Chapter XVII: Part 17

But this phenomenon of a king above all other authority occurred, we have observed, in the most unlikely country to present so strange a sight; for nowhere was a European throne so weak and unstable as the throne of the house of Bourbon after the murder of Henry the Fourth. The moment that strong hand was withdrawn from the government, all classes broke loose. The nobles conspired against the queen, Marie de Medicis, who relied upon foreign favourites and irritated the nation to madness. Paris rose in insurrection, and tore the wretched Concini, her counsellor, whom she had created Marshal D'Ancre, to pieces; and, to glut their vengeance still more, the judges condemned his innocent wife to be burned as a sorceress. Louis the Thirteenth, the unworthy son of the great Henry, rejoiced in these atrocities, which he thought freed him from all restraint. But he found it impossible to quell the wild passions by which he profited for a while. Civil war raged between the court and country factions, and soon became embittered into religious animosities. [A.D. 1622.] The sight of a king marching at the head of a Catholic army against a portion of his Reformed subjects was looked upon by the rapidly-increasing malcontents in England with anxious curiosity. For year by year the strange spectacle was unrolled before their eyes of what might yet be their fate at home. Perhaps, indeed, the success of the royal arms, and the policy of strength and firmness introduced by Cardinal Richelieu, may have contributed in no slight degree to the measures pursued by Wentworth and Laud in their treatment of the English recusants. With an anticipative interest in our Hull and Exeter, the Puritans of England looked on the resistance made by Rochelle; and we can therefore easily imagine with what feelings the future soldiers of Marston Moor received the tidings that the Popish cardinal had humbled the capital of the Huguenots by the help of fleets furnished to them by Holland and England! Richelieu, indeed, knew how to make his enemies weaken each other throughout his whole career. [A.D. 1627.] Those enemies were the nobility of France, the house of Austria, and the Reformed Faith. When Rochelle was attacked the second time, and England pretended to arm for its defence, he contrived to win Buckingham, the chief of the expedition, to his cause, and procured a letter from King Charles, placing the fleet, which apparently went to the support of the Huguenots, at the service of the King of France! After a year's siege, and the most heroic resistance, Rochelle fell at last, in 1628. And, now that the Huguenots were destroyed as a dangerous party, the eyes of the great minister were turned against his other foes. He divided the nobles into hostile ranks, degraded them by petty annoyances, terrified them by unpitying executions of the chiefs of the oldest families, showed their weakness by arresting marshals at the head of their armies, and during the remaining years of his authority monopolized all the powers of the state. To weaken Spain and Austria, we have seen how he assisted the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War; to weaken England, which was only great when it assumed its place as bulwark and champion of the Protestant faith, he encouraged the court in its suicidal policy and the oppressed population in resistance. Ever stirring up trouble abroad, and ever busy in repressing liberty at home, the ministry of Richelieu is the triumph of unprincipled skill. But when he died, in 1643, there was no man left to lift up the burden he threw off. The king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet as the old descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of the Palace, left the throne he had nominally filled, vacant in the same year; and the heir to the dishonoured crown and exhausted country was a boy of five years of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled mother, and with the old hereditary counsellors and props of his throne decimated by the scaffold or impoverished by confiscation. The tyranny of Richelieu had at least attained something noble by the high-handed insolence of all his acts. If people were to be trampled on, it was a kind of consolation to them that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand. The Cardinal Mazarin brought every thing into greater confusion than ever. In twenty millions of men there will always be great and overmastering spirits, if only an opportunity is found for their development; but civil commotion is not the element in which greatness lives. All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting motives of party politics. [A.D. 1648-1654.] The dissensions of the Fronde, accordingly, produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled respect. The Great Condé and the famous Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope: Condé and Turenne, always on opposite sides,--for each changed his party as often as the other; battles prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops fighting like gladiators and intriguing like the vulgarest conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended with cheers and laughter; and over all an Italian ecclesiastic, grinning with satisfaction at the increase of his wealth,--caballing, cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:--no country was ever so split into faction or so denuded of great men.

