The United kingdom; a political history online

shown by commercial England to breed in the Scotch
a fancy that to English influence the failure was due.
A paroxysm of bitterness and a dangerous crisis fol-
lowed. Scotland assumed an attitude most hostile and
offensive to England. The Scotch parliament passed an

1703 Act of Security separating the succession to the crown
of Scotland from the succession to the crown of England.



IV ANNE 137

At last the captain and crew of an English vessel were
murdered under form of law at Edinburgh with the brutal
fury of. an Edinburgh mob. England, of course, met the
hostile demonstrations of Scotland by similar demonstra- 1704
tions on her part. .

It was chiefly owing to the grievous need which Scot-
land felt of the English market that diplomacy at
length prevailed over the rising storm of passion, and
commissioners were appointed on both sides to treat for
a union. Inflamed as Scotch nationality had been in the 1706
recent affray, its agonies were acute. It found cham-
pions in Lord Belhaven, a brilliant orator, and Fletcher
of Saltoun, that Spartan republican who had proposed
to restore economical prosperity to Scotland by making
helots of the needy. The Scotch were told that the
promised participation in English commerce was a delu-
sion and a snare, that every seat at that board was already
filled, that all the benefit would be to the devouring
Southerner, that the Scotch workman would get English
prices without English wages, and that English excise
would snatch the jug of ale from his hand. The English
were told by the opponents of union on their side that
their substance would be devoured by hungry Scotch.
To the Scottish parliament Lord Belhaven, in a speech
which had immense vogue, unfolded a dire apocalypse of
woe. He saw the peers of Scotland, after all their glori-
ous achievements, walking in the Court of Requests like
so many English attorneys, and laying aside their swords
when in company with the English peers, lest their self-
defence should be termed murder. He saw the Royal
State of Boroughs walking their desolate streets, hanging
down their heads, wormed out of all the branches of their



138 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

old trade; Caledonia, like Julius Caesar, ruefully looking
round about«her, covering herself with her royal garment
and awaiting the fatal blow. He saw the Scotch ar-
tisan drinking water instead of ale and eating his saltless
porridge ; the ploughman, his grain rotting upon his land,
cursing the day of his birth, dreading the expense of his
burial. Lord Marchmont's answer was, "He dreamed,
but lo ! when he aAvoke behold it was a dream."

In the frame of mind in which the two nations were, to
get a joint commission appointed, to get the English and
Scotch commissioners to agree, to get the two parliaments,
full of national jealousy recently excited, and with the
hostile churches behind them, to accept the terms settled by
the commission, was a task by which the most skilful of
diplomatists might have been appalled. Yet, by the tact
and temper of Godolphin, Somers, and Montagu, aided by
that of the friendly statesmen of Scotland, the task was
performed. Blenheim had deprived the Scotch Jacobites,
deadly enemies to the union, of the hope of aid from
France.

Passed by the parliament of Scotland, to which in the
first instance it was wisely submitted, the Act of Union
1707 was afterwards passed by the parliament of England.
With infinite skill and temper all questions were solved
and all claims were adjusted. In pecuniary and fiscal ar-
rangements England could afford to be, and was, liberal.
The title of the United Kingdom was to be " Great Brit-
ain," which, however, its want of simplicity combined
with the force of tradition has prevented from effectually
displacing that of " England " in the language of the
world. Scotland received a representation, fully propor-
tioned to her share of taxation, in the House of Commons,



IT ANNE 139

with sixteen peers, elected from the body of her peerage,
to represent her in the House of Lords, the principle of
election being thus introduced, though in the mildest form
possible, into the hereditary House. The Presbyterian
establishment of Scotland was preserved and continued to
form a strong line of demarcation. Scotland also retained
her own law and her own judicial procedure, though the
House of Lords became the ultimate court of appeal for
the whole of the united nation.

Scarcely would the union have threaded the opposi-
tion of the high churchmen and Tories in the English par-
liament if they had been allowed to debate the articles in
detail. The Bill might have been in committee till the
day of doom. But that danger was eluded by the in-
genuity of Harcourt, afterwards chancellor, who framed a
Bill with the treaty recited in the preamble and a single
enacting clause. To make all fast, in addition to the
Acts imposing the abjuration oath, an Act was passed 1707
declaring it treason to impugn the settlement of the crown
under the Act of Union or the right of parliament to
limit the succession. This was aimed against the Jacobite
enemies of the union and the succession in Scotland. It
stamped the monarchy as parliamentary.

