VOLUME I (OF 4)***


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A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES

by

JUSTIN MCCARTHY, M.P.

Author of "A History of Our Own Times" Etc.

In Four Volumes

VOL. I.







New York
Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square
1901




CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.


CHAP.                                                      PAGE

     I. "MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!".......    1
    II. PARTIES AND LEADERS ...............   16
   III. "LOST FOR WANT OF SPIRIT" ............   39
    IV. THE KING COMES..................   55
     V. WHAT THE KING CAME TO ..............   63
    VI. OXFORD'S HALL; BOLINGBKOKE'S FLIGHT .......   91
   VII. THE WHITE COCKADE ................  116
  VIII. AFTER THE REBELLION ...............  135
    IX. "MALICE DOMESTIC.--FOREIGN LEVY".........  158
     X. HOME AFFAIRS...................  168
    XI. "THE EARTH HATH BUBBLES".............  183
   XII. AFTER THE STORM .................  202
  XIII. THE BANISHMENT OF ATTERBURY ...........  211
   XIV. WALPOLE IN POWER AS WELL AS OFFICE........  224
    XV. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS ..............  240
   XVI. THE OPPOSITION..................  249
  XVII. "OSNABRUCK!  OSNABRUCK!".............  262
 XVIII. GEORGE THE SECOND ................  272
   XIX. "THE PATRIOTS"..................  284
    XX. A VICTORY FOR THE PATRIOTS............  299
        INDEX ......................  322




{1}

A HISTORY

OF

THE FOUR GEORGES.


CHAPTER I.

"MORE, ALAS! THAN THE QUEEN'S LIFE!"

"The Queen is pretty well," Swift wrote to Lord Peterborough on May 18,
1714, "at present, but the least disorder she has puts all in alarm."
Swift goes on to tell his correspondent that "when it is over we act as
if she were immortal; neither is it possible to persuade people to make
any preparations against an evil day."  Yet on the condition of Queen
Anne's health depended to all appearance the continuance of peace in
England.  While Anne was sinking down to death, rival claimants were
planning to seize the throne; rival statesmen and rival parties were
plotting, intriguing, sending emissaries, moving troops, organizing
armies, for a great struggle.  Queen Anne had reigned for little more
than twelve years.  She succeeded William the Third on March 8, 1702,
and at the time when Swift wrote the words we have quoted, her reign
was drawing rapidly to a close.

Anne was not a woman of great capacity or of elevated moral tone.  She
was moral indeed in the narrow and more limited sense which the word
has lately come to have among us.  She always observed decorum and
propriety herself; she always discouraged vice in others; but she had
no idea of political morality or of high {2} political purpose, and she
had allowed herself to be made the instrument of one faction or
another, according as one old woman or the other prevailed over her
passing mood.  While she was governed by the Duchess of Marlborough,
the Duke of Marlborough and his party had the ascendant.  When Mrs.
Masham succeeded in establishing herself as chief favorite, the Duke of
Marlborough and his followers went down.  Burnet, in his "History of My
Own Times," says of Queen Anne, that she "is easy of access, and hears
everything very gently; but opens herself to so few, and is so cold and
general in her answers, that people soon find that the chief
application is to be made to her ministers and favorites, who, in their
turns, have an entire credit and full power with her.  She has laid
down the splendor of a court too much, and eats privately; so that,
except on Sundays, and a few hours twice or thrice a week, at night, in
the drawing-room, she appears so little that her court is, as it were,
abandoned."  Although Anne lived during the Augustan Age of English
literature, she had no literary capacity or taste.  Kneller's portrait
of the Queen gives her a face rather agreeable and intelligent than
otherwise--a round, full face, with ruddy complexion and dark-brown
hair.  A courtly biographer, commenting on this portrait, takes
occasion to observe that Anne "was so universally beloved that her
death was more sincerely lamented than that of perhaps any other
monarch who ever sat on the throne of these realms."  A curious comment
on that affection and devotion of the English people to Queen Anne is
supplied by the fact which Lord Stanhope mentions, that "the funds rose
considerably on the first tidings of her danger, and fell again on a
report of her recovery."

[Sidenote: 1714--Fighting for the Crown]

England watched with the greatest anxiety the latest days of Queen
Anne's life; not out of any deep concern for the Queen herself, but
simply because of the knowledge that with her death must come a crisis
and might come a revolution.  Who was to snatch the crown as it fell
from Queen Anne's dying head?  Over at Herrenhausen, in {3} Hanover,
was one claimant to the throne; flitting between Lorraine and St.
Germains was another.  Here, at home, in the Queen's very
council-chamber, round the Queen's dying bed, were the English heads of
the rival parties caballing against each other, some of them deceiving
Hanover, some of them deceiving James Stuart, and more than one, it
must be confessed, deceiving at the same moment Hanoverians and Stuarts
alike.  Anne had no children living; she had borne to her husband, the
feeble and colorless George of Denmark, a great many children--eighteen
or nineteen it is said--but most of them died in their very infancy,
and none lived to maturity.  No succession therefore could take place,
but only an accession, and at such a crisis in the history of England
any deviation from the direct line must bring peril with it.  At the
time when Queen Anne lay dying, it might have meant a new revolution
and another civil war.

While Anne lies on that which is soon to be her death-bed, let us take
a glance at the rival claimants of her crown, and the leading English
statesmen who were partisans on this side or on that, or who were still
hesitating about the side it would be, on the whole, most prudent and
profitable to choose.

The English Parliament had