It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolized; religion ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish of charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had kept in distressing dependence and the profoundest political inactivity, found himself delivered from a master and free to choose his path. This was in 1661. Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered thrones; for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin had been to the other. [A.D. 1641-1660.] Charles had had the experience of nineteen years and of various fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and cities, and he deceived every expectation. Louis had been studiously brought up by his mother and her Italian favourite in the abasement of every lofty aspiration. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and kept in such painful vassalage that his shyness and awkwardness revealed the absence of self-respect to the very pages of his court; and he, no less than Charles, deceived all the expectations that had been formed of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how brightly the monarchical principle still burned in the heart of all the French. Even in their fights and quarrellings there was a deep reverence entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilized society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a king, as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth. Nobody remembered that circumstance so vividly as Louis himself; but he remembered also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and the renewer of the Roman Empire of the ninth. He let the world know, therefore, that his title was Most Christian King as well as foremost of European powers. He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the first time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from the Pope. The world is always apt to take a man at his own valuation. Louis, swelling with pride, ambitious of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and everybody believed him. Every thing was soon changed throughout the land. Ministers had been more powerful than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in right of their appointment. A minister was nothing more to Louis than a _valet-de-chambre_. He gave him certain work to do, and rewarded him if he did it; if he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few relics of the historic names of France, the descendants of the great vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as the Capets or Valois, looked on with surprise at the new arrangements in camp and court. But the people were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy of those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their haughty disaffection. Before Louis had been three years on the unovershadowed throne, the struggle had been fairly entered on by all the orders of the State, which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank, talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with each other in their devotion to the king. He would have been more than mortal if he had retained his senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such incense. Success in more important affairs came to the support of his personal assumptions. Victories followed his standards everywhere. Generals, engineers, and administrators, of abilities hitherto unmatched in Europe, sprang up whenever his requirements called them forth. Colbert doubled his income without increasing the burdens on his people. Turenne, Condé, Luxembourg, and twenty others, led his armies. Vauban strengthened his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and the dock-yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and the Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like Molière, Corneille, and Racine ennobled his stage; while the genius of Bossuet and Fénélon inaugurated the restoration of religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes knew no ebb. He was the object of all men's hopes and fears, and almost of their prayers. Nothing was too great or too minute for his decision. He was called on to arbitrate (with the authority of a master) between sovereign States, and to regulate a point of precedence between the duchesses of his court. Oh, the weary days and nights of that uneasy splendour at Versailles! when his steps were watched by hungry courtiers, and his bed itself surrounded by applicants for place and favour. No galley-slave ever toiled harder at his oar than this monarch of all he surveyed at the management of his unruly family. It was the day of etiquette and form. The rights of princesses to arm-chairs or chairs with only a back were contested with a vigour which might have settled the succession to a throne. The rank which entitled to a seat in the king's coach or an invitation to Marly was disputed almost with bloodshed, and certainly with scandal and bitterness. The depth of the bows exacted by a prince of the blood, the number of attendants necessary for a legitimated son of La Vallière or Montespan, put the whole court into a turmoil of angry parties; and all these important points, and fifty more of equal magnitude, were formally submitted to the king and decided with a gravity befitting a weightier cause. Nothing is more remarkable in the midst of these absurd inanities than the great fund of good common sense that is found in all the king's judgments. He meditates, and temporizes, and reasons; and only on great occasions, such as a quarrel about dignity between the wife of the dauphin and the Duchess of Maine, does he put on the terrors of his kingly frown and interpose his irresistible command. It would have been some consolation to the foreign potentates he bullied or protected--the Austrian and Spaniard, or Charles in Whitehall--if they had known what a wretched and undignified life their enslaver and insulter lived at home. It was whispered, indeed, that he was tremendously hen-pecked by Madame de Maintenon, whom he married without having the courage to elevate her to the throne; but none of them knew the pettinesses, the degradations, and the miseries of his inner circle. They thought, perhaps, he was planning some innovation in the order of affairs in Europe,--the destruction of a kingdom, or the change of a dynasty. He was devoting his deepest cogitations to the arrangement of a quarrel between his sons and his daughters-in-law, the invitations to a little supper-party in his private room, or the number of steps it was necessary to advance at the reception of a petty Italian sovereign. The quarrels between his children became more bitter; the little supper-parties became more dull. Death came into the gilded chambers, and he was growing old and desolate. Still the torturing wheel of ceremony went round, and the father, with breaking heart, had to leave the chamber of his deceased son, and act the part of a great king, and go through the same tedious forms of grandeur and routine which he had done before the calamity came. Fancy has never drawn a personage more truly pitiable than Louis growing feeble and friendless in the midst of all that magnificence and all that heartless crowd. You pardon him for retiring for consolation and sympathy to the quiet apartment where Madame de Maintenon received him without formality and continued her needlework or her reading while he was engaged in council with his ministers. He must have known that to all but her he was an Office and not a Man. He yearned for somebody that he could trust in and consult with, as entering into his thoughts and interests; and that calm-blooded, meek-mannered, narrow-hearted woman persuaded him that in her he had found all that his heart thirsted for in the desert of his royalty. But in that little apartment he was now to find refuge from more serious calamities than the falsehood of courtiers or the quarrels of women. Even French loyalty was worn out at last. Victories had glorified the monarch, but brought poverty and loss to the population. Complaints arose in all parts of the country of the excess of taxation, the grasping dishonesty of the collectors, the extravagance of the court, and even--but this was not openly whispered--the selfishness of the king. He had lavished ten millions sterling on the palace and gardens of Versailles; he had enriched his sycophants with pensions on the Treasury; he had gratified the Church with gorgeous donations, and with the far more fatal gift of vengeance upon its opponents. The Huguenots were in the peaceful enjoyment of the rights secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, granted by Henry the Fourth in 1598. But those rights included the right of worshipping God in a different manner from the Church, and denying the distinguishing doctrines of the Holy Catholic faith. [A.D. 1685.] The Edict of Toleration was repealed as a blot on the purity of the throne of the Most Christian King. Thousands of the best workmen in France were banished by this impolitic proceeding, and Louis thought he had shown his attachment to his religion by sending the ingenuity and wealth, and glowing animosity, of the most valuable portion of his subjects into other lands. Germany calculated that the depopulation caused by his wars was more than compensated by the immigration. England could forgive him his contemptuous behaviour to her king and Parliament when she saw the silk-mills of Spitalfields supplied by the skilled workmen of Lyons. Eight hundred thousand people left their homes in consequence of this proscription of their religion, and Germany and Switzerland grew rich with the stream of fugitives. It is said that only five thousand found their way to this country,--enough to set the example of peaceful industry and to introduce new methods of manufacture.

