small one, in spite too of the difference between the king who began by choosing his ministers from both parties, and the king who persisted in choosing his ministers from only one, the work of pacification was accomplished by George even more thoroughly than by William.

George L was fortunate in arriving in England when a great military struggle had come to an end. He had therefore no reason to call upon the nation to make great sacrifices. All that he wanted was to secure for himself and his family a high position which he hardly knew how to occupy, to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German mistresses, to get away as often as possible from the uncongenial islanders whose language he was unable to speak, and to use the strength of England to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. In order to do this he attached himself entirely to the Whig party, though he refused to place himself at the disposal of its leaders. He gave his confidence, not to Somers and Wharton and Marlborough, but to Stanhope and Townshend, the statesmen of the second rank. At first he seemed to be playing a dangerous game. The Tories, whom he rejected, were numerically superior to their adversaries, and were strong in the support of the country gentlemen and the country clergy. The strength of the Whigs lay in the towns and in the higher aristocracy. Below both parties lay the mass of the nation, which cared nothing for politics except in special seasons of excitement, and which asked only to be let alone. In 1715 a Jacobite insurrection in the north, supported by the appearance of the Pretender, the son of James II., in Scotland, was suppressed, and its suppression not only gave to the Government a character of stability, but displayed its adversaries in an unfavourable light as the disturbers of the peace.

Even this advantage, however, would have been thrown away, if the Whigs in power had continued to be animated by violent party spirit. What really happened was that the Tory leaders were excluded from office, but that the principles and prejudices of the Tories were admitted to their full weight in the policy of the Government. The natural result followed. The leaders to whom no regard was paid continued in opposition. The rank and file who would personally have gained nothing by a party victory were conciliated into quiescence.'

Stanhope in conjunction with Sunderland took up a more
decided Whig policy. The Occasional Conformity Act and
the Schism Act were repealed in 1719. But the wish of
the liberal Whigs to modify if not to repeal the Test Act
remained unsatisfied. In the following year the bursting
of the South Sea bubble, and the subsequent deaths of
Stanhope in 1721 and of Sunderland in 1722, cleared the
way for the accession to power of Sir Robert Walpole, to
whom and not to the king was due the conciliatory policy
which quieted Tory opposition by abstaining from pushing
Whig principles to their legitimate consequences.
Nevertheless something of the honour due to Walpole
must be reckoned to the king's credit. It is evident that
at his accession his decisions were by no means unimport-
ant. The royal authority was still able within certain
limits to make its own terms. This support was so neces-
sary to the Whigs that they made no resistance when he
threw aside their leaders on his arrival in England. When
by his personal intervention he dismissed Townshend and
appointed Sunderland, he had no such social and parliament-
ary combination to fear as that which almost mastered his
great-grandson in his struggle for power.
If such a com-
bination arose before the end of his reign it was owing
more to his omitting to fulfil the duties of his station than
from the necessity of the case. As he could talk no
English, and his ministers could talk no German, he
absented himself from the meetings of the cabinet,
and his frequent absences from England and his want of
interest in English politics strengthened the cabinet in its
tendency to assert an independent position. Walpole at
last by his skill in the management of parliament rose as
a subject into the almost royal position denoted by the
name of prime minister. In connexion with Walpole the
force of wealth and station established the Whig aristocracy
in a point of vantage from which it was afterwards difficult
to dislodge them. Yet, though George had allowed the
power which had been exercised by William and Anne to
slip through his hands, it was understood to the last that
if he chose to exert himself he might cease to be a mere
cipher in the conduct of affairs. As late as in 1727
Bolingbroke gained over one of the king's mistresses, the
duchess of Kendal; and though her support of the fallen
Jacobite took no effect, Walpole was not without fear that
her reiterated entreaties would lead to his dismissal. The
king's death in a carriage on his way to Hanover, in the
night between 10th and 11th June in the same year, put
an end to these apprehensions.

His only children were his successor George II., and
Sophia Dorothea (1687-1757), who married in 1706 Fre-
derick William, crown prince (afterwards king) of Prussia.
She was the mother of Frederick the Great. (S. B. G.)

