THE STUART MENACE 349 every ten were rebels.1 The public Guelph dissensions, for "it ran a little in the blood of the family to hate the eldest son",2 could not fail to gild the memory of a dignified and kindly royal line. God grant the land may profit reap From all this silly pother, And send these fools may ne'er agree was the sentiment of many-of how many Walpole could never be quite sure. They were enough, however, to make almost the whole art of government consist in the endeavour to reduce their number. As late as 1738, Yorke, the sagacious lawyer, would not have the army reduced lest they should rise. The clergy, sneered Lord Hervey, who had been paid for preaching up divine right, were now paid for preaching it down.5 Statesmen who despised clerical prejudices did not dare to interfere. In 1718, indeed, the Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act were repealed, but the Test Act was maintained. Every domestic upheaval and every threat of continental war made the Government tremble. Still more alarming was the possibility that a Stuart heir would adopt the national faith and make loyalty irresistible. When the South Sea Bubble burst, the Speaker declared that if the Pretender had then appeared he might have ridden to St James's. For a whole year the Habeas Corpus Act was in suspense. In 1722, the King's departure was prevented by the plot which involved the fall of Bishop Atterbury, and in which Spain was implicated. Almost every year, indeed, some outbreak of opinion or of force reminded George I and his minister of the fissure in the foundations of the throne. Every year, it is true, also did something to cement it over. As more of the people stood to lose by change, as the hot-heads of the 'Fifteen aged into prudent family men, as a generation grew up to which Guelph kings were the natural order and the Stuarts dubious exotics, so the harvest of the "Glorious Revolution" ripened, and Britain developed from a loyalistic into a modern patriotic State. Yet in 1733 the failure of the Excise bill brought many gownsmen into the streets of Oxford crying, "King James for ever". After Culloden (1746) the royal victor, leaving a country which to the English seemed as remote as Norway, trembled, as he declared, "for fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this island and of our family". Not until France had sacrificed the Pretender at Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) could the Government afford to despise the Stuarts or Pitt approach his task freed from the burden. 1 Chance, J. F., George I and the Northern War, p. 169. 2 Walpole, H., Memoirs of the reign of King George II, 1, 72. 2 Wilkins, W. H., Caroline the illustrious, p. 235. Yorke, P. C., Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, 1, 184. 5 Hervey, John, Lord, Memoirs of the reign of George II, 1, 7. Charteris, Cumberland, p. Coxe, Walpole, III, 137. 8. • Charteris, Cumberland, pp. 288 and 147. which had always crippled Walpole. For a full generation after Utrecht the Stuarts had forced posterity to trace the history of the British Empire rather in the rivalries and intrigues of Europe than across the seas. If during that time British statesmen were ready to surrender the most splendid acquisition in the New World for some mediocre stronghold or concession in the Old it was due to the sound instinct of a builder that without secure foundations the noblest façade will collapse. Through all these years, moreover, and indeed so long as George II remained alive, Britain had borne another burden which often rendered her course incalculable and sometimes perilous-that of her union with Hanover. But for the Act of Settlement, the connection of Britain with this haughty and ambitious North German house would have been but slight. Normally, such commerce as might pass through Stade, perhaps a treaty for the hire of Electoral troops, possibly some co-operation based on common Protestantism, or on common disposition to unite with the Emperor, not inconceivably a relationship arising from the Guelph rivalry with the Hohenzollerns of Berlin-such were the points of contact that might have been expected, had not the mother of Elector George chanced to be the granddaughter of James I and a Lutheran. Hence it came about that, in 1714, a veteran warrior of fifty-four, accustomed for sixteen years to the unquestioning obedience of his Hanoverians, ascended the uneasy throne of Britain.1 Family pride, financial profit, a sense of duty to his dynasty and to Europe forbade him to decline or later to desert his post. He frustrated the hopes of those Hanoverians who thought that their country was annexing England: he left domestic matters in British hands: in his last days he chose an English mistress. But neither he nor his son could fail to be aware that the shepherds of Hanover were in Britain hireling kings. Here their only comfortable hours were those passed punctually with a German mistress, and