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There being no present opportunity for anyone to seize anything, there was an interval of peace for some years. It was disturbed by the action of France in 1725. The Infanta of Spain, at four years old, had been betrothed to Louis XV. and sent to France to be brought up. But Bourbon the Regent, being afraid of Louis' death before having issue by so young a child, broke the treaty and sent back the Infanta. Spain thereupon allied herself with Austria, while by the Treaty of Hanover Great Britain, France and Prussia made an alliance by which great sums of English money were to be spent in Germany to gain over Sweden.

The Emperor had just set up at Ostend an East India Company as rival to England and Holland. Spain agreed to give this Company most favoured nation treatment and to guarantee the Pragmatic Sanction which admitted women to succeed to the Austrian States; meanwhile she plotted in favour of James. By 1726 Great Britain was drifting into a new war with Spain. The Spaniards besieged Gibraltar and the British Porto Bello. But Austria deserted Spain and conciliated the others by suspending the Charter of the Ostend Company; Bourbon was replaced by the pacific Cardinal Fleury; George I. died and was buried in Hanover in 1727, a few months after the death of his most injured wife Dorothea who had been confined in a fortress for many years.

In 1729 the Treaty of Seville was signed between Great Britain, France and Spain, and Holland. Twelve thousand Hessians were kept in British pay for the benefit of Hanover, and the Duke of Brunswick had £25,000 a year for four years to provide 5,000 men. Then in 1733 came the struggle of the Polish succession. Stanislaus, whose daughter Marie Leczinska had been married to Louis XV., was supported by France. His opponent Augustus of Saxony, the son of Augustus II., was supported by Austria and Russia. Stanislaus was duly elected by the Poles, but a Russian army from Lithuania drove him out, and forced on the Poles Augustus. Then while Russia retired and looked on, came war between Austria and France and Spain. The Infante Don Carlos, afterwards Charles III. of Spain, became King of Naples and Sicily; Eugene and Berwick moved against each other on the Rhine. made at Vienna in 1788. (See p. 121.)

Peace was

The unutterable corruption of Parliamentary life under the Whigs and the want of any reality in public affairs gives little interest to the internal political records of those days. So far as the record exists it is one of general repression of liberty, both of speech and action, by a most evil faction of corrupt politicians. The efforts of the German favourites of King George to get round the limitation of the Act of Settlement led to an attempt in 1719 to limit the power of the Crown to grant hereditary peerages. It was defeated by Walpole's opposition. If carried it would have had an evil influence, as the strength of our British peerage consists in the mutual recruiting of the peerage from the ranks of the Commons, and of the Commons from the younger sons of peers.

The Houses of Parliament forbade the printing of division lists, and by a resolution of February, 1729, of their debates; the Riot Act made penal the continuance of meetings ordered by justices to disperse; in a Bill to crush the Stuart supporters was a clause providing for the " effectual and exemplary punishment of such as, being Papists, shall enlist themselves in His Majesty's service"; the Septennial Act prolonging the life of Parliament was passed to prevent the voice of the nation from being heard against the dynasty; Convocation in 1717 was permanently prorogued because Hoadley Bishop of Bangor had in a sermon used expressions calculated to impugn and impeach the Royal Supremacy in ecclesiastical causes; the Jacobite Roman Catholics and Protestant non-jurors were persecuted by most harsh penal laws; disturbances in Scotland were quelled by British troops who fired on and killed people; the City Act in 1725 was passed to curb the Common Council which dared to oppose the Ministry.

The abuses in the Court of Chancery led to the impeachment of the Chancellor, Lord Macclesfield. But such was the corruption that, although he was convicted and fined £30,000, it does not at all follow that he was guilty. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, was able to get back his estates by a bribe through his wife of £11,000 to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal. This woman was also responsible for a scandalous patent granted by a bribe to her, to one Wood, an ironworks owner, for coining copper coins to the amount of £100,000, afterwards reduced to £40,000, for use in Ireland. The opposition aided by Swift's

letters was so strong that it was found impossible to force the coinage on the Irish people. The patent had to be withdrawn, Wood receiving a pension of £8,000 at the expense of the British taxpayer. Acts were passed for disarming the Highlanders and giving the property either of the clansmen or of the chiefs who favoured the Stuarts to those who did not. The Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham were dismissed from their regiments for voting against Walpole, and later Pitt was deprived of his Cornetcy in the Blues for speaking against the ministers. The Porteous riot in Edinburgh showed the relations between the authorities and the people, and the readiness of the authorities to use force and to pass Acts to support it. Walpole, supported by the Dissenters, put off from time to time the repealing of the Test Act which imposed their disabilities. At last in 1786, when Mr. Plumer brought forward a motion for its repeal, Walpole, the apostle of freedom, voted against it.

