The Fall of the 16831714. taken against the dangers it involved to the balance CHAP. III. of power, save by a provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head, and by Philip's Stuarts. renunciation of all right of succession to the throne of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the Netherlands with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his claims; while he handed over Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he gave up not only Minorca but Gibraltar, two positions which secured her the command of the Mediterranean. France purchased peace by less. costly concessions. She had to consent to the re-establishment of the Dutch barrier on a greater scale than before; to pacify the English resentment against the French privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk; and not only to recognise the right of Anne to the crown, and the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover, but to consent to the expulsion of the Pretender from her soil. The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into faction and intrigue. The Whigs, who were still formidable in the Commons, and who showed the strength of their party in the Lords by defeating a Treaty of Commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest financial triumph of William Pitt and secured freedom of trade between England and France, were zealous for the succession of the House of Hanover in the well founded belief that the Elector George hated the Tories; nor did the Tories, though the Jacobite sympathies of a portion of their party forced both Harley and Bolingbroke to keep up a delusive correspondence with the Pretender, who had withdrawn to Lorraine, really contemplate any other succession than that of the Elector. But on the means Harley and Bolingbroke. The Fall of the Stuarts. 16831714. CHAP. III. of providing for his succession Harley and Bolingbroke differed widely. Harley, still influenced by the Presbyterian leanings of his early life, and more jealous of Lord Rochester and the high Tories he headed than of the Whigs themselves, inclined to an alliance between the moderate Tories and their opponents, as in the earlier days of Marlborough's power. The policy of Bolingbroke on the other hand was so to strengthen the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents that whatever might be the Elector's sympathies they could force their policy on him as King; and in the advances which Harley made to the Whigs he saw the means of ruining his rival in the confidence of his party, and of taking his place at their head. It was with this purpose that he introduced a Schism Bill, which would have hindered any Nonconformist from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor. The success of this measure broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition to it. But its effects went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned her that "such conduct may imDeath of peril the succession itself.” Anne. To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence in Harley by conferring on him the Earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry, which would back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of 1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the district in which either claimant of the crown must land, while he gave Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. The appointments were probably only to secure Jacobite support, for Bolingbroke had in fact no immediate apprehensions of the Queen's death, and his aim was to trim. between the Court of Hanover and the Court of James while building up a strong Tory party which would enable him to meet the accession of either with a certainty of retaining power both for himself and the principles he represented. With this view he was preparing to attack both the Bank and the East India Company, the two great strongholds of the Whigs, as well as to tax the bondholders at higher rates than the rest of the community by way of conciliating the country gentry, who hated the moneyed interest which was rising into greatness beside them. But CHAP. III. The Fall stuarts. of the 1683 1714. The Fall of the Stuarts 16831714. CHAP. III. events moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July, three days after Harley's dismissal, Anne was suddenly struck with apoplexy. The Privy Council at once assembled, and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and Somerset entered the Council Chamber without summons and took their places at the board. The step had been taken in secret concert with the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was President of the Council in the Tory Ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke and an adherent of the Hanoverian succession. The act was a decisive one. The right of the House of Hanover was at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as Lord Treasurer by the Council, and the nomination was accepted by the dying Queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained Secretary of State, suddenly found himself powerless and neglected while the Council took steps to provide for the emergency. Four regiments were summoned to the capital in the expectation of a civil war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and unprepared; and on the death of Anne on the evening of the 10th of August, the Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne by his mother's death, was proclaimed as King of England without a show of opposition. CHAPTER IV. THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 1714-1760. position. THE accession of George the First marked a change in the England's position of England as a member of the European Com- European monwealth. From the age of the Plantagenets to the age of the Revolution the country had stood apart from more than passing contact with the fortunes of the Continent; for if Wolsey had striven to make it an arbiter between France and the House of Austria the strain of the Reformation withdrew Henry and his successor from any effective interference in the strife across the Channel; and in spite of the conflict with the Armada Elizabeth aimed at the close as at the beginning of her reign mainly at keeping her realm as far as might be out of the struggle of western Europe against the ambition of Spain. Its attitude of isolation was yet more marked when England stood aloof from the Thirty Years' War, and after a fitful outbreak of energy under Cromwell looked idly on at the earlier efforts of Lewis the Fourteenth to become master of Europe. But with the Revolution this attitude became impossible. In driving out the Stuarts William had aimed mainly at enlisting England in the league against France; and France backed his effort by espousing the cause of the exiled King. To prevent the undoing of all that the Revolution had done England was forced to join the Great Alliance of the European peoples, and reluctantly as she |