INAUGURAL LECTURE (continued 7)

Within a week of the first treaty of partition, Sir William Temple concluded the Triple Alliance. Deserted by Austria, De Witt turned to England. He sent his fleet to destroy the British men-of-war in the Medway, and this catastrophe, coming so soon after the plague and the fire of London, was too much for the feeble spirit of Charles and his ministers. They made peace, allied themselves with Holland and with Sweden, and the progress of the French was arrested. The Triple Alliance was the earliest of that series of coalitions which ended by getting the better of the power of Lewis XIV, and is therefore a landmark in History. But there was nothing lasting in it; the rivalry of the two commercial countries was not to be reconciled by politicians. England was on the side of the Prince of Orange, and desired that he should become sovereign. William had resolved, during the very negotiations that prepared the alliance, that the way to ruin De Witt was to exhibit him to Lewis in the light of a friend of the English. After having been conciliatory to the edge of weakness, he had turned suddenly into an enemy. Lewis could not continue the war because of the maritime superiority of his united opponents. He made peace, restoring Franche Comte, which Conde had occupied, and contenting himself with an extended frontier in Flanders. Lille, which had been taken by Vauban, in an otherwise inglorious campaign, was converted into a great French stronghold. That was the result.

These events exhibit Lewis in his prime, while Colbert and Lionne were living, and were able to balance the sinister influence of Louvois. It was a war of ambition, undertaken after the shock of the loss of Spain and of all that belonged to it. It was not begun from a sense of right and duty. But the advantage was not pushed to the bitter end; the terms agreed upon were reasonable; part of the conquests were restored. Lewis proved himself capable of moderation, of self-command, even of generosity. The outrageous violence and tyranny of later years were not immediately apparent. He withdrew from the fray, preparing for another spring. Then he would avenge himself on John de Witt, and conquer Belgium in Holland. De Witt was the most enlightened statesman in Europe, but he was not a war minister. England was easily detached from him in the hope that the Prince of Orange might be supreme; and Lewis agreed to whatever was necessary, that the English fleet might be on his side. Thus the Triple Alliance was dissolved, and the Dover Treaty took its place. The help afforded by the English fleet in the Dutch war fell short of expectation, but the effect of the agreement was to blot out England for many years.

De Witt, unable to face the storm, offered advantageous terms, which were rejected, and then resigned office. The Prince of Orange took the command of the army; but, at the approach of the French, eighty- three Dutch fortresses opened their gates. At The Hague De Witt and his brother were torn to pieces by an Orange mob, and Holland saved itself by letting in the ocean.

William of Orange, never a very successful general, was a good negotiator, and, excepting his own uncle Charles II, he soon had Europe on his side. The French were driven over the Vosges by the Imperialists. Turenne, in his last campaign, reconquered Alsace, crossed the Rhine, and gave battle to Montecucculi. He fell, and his army retired. Lewis XIV, to mark the greatness of the loss, at once named six new marshals of France. Montecucculi resigned his command. Having had the honour, he said, of fighting Turenne, and having even defeated him, he would not risk his reputation against men who were the small change for the great man who was dead. Lewis XIV had 220,000 men under arms. Conde defeated William at Senef. As often as Vauban defended a fortress, he held it; as often as he besieged a fortress, it fell. The balance of victory inclined to France. England gave no assistance, and the Prince of Orange came over, married the eldest of the princesses, immensely strengthening his own position, and hastening the conclusion of peace.

The peace of Nimeguen gave to Lewis XIV that predominant authority over Europe which he retained undiminished, and even increased, during at least ten years. He acquired a further portion of Belgium, strengthening his frontier on the threatened line; he annexed Franche Comte and he recovered Alsace. He had shown himself to be aggressive and unscrupulous, but his military power was equal to his pretensions; he was true to his humbler allies; his diplomatic foresight, and the art of his combinations, were a revelation to his contemporaries. They also knew that they would never be safe from renewed attack, as the larger half of the coveted region, in the Low Countries, Luxemburg, and Lorraine, was still unabsorbed. His interest was clearly recognised. His policy had been openly declared. With so much ambition, capacity, and power, the future was easy to foretell. In the position he had acquired, and with the qualities he had shown, he would be as dangerous in peace as in war. Coalitions alone could resist him, and a coalition could only be a work of time and patience. When the alliance which had opposed him with unequal fortune was dissolved, a season of peril would ensue, for which no defensive provision could be made.

The keystone of the situation was the assured inaction of England. Whilst that lasted, at least while Charles II lived, Lewis would defy the rest of Europe. He had nothing to fear except the Stadtholder. Whilst De Witt governed, the French attack was irresistible. But the Perpetual Edict was repealed, and William of Orange was captain-general for life. He had saved his country, driven out the French, raised Europe against them. The merchants of Amsterdam, who, in 1672, were preparing to sail for Batavia, as the Puritans sailed for New England, were now the second Power in Europe politically, and commercially by far the first. William of Orange, to whose international genius the change was due, stood very near the succession to the English throne. In the course of nature it would be his some day, by right of his wife, or by his own. And there was hope for European independence and the existence of free communities, if the resources of England passed to William earlier than the resources of Spain fell into the hands of Lewis. After the peace, that was the problem of general politics.

The treaties of Nimeguen were far from satisfying the aspirations of Lewis. He dismissed his foreign minister. Pomponne was the most honourable man in his service, and had conducted with eminent dexterity and success the negotiations for the numerous treaties with every country. Lewis says that he was deficient in the energy and the greatness requisite in executing the orders of a king of France who had not been without good fortune. Pomponne came into office in 1671 and left it in 1679, so that he was not compromised by the derisive claim of devolution, or by the yet more hollow sophistry of reunion, by which Lewis now proceeded to push his advantage. His dismissal announced to the nations what they had to look for. It meant that the profit of Nimeguen was not enough, that the greatness of the French monarch exacted further sacrifices.

After the peace Lewis kept up his army. There were 112,000 men under arms, and there were cadres for twice as many more. With that force in hand, he proceeded to raise new claims, consequential, he said, on the late favourable treaties. He said that the territories ceded to France ought to be ceded with their dependencies, with such portions as had formerly belonged to them, and had been detached in the course of ages. And the parliaments of Lorraine, Alsace, and Franche Comte were directed to ascertain what places there were, what fragments under feudal tenure, to which that retrospective principle applied. They were called chambers, or courts, of reunion, and they enumerated certain small districts, which the French troops accordingly occupied. All this was futile skirmishing. The real object was Strasburg. Alsace was French, but Strasburg, the capital, that is, the capital of Lower Alsace, was imperial. It was the most important place on the road between Paris and Vienna, for it commanded the passage of the only river which crossed and barred the way. Situated on the left bank, it was the gate of France; and twice in the late war it had admitted the Imperialists, and opened the way to Paris. The bishop, Furstenberg, belonged to a great German family that was devoted to the French interest; but the town was Protestant.

Up to that moment, 1681, religious antagonism had not added much to the acerbity of the conflict. Spain and Austria were the enemies of Lewis; Sweden and Denmark were his allies. Brandenburg accepted his gifts, in money, in jewels, in arras. England was his humble friend. But a change was approaching; and it began when Furstenberg first said mass in Strasburg minster, and preached from the text "Nunc Dimittis." Vauban at once arrived, and erected an impregnable barrier, and a medal was struck bearing the inscription: "Clausa Germanis Gallia." On the same day as Strasburg, the French occupied Casale. This was a fortress closing the road between the duchy of Savoy and the duchy of Milan, and commanding the line of the Po. It belonged to Montferrat, which was a dependency of Mantua; but the duke had his price, and he sold the right of occupation to the French. The agreement had been concluded three years before, but it had been betrayed by the duke's minister, and it had become necessary to await a more convenient occasion. The French government did not scruple to have an obstructive adversary put out of the way. Louvois gave orders that Lisola, the Austrian statesman who exposed the scheme of devolution, should be seized, and added that it would be no harm if he was killed. His son commissioned Grandval to murder William III.

The traitor of Casale met with a more terrible fate than a pistol shot or the stroke of a dagger. He suddenly disappeared, and no man ever looked upon his face again. His existence was forgotten, and when he died, long after, nobody knew who he was. In the dismal register of the dead who died in the Bastille he is entered under the name of Marchiali. Fifty years later he began to fix the attention of the world, and became a fascinating enigma. For Marchiali means Mattioli, who was the man in the Iron Mask. That is, of course, there was no man in the Iron Mask; the material was more merciful than that; and the name which has become so famous is as false as the one in which the victim of tyranny was buried.

Whilst Lewis pursued his career of annexation, the empire was disabled by war with the Turks and by troubles in Hungary. In 1683 the grand vizier besieged Vienna, and would have taken it but for the imperial allies, the Elector of Saxony, the Duke of Lorraine, and the King of Poland. After the relief of the capital they carried the war down the Danube, and Leopold was once more the head of a powerful military empire. It was too late to interfere with French conquests. Luxemburg was added to the series in 1684, and an armistice of twenty years practically, though not finally, sanctioned what had been done since Nimeguen. When the four great fortresses had become French—Lille, Besancon, Strasburg, and Luxemburg—and when the empire succumbed, recognising all these acts of entirely unprovoked aggression, Lewis attained the highest level of his reign. He owed it to his army, but also to his diplomacy, which was pre-eminent. He owed it, too, to the intellectual superiority of France at the time, and to the perfection which the language reached just then. The thinking of Europe was done for it by Frenchmen, and French literature, penetrating and predominant everywhere, was a serious element of influence.