But the full benefit of the measures of Louis and Maintenon was denied us, by the distrust with which the Protestant exiles looked on the accession to our throne of a narrower despot and more bigoted persecutor than Louis; for in this same year James the Second succeeded Charles. Relying on each other's support, and gratified with the formal approval of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes pronounced by the Pope, the two champions of Christendom pursued their way,--dismissals from office, exclusion from promotion, proscription from worship in France, and assaults on the Church, and bloody assizes, in England,--till all the nations felt that a great crisis was reached in the fortunes both of England and France, and Protestant and Romanist alike looked on in expectation of the winding-up of so strange a history. Judicial blindness was equally on the eyes of the two potentates chiefly interested. James remained inactive while William Prince of Orange, the avowed chief of the new opinions, was getting ready his ships and army, and congratulated himself on the silence of his people, which he thought was the sign of their acquiescence instead of the hush of expectation. All the other powers--the Papal Chair included--were not sorry to see a counterpoise to the predominance of France; and when William appeared in England as the deliverer from Popery and oppression, the battle was decided without a blow. [A.D. 1688.] James was a fugitive in his turn, and found his way to Versailles. It is difficult to believe that any of the blood of Scotland or Navarre flowed in the veins of the pusillanimous king. He begged his protector, through whose councils he had lost his kingdom, to give it him back again; and the opportunity of a theatrical display of grandeur and magnanimity was too tempting to be thrown away. Louis promised to restore him his crown, as if it were a broken toy. It was a strange sight, during the remainder of their lives, to see those two monarchs keeping up the dignity of their rank by exaggerations of their former state. No mimic stage ever presented a more piteous spectacle of poverty and tinsel than the royal pair. Punctilios were observed at their meetings and separations, as if a bow more or less were of as much consequence as the bestowal or recovery of Great Britain; and in the estimation of those professors of manners and deportment a breach of etiquette would have been more serious than La Hogue or the Boyne. In that wondrous palace of Versailles all things had long ceased to be real. Speeches were made for effect, and dresses and decorations had become a part of the art of governing, and for some years the system seemed to succeed. When the king required to show that he was still a conqueror like Alexander the Great, preparations were made for his reception at the seat of war, and a pre-arranged victory was attached lo his arrival, as Cleopatra wished to fix a broiled fish to Anthony's hook. He entered the town of Mons in triumph when Luxembourg had secured its fall. He appeared also with unbounded applause at the first siege of Namur, and carried in person the news of his achievement to Versailles. Every day came couriers hot and tired with intelligence of fresh successes. Luxembourg conquered at Fleurus, 1690; Catinat conquered Savoy, 1691; Luxembourg again, in 1692, had gained the great day of Steinkirk, and Nerwinde in 1693. But the tide now turned. William the Third was the representative at that time of the stubbornness of his new subjects' character, who have always found it difficult to see that they were defeated. He was generally forced to retire after a vigorously-contested fight; but he was always ready to fight again next day, always calm and determined, and as confident as ever in the firmness of his men. Reports very different from the glorious bulletins of the earlier years of the Great Monarch now came pouring in. Namur was retaken, Dieppe and Havre bombarded, all the French establishments in India seized by the Dutch, their colony at St. Domingo captured by the English, Luxembourg dead, and the whole land again, for the second time, exhausted of men and money. It was another opportunity for the display of his absolute power. France prayed him to grant peace to Europe, and the earthly divinity granted France's prayer. Europe itself, which had rebelled against him, accepted the pacification it had won by its battles and combinations, as if it were a gift from a superior being. [A.D. 1697.] He surrendered his conquests with such grandeur, and looked so dignified while he withdrew his pretensions, acknowledging the Prince of Orange to be King of England, and the King of England to have no claim on the crown he had promised to restore to him, that it took some time to perceive that the terms of the Peace of Ryswick were proofs of weakness and not of magnanimity. But the object of his life had been gained. He had abased every order in the State for the aggrandizement of the Crown, and, for the first time since the termination of the Roman Empire, had concentrated the whole power of a nation into the will of an individual. And this strange spectacle of a possessor of unlimited authority over the lives and fortunes of all his subjects was presented in an age that had seen Charles the First of England brought to the block and James the Second driven into exile! The chance of France's peacefully rising again from this state of depression into liberty would have been greater if Louis, in displacing the other authorities, had not disgraced them. He dissolved his Parliament, not with a file of soldiers, like Cromwell or Napoleon, but with a riding-whip in his hand. He degraded the nobility by making them the satellites of his throne and creatures of his favour. He humbled the Church by secularizing its leaders; so that Bossuet, bishop and orator as he was, was proud to undertake the office of peacemaker between him and Madame de Montespan in one of their lovers' quarrels. And the Frenchmen of the next century looked in vain for some rallying-point from which to begin their forward course towards constitutional improvement. They found nothing but parliaments contemned, nobles dishonoured, and priests unchristianized.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Kings of France.

