tary Craggs, Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the King's German mistresses, the Duchess of Kendal, the Countess of Platen and her two nieces. Those who had not got anything themselves voted this a notorious and most dangerous species of corruption. Walpole quieted the people down and reestablished credit.

In the same year there was a speculative movement in Holland for insurance and trading companies.

CHAPTER V

EUROPE, 1715-1739

THE years that followed the compromises of Utrecht were occupied with attempts by those who were satisfied, to consolidate their gains and to provide against any reversal of the conditions, and by those who had been forced to an acceptance of unpleasant terms to procure variation or rescission of the provisions to which they objected.

For the British Islands the international problems of the next thirty-five years resolved themselves into such political channels as would tend to a continuance of peaceful conditions, increase of trade, and supremacy on the sea. The British position was threatened in two directions. Continental powers which had not, like the British, succeeded in making money and increasing trade by the war, made various successive combinations and plots tending to injure British trade and nullify the increased prestige. The means were ready at hand in the dynastic disputes arising from the attempts of the Stuarts to regain the throne of Britain. These form the easy excuse for every difference, war or diplomatic squabble which during these years disturb the rest of nations weary of war. Sometimes the support of the Stuarts and consequent threat to Georgian supremacy comes from the South, from Spain or other Mediterranean power, sometimes it is the Baltic Protestant who attacks the Hanoverian, and organizes a Jacobite invasion. So long

as the islands hold the command of the sea, these attempts, though very disturbing to the traders, created no real danger to the islands.

There was another way in which the disappointed ones might show their enmity and hope for their revenge. Just as under Dutch William Britain had been dragged at the heels of Holland into European wars in which she had no concern, so under the two first Georges she became the moneyed annex to the unprotected flats of Hanover, open to the invasion of all Britain's enemies. Since the peace of Utrecht she had, and with reason, no friends and no allies except her one permanent old supporter, the sea storm. If her Georgian rulers had been loyal to the country which had given to them a throne, there might have been little danger. But throughout their reigns these little German despots, their hearts set in Hanover where they could rule absolutely, making belief that with their armies they understood generalship, consistently sacrificed the men, the money, the interests, and, above all, the honour of naval Britain to their desires or fears for Hanover.

Coming," says Stanhope, "from a poor electorate, a flight of hungry Hanoverians, like so many famished vultures, fell with keen eyes and bended talons on the fruitful soil of England." Of the first George's mistress, the German Duchess of Kendal, Walpole said that "she would have sold the king's honour (such as it was) for a shilling in advance to the best bidder." As Walpole was himself the "patron and parent of parliamentary corruption " he should be a good judge of the Duchess' capacity as a colleague. "Thus Hanover rode triumphant on the shoulders of England," says Chesterfield in 1725.

There is not much advantage to be gained by discussing the might-have-beens, but one may think of the possibilities of eighteenth-century history if the Stuarts had remained on the throne. The religious aspect made use of to sway the fickle populace and to confound constitutional issues is negligible. Whatever might be the case in the days of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary, the whole course of English history had made persecution of Protestants by Romanists, or the overthrow of the English Church impossible in the eighteenth century whether by the Stuarts or any other authority. The minority of Roman Catholics, like the Huguenots of France, were the party of

toleration as against the Church of England, as they had been since the Restoration.

But the effect on our foreign policy and on our secular institutions would have been very great. The accession of the Hanoverian kings not only forced us to wage wars for the protection of their continental possessions at the expense of the islands, but brought British free institutions in dangerous contact with the absolutist ideas of the little German princelings. Much of our difficulty in Ireland and America, to say nothing of England, was occasioned by the use of Hessian, Hanoverian and other German troops to punish acts of violence which had arisen from the disorderly efforts of freemen to obtain redress for grievances.

At the same time should we have conquered Canada and driven our enemy, the French, from India, or gained the magnificent naval record of the Seven Years' War without the diversion caused by the French obsession, of the necessity for a crushed and vanquished Germany, forcing them to waste themselves in Central Europe against Frederick II. on land, while we dominated the seas?

