management of a board, the members of which were called Lords of the Treasury, and the chairman was called the First Lord. In a similar way we now have a First Lord of the Admiralty. Since the ministers had been chosen from one political party, they had begun to act together much more than before, and this had given them the name of the Ministry; the leader of which was called the Premier, or Prime Minister. This title is not to be found in English law; it is merely a title of courtesy. The Premier need not necessarily be the First Lord of the Treasury. In Lord Salisbury's ministry in 1885, and again in 1887, he held the post of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Walpole.

Walpole became Prime Minister in March, 1721. His chief colleagues were Townshend, Pulteney, and Carteret; of these Townshend and Pulteney have been noticed before. Carteret Robert was a peer and a most brilliant speaker; he also had the advantage of knowing German, which gave him great influence with the king. Happily for Walpole, all his great rivals about this time left the political stage. Stanhope was dead; Sunderland had already resigned office, and died in 1722; Aislabie had been expelled. There were no great statesmen who were not at this time his friends. Walpole himself was a most remarkable man. He was a thorough Englishman, plain-spoken and good-natured, a hard worker but a lover of sport, with a capital knowledge of human nature and of the art of managing men; he knew what he wanted to get and how to get it, and if he found that insuperable difficulties lay in his way, he was willing to turn back and to wait for a more convenient season. His great fault was that, like many other able men, he was too fond of keeping power in his own hands, and his jealousy of the interference of other men led to a series of quarrels with all the ablest members of the Whig party. Abroad, Walpole advocated peace as the best security against Jacobite intrigue; at home, he was in favour of such moderate reforms as were not likely to provoke much opposition. He had no liking for heroic measures, and always went on the principle of letting well alone.

The need for this caution was very soon shown by the revelation of a Jacobite conspiracy. The friends of the Pretender had been much elated by the birth of a grandson of James II., who was

Jacobite conspiracy.

afterwards the unfortunate leader of the rebellion of '45; they also believed that George was tired of his new power, and the Pretender went so far as to write to the king, and offered to secure him the title of King of Hanover if he would retire in his favour; it was also believed that the country was irritated by the South Sea Scheme. These hopes, which were quite misleading, encouraged the Jacobites to fresh efforts; but the government was soon aware of what was going on. Their chief agent, Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, was arrested and tried before the House of Lords. His guilt was proved, and he was sent into banishment. This blow crushed the Jacobites for a time, and Walpole felt safe enough to allow Bolingbroke to come back; but his attainder was not reversed, so the great Tory was never again able to sit in the House of Lords.

In 1724 the first quarrel between Walpole and his colleagues took place. This time Carteret was Walpole's opponent. The king

Quarrel between

took Walpole's side, and Carteret had to accept the Walpole and post of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, just as Townshend his colleagues. had done eight years before. The Duke of Newcastle and his brother, Henry Pelham, then joined Walpole.

State of
Ireland.

On reaching Ireland Carteret found abundance of work. We saw that by Poynings' law no bill could be introduced into the Irish Parliament which had not first passed the English council. This deprived the Irish Parliament of all power of independent legislation; and in 1719 the English Parliament passed a statute by which the English Parliament was allowed to pass laws binding on Ireland. This took away even the semblance of independence, and naturally made the Irish very jealous of English interference. Accordingly, when Walpole, in 1722 granted a patent to an ironmaster, named Wood, to coin £108,000 worth of copper in order to restore the Irish coinage, just as that of England had been renewed in 1696, there broke out a fierce agitation. It was not that the new copper coins were to be bad-apparently every care had been taken that the opposite should be the case; the real grievance was that Ireland had not been consulted in the matter. This feeling was fanned to fever-heat by a series of letters written by Dean Swift, the ablest of the Tory pamphleteers, under the title of the "Drapier," and

Renewal of the coinage.

The Drapier
Letters.

when Carteret arrived he found all Ireland in a blaze. True, however, to his usual policy, Walpole, when he found the opposition to be serious, withdrew his scheme, and Ireland again settled down into gloomy quiescence. In 1727 the franchise was taken away from all Catholics, so that Protestants alone could either vote at elections or sit as members of the Irish Parliament. Consequently the Dublin Parliament only represented one-sixth of the population of Ireland.

Pulteney and

Bolingbroke organize an opposition.

In 1725 Walpole quarrelled with Pulteney, another of his colleagues. Pulteney, who had been a great friend of Walpole, was not prepared to efface himself, and he had no sooner left office than he began to organize an opposition to the minister. Hitherto there had been no organized opposition in the House; but Pulteney set himself to revive the old country party which had opposed the court under Charles II. In those days the court party had been Tories; they were now Whigs; but this made little difference. There was still great jealousy of the power of the court, and of this Pulteney took advantage. His great ally was Bolingbroke, who saw that he could never regain his lost power so long as Walpole was at the helm; and these two able men steadily set themselves to form an opposition to the government, both in the House and in the country. In Parliament Pulteney gathered round himself the discontented Whigs, who thought they had been ill used by Walpole, and acted more or less in concert with the Tories. Bolingbroke strove to excite the country by attacking ministers in the Craftsman. This paper, which was published daily, was the first regular opposition newspaper. It attacked Walpole impartially whatever he did. If Walpole advocated peace, said that he was bent on sacrificing the interests of his country; if he remonstrated with foreign powers, it declared that he was dragging the country into war. Everything that ingenuity could suggest was made use of against ministers, and soon the country party, who called themselves Patriots, attained formidable dimensions. The centre of the opposition was the court of the Prince of Wales. It was one of the peculiarities of the early Hanoverian sovereigns that they always quarrelled with their heirs. This was not creditable to the

The "Craftsman."

The Prince

of Wales in opposition.

it

royal family, but it was a good thing for the country. Had father and son been united, any one who was discontented with the government of the father would naturally have gone over to the Pretender. As it was, he merely allied himself with the Prince of Wales, so that the rivalry between the two centres of Hanoverian influence was a positive advantage. Pulteney and Bolingbroke flattered the Prince, and hoped that when he came to the throne Walpole would be dismissed. Whilst these intrigues were going on George died suddenly in Hanover, in 1727.

Death of
George I.

CHIEF BATTLES, SIEGES, AND TREATIES UNDER GEORGE I. AND GEORGE II.