A.D.

LOUIS XIV.--(_cont._)

1715. LOUIS XV.

1774. LOUIS XVI.

1793. LOUIS XVII.

Emperors of Germany.

A.D.

LEOPOLD I.--(_cont._)

1705. JOSEPH I.

1711. CHARLES VI.

1740. MARIA-THERESA.

1742. CHARLES VII.

1745. FRANCIS I.

1765. JOSEPH II.

1790. LEOPOLD II.

1792. FRANCIS II.

Kings of England and Scotland.

A.D.

WILLIAM III. and MARY.--(_cont._)

1702. ANNE.

(_Great Britain_, 1707.)

1714. GEORGE I. }

1727. GEORGE II. } House of Hanover.

1760. GEORGE III. }

Kings of Spain.

A.D.

1700. PHILIP V.

1724. LOUIS I.

1724. PHILIP V. again.

1745. FERDINAND VI.

1759. CHARLES III.

1788. CHARLES IV.

Distinguished Men.

ADDISON, STEELE, SWIFT, POPE, ROBERTSON, HUME, GIBBON, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU, LESAGE, MARMONTEL, MONTESQUIEU, FRANKLIN, (1706-1790,) JOHNSON, (1709-1784,) GOLDSMITH, (1728-1774,) WOLFE, (1726-1759,) WASHINGTON, (1732-1799.)

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

INDIA--AMERICA--FRANCE.

The characteristic feature of this period is constant change on the greatest scale. Hitherto changes have occurred in the internal government of nations: the monarchic or popular feeling has found its expression in the alternate elevation of the Kingly or Parliamentary power. But in this most momentous of the centuries, nations themselves come into being or disappear. Russia and Prussia for the first time play conspicuous parts in the great drama of human affairs. France, which begins the century with the despotic Louis the Fourteenth at its head, leaves it as a vigorous Republic, with Napoleon Buonaparte as its First Consul. The foundations of a British empire were laid in India, which before the end of the period more than compensated for the loss of that other empire in the West, which is now the United States of America. It was the century of the breaking of old traditions, and of the introduction of new systems in life and government,--more complete in its transformations than the splitting up into hitherto unheard-of nationalities of the old Roman world had been; for what Goth and Vandal, and Frank and Lombard, were to the political geography of Europe in the earlier time, new modes of thought, both religious and political, were to the moral constitution of that later date. The barbarous invasions of the early centuries were the overflowing of rivers by the breaking down of the embankments; the revolutionary madness of France was the sudden detachment of an avalanche which had been growing unobserved, but which at last a voice or a footstep was sufficient to set in motion. In all nations it was a period of doubt and uneasiness. Something was about to happen, but nobody could say what. The political sleight-of-hand men, who considered the safety of the world to depend on the balance of power, where a weight must be cast into one scale, exactly sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to keep the other in equilibrio, were never so much puzzled since the science of balancing began. A vast country, hitherto omitted from their calculations, or only considered as a make-weight against Sweden or Denmark, suddenly came forward to be a check, and sometimes an over-weight, to half the states in Europe. Something had therefore to be found to be a counterpoise to the twenty millions of men and illimitable dominions of the Russian Czars. This was close at the conjurer's hand in Prussia and her Austrian neighbour. Counties were added,--populations fitted in,--Silesia given to the one, Gallicia added to the other; and at last the whole of Poland, which had ceased to be of any importance in its separate existence, was cut up into such portions as might be required, with here a fragment and there a fragment, till the scales stood pretty even, and the three contiguous kingdoms were satisfied with their respective shares of infamy and plunder. If you hear, therefore, of robberies upon a gigantic scale,--no longer the buccaneering exploits of a few isolated adventurers in the Western seas, but of kingdoms deliberately stolen, or imperiously taken hold of by the right of the strong hand; of the same Titanic magnitude distinguishing almost all other transactions; colonies throwing off their allegiance, and swelling out into hostile empires, instead of the usual discontent and occasional quarrellings between the mother-country and her children; of whole nations breaking forth into anarchy, instead of the former local efforts at reformation ending in temporary civil strife; of commercial speculations reaching the sublime of swindling and credulity, and involving whole populations in ruin; and of commercial establishments, on the other hand, vaster even in their territorial acquisitions than all the conquests of Alexander,--you are to remember that these things can only have happened in the Eighteenth Century; the century when the trammels of all former experiences were thrown off, and when wealth, power, energy, and mental aspirations were pushed to an unexampled excess. This exaggerated action of the age is shown in the one great statement which nearly comprehends all the rest. The Debt of this country, which at the beginning of this century was sixteen millions and a half and tormented our forefathers with fears of bankruptcy, had risen at the end of it, in the heroic madness of conquest and national pride, to the sum of three hundred and eighty millions, without a doubt of our perfect competency to sustain the burden.