So far as the social record goes, no period of our history, until King George III., raising high the tone of social, political and religious life, delivered us from the Whig oligarchy, is so degraded as the first forty-five years of Hanoverian rule. We have always, with the exception of King John and Cromwell, who were English born, and of Edward VI., Elizabeth and Anne, who had English mothers, been ruled by kings from beyond. But to judge from the accounts given of them by their Whig supporters, we could hardly ever have had worse rulers from any point of view than the two Georges who followed Queen Anne. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu thus describes George I. "In private life he would have been called an honest blockhead; and fortune that made him a king added nothing to his happiness, only prejudiced his honesty and shortened his days. He could speak no English and was past the age of learning it. Our customs and laws were all mysteries to him which he neither tried to understand, nor was capable of understanding if he had endeavoured it." Of George II. as prince she says: "He looked on all the men and women he saw as creatures he might kick or kiss for his diversion; and

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whenever he met with any opposition to these designs, he thought his opposers impudent rebels to the will of God who had created them for his use." "If," said Lord Chesterfield, "if we have a mind effectually to prevent the Pretender from ever obtaining this Crown, we should make him elector of Hanover, for the people of England will never fetch another king from thence." "England," he said, "was too big for him." My excuse for quoting such contemporary estimates of character is that the actions of both kings fully sustain them.

While English trade was prosperous, the French trade and shipping had been absolutely destroyed by the war. Lady Mary, going in 1717 from Lyons to Paris, writes: "I think nothing so terrible as objects of misery and all the country villages of France show nothing else. While the post horses are changed the whole town comes out to beg with such miserable, starved faces and thin, tattered clothes they need no other eloquence to persuade one of the wretchedness of their condition." Spain, on the contrary, after 1715 was increasing her trade and improving her military and naval establishments under the Prime Minister Alberoni.

Passing through France again in 1739, after many years the peaceful government of Fleury, Lady Mary writes: "France is so much improved it would not be known to be the same country we passed through twenty years ago. Everything I see speaks in praise of Cardinal Fleury. . The roads are

all mended . . . the French are more changed than their roads; instead of pale, yellow faces wrapped in blankets as we saw them, the villages are all filled with fresh-coloured, lusty peasants in good clothes and clean linen."

The affairs of the western powers during these twenty years were of a very dull nature. Britain in 1716 signed defensive treaties with Holland and Austria against France. King George, wishing to add to his continental possessions the secularized bishoprics of Bremen and Verden which belonged to Sweden, Frederick IV. of Denmark agreed, after Charles XII. had been defeated by Peter at Pultowa, to sell them to George for £50,000, if he would join in a coalition against Sweden. So George made use of the British fleet in the Baltic to persuade Charles peacefully to surrender his dominions sold by Frederick to George. But Charles refused, became a Jacobite, and planned

an expedition by way of counter-attack to invade Scotland for the Stuarts with 12,000 men. This failed, the plan being discovered, because, contrary to all the laws of nations, the Swedish ambassador in England was arrested.

Great Britain in 1715 had made treaty with Spain, by which the British obtained advantages in trade. But Britain making treaty with Austria, and later a Triple Alliance with Holland and France, Spain held back the Treaty and went to war with Austria, seizing Sardinia. Then Great Britain, Holland and France interfered, proposing exchanges of territory which did not belong to them; and the Pope, under Austrian influence, threatened the King of Spain with excommunication unless he agreed to the terms. This Spain refused. Alberoni prepared for war, built and bought ships, and stirred up all over Europe from Holland to Turkey every faction and source of division and hatred that might divide the allied powers. He assisted James Stuart, the old Chevalier, and fomented faction war in Britain.

To oppose Spain and to force their terms on her and on Savoy, a Quadruple Alliance was formed in August, 1718, between Great Britain, Holland, France and Austria. The Spaniards on their part sent a fleet to Sicily and occupied Palermo and Messina. Byng thereupon came with a superior British fleet from Italy, attacked the Spaniards and destroyed the greater part of their fleet. Then he went back to Naples. He was created Viscount Torrington. Alberoni in reply fitted out privateers, ordered the seizure of British goods and vessels, and stirred up plots in France against the Regent. Victor Amadeus, King of Sicily, exchanged that island for Sardinia and joined the Quadruple Alliance.

Then, all things being ready, Great Britain and France both declared war against Spain. Alberoni sent a fleet with troops on board to invade Great Britain for James; but Britain's old ally, the storm, successfully wrecked the whole fleet in the Bay of Biscay, only two ships escaping. The French, under Marshal Berwick, supported by the British fleet, invaded Spain, and destroyed the rest of the Spanish Navy. Spain was forced to make peace on the terms of dismissal of Alberoni. Philip gave up Sicily and Sardinia. An alliance between Sweden and Russia in support of James was ended by the death of Charles XII. by a chance bullet in December, 1718.