantage of the reconstruction of the
cabinet to resign a position in which he had not been given a free hand,
and his post of foreign secretary was offered to Canning. Canning,
however, refused to serve with Castlereagh as minister of war, and the
latter received the foreign office, which he was to hold till his death