If the tendency of affairs on the other side of our encircling sea was to pull down, to destroy, to modify, and to redistribute, the tendency at home was to build up and consolidate; so that in almost exact proportion to the wild experiments and frantic strugglings of other nations after something new--new principles of government, new theories of society--there arose in this country a dogged spirit of resistance to all alterations, and a persistence in old paths and old opinions. The charms which constitution-mongers saw in untried novelties and philosophic systems existed for John Bull only in what had stood the wear and tear of hundreds of years. The Prussians, Austrians, Americans, and finally the French, were groping after vague abstractions; and Frederick the Soldier, and Joseph the Philanthropist, and Citizen Franklin, and Lafayette and Mirabeau, were each in their own way carried away with the delusion of a golden age; but the English statesmen clung rigidly to the realities of life,--declared the universal fraternity of nations to be a cry of knaves or hypocrites,--and answered all exclamations about the dignity of humanity and the sovereignty of the people with "Rule Britannia," and "God save the King." How deeply this sentiment of loyalty and traditionary Toryism is seated in the national mind is proved by nothing so much as by the dreadful ordeal it had to go through in the days of the first two Georges. It certainly was a faith altogether independent of external circumstances, which saw the divinity that hedges kings in such vulgar, gossiping, and undignified individuals. And yet through all the troubled years of their reigns the great British heart beat true with loyalty to the throne, though it was grieved with the proceedings of the sovereigns; and when the third George gave it a man to rally round--as truly native-born as the most indigenous of the people, as stubborn, as strong-willed, and as determined to resist innovation as the most consistent of the squires and most anti-foreign of the citizens--the nation attained a point of union which had never been known in all their previous history, and looked across the Channel, at the insanity of the perplexed populations and the threats of their furious leaders, with a growl of contempt and hatred which warned their democrats and incendiaries of the fate that awaited them here. There are times in all national annals when the narrowest prejudices have an amazing resemblance to the noblest virtues. When Hannibal was encamped at the gates of Rome, the bigoted old Patricians in the forum carried on their courts of law as usual, and would not deduct a farthing from the value of the lands they set up for sale, though the besieger was encamped upon them. When a king of Sicily offered a great army and fleet for the defence of Greece against the Persians, the Athenian ambassador said, "Heaven forefend that a man of Athens should serve under a foreign admiral!" The Lacedemonian ambassador said the Spartans would put him to death if he proposed any man but a Spartan to command their troops; and those very prejudiced and narrow-minded patriots were reduced to the necessity of exterminating the invaders by themselves. Great Britain, in the year 1800, was also of opinion that she was equal to all the world,--that she could hold her own whatever powers might be gathered against her,--and would not have exchanged her Hood, and Jervis, and Nelson, for the assistance of all the fleets of Europe.