This mingling of two policies was conspicuous both in the foreign and the domestic actions of the reign. In the days of Queen Anne, the Whig party had advocated the continuance of war with a view to the complete humiliation of the king of France, whom they feared as the protector of the Pretender, and in whose family connexion with the king of Spain they saw a danger for England. The Tory party on the other hand had been the authors of the peace of Utrecht, and held that France was sufficiently depressed. GEORGE II. (George Augustus, 1683-1760), the only A fortunate concurrence of circumstances enabled George's son of George I., was born in 1683. In 1705 he ministers, by an alliance with the regent of France, the married Wilhelmina Caroline of Anspach. In 1706 he duke of Orleans, to pursue at the same time the Whig was created earl of Cambridge. In 1708 he fought policy of separating France from Spain and from the cause bravely at Oudenarde. At his father's accession to the of the Pretender, and the Tory policy of the maintenance English throne he was thirty-one years of age. He was of a good understanding with their neighbour across the already on bad terms with his father. The position of Channel. The same eclecticism was discernible in the pro- an heir-apparent is in no case an easy one to fill with ceedings of the home Government. The Whigs were con- dignity, and the ill treatment of the prince's mother by his ciliated by the repeal of the Schism Act and the Occasional father was not likely to strengthen in him a reverence for Conformity Act, whilst the Tories were conciliated by the paternal authority. It was most unwillingly that, on his maintenance of the Test Act in all its vigour. The satis first journey to Hanover in 1716, George I. appointed the faction of the masses was increased by the general well-prince of Wales guardian of the realm during his absence. being of the nation. În 1717 the existing ill feeling ripened into an open breach. At the baptism of one of his children, the prince selected one godfather whilst the king persisted in selecting another. The young man spoke angrily, was ordered into arrest, and was subsequently commanded to leave St James's, and to be excluded from all court ceremonies. The prince took

Very little of all that was thus accomplished was directly owing to George I. The policy of the reign is the policy of his ministers. Stanhope and Townshend from 1714 to 1717 were mainly occupied with the defence of the Hanoverian settlement. After the dismissal of the latter in 1717,

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his residence at Leicester House, and did everything in | might show his spite to his father who had provided all his power to support the opposition against his father's necessary attendance at the former place. George ordered ministers. his son to quit St James's, and to absent himself from court. Frederick in disgrace gave the support of his name, and he had nothing else to give, to the Opposi tion. Later in the year 1737, on November 20, Queen Caroline died. In 1742 Walpole, weighed down by the unpopularity both of his reluctance to engage in a war with Spain and of his supposed remissness in conducting the operations of that war, was driven from office. His successors formed a composite ministry in which Walpole's old colleagues and Walpole's old opponents were alike to be found.

When therefore George I, died in 1727, it was generally supposed that Walpole would be at once dismissed. The first direction of the new king was that Sir Spencer Compton would draw up the speech in which he was to announce to the Privy Council his accession. Compton, not knowing how to set about his task, applied to Walpole for aid. The queen took advantage of this evidence of incapacity, advocated Walpole's cause with her husband, and procured his continuance in office. This curious scene was indicative of the course likely to be taken by the new sovereign. His own mind was incapable of rising above the merest details of business. He made war in the spirit of a drill-sergeant, and he economized his income with the minute regularity of a clerk. A blunder of a master of the ceremonies in marshalling the attendants on a levee put him out of temper. He took the greatest pleasure in counting his money piece by piece, and he never forgot a date. He was above all things methodical and regular. "He seems," said one who knew him well, "to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it to-morrow."

Most men so utterly immersed in details would be very impracticable to deal with. They would obstinately refuse to listen to a wisdom and prudence which meant nothing in their ears, and which brought home to them a sense of their own inferiority. It was the happy peculiarity of George II. that he was exempt from this failing. He seemed to have an instinctive understanding that such and such persons were either wiser or even stronger than himself, and when he had once discovered that, he gave way with scarcely a struggle. Thus it was that, though in his domestic relations he was as loose a liver as his father had been, he allowed himself to be guided by the wise but unobtrusive counsels of his wife until her death in 1737, and that when once he had recognized Walpole's superiority he allowed himself to be guided by the political sagacity of the great minister. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of such a temper upon the development of the constitution. The apathy of the nation in all but the most exciting political questions, fostered by the calculated conservatism of Walpole, had thrown power into the hands of the great landowners. They maintained their authority by supporting a minister who was ready to make use of corruption, wherever corruption was likely to be useful, and who could veil over the baseness of the means which he employed by his talents in debate and in finance. To shake off a combination so strong would not have been easy. George II. submitted to it without a struggle.