There was friction afterwards, as might have been
expected, about questions political, fiscal, judicial, and
religious. Scotland was surprised and somewhat shocked
at finding that the British House of Lords had become
the high court of appeal. Anglicanism and Presbyterian-
ism did not easily fraternize in parliament. When the
English Tories came into power, they showed their temper
against the Scotch church. Jacobites made as much mis-
chief as they could, and were aided by the venom of



140 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

Swift. A motion for the dissolution of the union was
all but carried in the House of Lords ; but the argument
that what had been done could not be undone happily-
prevailed. France made a last effort in conjunction with
the Scotch Jacobites to restore the disunion which had
served lier malignant policy well. She sent an expedi-
tion, but it failed.

Scotch disunionists have fondly cherished the tradition
that the independence of their country was sold by her
leading men for the sum of <£ 20,540 17s. 7c?., of which sum
Lord Banff received <£!! 2s. Od. as the bribe to which his
integrity and patriotism gave way. The money was pay-
ment for arrears of salary and other debts which, the
Scotch treasury being empty, the English treasury de-
frayed.

Thus after long centuries of miserable enmity, mutual
devastation, and progress retarded on both sides, nature
had her way, and union came at last. The line of
religious division which the Act of Union left is being
softened if not effaced by the intellectual forces which are
everywhere sapping dogmatic organizations. The line
of legal division will probably in time be effaced by the
progress of scientific jurisprudence. Yet the evil which
the Norman Conquest did in severing Scotland and Wales
from England is not yet wholly undone. Antiquarian
whim or demagogic malice can still appeal to separatist
sentiment in Scotland and Wales as well as in Ireland.

Lord Belhaven's dream was ruin ; the reality was to be
the warehouses of Glasgow, the ship-building yards of
Clyde, and in time the farms of the Lothians. The
shipping trade of Scotland had been ruined by the
Navigation Act ; but after the union Glasgow chartered



IV ANNE 141

ships and opened a growing trade with the American colo-
nies. In 1716 or 1718 the first trading vessel that crossed
the Atlantic was launched upon the Clyde. In 1735
Glasgow had sixty-seven vessels and had become a rival
of England in the American trade. Greenock made her-
self a harbour ; Paisley grew into a manufacturing town.
The merchant marine of Scotland rapidly advanced, and
the younger sons of the gentry, hitherto in want of
occupation, took to commercial enterprise. The linen
trade and the woollen trade kept pace with the mercantile
marine. Products which before had been valueless or of
little value, such as black cattle or kelp, became sources
of wealth. Agriculture, retarded by a bad system of
holdings, as well as by the want of good markets, fol-
lowed the advance of commerce with a somewhat slower
step. Improved habitations, comfort, cleanliness, civilized
habits spread among the people.

Union with England gave Scotland unity in herself.
The force which she had lacked for the incorporation of
the Highlands was henceforth supplied. After the next
rising of the clans military roads were made through the
Highlands, hereditary jurisdictions were abolished, law
took the place of the chieftain's lawless will, Christianity
and in time the southern language, the indispensable
instrument of education and culture, made its way. The
mountain lair of the marauding cateran became a reserve
of beauty and romance in a land of factories and forges,
while the plaid, the sight of which had long been dreaded
by the Lowlander, was by the genius of a military tailor
improved into the picturesque costume which kings as well
as warriors and sportsmen have delighted to wear.

Increase of material prosperity, however great, might



142 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

not have made up to the patriot for political degra-
dation; but Scotland could not lose political dignity by
exchanging the state of a satrapy, which under the union
of the crowns had been and must always have been hers, for
partnership in the illustrious destinies of a great nation.
Nor can Scotch character have suffered if the present
Scotch estimate of it is true. It is eminently commercial,
and in that aspect must have been formed after the union,
since before the union there was little trade. Lack of
trade, in fact, it was that made the union. The heart
of Sir Walter Scott was thoroughly Scotch and at the same
time thoroughly British.

