History of the English People Volume Vii Part 9

Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning-point in our national history, as it is a turning-point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland indeed had won a dominion in other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their fellow-states greater than that which was due to their purely European position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.

[Sidenote: England in the Pacific.]

It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St.

Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words to his a.s.sailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But greater even than Pitt's statesmans.h.i.+p was the conviction on which his statesmans.h.i.+p rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay before it. And once roused, the sense of these destinies could never be lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements spread along its eastern sh.o.r.e and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace of Paris, in 1764, two English s.h.i.+ps were sent on a cruise of discovery to the Straits of Magellan.

[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]

"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron, "nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make discoveries of countries. .h.i.therto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere s.h.i.+p-boy on a Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy, and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or Australia, on whose eastern sh.o.r.e, from some fancied likeness to the district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters, and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti, the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the expansion of the English race.

[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]

Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in however vague and imperfect a fas.h.i.+on, the policy of the English crown.

Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's att.i.tude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all, without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds, whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.

[Sidenote: England and America.]

And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take an active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on the mother country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of protection was removed. The att.i.tude of England towards its distant dependency became one of simple possession; and the differences of temper, the commercial and administrative disputes, which had long existed as elements of severance, but had been thrown into the background till now by the higher need for union, started into a new prominence. Day by day indeed the American colonies found it harder to submit to the meddling of the mother country with their self-government and their trade. A consciousness of their destinies was stealing in upon thoughtful men, and spread from them to the ma.s.ses around them. At this very moment the quick growth of population in America moved John Adams, then a village schoolmaster of Ma.s.sachusetts, to lofty forebodings of the future of the great people over whom he was to be called to rule.

"Our people in another century," he wrote, "will be more numerous than England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us." The sense that such an independence was drawing nearer spread even to Europe.

"Fools," said a descendant of William Penn, "are always telling their fears that the colonies will set up for themselves." Philosophers however were pretty much of the same mind on this subject with the fools. "Colonies are like fruits," wrote the foreseeing Turgot, "which cling to the tree only till they ripen. As soon as America can take care of itself it will do what Carthage did." But from the thought of separation almost every American turned as yet with horror. The Colonists still looked to England as their home. They prided themselves on their loyalty; and they regarded the difficulties which hindered complete sympathy between the settlements and the mother country as obstacles which time and good sense could remove. England on the other hand looked on America as her n.o.blest possession. It was the wealth, the growth of this dependency which more than all the victories of her arms was lifting her to a new greatness among the nations. It was the trade with it which had doubled English commerce in half-a-century. Of the right of the mother country to monopolize this trade, to deal with this great people as its own possession, no Englishman had a doubt. England, it was held, had planted every colony. It was to England that the Colonists owed not their blood only, but the free inst.i.tutions under which they had grown to greatness. English arms had rescued them from the Indians, and broken the iron barrier with which France was holding them back from the West. In the war which was drawing to a close England had poured out her blood and gold without stint in her children's cause.

Of the debt which was mounting to a height unknown before no small part was due to her struggle on behalf of America. And with this sense of obligation mingled a sense of ingrat.i.tude. It was generally held that the wealthy Colonists should do something to lighten the load of this debt from the shoulders of the mother country. But it was known that all proposals for American taxation would be bitterly resisted. The monopoly of American trade was looked on as a part of an Englishman's birthright.

Yet the Colonists not only murmured at this monopoly but evaded it in great part by a wide system of smuggling. And behind all these grievances lay an uneasy sense of dread at the democratic form which the government and society of the colonies had taken. The governors sent from England wrote back words of honest surprise and terror at the "levelling principles" of the men about them. To statesmen at home the temper of the colonial legislatures, their protests, their bickerings with the governors and with the Board of Trade, the constant refusal of supplies when their remonstrances were set aside, seemed all but republican.

[Sidenote: George the Third.]

To check this republican spirit, to crush all dreams of severance, and to strengthen the unity of the British Empire by drawing closer the fiscal and administrative bonds which linked the colonies to the mother country, was one of the chief aims with which George the Third mounted the throne on the death of his grandfather George the Second, in 1760.