their unvarying feelings were those of the royal observation to Queen Caroline in 1736, "the devil take the Parliament, and the devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover"." The first Georges could indeed hardly be blamed for their failure to admire, or even to understand, our nascent constitution. Thanks to our party system, the long war in which we had led the Grand Alliance, Elector George included, to victory over France, had left the French dynasty, in the words of a papal legate, "superior to the state in which it had been in the time of Charlemagne". George, as he assured a timid mistress, had all the king-killers in England on his side, and he took care to choose their more moderate men for office and to avoid needless offence to their opponents. To a Han 1 Cf. Ward, Sir A. W., Great Britain and Hanover, p. 81 and passim. Head, F. W., The Fallen Stuarts, p. 159. 4 Wilkins, p. 110. GREAT BRITAIN AND HANOVER 351 overian, moreover, there was nothing strange in a small band of noble families monopolising the ministry and controlling the Estates.1 But that a particular brand of Whig, a mere temporary majority within a temporary oligarchy, should be able to designate his ministers and to prevent him from governing the country as he pleased, still more, that this should be done by votes in a packed Parliament and by a man who disclaimed the title of Premier and approached him as deferentially as any Hanoverian-all this was as unintelligible as it was unpleasing to a military German prince. Yet, however complete his submission to a system which he could not change, his personality and his kingship were bound to count for something in a still monarchic age. Walpole, a trusty servant who, George I declared, had never had his equal in business,2 thought that only the King's death had shielded him against Bolingbroke, who had paid the Duchess of Kendal a sufficient sum. "While Britain dared France", said Chesterfield, "the monarch trembled for his Hanover", and it was true. Throughout the reigns of the first two Georges, the fact that the same man was King and Elector profoundly and constantly affected Britain. It is true that Bernstorff's attempt to govern her was soon repulsed, and that George II was absent from his kingdom for barely one month in the year. Britain, moreover, could bear the cost of satisfying Hanoverian rapacity; it was convenient to hire Hanoverians for her defence; while it was perhaps not unfortunate that a monarch whose presence she desired without his interference should have Hanoverian matters with which to occupy his mind. But the Hanoverian connection warped the King's choice of British ministers, delayed British business, and far less often helped than hindered British aims. When the ministers of George the King were not on speaking terms with those of George the Elector, when the elector was giving secret verbal promises to foreign Powers for fear of Parliament which would have disapproved, when the treaties or wars necessary to Britain were jeopardised by subterranean workings on behalf of Hanover, then the constant disorder of our policy from this cause merely entered upon a phase more than usually acute. In steering her way to safety and riches after Utrecht, Britain, already distracted by her parties, found in Hanover a new and incalculable disturbing force. Her thoughts and energies were drawn thither instead of following their natural course across the ocean. 5 The currents of post-Utrecht politics were baffling enough without such further complication. Although the major wars, those of the Spanish and of the Polish Succession, lay two decades apart, an interval scarcely precedented since the Reformation, the minor wars were so 1 Friis, Aage, Bernstorfferne og Danmark (København, 1903), I, 299. Coxe, Walpole, 1, 184. 3 Ibid. 11, 344. Imbert-Terry, Sir H. M., A constitutional King, George I, p. 301; Ward, pp. 73 seqq. Ibid. p. 80 and passim. numerous and the expectations of general strife so keen that within five years of the peace Europe seems to be in a state of "universal combustion". A quarter of a century of struggling against Louis XIV had indeed brought some questions nearer to solution. Whatever the power of France might be or might become, the peculiar claim of her King to general dictatorship had been refuted. The European equilibrium, though dear to Chauvelin and others "as being subject to so many different interpretations as may...prevent any action at all",2 embodies none the less an idea which was indispensable to the progress of States. A mechanical balance of power, it was true, helped rather to adjust the terms on which wars ended than to prevent them from breaking out, and the wars against Louis XIV had produced no panacea against a repetition. But they had removed the probability though not the apprehension of a new general war about religion, always since Luther the most fertile source of strife. "God can protect his own cause in