Unhappily, while to the statesmen of Anne undying
gratitude is due for the achievement of union with Scot-
land, on their memory rests the heavy charge of reject-
ing union with Ireland. To span that fatal arm of the
sea was harder than to overleap the Cheviots. But
monopoly was even more estranging than the sea. Here
we behold the dark side of commerce, of commerce at
least as it was in those days when everybody was in the
gall of protection. If the trader linked nations together
by interchange and intercourse, too often he bred war
among them by his spirit of monopoly and his malignant
fancy that the gain of others must be his loss.

The sword of William and the penal code had thor-
oughly quelled for a time the hapless Celt of Ireland,
who, for a full century, does not rise in rebellion again,
not even when the Jacobite flag is unfurled in England.
But to fear of Celtic insurrection had succeeded, on the
part of those who swayed the commercial councils of
England, a wretched jealousy of Irish trade, particularly
of trade in wool, which Ireland produced of the best, and



IT ANNE 143

in cattle. Ireland is a grazing country, for the most part
too wet for grain, as well as almost destitute of coal, and
nature has thus marked her destiny in relation to the
sister island, the swarming population of which it is her
natural function to supply with dairy produce and meat.
English greed dreaded the growth of rival industries
in Ireland, which, depressed as the Irish people were,
there was only too little need to fear. Small holdings,
spade tillage, the potato, and the periodical famines which
attended the treacherous tuber, and life in hovels shared
with the swine, were the result. The Saxons of Ireland,
seeing how their island as a dependency languished under
monopoly, and sighing for a share of English trade,
stretched out their hands for union. Their overture
was coldly repelled. English commerce, possessed by
the demon of jealousy not less irrational than sordid,
protested against Irish competition ; and commerce was
the great support of the Whigs, who were then in power.
Had Ireland been then allowed to become a commercial
and industrial country in equal partnership with Great
Britain, what calamities would both islands have been
spared ! She was forced, instead, to become a smuggling
country, a recruiting ground for the armies of catholic
Europe, and a seed-plot of disaffection destined to bear
a hideous harvest at a later day.

Marlborough meanwhile pursued his career of victory.
After Blenheim came Ramillies and Oudenarde, while 1706;
the fortresses fell as usual to the conqueror in the field. ^'^^^
France was exhausted and her king sued for peace, offer-
ing to abandon his grandson's claim on Spain. The allies
insisted that he should turn his grandson out. This was
a moral blunder ; it gave Louis a strong ground for



144 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

appeal to his people, and enabled the party opposed to the
war in England to say that it was being protracted in the
interest of Marlborough and others who gained by its
continuance. In Spain the allies had not prospered.
Spanish sentiment was strongly against them. Castilian
pride revolted at the thought of partition. The Austrian
Archduke, whose claim the allies supported, was a Serene
Highness too dull and stiff to make way with the people,
too slow to follow fortune when she beckoned him to
Madrid. Peterborough, a knight-errant out of date, ran
a meteoric course of victory; but he could only per-
form impossibilities, and, his career over, the fortune of
war went against the allies in Spain almost as much as it
had gone for them in other fields. The insulting demand
of the allies raised a fresh army in France with an access
1709 of national spirit, and Malplaquet, the last of Marlbor-
ough's battles, though a victory, had been a fearful and
sickening day of blood. After it he prayed that he might
never be in battle more. It does not seem that he really
wished to prolong the war. He seems to have been
weary and to have longed to get back to his Sarah;
though he saw that as Louis Had set out to dictate peace
to Europe at Vienna the right course was to dictate peace
to him at Paris, whither victory had opened the way.
Commercial England had borne much more than her
share of the cost. Debt was being piled up and taxation
was growing oppressive. Merchants might fancy that
they gained by the destruction of French trade ; but for
the land owner and the people in general there was no
compensation. In spite of trophies and processions to St.
Paul's the nation was growing somewhat weary of the
war. Marlborough's towering greatness and known am-



IV ANNE ^ 145

bition created a fear of military dictatorship, which was
enhanced by his own imprudence in seeking the office of
captain-general for life.