But it was far from being his only aim. For the first and last time since the accession of the House of Hanover England saw a king who was resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. During the first ten years of his reign he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt and independence, and brought England to what then seemed the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and often by very wicked and profligate men; but George was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James the Second. He was wretchedly educated, and his natural powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have concealed their natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling towards great men was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the time when "decrepitude or death" might put an end to Pitt; and even when death had freed him from "this trumpet of sedition," he denounced the proposal for a public monument to the great statesman as "an offensive measure to me personally." But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his purpose was to rule. "George," his mother, the Princess of Wales, had continually repeated to him in youth, "George, be king." He called himself always "a Whig of the Revolution," and he had no wish to undo the work which he believed the Revolution to have done. But he looked on the subjection of his two predecessors to the will of their ministers as no real part of the work of the Revolution, but as a usurpation of that authority which the Revolution had left to the crown. And to this usurpation he was determined not to submit. His resolve was to govern, not to govern against law, but simply to govern, to be freed from the dictation of parties and ministers, and to be in effect the first minister of the State.

[Sidenote: Importance of his action.]

How utterly incompatible such a dream was with the Parliamentary const.i.tution of the country as it had received its final form from Sunderland it is easy to see; and the effort of the young king to realize it plunged England at once into a chaos of political and social disorder which makes the first years of his reign the most painful and humiliating period in our history. It is with an angry disgust that we pa.s.s from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the century that has pa.s.sed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the transfer of power within England itself from a governing cla.s.s to the nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.

[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]

To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed cla.s.ses and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national will showed its old power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which would follow on a return of the Stuarts.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]

The results of such a divorce between the government and that general ma.s.s of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the consciousness of power carries with it, among the ma.s.s of Englishmen public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on the governing cla.s.s were even more fatal to any right conduct of public affairs. Not only had the ma.s.s of national sentiment been so utterly estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation, that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank with instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers by the ma.s.s of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.

[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]

And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation of Parliament to the const.i.tuencies made some change in its composition a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of Commons were called for by the natural s.h.i.+ftings of population and wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the narrowing of munic.i.p.al privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough members in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the enormous expense of contesting such const.i.tuencies practically left their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and sixty thousand were electors at all.

[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]

"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in n.o.ble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.

Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament; and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of n.o.ble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives naturally told on a body returned by such const.i.tuencies, cut off from the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on politics.

[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]

Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large; and the wider demand for books to read that came of this quickening gave a new extension and vigour to their sale. Addison tells us how large and rapid was the sale of his "Spectator"; and the sale of Shakspere's works shows the amazing effect of the new pa.s.sion for literature on the diffusion of our older authors. Four issues of his plays in folio, none of them probably exceeding five hundred copies, had sufficed to meet the wants of the seventeenth century. But through the eighteenth ten editions at least followed each other in quick succession; and before the century was over as many as thirty thousand copies of Shakspere were dispersed throughout England. Reprints of older works however were far from being the only need of English readers. The new demand created an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed the degradation of letters. The intellectual demand for the moment outran the intellectual supply. The reader called for the writer; but the temper of the time, the diversion of its mental energy to industrial pursuits, the influences which tended to lower its poetic and imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen to any buyer, hawking their flatteries and their libels from door to door, fawning on the patron and the publisher for very bread, tagging rimes which they called poetry, or abuse which they called criticism, vamping up compilations and abridgements under the guise of history, or filling the journals with empty rhetoric in the name of politics.

[Sidenote: Pope.]

It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution; for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of his age was pa.s.sing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart. He was the son of a Catholic linen-draper, who had withdrawn from his business in Lombard Street to a retirement on the skirts of Windsor Forest; and there amidst the stormy years which followed William's accession the boy grew up in an atmosphere of poetry, buried in the study of the older English singers, stealing to London for a peep at Dryden in his arm-chair at Will's, himself already lisping in numbers, and busy with an epic at the age of twelve. Pope's latter years were as secluded as his youth. His life, as Johnson says, was "a long disease"; his puny frame, his crooked figure, the feebleness of his health, his keen sensitiveness to pain, whether of mind or body, cut him off from the larger world of men, and doomed him to the faults of a morbid temperament. To the last he remained vain, selfish, affected; he loved small intrigues and petty lying; he was incredibly jealous and touchy; he dwelt on the fouler aspect of things with an unhealthy pruriency; he stung right and left with a malignant venom. But n.o.bler qualities rose out of this morbid undergrowth of faults. If Pope was quickly moved to anger, he was as quickly moved to tears; though every literary gnat could sting him to pa.s.sion, he could never read the lament of Priam over Hector without weeping. His sympathies lay indeed within a narrow range, but within that range they were vivid and intense; he clung pa.s.sionately to the few he loved; he took their cause for his own; he flung himself almost blindly into their enthusiasms and their hates. But loyal as he was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much, or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into hangers-on of the great.