In all the work of these brilliant years there was increase of power and territorial agglomeration; there was no internal growth or political development. The one thing wanted was that the king should be great and the country powerful. The object of interest was the State, not the nation, and prosperity did not keep pace with power. The people were oppressed and impoverished for the greater glory of France. Colbert trebled the public revenue, but he did not make it depend on the growth of private incomes or the execution of useful public works. In 1683 Colbert died, and Louvois, the son of Le Tellier, became supreme minister.

The queen's death, about the same time, caused a greater change. The king married Madame de Maintenon. He had been unfaithful to his first wife, but now he was a model husband. The second wife, who never became a queen, and was never acknowledged, ruled over his later years. She was the most cultivated, thoughtful, and observant of women. She had been a Protestant, and retained, for a long time, the zeal of a convert. She was strongly opposed to the Jansenists, and was much in the confidence of the best men among the clergy. It was universally believed that she promoted persecution, and urged the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes. Her letters are produced in evidence. But her letters have been tampered with by an editor, who was a forger and a falsifier.

The Revocation required no such specific agency, but proceeded by consistent logic, from the tenor of the reign. The theory of government, which is that which Bossuet borrowed from Hobbes, and clothed in the language of Scripture, does not admit that a subject should have a will, a conviction, a conscience of his own, but expects that the spiritual side of him shall be sacrificed to the sovereign, like his blood and treasure. Protestant liberties, respected by Richelieu and still more entirely by Mazarin, who acknowledged the loyalty of Huguenots in the Fronde, became an exotic, an anachronism, a contradiction, and a reproach, as absolute monarchy rose to the zenith. The self-government of the Gallican Church, the administration of the clergy by the clergy, was reduced to the narrowest limits, and the division of power between Church and State was repressed in favour of the State. It could not be borne, in the long-run, that Protestants should govern themselves, while Catholics could not.

The clergy, zealous for the extinction of Jansenism, naturally extended their zeal against those who were more hostile to their Church than Jansenists. Everything else was required to give way to the governing will, and to do honour to the sovereign. The Protestants, under their protecting immunity, were a belated and contumelious remnant of quite another epoch. Exceptions which were tolerable under the undeveloped monarchy were revolting when it had grown to its radiant perfection. The one thing wanting was the Revocation, to abolish the memory of an age in which a king whose throne was insecure conceded to turbulent and disloyal subjects that which the sovereign of a loyal and submissive people would do well to revoke. To fulfil the ideal of royalty, the monument of the weakness of royalty and the strength of revolution must be ingeniously hidden away. The ardour of rising absolutism is the true cause of the Revocation.

William III explained it in another way. He said that the purpose was to sow suspicion and dissension between Protestant and Catholic Powers, by showing that the Catholics at heart, desired to extinguish the Protestant religion. Such a suspicion, properly fanned, would make alliances and coalitions impossible between them. The Waldenses then survived in one or two valleys of Piedmont, much assimilated to the Swiss Calvinists. Lewis required that they should be put down by force, and, when the Duke of Savoy hesitated, offered to supply the necessary troops. This extraordinary zeal, indicating that the spirit of persecution was common to all, and was not stimulated by causes peculiar to France, supplies the only evidence we have to sustain William's interpretation.

It is well to be rational when we can, and never, without compulsion, to attribute motives of passion, or prejudice, or ignorance as a factor in politics. But it is necessary to remember that the Plot was only six years old. The French government knew all about it, and was in the secret of the papers destroyed by Coleman. To them it must have appeared that the English were turned into ferocious assassins by the mere force of their religious belief. There was no visible reason why such things should be in England and not in France, why a majority should be more easily carried away than a minority, or why High Church Anglicans should be more prone to murder a priest or a friar than extreme Calvinists, with whom it was a dogmatic certainty that Catholics were governed by Antichrist.

The Gallican clergy were divided. Several bishops condemned the action of the government, then or afterwards. The great majority promoted or encouraged it, not all by a revival of the persecuting spirit, but partly in the belief that the barriers were falling, and that the Churches were no longer irreconcilable. They were impressed by the fact that Protestantism had outgrown and discarded Luther, that Arminians in Holland, the Lutherans of the University of Helmstedt, the French schools of Sedan and Saumur, the Caroline divines in England, and even Puritans like Leighton and Baxter, were as much opposed as themselves to the doctrine of justification, which was the origin of the Protestant movement. At the same time, the abuses which roused Luther's opposition had disappeared, if not everywhere, at least in France. Between Protestants in that later variation and Gallicans, the difference was not that which subsisted with Ultramontanes. Bossuet and two Englishmen, Holden and Cocker, drew up statements of what they acknowledged to be essentials in religion, which were very unlike the red-hot teaching of Salamanca and Coimbra. As the Protestants were no longer the Protestants who had seceded, the Catholics were no longer the Catholics who had cast them out. The best men of the Sorbonne were as unlike Tetzel and Prierias as Leibniz was unlike John Knox. It was unscientific, it was insincere, to regard the present controversy as a continuation of the old.

These sentiments were very heartily reciprocated among the Lutherans, and people spoke much of a misunderstanding, and represented the Reformation as the result of the unfinished theology, the defective knowledge of Church history, in the sixteenth century. Thus it was that nobody went further than Bossuet at one time in the direction of union, and nobody was more strongly in favour of the harsh measures of Louvois. If the policy of the Revocation had been to divide the European Powers, it proved a failure; for it helped to make them coalesce.

In the following year, 1686, a league was concluded at Augsburg between the emperor, part of the empire, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. This was the old story. Against nearly the same combination of discordant forces Lewis had held his own in the Dutch war and the negotiations of Nimeguen. England was wanting. William attempted to bring over his father-in-law, and, having failed by friendly arts, undertook to compel him. The Revolution threw the weight of England into the scales, and the war that ensued became the war of the Grand Alliance.

This was the turn in the fortunes of Lewis. He ravaged twenty miles of the Palatinate for the sake of a claim on the part of the Duchess of Orleans, who was a Princess Palatine. His armies were victorious, as usual, at Steenkerk and at Landen. The English were driven to the north-eastern extremity of Ireland; and Trouville had better reason than Van Tromp to fix a broom at his masthead. And then Ireland was lost. The French fleet was destroyed, by very superior numbers, at La Hogue, and the Grand Alliance, aided at last by the ships, and the men, and the money of England, bore down the resistance of exhausted France. William was acknowledged King of England at the close of a struggle which had begun twenty-five years before. Lewis, having formally offered to support James's election to the throne of Poland, when Sobieski died, gave him up. Vauban complained that the war had been too prosperous on the Continent to justify so disastrous a termination.

From the peace of Ryswick the lengthening shadow of the Spanish succession falls upon the scene, and occupies the last years alike of William, of Leopold, and of Lewis. It was known that the King of Spain could not live long; and as the prize came near, Europe, for four years, was hushed in expectation.

XV

THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

WE COME now to the last and greatest transaction in Lewis XIV's reign—the acquisition of the Spanish crown.

The idea of a predominant Power in Europe was part of absolutism. It proceeded from the same love of authority, the same pride of greatness, the same disregard for the equal rights of men, the same pretensions to superiority and prerogative, international as well as national. The position of the king in Europe was security for his position in France itself. Subjects were more willing to submit to one to whom foreigners submitted. In three successive wars Lewis had striven for this advantage, and had made himself felt as the public enemy and the vigilant disturber of the peace of Europe. If he added Spain to his dominions by legal and pacific means, by negotiated treaty or testamentary bequest, it would be more legitimate than his former attempts at mastery. His mother was a Spanish princess. His wife was a Spanish princess. The emperor was in the same position, but in each case the Queen of France was the elder sister. Both of the French queens had resigned their claims; but Lewis had not confirmed his wife's renunciation, as her dowry was left unpaid; and it was not confirmed by the national authorities in Spain.

In 1668, in spite of the will of Philip IV giving the succession to Austria, Leopold, who at that time had no children, had been ready for an equitable partition. But in 1689, when the Maritime Powers, that is, when William III had urgent need of Austria in the coalition against France, they promised the undivided monarchy of Spain to Leopold's second son. That agreement was superseded by the peace of Ryswick. And in the interval a new claimant was born, with evidently better right than the young archduke. For the archduke was the son of a second marriage. The emperor had only a daughter by his Spanish wife, who married the elector Max Emmanuel of Bavaria, and gave birth to a son in 1692. Under the will of Philip IV, the late King of Spain, that prince was the lawful heir. He was not the imperial candidate; for Leopold had required his own daughter to surrender her claim, that his crowns might not pass from Habsburg to Wittelsbachs.

