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1713.]

TREATIES COMPLETED AT UTRECHT.

397

against the military resources of France, and the genius of her commanders. They finally, in December, accepted the propositions made in concert between France and England. But in the proportion that concessions were made to France her plenipotentiaries became more captious and evasive. The treaty would probably have fallen through, and have left its English negotiators exposed to the vengeance of their political rivals, had not the ministers issued. peremptory orders to their plenipotentiaries to sign it at all hazards.

On the 11th of April, 1713, the treaty of Utrecht was signed by the representatives of Great Britain, France, Savoy, Portugal, Prussia, and the States-General. The emperor refused to be a party to it. Those points which affected Great Britain have been already mentioned in general terms. Those which affected the other powers were accomplished by this treaty of Utrecht, and by subsequent treaties of 1714.* We subjoin a very brief view of the entire arrangement. Spain and the Indies were given to Philip; the French king recognised the Protestant succession, and engaged to make the Pretender withdraw from the French dominions; he renounced for himself, his heirs, and his successors, the succession to the throne of Spain, while Philip renounced in like manner the succession to the throne of France; the fortifications of Dunkirk were to be demolished, and the harbour filled up, an equivalent being first given to France by Great Britain; Hudson's Bay and Straits were to remain to Great Britain, and satisfaction was to be made by France to the Hudson's Bay Company for all damages sustained; St. Christopher's, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland were given to Great Britain, with certain rights of fishing off Newfoundland reserved to France, and, by a separate treaty with Philip, as king of Spain, Minorca and Gibraltar were retained by Great Britain; the emperor of Austria received the kingdom of Naples, the duchy of Milan, and the Spanish Netherlands; Sicily was separated from Naples, and given to the duke of Savoy, with the title of king, and the succession to the throne of Spain, in default of descendants from Philip, was settled in the house of Savoy; Luxembourg, Namur, Charleroy, Ypres, and Nieuport were assigned to the Dutch, in addition to the places already possessed by them.

Upon the assembling of Parliament, the queen announced in general terms the conclusion of the treaty of peace. On the 9th of May her majesty sent a message to the effect, that as it is the undoubted prerogative of the Crown to make peace and war, she had ratified the treaties of peace and commerce with France, and had concluded a treaty with Spain. The treaties were then laid before the Houses. The treaty of commerce contained two articles which had been agreed to by the British plenipotentiaries, upon the condition that they should be binding if they received the sanction of Parliament. They were conceived in a spirit of liberality which was far before the age in which they were propounded. The negotiators proposed that reciprocal advantages should be enjoyed by the subjects of Great Britain and France, by putting the trade of each upon the footing of that of the most favoured nations; and that the laws made since 1664 for the prohibition of French imports should be repealed. The mercantile public clamoured against the proposal as destructive of British commerce. The balance of

* See the Table of Treaties, ante, p. 389.

398

TREATY OF COMMERCE WITH FRANCE REJECTED.

[1713.

trade would be annually a million and a half against Great Britain; which was held to be equivalent to the actual loss, according to the absurd delusion of those days, of a million and a half. The manufactures of silk, linen, and paper, would be destroyed. France would not buy our wool or woollen stuffs. We should drink her wines, to the injury of Portugal, who had become our best customer under the Methuen treaty, actually paying us half a million in good, hard, unconsumable dollars. Burnet expresses the popular philosophy when he says, "We were engaged by our treaty with Portugal that their wines should be charged a third part lower than the French wines; but if the duties were, according to the treaties of commerce, to be made equal, then, considering the difference of freight, which is more than double from Portugal, the French wines would be cheaper, and the nation liking them better, by this means we should break our treaties with Portugal," and lose that wonderful balance in our favour. It never entered into the reasonings of the advocates of prohibition and forced consumption, that a supply at the cheapest rate of what a nation liked and wanted, was preferable to a supply at a dearer rate of what a nation did not like and did not want. The treaty of commerce with France was rejected by a small majority of the Commons; and though much has been since done for the removal of prohibitory duties, there still remains much to be accomplished before the two nations, each producing what the other would willingly take in exchange, shall have wholly cast aside the prejudices of 1713.