[Sidenote: The Dunciad.]

With aims and conceptions such as these, Pope looked bitterly out on the phase of transition through which English letters were pa.s.sing. As yet his poetic works had shown little of the keen and ardent temper that lay within him. The promise of his spring was not that of a satirist but of the brightest and most genial of verse writers. When after some fanciful preludes his genius found full utterance in 1712, it was in the "Rape of the Lock"; and the "Rape of the Lock" was a poetic counterpart of the work of the Essayists. If we miss in it the personal and intimate charm of Addison, or the freshness and pathos of Steele, it pa.s.ses far beyond the work of both in the brilliancy of its wit, in the lightness and buoyancy of its tone, in its atmosphere of fancy, its glancing colour, its exquisite verse, its irresistible gaiety. The poem remains Pope's masterpiece; it is impossible to read it without feeling that his mastery lay in social and fanciful verse, and that he missed his poetic path when he laid down the humourist for the philosopher and the critic.

But the state of letters presented an irresistible temptation to criticism. All Pope's n.o.bler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on men whose last fault was dulness. But in the main the "Dunciad" was a n.o.ble vindication of literature from the herd of dullards and dunces that had usurped its name, a protest against the claims of the journalist or pamphleteer, of the compiler of facts and dates, or the grubber among archives, to the rank of men of letters.

[Sidenote: Revival of Letters.]

That there was work and useful work for such men to do, Pope would not have denied. It was when their pretensions threatened the very existence of literature as an art, when the sense that the writer's work was the work of an artist, and like an artist's work must show largeness of design, and grace of form, and fitness of phrase, was either denied or forgotten, it was when every rimer was claiming to be a poet, every fault-finder a critic, every chronicler an historian, that Pope struck at the herd of book-makers and swept them from the path of letters. Such a protest is as true now, and perhaps as much needed now, as it was true and needed then. But it had hardly been uttered when the chaos settled itself, and the intellectual impulse which had as yet been felt mainly in the demand for literature showed itself in its supply. Even before the "Dunciad" was completed a great school of novelists was rising into fame; and the years which elapsed between the death of Pope in 1744 and that of George the Second in 1760 were filled with the masterpieces of Richardson, Smollett, and Fielding. Their appearance was but a prelude of a great literary revival which marked the closing years of the eighteenth century. But the instant popularity of "Clarissa" and "Tom Jones" showed the work of intellectual preparation which had been going on through Walpole's days in the people at large; and it was inevitable that such a quickening of intelligence should tell on English politics.

The very vulgarization of letters indeed, the broadsheets and pamphlets and catchpenny magazines of Grub Street, were doing for the ma.s.s of the people a work which greater writers could hardly have done. Above all the rapid extension of journalism had begun to give opinion a new information and consistency. In spite of the removal of the censors.h.i.+p after the Revolution the press had been slow to attain any political influence. Under the first two Georges its progress had been hindered by the absence of great topics for discussion, the worthlessness of the writers, and above all the lethargy of the time. But at the moment of George the Third's accession the impulse which Pitt had given to the national spirit, and the rise of a keener interest in politics, was fast raising the press into an intellectual and political power. Not only was the number of London newspapers fast increasing, but journals were being established in almost every considerable town.

[Sidenote: Return of the Tories.]

With impulses such as these telling every day on it more powerfully, roused as it was too into action by the larger policy of Pitt, and emboldened at once by the sense of growing wealth and of military triumph, it is clear that the nation must soon have pa.s.sed from its old inaction to claim its part in the direction of public affairs. The very position of Pitt, forced as he had been into office by the sheer force of opinion in the teeth of party obstacles, showed the rise of a new energy in the ma.s.s of the people. It showed that a king who enlisted the national sentiment on his side would have little trouble in dealing with the Whigs. George indeed had no thought of such a policy. His aim was not to control the Parliament by the force of national opinion, but simply to win over the Parliament to his side, and through it to govern the nation with as little regard to its opinion as of old. But, whether he would or no, the drift of opinion aided him. Though the policy of Walpole had ruined Jacobitism, it long remained unconscious of its ruin.