For the very reason that he was neither a Habsburg nor a Bourbon, the electoral Prince of Bavaria became the candidate of William, and he agreed with Lewis that he should inherit Spain and the Indies, Italy and the Low Countries to be divided. By this, which is known as the First Partition Treaty, though in reality it was the second, England obtained nothing, except the prospect of peace through a friendly understanding with France, and it alienated the emperor and outraged Spain. That foreigners should dispose at their own convenience of the empire which had been built up by Spanish hands was an intolerable offence to Spaniards. They refused to be dismembered without even having been consulted. With all her dominions, with the united crowns of twenty-two kingdoms, Spain was unprosperous and insecure. Her vitality was kept up by her foreign possessions. Brabant, the Milanese, Campania, Apulia, were the richest portions of Europe, and neither France, nor the empire, nor England possessed the like. Deprived of these, the monarchy would decline quickly; for with all her pride, and her fame, and her unsetting sun, Spain was visibly going down. It was their policy and their resolution that the crown, though it must pass away to strangers, should pass undiminished. That it was about to pass away, all men knew.

On 19th September, three weeks before Lewis and William concluded their treaty, the primate assured the French ambassador that they must proceed as if the king was a dead man. The king himself knew his danger. His wife was a sister of the empress, and they were in the Austrian interest. So much so, that having made a will in favour of the Bavarian prince, Charles revoked it; the ambassador Harrach, the Prince of Hesse, who commanded in Catalonia, the queen, when her confidant was not bribed on the other side, were active for the archduke. But when the Partition Treaty became known, in November 1698, the king made another will, and publicly announced that his heir was the young prince of Bavaria. He thus took the candidate of France and England, assigning to him the whole, not a part. It was an attempt to preserve unity and avert partition by adopting the chosen claimant of the partitioning Powers. The English parliament, intent on peace, and suspicious of William's foreign policy, which was directed by him personally, with Dutch advisers, to the exclusion of ministers, reduced the army to 7000 men. William carried his distrust of Englishmen so far that he requested the imperial ambassador Wratislaw, an important man in his own country, to consult nobody but the Dutchman Albemarle. The public men of this country, he said, revealed every secret to their friends.

Six months later, both the will and the treaty were void and annulled by the death of the Bavarian prince, by small-pox, at Brussels, where his father was governor. The work had to be begun over again. The feeling of all Spanish statesmen in favour of maintaining the integrity of the monarchy was unchanged. That could be done only by choosing a Bourbon or a Habsburg. No other person could compete. The court was divided simply into an Austrian and a French party. The king's choice reverted to his nephew, the archduke. But those who had preferred the electoral prince were opposed to the Austrian, and became the partisans of France. They were a majority, and preponderant. If it could be made her interest to keep up the Spanish empire France was better able to do it than Austria. Especially now that England was detached from her ally the emperor. For William concluded with Lewis a second Treaty of Partition, giving Spain, the Indies, and the Netherlands to the archduke, the Italian possessions to France. Austria was no party to this agreement, and openly preferred Italy to all the rest. In England it was received with extreme coldness, and in Spain with indignation. In the summer of the year 1700 the king's illness became alarming. The skill of his physicians being exhausted, spiritual remedies were sought, and he was exorcised. The devil declared that the king was possessed. Subsequently he admitted that this was a falsehood, which surprised nobody.

The great question, whether the Spanish monarchy should remain united or should go to pieces, reached a preliminary conclusion on 3rd October, 1700. Charles appeared to be sinking, when he signed the last will which Portocarrero and the friends of the French had drawn up, with some marks of haste. He lived on four weeks longer, but never had the strength to revoke the act which disinherited his family. He left Spain, with all dependencies, to the Duke of Anjou, second son of the Dauphin, and if Anjou ever came to the throne in France, then he should be succeeded in Spain by his younger brother, so that the two crowns could never be united. Failing the French line, the succession was to pass to the archduke; and if the archduke came to the throne of Austria, then to the Duke of Savoy. There also the union of the crowns was provided against. The policy of all this was obvious. The artifice consisted in the omission of the House of Orleans. For the Duke of Orleans, descending from Anne of Austria, was nearer than the archduke Charles. At the same time he was farther removed from the throne of France than the Duke of Anjou, less likely, therefore, to alarm the Powers. It might be hoped that he would be near enough to Lewis to secure the preservation of the Spanish empire, and not near enough to threaten European independence. A time came when the allies thought of him as a possible substitute, and offered him a principality between France and Spain. That is, he suggested himself as a better alternative to Anjou, and they thought of giving him Navarre and Languedoc. Put forward at a time when the Maritime Powers were not committed to the archduke, he might have been accepted. But he was not the candidate of Lewis. The object of the Spaniards was to make sure that Lewis would break his engagement with William III, that he would give up the partition and accept the succession, preferring the risk of war for so great a prize to the chance of a pacific division of the spoil. This they ensured by the provision that Spain, if it did not belong to the French line, should pass to the Austrian; that, failing Anjou and his brother, the Austrian should take his place.

The will of Charles II shows a distinct animosity against the Maritime and Protestant Powers; and a rumour spread that it had been written under the influence of the pope, who dreaded the presence of Dutch and English sailors and factors in South America. A letter was produced purporting to contain the advice of Innocent XII in the matter; and the following pontiff, Clement XI, was obliged to disavow it.

Before the death of Charles II the nature of the will he had made was known at Versailles. Tallard, who had negotiated the Partition Treaty, was beside himself with anger. He convinced Torcy, he convinced Lewis himself, that they must not accept the succession. On 4th November the king sent word to William that he remained true to the scheme of Partition to which he had pledged himself. "I shall fulfil my engagements," he said, "in spite of any offers that may be made to me." He assured Leopold that he would never accept the whole succession. It was safer to be content with a share, under the auspicious sanction of the Maritime Powers. But Torcy having shaken off the too eager Marshal Tallard, changed his mind. He urged that neither the whole succession nor a part of it could be had without fighting, as Austria was as much opposed to the partition, as to the acceptance of the will by France. Torcy was not yet the great man he became during his long administration. But his argument carried conviction, and Lewis argued that his grandson should accept the proffered throne, and that Bourbons should reign where the Habsburgs had reigned for a century and a half. He was not bound by any engagement to the emperor, who was no party to the Partition Treaty. He was bound by that treaty to King William; but it was uncertain whether William had the support of his two nations. The funds rose at Amsterdam; and in England the king observed that everybody preferred the will to the treaty. For the Partition Treaty had stipulated nothing for English interests, nothing, therefore, worth fighting for. And England had no territorial advantage to claim.

The commercial, economical, and pacific spirit was evident, both in England and Holland. On the other side, there was the strong will and infinite dexterity of William. In the last Partition Treaty he had betrayed this weakness of his position, and had given way to the skilled diplomacy of France. Lewis did not believe that he would prevail over the public opinion of his country. And if he did prevail, his position would be less formidable than before. Lewis now had Spain on his side, and all the dependencies of Spain. He also had Bavaria and Savoy. In the last war he had been unsuccessful at sea, and in the Irish expedition, which was carried on beyond the sea by his naval, not his military administration. In the coming war he would trust less to his fleet than to his troops, which had never been unsuccessful in a general action. He resolved to defy the Dutch and the English, and to seize every attainable advantage. The Spanish ambassador had exclaimed, "The Pyrenees have melted away." Lewis now announced that his grandson was not to renounce his right to the throne of France. In the Barrier Fortresses the Dutch held garrisons. Lewis sent them home and occupied the places himself. "Dutchmen were not wanted," he said, "to protect one Bourbon against the other." In August 1701 he obtained for French traders the asiento, the profitable and coveted monopoly in negro slaves. In September he prohibited English imports. Then, on the 16th, he did one thing more, one thing too much even for a nation of economists and calculators.

The acceptance of the Spanish succession by France was the frustration of William's efforts during thirty years. He had striven and made war for peace and civilisation against wilful attack and the reign of force. That good cause was defeated now, and the security of national rights and international conventions was at an end. The craving for empire and the hegemony of Europe had prevailed. The temper of England compelled him, in April 1701, to acknowledge Philip of Anjou. The country, he said, could not understand the refusal to acknowledge a king welcomed by the whole of Spain. He advised the Emperor to have the German princes with him, and to begin the attack. He himself would arm meanwhile, and his own people, before long, would drive him into war. He relied on the arrogance of the French, and this calculation, the measures by which he brought public opinion on to his side, are the greatest achievement of his career.

As it became apparent that England was to lose, not, like Austria, a visionary prospect, but its commercial existence, during the summer of 1701 the spirit of parliament began to be roused. William, watching the flow of the patriotic tide, concluded with Austria and Holland the treaty of The Hague, which divided Europe, for the first time, into a Latin and a German half. Austria was to obtain that which it desired above all things, dominion over Italy. The Maritime Powers were to retain their commercial privileges in Spain, and everything they could make their own in America. France was to be excluded from transatlantic markets; but nothing was said as to Spain. Implicitly, Philip V was acknowledged. The Maritime Powers aimed much more at prosperity than at power. Their objects were not territorial, but commercial. The date of this treaty, which was to cost so much blood, was 7th September.