On the 7th of July there was a public thanksgiving for the Peace, and both Houses of Parliament went in procession to St. Paul's. The Commons had sufficiently manifested their adhesion to the principles which placed Harley and St. John in power, by appointing Sacheverel to preach before them on the 29th of May. Yet this uncompromising body of so-called representatives of the people, who would gladly have annihilated all that the Revolution bestowed upon the people, was happily limited in its term of existence by the Triennial Bill. The Parliament was prorogued on the 16th of July; and very shortly afterwards was dissolved. The elections were conducted with more than usual party-violence. The Tory wore a green bough in honour of the Restoration of the Stuarts; the Whig placed a lock of wool in his hat to mark how he had supported the good old principles of exclusive trade. But the Jacobites were working steadily at their great object of preparing the way for their legitimate shadow of a king, who had, according to the letter of the treaty with France, been removed out of the dominions of Louis, to be seated in Lorraine, which was equally convenient for any enterprise, either before or after the decease of the queen. The Jacobites had great encouragement in their schemes through the ascendancy of Bolingbroke. Oxford had become comparatively powerless; and the bold Secretary, in conjunction with the duke of Ormond, reduced the army, particularly the regiments which had been raised by William III.; and they placed their own instruments in the command of various strongholds. The chevalier St. George was in his own person the greatest obstacle to the success of the plans of his adherents. Bolingbroke and other Jacobites who knew how

"Own Time," vol. vi. p. 146.

1714.]

JACOBITE INTRIGUES-LIBELS.

399

firmly the people clung to the principle of Protestantism, had repeatedly urged him to change his religion, or at least to make a pretended renunciation of his faith. His determination was honourable to himself, and a severe rebuke to his unscrupulous friends. He wrote a letter in 1711, which was shown to many persons, containing this honest sentence: "Plain dealing is best in all things, especially in matters of religion; and as I am resolved never to dissemble in religion, so I shall never tempt others to do it; and as well as I am satisfied of the truth of my own religion, yet I shall never look worse upon any persons because in this they chance to differ from me; nor shall I refuse, in due time and place, to hear what they have to say upon this subject. But they must not take it ill if I use the same liberty I allow to others, to adhere to the religion which I, in my conscience, think the best; and I may reasonably expect that liberty of conscience for myself which I deny to none." The son of James inherited the inflexibility of his father in his adherence to the church of Rome, also inheriting the family likeness. Horace Walpole says, "Without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all. From the first moment I saw him, I never doubted the legitimacy of his birth." +

The new Parliament met in February, 1714. The queen in her Speech said, "there are some who are arrived to that height of malice, as to insinuate that the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover is in danger under my government." Her majesty called upon Parliament to suppress "seditious papers and factious rumours.' Both Houses went to work in this congenial duty, according to their respective party-tendencies. The Lords had the printer and publisher of "The Public Spirit of the Whigs" called to their bar. They were committed to the custody of the Black Rod. Swift was the author of this libel against the Scotch nation, but Oxford professed indignation against such libels. Oxford had caused a hundred pounds to be presented to the anonymous writer. Steele had written a pamphlet called "The Crisis," to which he had affixed his name. He was expelled the House by a large majority of his fellow representatives. Steele made an able defence, in which he was assisted by Addison; and Walpole, in a speech of unanswerable truth, showed the atrocious tyranny of this proceeding. "In former reigns, the audacity of corruption extended itself only to judges and juries. The attempt so to degrade Parliament was, till the present period, unheard of. The Liberty of the Press is unrestrained. How then shall a part of the Legislature dare to punish that as a crime which is not declared to be so, by any law framed by the whole." ‡

On the 28th of May an event occurred which, although highly probable, and therefore likely to be familiar to men's thoughts, gave more distinctness to the question of the Protestant Succession. The princess Sophia fell dead in an apoplectic fit whilst walking in the garden of the palace of Herrenhausen. She was in her eighty-fourth year. Her son was therefore, under the Act of Settlement, the heir-apparent to the British Crown. George, elector of Hanover-or more properly elector of Brunswick and Lunenburg-was born on the 28th of May, 1660. He had therefore

Macpherson Papers, vol. ii. p. 225.