The murmurs of Jacobite disaffection and of Tory oppo-
sition had been drowned in the Te Deum. In vain the
Tories had striven to set up the naval glory of Rooke, a
Tory, against the military glory of Marlborough. Union
with Scotland had come to crown the triumphs of their
opponents. Still, the Tory party was strong in parlia-
ment, and in the country stronger still. It had on its
side a solid phalanx of landed gentry, of whom was
presently formed the October Club, so called from the
strong ale by which its political spirit was fed, jealous of
the commercial interest, and little favourable to the war
by which it was supposed to be gaining at their expense.
It had the lower clergy, especially in the rural districts.
Personally the clergy were never less respected or less
deserving of respect than at this time. Yet as an
order they never were more powerful. They had their
pulpits, which they used without scruple for political pur-
poses, and of which the influence in rural parishes was far
greater than that of the press. They had the ear of the
squire who looked on their church as the bulwark against
Puritanism and with whom their subserviency would be a
merit. They hated the Revolution, were Tory, and often
tinged with Jacobite sentiment if not Jacobite. Their
political preaching was dangerous, since in the opinion of
good judges the Stuart might have come back if he could
have changed his Roman Catholicism for the Anglican
religion, which, to his honour, as well as happily for the
country, he steadfastly refused to do. The universities,
which were entirely clerical and centres of clerical big-

VOL. II — 10



146 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

otry, were Tory. Oxford was Jacobite, having buried
the memory of the attacks made on her by James.

The Whig leaders seem to have felt that there was
a growing prevalence of anti-Revolution sentiment which,
with the demise of the crown in view, might be dan-
gerous, and to have looked for an opportunity of taking
Jacobitism by the throat and binding the nation fast to
Revolution principle and the Hanover succession. Sache-

1709 verell, a clerical demagogue, in a sermon preached on the
anniversary of the gunpowder plot, impugned the Revo-
lution doctrine of resistance. Upon this the Whigs

1709- pounced as a subject for their grand demonstration.

1^1^ They could not have chosen worse ; for, in attacking an
ecclesiastic they brought the order about their ears,
at the same time offending the high-church queen. This
the wisest members of the party saw ; but it is said that
he who generally was the wisest of all, Godolphin, allowed
himself to be stung to imprudence by a personal allusion.

1710 The petty agitator was impeached. There was a grand
state trial, in which the Whig leaders, as managers of the
impeachment, expounded their political creed, asserting,
while they strictly defined and limited, the principle of
resistance, with benefit to political philosophy, perhaps
in the end to the party, though to themselves the conse-
quences were disastrous. The clergy were at once in a
ferment. Their fury was seconded by the street mob,
always on the side of violence. The terrible cry of
"church in danger" was raised. The populace shouted
for "high church and Sacheverell" round the carriage

1710 of the queen, whose heart responded. Sacheverell was
condemned by an ineffective majority to a nominal sen-
tence. He at once became the martyred hero of the hour,



IV ANNE 147

and made a triumphal tour of agitation through the coun-
try. A tidal wave of fanaticism swelled and roared
against the Whig administration.

At the same time a blow was dealt by an even more
despicable hand. " It seems," says Hallam, " rather a
humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince
enjoys, even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes
of Europe should have been changed by nothing more
than the insolence of one waiting-woman and the cunning
of another." There was a good deal more at work, but
bed-chamber intrigue played a shameful part. Anne was
at last growing tired of the insolence of Marlborough's
wife. An opening was thus given to the wiles of Abi-
gail Hill, whom the duchess in an ' evil hour for herself
and her friends had introduced to the queen's toilet, and
who became the tool of the Tory leaders. Under the
influence of Abigail, combined with her own Tory and
high-church leanings, the queen broke with the duchess,
dismissed the Whigs, and called the Tories to power. 1710
Parliament was dissolved, and the new election gave the
Tories a great majority. Thus partly by its own fault,
partly through intrigue, the current of popular feeling
at the time setting against it, fell the great Whig minis-
try of Anne.