So strong indeed had the Whig aristocracy grown that it began to lose its cohesion. Walpole was determined to monopolize power, and he dismissed from office all who ven

tured to oppose him. An Opposition formidable in talents was gradually formed. In its composite ranks were to be found Tories and discontented Whigs, discarded official hacks who were hungry for the emoluments of office, and youthful purists who fancied that if Walpole were removed, bribes and pensions would cease to be attractive to a corrupt generation. Behind them was Bolingbroke, excluded from parliament but suggesting every party move. In 1737 the opposition acquired the support of Frederick prince of Wales. The young man, weak and headstrong, rebelled against the strict discipline exacted by his father. His marriage in 1736 to Augusta of Saxony brought on an open quarrel In 1737 just as the princess of Wales was about to give birth to her first child, she was hurried away by her husband from Hampton Court to St James's Palace at the imminent risk of her life, simply in order that the prince

The years which followed settled conclusively, at least for this reign, the constitutional question of the power of appointing ministers. The war between Spain and England had broken out in 1739. In 1741 the death of the emperor Charles VI. brought on the war of the Austrian succession. The position of George II. as a Hanoverian prince drew him to the side of Maria Theresa through jealousy of the rising Prussian monarchy. Jealousy of France led England in the same direction, and in 1741 a subsidy of £300,000 was voted to Maria Theresa. The king himself went to Germany and attempted to carry on the war according to his own notions. Those notions led him to regard the safety of Hanover as of far more importance than the wishes of England. Finding that a French army was about to march upon his German states, he concluded with France a treaty of neutrality for a year without consulting a single English minister. In England the news was received with feelings of disgust. The expenditure of English money and troops was to be thrown uselessly away as soon as it appeared that Hanover was in the slightest danger. In 1742 Walpole was no longer in office. Lord Wilmington, the nominal head of the ministry, was a mere cipher. The ablest and most energetic of his colleagues, Lord Carteret, attached himself specially to the king, and sought to maintain himself in power by his special favour and by brilliant achievements in diplomacy. In part at least by Carteret's mediation the peace of Breslau was signed, by which Maria Theresa ceded Silesia to Frederick (July 28, 1742). Thus relieved on her northern frontier, she struck out vigorously towards the west. Bavaria was overrun by her troops. In the begin ning of 1743 one French army was driven across the Rhine. On June 27th another French army was defeated by George II. in person at Dettingen. Victory brought elation to Maria Theresa. Her war of defence was turned into a war of vengeance. Bavaria was to be annexed. The French frontier was to be driven back. George II. and Carteret after some hesitation placed themselves on her side. Of the public opinion of the political classes in England they took no thought. Hanoverian troops were indeed to be employed in the war, but they were to be taken into British pay. Collisions between British and Hanoverian officers were frequent. A storm arose against the preference shown to Hanoverian interests. After a brief struggle Carteret, having become Lord Granville by his mother's death, was driven from office in November 1744.

Henry Pelham, who had become prime minister in the preceding year, thus saw himself established in power. By the acceptance of this ministry, the king acknowledged that the function of choosing a ministry and directing a policy had passed from his hands. In 1745 indeed be recalled Granville, but a few days were sufficient to convince him of the futility of his attempt, and the effort to exclude Pitt at a later time proved equally fruitless.

Important as were the events of the remainder of the reign, therefore, they can hardly be grouped round the name

position which he assumed was as contrary to the principles of parliamentary government as the encroachments of Charles I had been. But it was veiled in the eyes of Englishmen by the prominence given to the power of the British parliament rather than to the power of the British king. In fact the theory of parliamentary government, like most theories after their truth has long been universally acknowledged, had become a superstition. Parliaments were held to be properly vested with authority, not because they adequately represented the national will, but simply because they were parliaments. There were thousands of people in England to whom it never occurred that there was any good reason why a British parliament should be allowed to levy a duty on tea in the London docks and should not be allowed to levy a duty on tea at the wharves of Boston. Undoubtedly George III. derived great strength from his honest participation in this mistake. Contending under parliamentary forms, he did not wound the susceptibilities of members of parliament, and when at last in 1770 he appointed Lord North-a minister of his own selection-prime minister, the object of his ambition was achieved with the concurrence of a large body of politicians who had nothing in common with the servile band of the king's friends.

overpower America and France together. Lord North retained office, but he acknowledged to the king that his own opinion was precisely the same as that of his late colleagues.