William was moving more rapidly than public opinion, but public opinion was not far behind. The country was committed to war with France at the very beginning of that fatal September. The treaty had been signed nine days, when James II died at St. Germains. Lewis acknowledged the son as he had acknowledged the father—the one as the other, a king in partibus. It was a platonic engagement, involving no necessary political consequences. Since the treaty of Ryswick, Lewis treated William as king, though there was a James II. He did not cease so to treat him because there was a James III. To a prince who, the week before, had contrived a warlike coalition against him, a coalition which soon proved more formidable than all those which had preceded it, he owed no more than the letter of their agreements. The decisive step towards open hostilities was taken by the King of England, not by the King of France. Parliament had just passed the Act of Succession. Lewis's declaration in favour of the Stuarts appeared to be in defiance of the law in favour of the Guelphs. England had not dared to question the right of the Spaniards to regulate the succession. England could not permit interference with her own.

This declaration of Lewis XIV, imprudent but not unprovoked, gave to William what he wanted. It supplied a strong current of national feeling. The nation was ardent on his side. He had succeeded at last. The war with France, for the partition of the Spanish monarchy, would be carried on with determination under the coming reign. For William knew that Anne would soon be queen. It was also known at Paris, for William had consulted the French king's physician, and there were no illusions. The strange impolicy of Lewis's action may be explained by the belief that another than William of Orange would appear at the head of the allied armies in the next campaign. That the change of commander would be the greatest calamity that had befallen France since Agincourt was not foreseen.

In November 1701 Parliament was dissolved, and a majority was returned prepared for war, prepared to support the policy of the Grand Alliance. What made it formidable was that the Tories themselves were warlike. The Whigs were warlike because it was their nature, since France had declared itself for the Stuarts; also because they and their friends were interested in pushing trade with the oceanic world, which was mainly Spanish. But it was not, at first, a Whig war. On 9th March, 1702 they obtained the majority. They were 235 to 221.

William III was dying. He had borne the accident well by which he broke his collar-bone. He sat at dinner that evening, and was expected to recover in a few weeks. But he fell asleep one day near an open window. Nobody had the courage to shut it, and he caught a chill, of which, in five days, he died. His prestige was lost to the cause of the allies. At the same time, William was a Dutch king, working with Dutchmen only, Heinsius, Bentinck, Keppel, for Dutch as much as for English objects. While he lived there was no danger that the interests of his own countrymen would be made subordinate to those of England. There was no sign of Holland taking the second place, of Holland being sacrificed to England. That security was now over. The leadership passed to England. In the field, the Dutch were far ahead. The understanding was that the English were to be 40,000, the Austrians 90,000, and the Dutch 102,000. But whereas the Dutch ultimately put 160,000 men into line, the English, in the greatest battle of the war, at Malplaquet, were under 8000, or less than one-twelfth of the whole force engaged.

What gave to this country the advantage in the war of the Spanish Succession was the genius and the overwhelming personal ascendency of Marlborough. One of the Dutch deputies, who did not love him, who was not even quite convinced as to his qualities as a soldier, describes him as perfectly irresistible, not so much by energy and visible power, as by his dexterity and charm. And this in spite of defects that were notorious and grotesque. Everybody knows, and perhaps nobody believes, the story of his blowing out the candle when he found that his visitor had no papers to read. Many years later the story was told, when an officer present stated that he was the visitor whom the duke had treated so parsimoniously. It is due to him that England became one of the great Powers of the world, and, next to France, the first of the Powers. And it was not his doing, but the doing of his rivals, that the allies were sacrificed. The Dutch had no such splendid personality, and though they had their full share in the war, they lost by the result. The character of the struggle changed by the death of William and the substitution of Marlborough, who depended, more and more, on the support of the Whigs. In one of his last conversations William had said: "We seek nothing but the security which comes from the balance of power." Our policy was not maintained throughout on that exalted level.

The War of Succession began in Italy, by the attempt of Eugene to recover Milan, which reverted to the empire on the death of Charles II. It was, as it were, a private affair, involving no declaration of war, no formal breach with France. But the French were in Lombardy, and, with the support of the Duke of Savoy, they were able to check the Austrian advance. Eugene went home to Vienna to organise and direct and urge the exertions of his government. On his return, after a very memorable absence, Victor Amadeus had deserted his French alliance, and had attached himself to the Austrians. A French army laid siege to Turin, and Eugene, coming up the right bank of the Po to his rescue, defeated the French, raised the siege, and established for the first time the domination of Austria over Italy. He was repulsed in his attempt on Toulon; but the Italian war was at an end, and the emperor triumphant. In Germany the valley of the Danube, which is the road to Vienna, was open to the French, because the elector of Bavaria was their ally against his father-in-law, the emperor. The Imperialists were in danger, and the Dutch, more solicitous of the Belgian frontier before them than of what went on hundreds of miles away, on the long line from Strasburg to the distant centre of Austria, refused to let Marlborough take their troops away to another seat of war in Southern Germany.

Marlborough, sheltered by the complicity of Heinsius, politely disregarded their orders and started on his famous march, by Ehrenbreitstein and Heilbronn, meeting Eugene on his way. Eugene, at that moment, was the most renowned commander in Europe. Marlborough was better known as a corrupt intriguer, who owed his elevation to the influence of his wife at court, who would disgrace himself for money, who had sought favour at St. Germains by betraying the expedition to Brest. Blenheim altered the relative position of the two men in the eyes of the world. It was known that the day had been won, not by the persistent slaughter of brave soldiers, but by an inspiration of genius executed under heavy fire with all the perfection of art. In the midst of the struggle Marlborough had suddenly changed his order of battle, gathered his squadrons on a new line, and sent them against the French centre, with infantry supports. He did what Napoleon was vainly entreated to do in his last engagement. That is what suggested the simile of the angel, and what Addison meant by the words:—

Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm.

The great Eugene had done well, as he always did. The Englishman had risen in a single day to the foremost rank of generals. And England rose with him. There had not been such a defeat for sixty years, since Conde, at Rocroy, established the military reputation of France. The French retreated to the Rhine, and on that side Austria was safe.

In Spain the issue was very different. Philip was thoroughly safe during three years of reign, and the archduke would have been glad to content himself with what could be secured in Italy. But the English felt that their trade interests would be safer in Spain and the Indies under a Habsburg than under a Bourbon. They brought the archduke to Lisbon in 1703, having concluded with the Portuguese that treaty which made them commercial dependants on England, and which has been the cause of much port wine and so much gout. It was a disastrous change of policy. The English destroyed the French fleet at Vigo, with many tons of American silver. They took Gibraltar and Minorca, without understanding their importance. They failed to defend the one; and they six times offered the other for an exchange. But on land they were utterly defeated, at Almanza and Brihuega, and the archduke never actually reigned over much more than Catalonia. There, having restored the Aragonese Constitution, he succeeded in inspiring a sentiment of loyalty, and repulsed his rival. He was never able to maintain himself at Madrid. On that seat of war the French had much the best of it. They lost Germany at Blenheim in 1704, and Italy at Turin in 1706.

The deciding campaigns were in Belgium, where there were many fortresses, and progress was necessarily slow. After Marlborough's victory at Ramillies in 1706 the French lost ground, and when the princes, as they were called, took the field together, no French marshal had a chance. For Marlborough was now a prince of the empire; and Eugene, having driven the enemy out of Germany and Italy, was again by his side, thirsting for something to do. At Oudenarde, where he was present, with no troops of his own, at a critical moment he led a successful charge. Together they conquered Lille; and together they defeated Villars at Malplaquet. There, in the summer of 1709, the five years of constant victory which began at Blenheim came to an end.

After Turin and Ramillies Lewis had been willing to treat. He was profoundly discouraged; and when Torcy came to The Hague in 1709 to meet the Triumvirate, Heinsius, Eugene, and Marlborough, he gave up almost every point. He even agreed that France should furnish men and money to drive Philip V out of Spain, where he felt quite safe and refused every summons. Lewis, in return, asked for Naples, and Naples only, without Sicily. The allies could have everything else, and could have compelled him to restore all the ill-gotten acquisitions of his reign. They were unwilling to be at the trouble of one more campaign in the Peninsula, where they had met with so much misfortune. They required that Lewis should undo his own offending deed, and himself compel his grandson to resign the Spanish throne. Marlborough, holding a position such as no Englishman had ever enjoyed, was preponderant in their councils. He aspired to be captain-general for life, and rejected an enormous sum with which France offered to repay his advocacy of peace. The attempt to prolong war for his own private advantage is the deadliest of his crimes. Lewis, in despair, made an appeal to his people, and a thrill of genuine indignation ran through the unhappy country. The tide began to turn. At Malplaquet, the greatest battle fought in modern Europe before Napoleon, the allies lost 23,000 out of less than 100,000; and the French not half so many.