As for the social and political condition of Ireland in this century, I earnestly recommend any self-respecting Englishman who wishes the affairs of his Empire to be managed with clean hands, to read the account of Ireland and its treatment at the hands of the British in the second volume of Lecky's History of England, and to note his quiet criticisms of the untrue statements of Froude which still form the basis of Irish history as it is taught to English students. The persistent famines brought about by British rule, the use of office of every kind for plunder, the persecution of the people in every relation of life, the refusal of education, the destruction of every form of Irish industry in turn, form a picture not to be omitted in an impartial survey of the world's history. We should not ignore the horrible scandals of the Charter Schools set up to force Catholic parents through dread of the starvation of their children to hand them over to their Protestant oppressors. These schools Froude described as "the best-conceived educational institutions which existed in the world." You may read of their disgraceful condition in Howard's book on Prisons; an enquiry about them, says Lecky, brought in 1788 "a revelation of abuses perhaps as horrible as any public institution has ever disclosed." If the evil effects of all this tyranny had died with the century, it might be left to one side.

H

There is one little episode of British internal politics of a lighter kind, almost of a prophetic character, a demonstration of suffragettes reported by Lady Mary in a letter to Lady Pomfret in 1738. 'At the last warm debate in the House of Lords," she says, "it was unanimously resolved that there should be no crowd of unnecessary auditors; consequently the fair sex was excluded and the gallery destined to the sole use of the House of Commons. Notwithstanding which determination a tribe of dames resolved to show on this occasion that neither men nor laws could resist them. These heroines were Lady Huntingdon " (afterwards head of the Methodist connexion of her name), "the Duchess of Queensberry, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Westmorland, Lady Cobham, Lady Charlotte Edwin, Lady Archibald Hamilton and her daughter, Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Pendarvis and Lady Frances Saunderson. I am thus particular in their names, as I look upon them to be the boldest and most resigned sufferers for liberty I ever heard of.

"They presented themselves at the door at nine o'clock in the morning, where Sir William Saunderson respectfully informed them that the Chancellor had made an order against their admittance. The Duchess of Queensberry, as head of the squadron, pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer, and desired him to let them upstairs privately. After some modest refusals he swore by God he would not let them in; Her Grace with a noble warmth answered, 'By God they would come in, in spite of the Chancellor and the whole House.' This being reported, the Peers resolved to starve them out. An order was made that the doors should not be opened until they had raised their siege. These Amazons now showed themselves qualified for the duty of foot soldiers; they stood there till five in the afternoon without either sustenance or evacuation, every now and then playing volleys of thumps, kicks and raps against the door with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarce heard. When the Lords were not to be conquered by this, the two Duchesses (very well apprised of the use of stratagems in war) commanded a dead silence of half an hour; and the Chancellor, who thought this a certain proof of their absence (the Commons also being very impatient to enter) gave order for the opening of the door; upon which they all rushed in,

pushed aside their competitors, and placed themselves in the front row of the gallery. They stayed there until after eleven, when the House rose; and during the debate gave applause and showed marks of dislike, not only by smiles and winks (which have always been allowed in these cases), but by noisy laughs and apparent contempts; which is supposed the true reason why poor Lord Harvey spoke miserably."

CHAPTER VI

COLONIAL TRADE AND EMPIRE

i. The War of Jenkins' Ear.-The agreement at Utrecht between Spain and Britain by which the British were to have the monopoly of supply of Guinea negroes to the Colonies of Spain in South America, and a very very limited right of trading with the colonists must from the first have been a source of friction and enmity between two nations who from long past relations had no reason to love one another.

The treaty allowed one solitary ship to barter with the Spanish colonists. It was, of course, always accompanied by several "tenders," which supplied it with fresh goods: the smuggling, which flourished at all times when colonial monopoly required that there should be no trade at all, increased infinitely under the new Assiento; British privateers hovered off the coast to land or receive goods and entered harbours under pretence of refitting; the existence of the one legal ship covered a thousand acts of piracy; men engaged in such a trade were not careful either of acts of violence or of respect for property; the Spaniards used, as they were justified in doing, stern measures of repression, by seizure of cargoes and imprisonment of crews, on the lawless smugglers who infested their settlements in the South Seas; the British pirates told terrible tales of the savagery exercised upon them by the Spanish Papists.

The conflict came to a head in 1739. In the year previous an outcry was raised over one Jenkins, who claimed to be a captain of one of these piratical trading sloops. He had lost

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