Nothing seems to die out so rapidly as the memory of martial achievements. The military glory of this country is a thing of fits and starts. Cressy and Poictiers left us at a pitch of reputation which you might have supposed would have lasted for a long time. But in a very few years after those victories the English name was a byword of reproach. All the conquests of the Edwards were wrenched away, and it needed only the short period of the reign of Richard the Second to sink the recollection of the imperturbable line and inevitable shaft. Henry the Fifth and Agincourt for a moment brought the previous triumphs into very vivid remembrance. But civil dissensions between York and Lancaster blunted the English sword upon kindred helmets, and peaceful Henry the Seventh loaded the subject with intolerable taxes, and his son wasted his treasures in feasts and tournaments. The long reigns of Elizabeth and James were undistinguished by British armies performing any separate achievements on the Continent; and again civil war lavished on domestic fields an amount of courage and conduct which would have eclipsed all previous actions if exhibited on a wider scene. We need not, therefore, be surprised, if, after the astonishing course of Louis the Fourteenth's arms, the discomfiture of his adversaries, the constant repulses of the English contingent which fought under William in Flanders, and at last the quiet, looking so like exhaustion, which ushered in the Eighteenth Century, the British forces were despised, and we were confessed, in the ludicrous cant which at intervals becomes fashionable still, to be not a military nation. How this astounding proposition agrees with the fact that we have met in battle every single nation, and tribe, and kindred, and tongue, on the face of the whole earth, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and have beaten them all; how it further agrees with the fact that no civilized power was ever engaged in such constant and multitudinous wars, so that there is no month or week in the history of the last two hundred years in which it can be said we were not interchanging shot or sabre-stroke somewhere or other on the surface of the globe; how, further still, the statement is to be reconciled with the fact, perceptible to all mankind, that the result of these engagements is an unexampled growth of influence and empire,--the acquisition of kingdoms defended by millions of warriors in Hindostan, of colonies ten times the extent of the conqueror's realm, defended by Montcalm and the armies of France,--we must leave to the individuals who make it: the truth being that the British people is not only the most military nation the world has ever seen, not excepting the Roman, but the most warlike. It is impossible to say when these pages may meet the reader's eye; but, at whatever time it may be, he has only to look at the "Times" newspaper of that morning, and he will see that either in the East or the West, in China or the Cape, or the Persian Gulf, or on the Indus, or the Irrawaddy, the meteor flag is waved in bloody advance. And this seems an indispensable part of the British position. She is so ludicrously small upon the map, and so absorbed in speculation, so padded with cotton, and so sunk in coal-pits, that it is only constant experience of her prowess that keeps the world aware of her power. The other great nations can repose upon their size, and their armies of six or seven hundred thousand men. Nobody would think France or Russia weak because they were inactive. But with us the case is different: we must fight or fall.

Twice in the century we are now engaged on, we rose to be first of the military states in Europe, and twice, by mere inaction, we sank to the rank of Portugal or Naples.

Charles the Second of Spain died in November, 1700,--a person so feeble in health and intellect that in a lower state of life he would have been put in charge of guardians and debarred from the management of his affairs. As he was a king, these duties were performed on his behalf by the priests, and the wretched young man--he succeeded at three years old--was nothing but the slave and plaything of his confessor. Yet, though his existence was of no importance, his decease set all Europe in turmoil. By his testament, obtained from him on his death-bed, he appointed the grandson of Louis the Fourteenth his heir. A previous will had nominated Charles of Austria. A previous treaty between Louis and William of England and the States of Holland had arranged a partition of the Spanish monarchy for the benefit of the contracting parties and the maintenance of the balance of power. But now, when a choice was to be made between the wills and the treaty, between the balance of power and his personal ambition, the temptation was too great for the cupidity of the Grand Monarque. He accepted the throne of Spain and the Indies for his grandson Philip of Anjou, and sent him over the Pyrenees to take possession of his dignity. The stroke was so sudden that people were silent from surprise. A French prince at Madrid, at Milan, and Naples, was only the lieutenant in those capitals for the French king. The preponderance of the house of Bourbon was dangerous to the liberties of Europe, and when the house of Bourbon was represented by the haughtiest, and vainest, and most insulting of men, the dignity of the remaining sovereigns was offended by his ostentatious superiority; and the house of Austria, which in the previous century had been the terror of statesmen and princes, was turned to as a shelter from its successful rival, and all the world prepared to defend the cause of the Austrian Charles. The affairs of Europe, which were disturbed by the death of an imbecile king in Spain, were further complicated by the death of a still more imbecile king at St. Germain's. James the Second brought his strange life to a close in 1701; and, though the advisers of Louis pointed out the consequence of offending England at that particular time by recognising the Prince of Wales as inheritor of the English crown, the vanity of the old man who could not forego the luxury of having a crowned king among his attendants prevailed over his better knowledge, and one day, to the amazement of courtiers and council, he gave the royal reception to James the Third, and threw down the gauntlet to William and England, which they were not slow to take up. William of Orange was not popular among his new subjects, and was always looked on as a foreigner. Perhaps the memory of Ruyter and Van Tromp was still fresh enough to make him additionally disliked because he was a Dutchman. But when it was known over the country that the bigoted and insulting despot in Paris had nominated a King of England, while the man the nation had chosen was still alive in Whitehall, the indignation of all classes was roused, and found its expression in loyalty and attachment to their deliverer from Popery and persecution. Great exertions were made to conduct the war on a scale befitting the importance of the interests at stake. Addresses poured in, with declarations of devotion to the throne; troops were raised, and taxes voted; and in the midst of these preparations, the King, prematurely old, in the fifty-third year of his age, died of a fall from his horse at Kensington, in March, 1702, and the powers of Europe felt that the best soldier they possessed was lost to the cause. Rather it was a fortunate thing for the confederated princes that William died at this time; for he never rose to the rank of a first-rate commander, and was so ambitious of glory and power that he would not have left the way clear for a greater than himself.