The Tory leaders were Harley, presently created Earl
of Oxford, and St. John, presently created Viscount
Bolingbroke, both of whom had sat as moderate Tories
in Marlborough's first ministry and been the last of that
section to be dropped. Harley was given to mystifying
his contemporaries about himself, and he has in some
measure mystified posterity. He seems, however, to have
been a man of second-rate ability, owing his position



148 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

mainly to his parliamentary experience, irresolute in
character and infirm of purpose. He gained a reputa-
tion for wisdom by holding his tongue. Nobody could
speak of him with more intense contempt than did after-
wards his partner in power. For his patronage of letters,
if it was not political, he deserves to be remembered.
Bolingbroke was a brilliant and daring knave. A scoun-
drel he is called by Johnson, who was on his side in
politics though not in religion. The epithet is surely
deserved by the man who, without being a Jacobite,
conspired for the restoration of the Stuarts, who being
a free-thinker at heart and loose in life led a mob of
bigots in a persecution of nonconformists. Bolingbroke
in his writings scoffs at divine right as a figment of
kings and priests playing into each other's hands. "The
characters of king and priest have been sometimes
blended together ; and when they have been divided,
as kings have found the great effects wrought in gov-
ernment by the empire which priests obtain over the
consciences of mankind, so priests have been taught by
experience that the best method to preserve their own
rank, dignity, wealth, and power, all raised upon a sup-
posed divine right, is to communicate the same preten-
sion to kings, and by a fallacy common to both impose
their usurpations on a silly world. This they have done ;
and, in the state as in the church, these pretensions to
a divine right have been generally carried highest by
those who have had the least pretension to the divine
favour." Such were the real opinions, afterwards dis-
closed, of the head of the Jacobite and Anglican party.
Bolingbroke's professed ideal of a government was em-
bodied in his " Patriot King," which had some influence



IV ANNE 149

in later times, and has had some even in our own day.
The " patriot king " was to be raised above all party and
to rule for the general good. But Bolingbroke himself
was a party leader in the narrowest sense of the term,
affecting Jacobitism and Anglicanism merely for a party
purpose. He compared himself to a huntsman cheering
on his pack of hounds and showing them game. He
avowed that the principal spring of his actions and of
those of his friends was to have the government of the
state in their hands, and that their principal views were
the conservation of this power, great employments to
themselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those
who had helped to raise them and of hurting those who
had stood in opposition. The aims of faction could not
be more frankly described. The loss of Bolingbroke's
speeches has been much deplored. They were no doubt
brilliant, like his writings, in form, and effective with his
party pack of hounds ; but if the substance was no better
than that of his writings, we may resign ourselves to the
loss. The orations of a charlatan, pandering to the pas-
sions of boors and bigots soaked with October ale, can
hardly have been in the noblest style of eloquence.

The Tory ministers at once dismissed Marlborough 1711
from his command ; disgraced him ; brought against him
charges of malversation, of which, though greedy of money,
he was not guilty, while he had refused an enormous
bribe offered by France ; put the Jacobite and traitor Or-
monde in his place ; and at once flung themselves into the
arms of their friend and patron, the French king, to
whom, in his desperate condition, their ascendancy was
salvation. In the negotiations which they opened they
were almost more ready to give than Louis was to ask.



150 THE UNITED KINGDOM chap.

1713 The Treaty of Utrecht, Bolingbroke afterwards owned,
was less answerable to the success of the war than it might
and ought to have been, though he lays the blame, of
course, on everything but his own treason. Perfidy to
allies, behind whose back negotiations with France were
carried on ; treacherous desertion of them in the field,

1712 which caused Eugene to lose the battle of Denain, and
made Marlborough's victorious veterans hang their heads
with shame ; betrayal of the Catalans who had been in-
duced to rise in favour of the candidate of the allies for
the Spanish throne — not even defenders of the treaty can
defend. Nor can it be questioned that England was low-
ered in the eyes of Europe. Louis entered into an en-
gagement against the union of the French and Spanish
crowns, out of which, had the case occurred, his French
jurists and his Jesuits would have found him a way.
England kept Gibraltar, to which she had scarcely a claim,
since it had fallen into her hands, not in a war against
Spain, but in a war waged ostensibly in support of the
rightful candidate to the Spanish throne.