+"Memoirs of George II.," vol. i. p. 285.

Coxe's "Walpole," vol. i. p. 44.

400 DEATH OF THE PRINCESS SOPHIA-DEATH OF QUEEN ANNE. [1714. reached his fifty-fourth year on the day of his mother's death. There could be no enthusiasm in England for the succession of an elderly foreign gentleman, who spoke no English, had the reputation of being reserved and morose, and was singularly unhappy in his domestic relations. But he was also known to be a man of courage and honesty; and he was the rallyingpoint for that great principle of freedom, civil and religious, which was endangered under the Stuart dynasty, and could never be secure if one of that race were carried to the throne upon the shoulders of those who shouted for divine right and non-resistance. Bolingbroke, with a daring which formed a part of his mysterious character, took the occasion, whilst the public mind was necessarily directed to the question of the Succession, to bring forward his Schism Bill, the object of which was to trample on the Dissenters, by enacting that no person should keep a public or private school, or act as a tutor, who had not subscribed the declaration of Conformity, and received a licence from the diocesan. This detestable measure was passed by a majority of a hundred in the Commons, and by a majority of fourteen in the Lords. Bolingbroke moved the second reading. Wharton flung a telling sarcasm at the secretary: "He was agreeably surprised to see that some men of pleasure were, on a sudden, become so religious, as to set up for patrons of the Church." The keen old debater hit both lord-treasurer and secretary very hard, when he said, “He could not but wonder that persons who had been educated in dissenting academies, whom he could point at, and whose tutors he could name, should appear the most forward in suppressing them."*

On the 9th of July the Parliament was prorogued by the queen in person. A violent rupture had taken place between Oxford and Bolingbroke. On the 27th of July there was a protracted dispute in Council between the two rivals, at which Anne was present till a late hour of the night. It ended in the dismissal of Oxford. Bolingbroke was now supreme. The agitation of the queen brought on a sudden illness. On the 30th she had a seizure of apoplexy. Bolingbroke had no time to carry through his schemes for the House of Stuart; and when the queen, in an interval of consciousness, delivered the staff of the highest office to the duke of Shrewsbury-who had been in concert with the dukes of Somerset and Argyle her death, on the morning of the 1st of August, gave the power of the government to the friends of the House of Brunswick.

*The Act was to come into operation on the 1st of August. On that day queen Anne died; and its execution was suspended by the new government.

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Literature and Manners of the earlier part of the eighteenth century-The Tatler-News-writers and Pamphleteers-Dunton's "Athenian Gazette"-Defoe's Review-The Spectator and the Guardian-Influence and objects of the Essayists-Low state of education-The Essayists diffusers of knowledge-Joint labours of Steele and Addison-The Spectator's ClubFiction-Reading for females-Literary Piracy-Copyright Act-Literature as a Profession-The Poets-Alexander Pope.

ADDISON has shadowed out an "imaginary historian, describing the reign of Anne I.," some two or three hundred years after his time, "who will make mention of the men of genius and learning who have now any figure in the British nation." He fancies a paragraph which he has drawn up "will not be altogether unlike what will be found in some page or other of this imaginary historian." It runs thus: "It was under this reign that the Spectator' published those little diurnal essays which are still extant. We know very little of the name or person of this author, except only that he was a man of a very short face, extremely addicted to silence, and so great. a lover of knowledge, that he made a voyage to Grand Cairo for no other reason but to take the measure of a pyramid. His chief friend was one Sir Roger de Coverley, a whimsical country knight, and a Templar, whose name he has not transmitted to us. He lived as a lodger at the house of a widowwoman, and was a great humourist in all parts of his life. This is all we can affirm with any certainty of his person and character. As for his speculations,

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