A much graver change was coming over the spirit of the English nation. As the Whigs offered nothing better than the continuation of war, Toryism gained ground; and with Toryism, the Church. The Duchess of Marlborough was supplanted in the queen's favour; the Whigs went out of office; and the new ministers dismissed Marlborough and appointed Ormonde to command in his stead. With the aid of an obscure French priest, who acted as chaplain to the Imperial ambassador, they began a secret negotiation with Torcy. They stipulated that the Dutch should be kept out of it, and should not be listened to, if they made proposals of their own; also that their conditions should be understood to come from the initiative of France. Torcy responded heartily. His first letter is dated five days after the death of the Emperor Joseph. By that event, the Archduke Charles succeeded to his throne. Joseph died 17th April. Four months earlier, 23rd December, Harley, by his intermediary, Gautier, informed Torcy that England would give up Spain and the Indies to the Bourbon king, and would desert the allies as soon as trade interests were provided for. The surrender of that which the English had claimed from 1703 to 1710, the return, in spite of success and glory, to the moderate policy laid down by William in 1701, was not caused by the prospect of the union of the crowns on the head of Charles. Harley was afraid that the archduke would make those terms himself. For it was known that the Austrians regarded Spain and its colonies as more burdensome than profitable. When Harley was stabbed by Guiscard, and was laid up with his wound, the secret of the negotiations passed into St. John's hands. His treatment of the allies was perfidious; but they obtained almost as much as they really wanted.

Eugene, deserted by the English forces under Ormonde, was beaten by Villars at Denain, and afterwards, by no fault of the English, at Friedlingen. Then the emperor made his own peace at Rastadt. At Utrecht, the Dutch secured a favourable tariff, the right of garrison in a line of fortified towns, from Ghent to Namur, and the daring Torcy had so thoroughly penetrated the weakness of England, in consequence of party divisions, that he concluded a disastrous war by negotiation. France retained her own territory, practically undiminished, recovering Lille, and acquiring, for the younger branch of the royal house, Spain and the Spanish colonies. It gained infinitely more than either Holland or England. Marshal La Feuillade asked Bolingbroke why he had let them off so easily. The answer was: Because we were no longer afraid of you. Philip V retained all that was legitimately Spanish, in Europe and America, excepting the two fortresses conquered by England, Gibraltar and Port Mahon. He refused to give up Corunna. But he renounced his claim in the succession to his grandfathers crown. Bolingbroke betrayed the allies, and he disgraced his country by the monopoly of the slave trade; but the distribution was not unfair to the contracting parties, and the share of England was not excessive. We acquired Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay territory, and, in addition to the asiento, the right of trading in the possessions of the House of Bourbon—in fact, the commerce of the world. And our revolutionary system, the permanent exclusion of the Stuarts, received the sanction of Europe. It was the condemnation of the principle of non-resistance, which had carried the Tories to power, and the perpetuation of Whiggism.

Bolingbroke did not intend that the great achievement of his life should serve the purpose of his enemies, and he gravitated towards the Stuarts, the true representatives of the cause to which Sacheverell had given renewed vitality. Harley had opened, through Berwick, negotiations with St. Germains, and had thereby secured the help of the Jacobite organisation. Bolingbroke went further. He believed that the Elector of Hanover could not be prevented from coming in, but that he would soon be driven out again. He said that he was too unintelligent to understand and manage parties, too much accustomed to have his own way to submit to govern under constitutional control. He promised that King James would be restored. And the French concluded peace at Utrecht in the belief that they were dealing with a Jacobite, that their concession in regard to the crown of England amounted to nothing, that, by yielding now, they would secure hereafter the elevation of a dependent dynasty. Under that illusion they combined with Bolingbroke to overreach themselves and to institute party government, under the supremacy of the Whigs.

XVI

THE HANOVERIAN SETTLEMENT

THE FIRST thing is to consider by what steps a government came into existence entirely different from that of England in the seventeenth century, and unlike anything that had previously been known in Europe.

The old order terminates with the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. What followed is not a development of that Act, but in contradiction to it. With the new dynasty there is a new departure. And the change was not effected by statute, but by that force which makes the law, and is above the law, the logic of facts and the opinion of the nation. The essential innovations, the cabinet, the premier, and government by party, are still without legislative sanction. The Act of Settlement was speedily unsettled. It separated the administration from the legislature by excluding placemen from the House of Commons; and it prohibited the king from visiting his foreign dominions without leave. And it required the king to be advised by the Privy Council, thereby rejecting a united cabinet, the exclusive organ of a party. Both William and, at that time, Marlborough preferred that all the leading men should be united in the administration. Before the Act of Settlement, came into operation, during the reign of Anne, the idea of a united cabinet taken from the same party had prevailed, and at last even Harley could not be tolerated by the Jacobites. If Bolingbroke had not made it impossible for George I to trust the loyalty of the Tories, the rising of 1715 would have been fatal to them. The new dynasty governed by the Whigs, that is, by one party, and by a cabinet, not by the council. As the king understood neither English nor English affairs, he very rarely presided. The cabinet decided in his absence, and then reported.

It is necessary to see what manner of man he was. A branch of the ancient Guelphic House reigned at Hanover, and had succeeded by politic and constant effort in consolidating half a dozen territories into one important principality. It was the most rising and prosperous of the German Houses. It acquired the ninth electorate in 1692; and it was manifestly appropriate when it was designated for the English succession, because the first elector, who had accomplished the greatness of his family, had married the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, the Princess Palatine, who in an evil hour was Queen of Bohemia. The Electress Sophia was a Calvinist. Her husband was a Lutheran. His predecessor, who died in 1678, had been a convert to Catholicism. Hanover had been the centre of reunion, and there were Lutheran divines there who, under the commanding influence of Leibnitz, went further than Tract No. 90 in the direction of Rome. With their easy comprehension and impartial appreciation of religious systems, the Guelphs of Hanover were not representative Protestants. Some misgivings arose in the mind of William III, and it was thought that he looked with suspicious favour on the young Frederic William, the man who afterwards drilled the battalions which Frederic the Great led to victory. A Hanoverian statesman wrote, in alarm, that William seemed to prefer the Prussian prince, because he was a Protestant, to the Hanoverian, who was a Lutheran. The implication is that the Lutherans offered less resistance to Catholicism. But the fact also was that Sophia was a Stuart by the mother's side, and did not wish too loudly to proclaim that she was not a legitimist. There was a little ostensible hesitation; and the electress so managed that the crown should seem to be forced upon her. It was part of this decorous comedy that her son never learnt English—a circumstance of the utmost value, afterwards, to England. The Electress Sophia was not perhaps a very estimable, though a very intelligent princess. But she was eighty-four when the crown came within reach, and she died of rage at an unfriendly letter from Queen Anne, betraying her Jacobite propensity.

The elector, who ascended the throne of England two months after his mother's death, was neither a tyrant, nor a coward, nor a fool; he was only unintellectual and brutally selfish. There were ladies in his company who received English titles, and offended one part of the public by their morals and the remainder by their ugliness. One was created Duchess of Kendal, and Walpole said of her that she was Queen of England if ever there was one. But she sold her influence for money, amounting sometimes to L10,000, and Walpole at last complained to his master. The king laughed in his face, and replied, in his dog-Latin, that no doubt his minister also was paid by the people whom he recommended. There was a deeper taint on his reputation. He had married the only daughter of his neighbour and kinsman, the duke of Celle, thereby securing the succession to his dominions. Her mother was not of royal birth, and she was treated so cruelly by her husband and by the Electress Sophia that she resolved to escape from her misery by flight. In her despair she accepted the assistance of Count Konigsmarck, whom the envoy Stepney described as a profligate adventurer. The secret was betrayed; the princess was divorced, and spent the long remainder of her life at Ahlden, a remote country house which had belonged to her father. This was no more than had happened in many great families tried by the temptation of irresponsible monarchy, but there was a superadded tragedy; for Count Konigsmarck disappeared and was never seen again. As part of the scheme to run away with the princess, he had transferred his services to Saxony, where he was made a general. For that reason, and still more for the persuasive supplications of his sister, the beautiful Aurora von Konigsmarck, the Elector Augustus the Strong caused some inquiry to be made. It led to no result. But Aurora became the mother of the Marshal of Saxony, who defeated the English at Fontenoy, and conquered the Austrian Netherlands for the French. From the marshal was descended George Sand, the most famous Frenchwoman of the last generation. The Hanoverian government issued a lying report, but attempted no defence. Nobody doubted that Konigsmarck had been made away with, and that the author of the crime was the King of England, whose proper destination therefore should have been not St. James's but Newgate, and indeed not Newgate but Tyburn. Such was the character that preceded the founder of our reigning line of kings, and such were the weapons in the hands of his dynastic foes.

His most dangerous enemy was the Prince of Wales; not the Stuart who held his court in Lorraine, but his own eldest son. For George II believed in the prisoner of Ahlden; believed that his mother had been cruelly treated, wrongfully accused, and unjustly divorced, and was therefore able to see his father by an exceedingly clear light. Thence arose a bitter enmity between them, and that tendency to opposition in the princes of Wales which became a family tradition and a salutary factor in the Constitution.