This was found in Marlborough. Military science was the characteristic of this illustrious general; and no one before his time had ever possessed in an equal degree the power of attaching an army to its chief, or of regulating his strategic movements by the higher consideration of policy and statesmanship. For the first time, in English history at least, a march was equivalent to a battle. A change of his camp, or even a temporary retreat, was as effectual as a victory; and it was seen by the clearer observers of the time that a campaign was a game of skill, and not of the mere dash and intrepidity which appeal to the vulgar passions of our nature. Not so, however, the general public: their idea of war was a succession of hard knocks, with enormous lists of the killed and wounded. A manoeuvre, without a charge of bayonets at the end of it, was little better than cowardice; and complaints were loud and common against the inactivity of a man who, by dint of long-prepared combinations, compelled the enemy to retreat by a mere shift of position and cleared the Low Countries of its invaders without requiring to strike a blow. "Let them see how we can fight," cried all the corporations in the realm: "anybody can march and pitch his camp." And it is not impossible that the foreign populations who had never seen the red-coats, or, at most, who had only known them acting as auxiliaries to the Dutch and often compelled to retire before the numbers and impetuosity of the French, had no expectation of success when they should be fairly brought opposite their former antagonists. Friends and foes alike were prepared for a renewal of the days of Luxembourg and Turenne. In this they were not disappointed; for a pupil of Turenne renewed, in a very remarkable manner, the glories of his master. Marlborough had served under that great commander, and profited by his lessons. He had fifty thousand British soldiers under his undivided command; and, to please the grumblers at home and the doubters abroad, he made the reign of Anne the most glorious in the English military annals by thick-coming fights, still unforgotten, though dimmed by the exploits of the more illustrious Wellington. The first of these was Blenheim, against the French and Bavarians, in 1704. How different this was from the hand-to-hand thrust and parry of ancient times is shown by the fate of a strong body of French, who were so posted on this occasion that the duke saw they were in his power without requiring to fire a gun. He sent his aid-de-camp, Lord Orkney, to them to point out the hopelessness of their position; and when he rode up, accompanied by a French officer, to act, perhaps, as his interpreter, a shout of gratulation broke from the unsuspecting Frenchmen. "Is it a prisoner you have brought us?" they asked their countryman. "Alas! no," he replies: "Lord Orkney has come from Marlborough to tell you you are his prisoners. His lordship offers you your lives." A glance at the contending armies confirmed the truth of this appalling communication, and the brigade laid down its arms. The tide of victory, once begun, knew no ebb till the grandeur of Louis the Fourteenth was overwhelmed. Disgraces followed quickly one upon the other,--marshals beaten, towns taken, conquests lost, his wealth exhausted, his people discontented, and the bravest of his generals hopeless of success. Prince Eugene of Savoy, equal to Marlborough in military genius, was more embittered against the French monarch, to whom he had offered his services, and who had had the folly to reject them. France, on the side of Germany and the Low Countries, was pressed upon by the triumphant invaders. In Spain, the affairs of the new king were more desperate still. Gibraltar was taken in 1704. Lord Peterborough, a wiser Quixote, of whose victories it is difficult to say whether they were the result of madness or skill, marched through the kingdom at the head of six or seven thousand English and conquered wherever he went.

When the war had lasted eight or nine years, the reputation of Marlborough and the British arms was at its height. Our fleets were masters of the sea, and the Grand Monarque sent humble petitions to the opposing powers for peace upon any terms. People tell us that Marlborough rejected all overtures which might have deprived him of the immense emoluments he received for carrying on the war. [A.D. 1711.] Perhaps, also, he was inspired by the love of fame; but, whether meanness or ambition was his motive, his warlike propensities were finally overcome,--for his wife, the imperious duchess, quarrelled with Queen Anne,--the ministry was changed, and the jealousies of Whitehall interfered with the campaigns in Flanders. [A.D. 1713.] Marlborough was displaced, and a peace patched up, which, under the name of the Peace of Utrecht, is quoted as showing what small fruits British diplomacy sometimes derives from British valour. Louis the Fourteenth, conquered at all points, his kingdom exhausted, and all his reputation gone, saw his grandson in possession of the crown which had been the original cause of the war, and Great Britain rewarded for all her struggles by the empty glory of filling up the harbour of Dunkirk, and the scarcely more substantial advantage, as many considered it at the time, of retaining Gibraltar, a barren rock, and Minorca, a useless island. After this, we find a long period of inaction on the continent produce its usual effect. When thirty years had passed without the foreign populations having sight of the British grenadiers, they either forgot their existence altogether, or had persuaded themselves that the new generation had greatly deteriorated from the old.[A.D. 1743.] [A.D. 1745.] It needed the victory of Dettingen, and the more glorious repulse of Fontenoy, to recall the soldiers of Oudenarde and Malplaquet.

