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ATIONS

CHAPTER XXXVII.

EUROPEAN AND COLONIAL WARS.

SECTION I.-EUROPEAN STATES-SYSTEM FROM

1714 TO 1740.

Great Britain

under the

Bruns

wick.

THE death of the Princess Sophia of Hanover made her son, the Elector George Louis of Hanover, the heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland by the terms of the Act of Settlement passed by House of the English Parliament in 1701 and accepted by Scotland upon her Constitutional, or Parliamentary Union with England in 1707. Upon Queen Anne's death, August 1, 1714, this German prince was in- George I., stantly proclaimed King of Great Britain by the queen's counselors, with the title of GEORGE I.; thus beginning the reign of the present House of Brunswick, or Hanover, or Guelf.

It was believed that the Jacobites would endeavor to offer a forcible opposition to the accession of George I.; but they were taken by surprise by Queen Anne's death, and were therefore unprepared to make any resistance.

George I. made no haste to take possession of his new kingdom, and did not arrive in England until six weeks after Queen Anne's death, when he and his eldest son landed at Greenwich. He was well received by his new subjects, but he utterly lacked the qualities essential to arouse the loyalty of the English people. Being a thorough German, he could not speak a word of English, and was obliged to learn by rote a few English words in which to reply to the addresses of his new subjects. He was fifty-four years of age when he ascended the British throne, and was small of stature, awkward in manner and insignificant in appearance. His private life was scandalous; and when he came to England he left his wife, Sophia of Zell, behind him in Germany, a prisoner in one of his castles in his Electorate of Hanover. He was honest and well intentioned in his treatment of his new subjects, but could never learn to be an Englishman. He preferred his native Hanover as a residence and visited that country yearly, thus causing constant annoyance and embarrassment to his Ministers in

A. D.

1714

1727.

Situation.

George I.

and the English People.

His

Private Life and Character.

New Whig Ministry.

Tory

larity.

England. The English nation cordially disliked him, and tolerated him only because he was a constitutional monarch and the only Protestant heir to the British crown, and because he did not interfere with their liberties.

George I. began his reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland by excluding the Tories from the government and forming a new Ministry consisting almost exclusively of Whigs, who were his natural supporters. He took no part in the government of his new kingdom, leaving the affairs of state entirely to his Ministers.

Queen Anne's Tory Ministers had disgusted the English nation by Unpopu- their plots for the restoration of the Stuarts to the British throne, and had thus made their party odious to the great majority of Englishmen. The restoration of the Stuarts would have been simply the undoing of the work of the Revolution of 1688, the repudiation of the national debt and the reëstablishment of Roman Catholicism by force.

Whig Popularity.

The Whigs were pledged to sustain the result of the Revolution of 1688, and could not be suspected of disloyalty to the system which they had established, whatever their faults as a party. The confidence of the English nation in the Whig party was not misplaced; as the plots of the Tory leaders, the Earl of Oxford and Lord Bolingbroke, had left the Whigs as the sole representatives of the principles of the Revolution of 1688, and of constitutional liberty and religious freedom. So overwhelmingly Whig was the first House of Commons summoned by George I. soon after his accession that it had less than fifty Tory members, and the Jacobite sympathies of these were so well understood that they had no influence in the government. In the new Whig Ministry, Lord Townshend was appointed Secretary of State; and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole, became successively PayMinistry. master of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Treasury.

Whigs in
Power.

Lord

Townshend's

Impeach- One of the first acts of the new Whig Parliament was to impeach Lord Bolingbroke, the Earl of Oxford and the Duke of Ormond for Tory Leaders. misconduct in the negotiations which resulted in the Treaty of Utrecht and for intriguing with the Pretender James Stuart. At the beginning of these proceedings Lord Bolingbroke fled to France, and was followed by the Duke of Ormond. The Earl of Oxford remained at home to face his Whig enemies, and was sent a prisoner of state to the Tower, but was acquitted and released two years afterward. Parliament passed Acts of Attainder against Lord Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond.

Riots

These proceedings of the Whig Parliament exasperated the Tory Riot Act. party, thus causing riots in various parts of England. These dis

and the

tender and the

Jacobite Scotland. Rising in

turbances became so numerous and so serious that Parliament passed the Riot Act, making it a felony for members of an unlawful assembly to refuse to disperse when commanded by a magistrate to do so. The Pretender James Stuart was then residing in France, and the The PreTory disaffection and disturbances in England encouraged him to hope that he could succeed in an effort to recover his ill-fated father's throne. Lord Bolingbroke, who fully understood English public sentiment, urged the Pretender not to make the attempt, assuring him that it would certainly end in failure; but young James Stuart was as insensible to reason as his father had been, and ordered the Earl of Mar, the Jacobite leader in Scotland, to raise the standard of the Stuarts in that country. The Earl of Mar obeyed the Pretender's order by raising the standard of the young Stuart in the Highlands, September 6, 1715. The Earl of Mar believed that his revolt in Scotland would be followed by a Jacobite rising in the West of England, but he soon discovered his mistake. He was joined by a few Englishmen from the northern counties; but the vigorous measures of the government deprived him of material aid from England, where the leading Jacobites were arrested, thus depriving their party of its leaders.

Sheriff

Muir.

The Earl of Mar was incompetent and cowardly. He advanced Battle of southward into the Lowlands, and was joined at Perth by six thousand Highlanders. On the royal side the Duke of Argyle summoned his clansmen, the numerous and powerful Campbells, to take up arms for King George I. The hostile forces encountered each other at SheriffMuir, near Dumblain, November 6, 1715. The troops of the Earl of Mar were successful at the first onset; and General Whetham, the commander of a division in the army of the Duke of Argyle, fled in full gallop to Stirling, exclaiming that the king's Scotch army had been utterly beaten. However, in the meantime, the Duke of Argyle's own division had defeated the body of the Earl of Mar's troops confronting them, but upon returning to the field met the victorious insurgents. As neither party seemed inclined to renew the struggle, they stood looking at each other for several hours, after which they withdrew in different directions, each claiming the victory. One of the Jacobite songs alluding to this drawn battle begun thus:

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