George I found that, as long as he respected English institutions, things went very well with him, and he made no attempt to overturn them. The fear that a sovereign who was nominally absolute in one place could never govern under a constitution in another proved to be unnecessary. His interests, and those of his continental advisers, were mainly continental. In political science he had long had the ablest counsellor in Europe at his elbow, Leibnitz, the friend of the electress. And although that great man did not enjoy unbroken favour, it was not easy to be blind to the flood of light which he poured on every subject. Leibnitz had been instrumental in securing the succession, and he abounded in expositions of constitutional policy. He professed himself so good a Whig that he attributed to that cause his unpopularity with many people in England, especially at Cambridge, and most of all at Trinity. He seems not to have known that his rival, Newton, was as good a Whig as himself, and indeed a much better one. It was characteristic of his mind ever to impute the broad divisions of opinion among men to ignorance or incapacity to understand each other. With a more scientific method, he thought that many disputes could be settled, and many adversaries reconciled. For many years it was his favourite occupation to show that there was no real cause for a breach at the Reformation, and that people called themselves Protestants not knowing what was really meant by Catholic. He assured the Catholics that the Confession of Augsburg, rightly understood, was sound Catholicism; and he assured the Lutherans that there was nothing in the Council of Trent with which they were forced, in consistency, to quarrel. With the same maxim, that men are generally right in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny, he taught that Whig and Tory are alike necessary portions of truth, that they complete each other, that they need each other, that a true philosophy of politics includes the two. He also said that the past is a law for the future, and that the will of Providence consecrates those things which are permitted to succeed and to endure. This is pure conservatism. The Whig seeks that which ought to be elsewhere than in that which is. His standing purpose is to effect change, for the past is essentially Tory.

The influence of the most enlightened German on the new German dynasty was not favourable to party government, and would have combined better with the system of William III. They consulted an enlightened Englishman, and Lord Cowper drew up an important political paper, showing that the king ought to depend on the Whigs. Moreover, Bolingbroke, at the last moment, by his Stuart intrigue, compelled George I to come in as the nominee of a party. To Bolingbroke's intrigues the House of Hanover owed that which it most needed, the prestige of victory. He had found comfort in the reflection that, although it might be impossible to prevent the heralds from proclaiming the new monarchy, the new monarch would soon make himself odious, and would be more easy to expel than to exclude. The mass of the people was Tory, and the majority of Tories were Jacobites. There was the assured co-operation of the sects discontented with the Union, and a part of the very small army would be held fast by the sullen anger of the Irish.

Lewis XIV, weary and inert, would not risk another war; but if he saw his opportunity to interfere, he was not likely to neglect it. The Pretender would be advised by his brother, Berwick, the victor of Almanza. The insurgent forces would be led by the Duke of Ormonde, who had succeeded Marlborough as commander-in-chief. Marlborough himself had advanced money for the Jacobite rising, and was so much suspected by the ministers that they would not let him take the command.

The hopefulness of the situation darkened somewhat before the time for action arrived. Lewis XIV died, and the Regent, having Philip of Spain for a rival, required the good-will of England. Two miscreants, to whom James had offered L20,000 if they would shoot the king and the Prince of Wales, failed to earn their reward. The arrest of a leading Jacobite, Sir William Wyndham, so scared his partisans, that Ormonde, having sailed into Torbay, returned to St. Malo without landing. The Highlanders rose, but there was no Dundee and no Montrose to make them superior to regular troops. They fought with doubtful fortune at Sheriffmuir, while the Borderers, finding no support in Lancashire, surrendered at Preston. When James Stuart landed in Aberdeenshire, the struggle was over. Cadogan was approaching at the head of the Dutch auxiliaries, and the Pretender escaped by a back door from his own men, and made his way to Gravelines. He had proved unequal to the occasion, and was not gifted with political understanding. But he had been instructed by Fenelon, and had learnt from him the doctrine of toleration.

The strongest part of the case against the new order in England was the treatment of the Irish Catholics; and James saw the whole thing in the light of a religious conflict. Bolingbroke, who had been an oppressor of Nonconformists, and had no sympathy with the prince's motives, fell into disgrace. He was made responsible for the failure, and was suspected of having told secrets to the ambassador, Stair, in order to make his peace at home. He was allowed to return, and did far more harm to the House of Hanover as a loyal subject than he had done as a manager of insurrection.

Seven peers had been taken with arms in their hands; and, in order to avoid questions which might have injured their friends, they pleaded guilty, and threw themselves on the mercy of the king. As they were more guilty than the followers whom they had led to their destruction, they could not be pardoned. Some, amid universal applause, made their escape from the Tower, and only two were sent to the scaffold. At the last moment, when repentance did not avail, Derwentwater retracted the declarations of loyalty he had made at his trial, and died protesting his unswerving fidelity to the House of Stuart. The Tories were effectually ruined. The militant part of them had been crushed. The remainder had proved helplessly weak, and the last dying speech of their honoured champion was taken as a proof that they were traitors at heart, and that their professions of loyalty were interested and insincere. Parliament displayed an enthusiastic attachment to the dynasty and its ministers; they were ready for any expenditure, for any armaments, and a force of 16,000 men was raised, for the better security of the Whigs.

On this state of feeling the government introduced septennial parliaments. Under the Triennial Act a general election would have fallen due in 1717, too soon for safety after the Jacobite rising. Opinion in the country had not been impressed by recent events, by the utter weakness of the rebels, the overwhelming success of the government, the significant menace of the dying leader, so deeply as the House of Commons. The new establishment would be in peril with the constituencies, but safe with their representatives. This was so certain that the philosophic arguments, for legislative independence and for popular control, were superfluous. The victors secured their victory and perpetuated their power by extending their mandate from three years to seven. The measure strengthened the House of Commons, and prepared the long reign of the Whigs. The funds rose, and the king took advantage of the improved situation to spend some months in Hanover. There he had greater scope to devote himself to foreign affairs, and to bring the Englishmen who attended him under the influence of experienced foreigners. Thus, while the Tories were prostrate and the Whigs supreme, a schism arose between the ministers at Hanover and the ministers at home. Walpole and Townshend went out of office; Stanhope and Sunderland formed a new administration, which the South Sea Bubble overthrew. A great question of constitutional principle opened between them and their former colleagues. The enmity between the king and the Prince of Wales made it probable that the ministers who had the confidence of the father would be dismissed on his son's accession. George II, to carry out his purpose, would be obliged to swamp the House of Lords with new peers. To prevent this, it was proposed to limit the power of creation and to fix a maximum number. As the Septennial Act had increased the power of the commons, the Peerage Bill would, in their turn, have increased the power of the peers, against the crown on one hand, against the commons on the other. The Whigs were not prepared to diminish the House of Commons, and not yet afraid that it would become too powerful, exposed as it was to corruption, and elected, on a narrow franchise, by an uneducated constituency. Burnet, the typical Whig, had protested against such limitations as should quite change the form of our government, and render the crown titular and precarious.

Walpole defeated the Bill. It deprived government of one great means of influence, by abolishing the hope of a peerage. He was not prepared to sacrifice a legitimate species of patronage. He came back, thereupon, to office, but not to a principal office; and he was not a member of the Cabinet when the South Sea Company undertook to reduce the National Debt. They offered only eight and a half years' purchase; but the spirit of speculation was strong, and these bad terms were widely accepted. The shares of the Company rose from 130 to 1000. As there was so much capital seeking investment, rival enterprises were started, and were opposed by the South Sea Company. Their ruin destroyed its credit; and after large sums had been won, large sums were lost. Some had been impoverished, others enriched. The country had not suffered, but the ministry fell. Walpole inherited their power. The ground was cleared for his long administration. It lasted so long that he did more than any other man to establish the new system of government. He was more zealous to retain his power than to make heroic use of it, and was a good administrator but an indifferent legislator. In his time those things were best which were done outside of parliament. Walpole made it his business to yield to public opinion, and did it consistently in the three critical moments of his career—in Wood's Halfpence, in the Excise, and in the Spanish war. The same problem presented itself to a greater man in the present century, and was decided on the opposite principle. Guizot was himself persuaded that a measure of parliamentary reform was inevitable, since the opinion of the country was in its favour. But the opinion of parliament was against it, and he preferred to fall, together with the monarchy, in obedience to parliament, rather than to triumph by public opinion.

Walpole gave way in the affair of the Halfpence, that he might not alienate those through whom he governed Ireland. The coins were good. They were to contain twice the value of metal with which we are satisfied, and it was never shown that they did not. The gains of the contractor were exhorbitant. He was able to pay a heavy fee to the Duchess of Kendal; and when the contract was revoked, he obtained an excessive compensation. His Halfpence are historic because Swift, in raising a tempest over the Irish grievance, employed the language of revolution and national patriotism, as it had never been heard. Again, the Excise Bill would have saved many hundreds of thousands of pounds to the State, when a hundred thousand was more than a million is now; but Walpole, in spite of his majority, yielded to the clamour outside. And he did the same thing in regard to the Spanish war, the last great crisis he encountered.