The year 1780 saw an agitation rising in the country for economical reform, an agitation very closely though indirectly connected with the war policy of the king. The public meetings held in the country on this subject have no unimportant place in the development of the constitution. Since the presentation of the Kentish Petition in the reign of William III. there had been from time to time upheav ings of popular feeling against the doings of the legislature, which kept up the tradition that parliament existed in order to represent the nation. But these upheavings had all been so associated with ignorance and violence as to make it very difficult for men of sense to look with displeasure upon the existing emancipation of the House of Commons from popular control The Sacheverel riots, the violent attacks upon the Excise Bill, the no less violent advocacy of the Spanish war, the declamations of the supporters of Wilkes at a more recent time, and even in this very year the Gordon riots, were not likely to make thoughtful men anxious to place real power in the hands of the classes from whom such exhibitions of folly proceeded. But the movement for economical reform was of a very different kind. It was carried on soberly in manner, and with a definite practical object. It asked for no more than the king ought to have been willing to concede. It attacked useless expenditure upon sinecures and unnecessary offices in the household, the only use of which was to spread abroad corruption amongst the upper classes. George III. could not bear to be interfered with at all, or to surrender any element of power which had served him in his long struggle with the Whigs. He held out for more thau another year. The news of the capitulation of York Town reached London on November 25, 1781. On March 20, 1782, Lord North resigned.

As long as the struggle with America was carried on with any hope of success they gained that kind of support which is always forthcoming to a Government which shares in the errors and prejudices of its subjects. The expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons in 1769, and the refusal of the House to accept him as a member after his re-election, raised a grave constitutional question in which the king was wholly in the wrong; and Wilkes was popular in London and Middlesex. But his case roused no national indignation, and when in 1774 those sharp measures were taken with Boston which led to the commencement of the American rebellion in 1775, the opposition to the course taken by the king made little way either in parliament or in the country. Burke might point out the folly and in- George III. accepted the consequences of defeat. He expedience of the proceedings of the Government. Chatham called the marquis of Rockingham to office at the head of might point out that the true spirit of English government a ministry composed of pure Whigs and of the disciples of was to be representative, and that that spirit was being vio- the late earl of Chatham, and he authorized the new lated at home and abroad. George III., who thought that ministry to open negotiations for peace. Their hands were the first duty of the Americans was to obey himself, had greatly strengthened by Rodney's victory over the French on his side the mass of unreflecting Englishmen who fleet, and the failure of the combined French and Spanish thought that the first duty of all colonists was to be useful attack upon Gibraltar; and before the end of 1782 a proand submissive to the mother-country. The natural dis- visional treaty was signed with America, preliminaries of like of every country engaged in war to see itself defeated peace with France and Spain being signed early in the followwas on his side, and when the news of Burgoyne's surrendering year. On September 3, 1783, the definitive treaties with at Saratoga arrived in 1777, subscriptions of money to raise new regiments poured freely in.

the three countries were simultaneously concluded. “Sir," said the king to Mr Adams the first minister of the United In March 1778 the French ambassador in London States of America accredited to him, "I wish you to announced that a treaty of friendship and commerce had believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I been concluded between France and the new United States have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought of America. Lord North was anxious to resign power into myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed stronger hands, and begged the king to receive Chatham as to my people. I will be very frank with you. I was the his prime minister. The king would not hear of it. He last to consent to the separation; but the separation having would have nothing to say to "that perfidious man "unless been made and having become inevitable, I have always he would humble himself to enter the ministry as North's said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the subordinate. Chatham naturally refused to do anything friendship of the United States as an independent power." of the kind, and his death in the course of the year relieved the king of the danger of being again overruled by too overbearing a minister. England was now at war with France, and in 1779 she was also at war with Spain.

George III. was still able to control the disposition of office. He could not control the course of events. His very ministers gave up the struggle as hopeless long before he would acknowledge the true state of the case. Before the end of 1779, two of the leading members of the cabinet, Lords Gower and Weymouth, resigned rather than bear the responsibility of so ruinous an enterprise as the attempt to

Long before the signature of the treaties Rockingham died (July 1, 1782). The king chose Lord Shelburne, the head of the Chatham section of the Government, to be prime minister. Fox and the followers of Rockingham refused to serve except under the duke of Portland, a minister of their own selection, and resigned office. The old constitutional struggle of the reign was now to be fought out once more. Fox, too weak to obtain a majority alone, coalesced with Lord North, and defeated Shelburne in the House of Commons on February 17, 1783. On April 2 the coalition took office, with Portland es nominal

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