In the interval, amazing things had been going on. Even while the career of Marlborough was attended with such glory in arms, a peaceful achievement was accomplished of far more importance than all his victories. An Act of Union between the two peoples who occupied the Isle was passed by both their Parliaments in 1707, and England and Scotland disappeared in their separate nationalities, to receive the more dignified appellation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was a statesman's triumph; for the popular feeling on both sides of the Tweed was against it. Scotland considered herself sold; and England thought she was cheated. Clauses were introduced to preserve, as far as possible, the distinctions which each thought it for its honour to keep up. National peculiarities exaggerated themselves to prevent the chance of being obliterated; and Scotchmen were never as Scotch, nor Englishmen ever so English, as at the time when these denominations were about to cease. As neighbours, with the mere tie between them of being subjects of the same crown, they were on amicable and respectful terms. But when the alliance was proposed to be more intimate, their interests to be considered identical and the Parliaments to be merged in one, both parties took the alarm. "The preponderating number of English members would scarcely be affected by the miserable forty-five votes reserved for the Scotch representatives," said Caledonia, stern and wild. "The compact phalanx of forty-five determined Scotchmen will give them the decision of every question brought before Parliament," replied England, with equal fear,--and equal misapprehension, as it happily turned out. When eight years had elapsed after this great event in our domestic history, with just sufficient experience of the new machinery to find out some of its defects, it was put to the proof by an incident which might have been fatal to a far longer established system of government. This was a rebellion in favour of the exiled Stuarts. James the Third, whom we saw recognised by Louis the Fourteenth on the death of his father in 1701, made his appearance among the Highlanders of the North in 1714, and summoned them to support his family claims.

But the memory of his ancestors was too recent. Men of middle age remembered James the Second in his tyrannical supremacy at Holyrood. The time was not sufficiently remote for romance to have gathered round the harsh reality and hidden its repulsive outlines. A few months showed the Pretender the hopelessness of his attempt; and the tranquillity of the country was considered to be re-established when the adherents of the losing cause were visited with the harshest penalties. The real result of these vindictive punishments was, that they added the spirit of revenge for private wrong to the spirit of loyalty to the banished line. Many circumstances concurred to favour the defeated candidate, who seemed to require to do nothing but bide his time. The throne was no longer held, even under legalized usurpation, as the discontented expressed it, by one of the ancient blood. [A.D. 1714.] A foreigner, old and stupid, had come over from Hanover and claimed the Parliamentary crown, and the few remaining links of attachment which kept the high-prerogative men and the Roman Catholics inactive in the reign of Queen Anne, the daughter of their rightful king, lost all their power over them on the advent of George the First, who had to trace up through mother and grandmother till he struck into the royal pedigree in the reign of James the First. It was thought hard that descent from that champion of monarchic authority and hereditary right should be pleaded as a title to a crown dependent on the popular choice. As years passed on, the number of the discontented was of course increased. Whoever considered himself neglected by the intrusive government turned instinctively to the rival house. A courtier offended by the brutal manners of the Hanoverian rulers looked longingly across the sea to the descendant of his lineal kings. The foreign predilections, and still more foreign English, of the coarse-minded Georges, made them unpopular with the weak or inconsiderate, who did not see that a very inelegant pronunciation might be united with a true regard for the interests of their country.

The commercial passions of the nations succeeded to the military enthusiasm of the past age, and brought their usual fruits of selfish competition and social degradation. Money became the most powerful principle of public and private life: Sir Robert Walpole, a man of perfect honesty himself, founded his ministry on the avowed disbelief of personal honesty among all classes of the people; and there were many things which appeared to justify his incredulity. [A.D. 1720.] There was the South-Sea Bubble, a swindling speculation, to which our own railway-mania is the only parallel, where lords and ladies, high ecclesiastics and dignified office-bearers, the highest and the lowest, rushed into the wildest excesses of gambling and false play, and which caused a greater loss of character and moral integrity than even of money to its dupes and framers. There was the acknowledged system of rewarding a ministerial vote with notes for five hundred or a thousand pounds. There were the party libels of the time, all imputing the greatest iniquities to the object of their vituperation, and left uncontradicted except by savage proceedings at law or by similar insinuations against the other side. There were philosophers like Bolingbroke and clergymen like Swift. But let us distinguish between the performers on the great scenes of life, the place hunter at St. James's, and the great body of the English and Scottish gentry, and their still undepraved friends and neighbours, whom it is the fashion to involve in the same condemnation of recklessness and dishonour. We are to remember that the dregs of the former society were not yet cleared away. The generation had been brought up at the feet of the professors of morality and religion as they were practised in the days of Charles and James, with Congreve and Wycherly for their exponents on the stage and Dryden for their poet-laureate.