Walpole's main idea on taking the highest office, that which he proclaimed in his first king's speech, was to divert the country from frantic speculation to the legitimate profits of industry and trade. The two great openings for trade were with the Mediterranean and with Spanish America. That with the Mediterranean was somewhat neglected, as the government relied more on the friendship of the piratical Algerines than on the solid possession of Gibraltar and Minorca. George I had written a letter to Philip V, dated 1st June, 1721, in which he distinctly assured him of his "readiness to satisfy with regard to your demand relating to the restitution of Gibraltar, promising you to make use of the first favourable opportunity to regulate this article with consent of my parliament." The English ministry were not convinced of the importance of retaining Gibraltar, and fully expected to be in a position to give it up to Spain for an equivalent. Indeed, in January 1721, Stanhope had said to the French envoy that in a year, when the financial position of England was better and the temper of parliament improved, they would certainly give up Gibraltar, for the merest shadow of an equivalent, as the place was only a burden to them. But they had not counted on the determination of the English people to hold it at all costs. Philip, however, not perhaps without some reason, always regarded the engagement as precise, and treated the continued retention as an act of bad faith. In all that I have just said about Gibraltar, I have been quoting a recent writer in the Historical Review.

The South American trade presented infinite possibilities. It was pursued with difficulty against the resistance of the Spaniards, who had the law on their side. It was considered worth a war, and the strength of public feeling overcame the feeble scruples of the minister. The war ended disastrously, but before the end Walpole had been driven from office. It had been no part of his policy to promote prosperity by arms, but it was part of his policy, and the deciding part of it, to let the nation, in the last instance, regulate its own affairs. Peace was a good thing; but profit was also a good thing; and Walpole had no principle that made one a question of duty and the other a question of interest.

The constant lesson of the Revolution was that England preferred monarchy. But after the fall of Walpole it was observed that there was a new growth of republican sentiment, and that the country felt itself superior to the government. This was the natural result of the time known as the Robinocracy; not because he devised liberal measures, but because he was careful to be neither wiser nor more liberal than the public. He was quite content to preserve the government of the country by the rich, in the interest of their own class. Unlike Stanhope, his predecessor, he was unmoved by the intolerance of the laws in England, and especially in Ireland. He was a friend to Free Trade; but he suffered Ireland to be elaborately impoverished, for the benefit of English landlords. Slavery and the slave trade, which Bolingbroke had promoted, were not remedied or checked by this powerful Whig. The criminal Code, in his time, grew annually more severe; and I need enter into no details as to the treatment of the prisoners and of the poor. Walpole was so powerful, and was powerful so long, that much of the responsibility for all these things is at his door. On this account, and not because he governed by patronage and pensions and ribbons and bribes, he was a false Whig.

Government by Party was established in 1714, by Party acting through the Cabinet. Walpole added to this the prime minister, the accepted head of the Party and of the Cabinet. As the king did not preside, the minister who did preside discharged many functions of the king. The power of governing the country was practically transferred. It was shared, not between the minister and the king, but between the head of the ministry and the head of the opposition. For Party implies the existence of a party which is out as well as a party that is in. There is a potential ministry ready for office whenever the majority is shifted. As Walpole remained twenty-one years in office, he ignored this part of the constitutional system. He never became a leader of opposition, and when he resigned, no such thing had been provided. "All the talents" were opposed to him, but they were not an organised opposition. They were discontented and offended Whigs, assailing ministers on no ground of principle. This form of opposition was instituted by Pulteney, when he quarrelled with Walpole. Pulteney founded the Craftsman, in which there was much good political writing. For Bolingbroke had returned to England, and as he was not allowed to resume his seat in the Lords, he could make his power felt only through his pen. As he was thoroughly cured of his Jacobite sympathies, the doctrine he proclaimed was a Toryism stripped of the reactionary element. He proposed to make the State dominate over all the interests—land, Church, trade, and the like. That this might be done, and the government by a class for a class abolished, he appealed to the crown. The elevation of the State over the dominant classes had been the part of intelligent Monarchy in every age. And it is the spell by which Bolingbroke transformed Toryism and introduced the party called the King's Friends, which became a power in the middle of the century, and was put an end to by Mr. Pitt, after losing America, and setting up an English rival to England. After the final fall of the Stuarts in 1746, this was the moving force of Toryism, and the illiberal spirit was seriously curbed. Macaulay goes so far as to say that the Tories became more liberal than the Whigs. But it was an academic and Platonic liberality that did not strengthen the constitution.

The Whigs, having added the unwritten clauses, exclusive government by party, cabinet instead of council, and premier instead of king, did nothing to discover defects to be reformed and principles to be developed. They became Conservatives, satisfied with defending the new dynasty and the institutions that accompanied it. One supreme change was absolutely essential to complete their system. For its essence was that the object of the law, which was liberty, should prevail over the letter of the law, which was restraint. It required that public opinion should control legislation. That could not be done without the liberty of the press; and the press was not free while it was forbidden to publish and to discuss the debates of parliament. That prohibition was strictly maintained. For near thirty years we know the debates, and even the divisions, chiefly through the reports of Bonnet the Brandenburg resident, and of Hoffmann the Austrian resident, who tell us much that is sought vainly in the meagre pages of Hansard. Then came the epoch of Dr. Johnson and his colleagues in Grub Street. But when the Whig reign ended, at the resignation of the great Commoner in 1761, the Whigs had not admitted the nation to the parliamentary debates.

The debates were made public in 1774. The unreported parliament of 1768, as it is called, is the first that was properly reported. The speeches were taken down by one of the members, Cavendish, the ancestor of the Waterparks. A portion has been printed and forgotten. The remainder is preserved in manuscript, and contains, in all, about two hundred and fifty speeches of Edmund Burke. It is of no little value to political students, inasmuch as Burke at his best is England at its best. Through him and through American influence upon him, the sordid policy of the Walpolean Whigs became a philosophy, and a combination of expedients was changed into a system of general principles.

XVII

PETER THE GREAT AND THE RISE OF PRUSSIA

WHILST THE English people, with the example and assistance of the Dutch, were carrying forward the theory of constitutional government, a still more important movement in the opposite direction was proceeding in the North, and new forces were brought into the widening circle of general history.

The Muscovite empire extended from the frontiers of Poland to the farthest extremity of China. In numbers and in extent it was the first of Christian Powers. But it played no part in the concert or the conflict of Europe, and its existence was almost unnoticed and unfelt. The people were too backward in the scale of wealth or knowledge or civilisation to obtain influence even on their neighbours. Potentially the most formidable force on earth, practically they were forgotten and unknown. In a single reign, by the action of one man, Russia passed from lethargy and obscurity to a dominant position among the nations.

The first need was intercourse with the world—intercourse of trade for its material progress, intercourse of ideas for its civilisation. The problem was too obvious to escape the earlier Romanoffs. They were a clerical dynasty, closely associated with the Church, and allowing to the Patriarch a position very near the throne. In politics they were inefficient and unsuccessful; but their Church policy was charged with far-reaching consequences. In that, they were superior to the people about them, and they introduced certain moderate reforms, literary rather than dogmatic, in the externals of ritual, and in the liturgical books. An illiterate clergy had allowed abuses to take root, and were excessively intolerant of change. A schism arose between the established church with its rectified texts and improved ceremonial, and the large minority who rejected them. Everybody knows Newman's story of the ancient priest who fell into the habit, at mass, of saying, "quod ore mumpsimus" instead of "quod ore sumpsimus," and, when admonished of his error, refused to exchange old "mumpsimus" for new "sumpsimus." Although "mumpsimus" is the very motto for the Russian schismatics, and although ignorance and superstition were the root of the matter, they combined with a dread of arbitrary change by an arbitrary power, and supplied a basis for resistance to Erastianism and the fusion of Church and State. This was the heart of the opposition to the later reforms, to which the Church in general yielded reluctantly, and the sectaries not at all, choosing death, and even suicide by fire, to compromise. The reforming government was driven into persecution by the fanaticism of these men.

The new spirit began to reign when the young Tsar Peter triumphed over family intrigues that were supported by the party of reaction. He was uneducated, unmannerly, uncivilised; but he had a clear notion of that which his people required, and the energy and force of character to achieve it. As there were no roads in Russia, and not much material for making them, the waterway was the easy and natural line to follow. The Russian rivers flowed to the Caspian and the Euxine, and invited to the conquest of Persia and Central Asia, or to the deliverance of the Slavonic and Greek brethren from the Turk. Peter was not carried away by either prospect. He did indeed send a fleet down the Volga, and another down the Don. He conquered the Persian coast of the Caspian, but resisted the temptation of pushing his arms to the Indian Ocean. He was repeatedly at war with the Turk; but he contented himself with a humble measure of success.

Poland, for reasons of race and religion, was the national enemy; and from the death of Sobieski in 1696 there were symptoms that it was likely to break up. The next king, Augustus of Saxony, in 1702, proposed the partition of the Polish dominions. His agent, Patkul, renewed the idea at Berlin in 1704, and Austria did the same in 1712. At the height of his military success, in 1710, Peter entertained the idea, only to dismiss it. He preferred to wait. Poland would be convenient as a helpless neighbour, covering his frontier on a dangerous side; and its constitution prevented it from becoming formidable. He was content to make sure that the feeble government should never undergo reform. He resolutely fixed his thoughts in another direction, and chose, not the easiest, but the most difficult line of attack.