the middle of a thousand errors, and variety of heresies will but give our churchmen a more ample field "-this was a doctrine convenient to the cynical deists who came to rule in many lands. In many lands besides France, however, "the church was the society", and policy could not remain unaffected by religion. If their expectations were less precise than those, based on Daniel and Revelation, which led the Bishop of Worcester to stake his bishopric in 1712 on Armageddon in 1716,5 statesmen had none the less to reckon with the force of religious antipathies when they framed alliances and contemplated wars. The equilibrium of Europe tottered because Prussia would take vengeance on her own Catholics for wrongs done to Protestants elsewhere, because Protestant princes aimed at choosing a Protestant emperor or at forming a Protestant fleet, because the Catholic emperor had qualms about supporting the Guelphs against the Stuarts or even, on occasion, against the Bourbons, his co-religionists although of old his foes. Even the deist Frederick used his official Protestantism to veil his robbery of a Catholic Queen (1740), and, fifteen years later, she won the alliance of his French accomplice largely on religious grounds. Religion, while it did not prevent the Most Christian King from association with the Turks, the Russians, the Prussians or the Barbary States, always imported into mixed alliances an unstable strain and complicated an already complex Europe. The peculiar and striking complexity of European politics after Utrecht may be ascribed to many causes other than the waning factor of religion and exhaustion after a quarter of a century of war. 1 The history of Cardinal Alberoni from his birth to the year 1719 (London, 1719), p. 82. 2 Horace Walpole the elder, cit. Williams, B., E.H.R. xvi, 443. 3 Davenant, Č., Political und commercial works, 1, 75. 4 Morley, J., Voltaire (edition 1872), p. 332. 5 Swift, J., Journal to Stella, 1 July 1712. EUROPEAN COMPLEXITIES AND DANGERS 353 It chanced that in an age when princes governed, often through ministers who were not even their subjects, an extraordinary number of States owed obedience to rulers of foreign birth or imbued with foreign ideas. Others were the tools of powerful allies. Prussia and the dominions of Savoy form almost the sole exceptions to a condition which, while it lasted, rendered Europe more than ever subject to the whims of a few high-placed men and women. Spain under Alberoni was governed in part by a Bourbon King, in greater part by a Parmesan Queen, most of all by the son of an Italian gardener who remained the envoy of the Duke of Parma, while each of the three strove for ends which were not those of the Spanish nation. Princes and even ministers have often found nothing so interesting or exciting as war,1 and war was rendered fatally easy by the code which then controlled it. All Europe, Germany most of all, lay open to the recruiting sergeant of every prince. Troops levied by one might pass by treaty on the outbreak of war to the control of another without valid complaint by the third against whom they took the field. The spirit of the best of such levies may have been that of the Scotch recruit who was questioned as to his reasons for venturing his life for the Pragmatic Sanction. "They tell me...to fight, and egad! I'll down with them an' I can." "But for whom do you fight?” “Nay, nay, that I can't tell, but 'tis for some damned queen or another."2 Others went of their own motion "to fight the foreign loons in their ain countree", and the departure of some of these was accounted a useful vent for dangerous elements of the population. Some princes were forced to make war to find employment for their armies, while others thought it cheaper to support them abroad than at home. To win a victory was not seldom to secure the willing enlistment of hundreds from the ranks of the defeated, while a difficult retreat might cost a leader half his mercenary force. A hundred motives impelled selfish princes to make war, and few beyond empty war-chests told on the side of peace. To this explosive atmosphere was applied spark after spark arising from disputed questions of succession. The Spanish Succession had by no means received its final settlement at Utrecht. The rulers of Madrid and the rulers of Vienna would find many fresh disputes concerning title, in Italy above all else. The accession of the child Louis XV (1715) raised a question of the French Succession which swayed the politics of Europe for no less than fourteen years. Until 1748 at least, the British Succession could hardly be regarded as secure. The Polish Succession convulsed Europe in 1733; the Austrian, in 1740. These questions and many more had to be decided by a Europe which was changing fast, and which looked in vain to its familiar E.g. the King of the Belgians to Queen Victoria, 4 Feb. 1853, in Letters of Queen Victoria. 2 Cf. Charteris, Cumberland, p. 119. CHBE I 23 |