But when a Jacobite prince stood in the heart of the realm, and not a Jacobite answered his call, the spell of Jacobitism was broken; and the later degradation of Charles Edward's life wore finally away the thin coating of disloyalty which clung to the clergy and the squires. They were ready again to take part in politics; and in the accession of a king who unlike his two predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman, who had been born in England and spoke English, they found the opportunity they desired. From the opening of the reign Tories gradually appeared again at court.

[Sidenote: The King's friends.]

It was only slowly indeed that the party as a whole swung round to a steady support of the Government; and in the nation at large the old Toryism was still for some years to show itself in opposition to the Crown. But from the first the Tory n.o.bles and gentry came in one by one; and their action told at once on the complexion of English politics.

Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and when they returned to political life it was to invest the new sovereign with all the reverence which they had bestowed on the Stuarts. In this return of the Tories therefore a "King's party" was ready made to his hand; but George was able to strengthen it by a vigorous exertion of the power and influence which was still left to the Crown. All promotion in the Church, all advancement in the army, a great number of places in the civil administration and about the court, were still at the king's disposal. If this vast ma.s.s of patronage had been practically usurped by the ministers of his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by George the Third; and the character of the House of Commons made patronage a powerful engine in its management. George had one of Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous energy to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. The Whigs were still indeed a great power. "Long possession of government, vast property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friends.h.i.+p, the name of Whigs dear to the majority of the people, the zeal early begun and steadily continued to the royal family, all these together," says Burke justly, "formed a body of power in the nation." But George the Third saw that the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious spirit which springs from a long hold of office, and that they were weakened by the rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the selfishness and corruption of its representatives.

[Sidenote: Pitt and the Whigs.]

More than thirty years before, the statesmen of the day had figured on the stage as highwaymen and pickpockets. And now that statesmen were represented by h.o.a.ry jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt was fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and corruption of party to a young sovereign who aired himself in a character which Bolingbroke had invented, as a Patriot King. Had Pitt and Newcastle held together indeed, supported as the one was by the commercial cla.s.ses, the other by the Whig families and the whole machinery of Parliamentary management, George must have struggled in vain. But the ministry was already disunited. The bulk of the party drew day by day further from Pitt. Attached as they were to peace by the traditions of Walpole, dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty with the pride of a ruling oligarchy, the Whigs were in silent revolt against the war and the supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against their will that he rejected proposals of peace from France which would have secured to England all her conquests on the terms of a desertion of Prussia, and that his steady support enabled Frederick still to hold out against the terrible exhaustion of an unequal struggle. The campaign of 1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of Frederick's genius.

Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by a victory at Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at Torgau: while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old along the Weser.

But even victories drained Frederick's strength. Men and money alike failed him. It was impossible for him to strike another great blow, and the ring of enemies again closed slowly round him. His one remaining hope lay in the support of Pitt, and triumphant as his policy had been, Pitt was tottering to his fall.

[Sidenote: Pitt resigns.]

The envy and resentment of the minister's colleagues at his undisguised supremacy gave the young king an easy means of realizing his schemes.

George had hardly mounted the throne when he made his influence felt in the ministry by forcing it to accept a Court favourite, the Earl of Bute, as Secretary of State. Bute had long been his counsellor, and though his temper and abilities were those of a gentleman usher, he was forced into the Cabinet. The new drift of affairs was seen in the instant desertion from Pitt of the two ablest of his adherents, George Grenville and Charles Townshend, who attached themselves from this moment to the rising favourite. It was seen yet more when Bute pressed for peace. As Bute was known to be his master's mouthpiece, a peace party at once appeared in the Cabinet itself, and it was only a majority of one that approved Pitt's refusal to negotiate with France. "He is madder than ever," was Bute's comment on this refusal in his correspondence with the king; "he has no thought of abandoning the Continent." Conscious indeed as he was of the king's temper and of the temper of his colleagues, Pitt showed no signs of giving way. So far was he from any thought of peace that he proposed at this moment a vast extension of the war. In 1761 he learned the signature of a treaty which brought into force the Family Compact between the Courts of Paris and Madrid, and of a special convention which bound the last to declare war on England at the close of the year. Pitt proposed to antic.i.p.ate the blow by an instant seizure of the treasure fleet which was on its way from the Indies to Cadiz, and for whose safe arrival alone the Spanish Court was deferring its action. He would have followed up the blow by occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and by an attack on the Spanish dominions in the New World. It was almost with exultation that he saw the danger which had threatened her ever since the Peace of Utrecht break at last upon England. His proud sense of the national strength never let him doubt for a moment of her triumph over the foes that had leagued against her. "This is the moment," he exclaimed to his colleagues, "for humbling the whole House of Bourbon." But the Cabinet shrank from plans so vast and daring; and the Duke of Newcastle, who had never forgiven Pitt for forcing himself into power and for excluding him from the real control of affairs, was backed in his resistance by the bulk of the Whigs. The king openly supported them, and Pitt with his brother-in-law Lord Temple found themselves alone. Pitt did not blind himself to the real character of the struggle. The question, as he felt, was not merely one of peace or war, it was whether the new force of opinion which had borne him into office and kept him there was to govern England or no. It was this which made him stake all on the decision of the Cabinet. "If I cannot in this instance prevail," he ended his appeal, "this shall be the last time I will sit in the Council. Called to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself accountable for my conduct, I will not remain in a situation which renders me responsible for measures I am no longer allowed to guide."