Tartars, or Persians, or Zaporogue Cossacks supplied no new element that could be of service to his people. The Russians had issued from the long subjection to the Golden Horde, indigent, ignorant, prejudiced, dishonest and false. A mighty future lay before them, but they were unfit for such a destiny. The civilising influences they required could come only from contact with superior races. From them they must import the goods, they must import the men, that were needed to raise them, in the arts of peace and war, to a level with others. The route for both species of commerce was by sea. But Russia touched the sea only in the North, where it is closed by ice. The way to the countries that were most advanced, intellectually and socially, to France and England, especially to Holland and the empire behind it, was by the Baltic.

There the Swedes stopped the way. Gustavus had conquered the Baltic provinces, and all the way from Poland to Finland the coast was inaccessible to the interior of Russia. Sweden was still esteemed a great Power; and although it was not yet discovered, the new king was, what Peter never became, a capable and ambitious commander. The main argument of Peter's reign was the struggle for supremacy with Charles XII.

Before it broke out, he undertook a journey to make acquaintance with the foreign countries by which he intended to accomplish the elevation of his own. That was the time of those grotesque studies in shipbuilding, tooth-drawing, and useful arts in which he acquired a sort of technical mastery; and it was then that he learned to think so highly of the Dutch as a practical people, worthy of imitation. This preference was not exclusive, and he was eager to borrow what he could from others—military organisation from Austria, manners from France, clothes from England, methods of administration from Germany. Together with the foreign customs he undertook to introduce experts who were to teach them, until the disciples became equal to their masters. The Scotsman Gordon and the Genevese Lefort were at the head of his army and navy. Germans, such as Munnich and Ostermann, followed; and then there came a vast army of engineers, miners, metal founders, artificers of almost all kinds, for the roads and bridges, the ships and palaces, the schools and hospitals that he called into existence. These things were the sine qua non of civilisation. It would be long before his own people understood the use of them. They could only be obtained by importation. To stimulate the demand for them at home it would be necessary to rely on the progress of intelligence. That could not be done in a nation consisting mainly of serfs. The educational part of the enterprise was the one which had least success, and which he understood least. For such imponderables he had no scales, and he cared more for the kind of knowledge that was practically useful than for the interior improvement of the mind, which constitutes what we call a gentleman. No such exotic could flourish at his court. He required that those whom he honoured with his confidence should get as drunk as himself; that they should be servile and cringing, without moral courage or self-respect, happy to be insulted, kicked, and spat upon. They might be men of resource, brave soldiers, clever administrators, but they seldom developed those elements of character which prevent a man from being corrupt. For those qualities he had no comprehension. Civilisation, as he understood it, was material, not moral. He could not imagine management of men by the nobler motives. He raised the condition of the country with great rapidity; he did not raise it above his own level.

While he was on his travels exploring Europe an insurrection broke out, and the old Russian militia, the Strelitz, mutinied, and plotted to exterminate the Germans and all the abettors of foreign innovation. The movement was crushed by Gordon, and Peter on his return was undisputed master. He then plunged into war with Sweden for the Baltic provinces—that is, for access to the sea, which was the highway to all the world. Beaten at first, but not discouraged, he organised a new army, while Charles XII overran Poland and dictated terms of peace in the heart of Germany.

It then appeared that the Russians, like most nations when they are ably commanded, were the raw material of good soldiers. Charles came back to Russia from his Saxon campaign laden with glory, and marched on Moscow by Minsk, Mohilev, the Beresina—very much the route which Napoleon followed. At the instigation of Mazeppa he turned aside to the Ukraine, in the hope of raising the Cossacks against the Tsar. At Pultawa, near the Dnieper, he was defeated, and fled for refuge to Turkey. The work of Gustavus, who had made Sweden so great, was undone, and Russia succeeded to the vacant place among the Powers.

The supreme object of Peter's policy was attained. He was in possession of the Baltic coast north of the Dwina. Finland was restored, but he retained Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, from Riga to Viborg. On the Neva, where the Gulf of Finland penetrates farthest inland, he fixed his capital. The place was a swamp, that swallowed the tallest trunks of trees, and the workmen perished by fever. But an island in the mouth of the river made it impregnable by sea. It was free from traditions and reactionary memories, looking only to the future and the new things that the commerce with the world would bring; a gate for the inflow of the forces by which its founder would transform the nation. As part of the same transformation the Tsar of Muscovy became Emperor of Russia. It was a claim to the Byzantine inheritance, and a menace to the Austrian successor of the Western Empire. This was faint and distant; and Peter remained on friendly terms with Vienna. But the title was coldly received by Europe, and was not finally recognised until forty years after his death.

The persuasions by which Peter bent Russia to his will were base and atrocious; for, although one of the greatest men that have influenced the course of Christian history, he is undoubtedly the worst of them; but he was not working for himself; at Pultawa he told his troops that they were fighting for Russia, not for him. His motive was impersonal. He had grasped a great ideal, and he served it with devotion, sacrificing everything to it, and not sparing himself. The absolute State was the ideal, or rather the idol, for which he toiled, the State as it had been devised by Machiavelli and Hobbes. To raise the country by the employment of its own internal forces was an unpromising and unprofitable enterprise. He, who was himself a barbarian, could only accomplish his purpose by means of aid from outside, by the instrumentality of those who had experience of a more advanced order of things. The borrowed forces could only be applied by the powers of a despot. That power, moreover, was already provided. Muscovy had never been governed otherwise than by irresponsible and irresistible authority. That authority had been inactive and not deeply felt. Now the same authority interfered to alter almost everything, except the subjection of the serf to the landowner.

To enforce the supremacy of the State over society, and of will over custom, Peter introduced his most characteristic institution. He made precedence depend on public service, and regulated it according to rank in the army in fourteen degrees, from the ensign to the marshal. A new aristocracy superseded the old, and the ancient nobles were forced to serve, in order to be somebody, when away from the ancestral home. They were important, not by their possessions or their descent, but by the position in which they stood towards the emperor. Peter had imbibed too much of the rationalism of the West to be a persecutor. He was severe with the schismatics, who existed only as opponents of change and enemies of civilisation; and as there were no Jews in Russia, he decreed that in future there should be none. But he built churches for the foreigners whom he brought into the country, and did not attempt to sustain the domination of the Muscovite clergy, who, like the English, professed passive obedience, but obeyed without approval. When the last patriarch was dying he expressed the wish that all men of other faith—Catholic, Protestant, and Mahomedan— should be burnt, and their places of worship levelled with the ground.

Peter's schemes of change were so tremendous that most Russians recoiled and wished them no success. His own family opposed him, and became a centre of plotting opposition. He repudiated his wife, and sent her to the seclusion of a convent. His second empress was a peasant woman, whose name was Martha, but was called, in Russia, Catharine. It was uncertain whether her husband was dead. It was certain that Peter's first wife was living. Nobody minded. But Alexis, the son of the earlier marriage, took the conservative side, and became, from 1711, the hope of those who rejected Peter's anti-national, cosmopolitan, chiefly Dutch and German system of reform. He longed for the Asiatic twilight of the past, and the discontented longed for him to succeed. Peter, seeing that he was a poor creature, wished him to resign his claim. Alexis fled, and placed himself under the protection of the emperor Charles VI. He was discovered in the castle of St. Elmo at Naples, and brought back to Russia, where he was condemned to death, and died of torture. The plan had been to return to the ancient ways, and to give Petersburg back to the Swedes, with the command of the coast. The clergy were mixed up in it, and Peter now secured himself against the Church. He had left the patriarchate vacant. He now abolished it, and divided its powers.

A kindred spirit had arisen, capable of carrying out reform in the Church. Procopovitch had become a united Greek, in order to be admitted to foreign universities. He studied in Rome, and in Germany he became familiar with Lutheran theology. He came back with much of the religious culture of the West, and Peter appointed him to one of the sees. The bishops protested. They said that he was a heretic seventeen times over. And they proposed, if they were not believed, that the matter should be decided by the three eastern patriarchs. It was a scheme to disconnect the Church from the State, to merge it in the Eastern Church. Procopovitch defeated his enemies, and drew up the plan by which the Church was brought under the civil power, much on the lines of Henry VIII. It was governed, thenceforward, by the Holy Synod, which was controlled by a great official who represented the emperor. The clergy ceased to be an obstacle. The government of the Church by the Synod was part of a plan of government by boards, which had been suggested by Leibnitz. The empire was governed by a Senate of eight, of ten, at one time of twenty members. Under the Senate, which made laws, were ten ministerial departments, or boards, like our Treasury or Admiralty, which executed them. And there were eleven governors of provinces, each larger than a European monarchy. Men fit for such a responsibility could not be found in Russia, and the empire was badly governed. But it was there. The transformation was accomplished. And the gigantic force was centred in the hand of a tyrant.

The concentration was such, the destruction of resisting forces was so complete, that the machine worked well in the hands of women. For almost the whole of the seventy years after Peter's death, Russia was governed by empresses. The last of them, Catharine II, was one of the ablest and most successful rulers in modern times. For the machine which Peter created was strong enough to endure. It still exists as he made it, an amalgam of power and servility, never leading, but often supplying the deciding force in the history of the world. It was the empire of Peter the Great that destroyed the empire of Napoleon.