His proposals were rejected; and the resignation of his post, which followed in October 1761, changed the face of European affairs.

[Sidenote: George breaks with the Whigs.]

"Pitt disgraced!" wrote a French philosopher, "it is worth two victories to us!" Frederick on the other hand was almost driven to despair. But George saw in the removal of his powerful minister an opening for the realization of his long-cherished plans. The Whigs had looked on Pitt's retirement as the restoration of their rule, unbroken by the popular forces to which it had been driven during his ministry to bow. His declaration that he had been "called to office by the voice of the people, to whom I conceive myself accountable," had been met with indignant scorn by his fellow-ministers. "When the gentleman talks of being responsible to the people," retorted Lord Granville, the Lord Carteret of earlier days, "he talks the language of the House of Commons, and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the King." But his appeal was heard by the people at large. When the dismissed statesman went to Guildhall the Londoners hung on his carriage-wheels, hugged his footmen, and even kissed his horses. Their break with Pitt was in fact the death-blow of the Whigs. In betraying him to the king they had only put themselves in George's power; and so great was the unpopularity of the ministry that the king was able to deliver his longed-for stroke at a party that he hated even more than Pitt. Newcastle found he had freed himself from the great statesman only to be driven from office by a series of studied mortifications from his young master; and the more powerful of his Whig colleagues followed him into retirement. George saw himself triumphant over the two great forces which had hampered the free action of the Crown, "the power which arose," in Burke's words, "from popularity, and the power which arose from political connexion"; and the rise of Lord Bute to the post of First Minister marked the triumph of the king.

[Sidenote: The Peace.]

Bute took office simply as an agent of the king's will; and the first resolve of George the Third was to end the war. In the spring of 1762 Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, was brought to the brink of ruin by a withdrawal of the English subsidies; it was in fact only his dogged resolution and a sudden change in the policy of Russia, which followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina Elizabeth, that enabled him at last to retire from the struggle in the Treaty of Hubertsberg without the loss of an inch of territory. George and Lord Bute had already purchased peace at a very different price.

With a shameless indifference to the national honour they not only deserted Frederick but they offered to negotiate a peace for him on the basis of a cession of Silesia to Maria Theresa and East Prussia to the Czarina. The issue of the strife with Spain saved England from humiliation such as this. Pitt's policy of instant attack had been justified by a Spanish declaration of war three weeks after his fall; and the year 1762 saw triumphs which vindicated his confidence in the issue of the new struggle. Martinico, the strongest and wealthiest of the French West Indian possessions, was conquered at the opening of the year, and its conquest was followed by those of Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent. In the summer the reduction of Havana brought with it the gain of the rich Spanish colony of Cuba. The Philippines, the wealthiest of the Spanish colonies in the Pacific, yielded to a British fleet. It was these losses that brought about the Peace of Paris in February 1763.

So eager was Bute to end the war that he bought peace by restoring all that the last year's triumphs had given him. In Europe he contented himself with the recovery of Minorca, while he restored Martinico to France, and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain. The real gains of Britain were in India and America. In the first the French abandoned all right to any military settlement. From the second they wholly withdrew. To England they gave up Canada, Nova Scotia, and Louisiana as far as the Mississippi, while they resigned the rest of that province to Spain, in compensation for its surrender of Florida to the British Crown.