mortified Bolingbroke, "and how does Anne were shocked to find the stately rooms Fortune banter us!" at Windsor and the long galleries of St. James' thronged with characters which it. would be charity to call doubtful. "There is nothing bad in him as a man," says Lord Chesterfield, whose notions of bad men were peculiar, writing about his king, "but he has no respect for women, and he likes those best who have little principles and much fat." Several of the fine ladies of those days, ambitious of the royal regard, did their utmost to increase their size in the hopes of rivalling the charms of the Duchess of Kendal, née Schulemberg, or those of the Countess of Darlington, née Kielmansegge. "Some succeeded, and others burst," sneers Chesterfield, as well he might.

The condition of affairs at the time of the accession of George I. required the greatest tact and judgment in him who was called to the throne to control the animosity of party feuds and the dangers of the political situation. Unfortunately the new king possessed few of the qualities to recommend him to the feelings of the English people. He was a German, and he took scant pains to hide his preference for the country of his birth. His intimate friends were all Germans, he refused to learn English, and whenever he could escape from St. James' he ran over to his beloved Herrenhausen. Among his boon companions he was jovial, free, and hearty; but when he appeared in state before the public, or had to attend to the various social duties imposed upon royalty, he was stiff, reserved, and ungracious. Except his courage, which was undoubted, he had not a single point in his character to propitiate the nation he had been summoned to govern. His abilities were slender, and his prejudices, which he occasionally mistook for ideas, strong. He was frugal where he ought to have been generous, and lavish where he ought to have been sparing. He rode badly, was a miserable shot, and consequently had little of the English enthusiasm for field sports. His manners were gross and coarse, and his appearance was not in his favour.

Whatever be our faults and vices, we at least prefer that our sins should be veiled from the public eye, to being exposed in all their hideous nudity. But our first George. was utterly indifferent to even the appearance of decorum. He entered London with a band of mistresses so fat and ugly, that they made his infidelity as ridiculous as it was shameless. And this flagrant misconduct became all the more offensive when it was known how harshly he had judged and treated his own wife for her alleged gallantries. Quiet people who remembered the decent, chaste, and formal court of Queen

It was an age of excessive insobriety, but King George drank like a boor, and cared little who saw him in his cups. It was his delight to booze far into the night, playing low buffooneries with his companions amid the laughter of his women, and doing his utmost to transform his court into the taproom of a tavern. Those who remembered the graceful dissipation of the Merry Monarch required all their breeding to suppress their scorn when in the presence of their sovereign. In short, the new king was a man in whom the material part of human nature clouded and weighted the intellectual. Within the pale of civilization it would be difficult to find one who more mistook sensuality for love, dissipation for amusement, and obstinacy for opinions, than he who established the house of Hanover upon the throne of England.

The conduct of such a monarch was hardly calculated to silence the disaffection that was seething around him both at home and abroad. The Jacobites were in ecstasies at the open profligacy of the German king, feeling assured that his manners and immorality would soon alienate the people of England from their allegiance to his family. Horace Walpole tells us that "nothing could be grosser than the ribaldry vomited out in lampoons, libels, and every

The

minor offices were also placed entirely in the hands of Whigs. Well might the mortified Bolingbroke write to Atterbury, "I see plainly that the Tory party is gone."

channel of abuse against the sovereign and | excluded from the cabinet, and had for the the new court, and chanted even in their moment to content himself with the subhearing about the public streets." The ordinate post of paymaster-general. Tories, disgusted with their exclusion from office, were intriguing again with the Pretender, and urging him, but-to his credit be it said with no avail, to abandon his religion. Abroad the accession of the house The Tory party was indeed gone; the of Hanover had made many enemies. elections were carried everywhere in favFrance was opposed to it, and was secretly our of the Whigs, and one of the first acts watching her opportunity. Spain and Italy of the now popular party, on acceding to disapproved of it. The Emperor of Ger- power, was to condemn the past misconduct Ger-power, many viewed it with jealousy. On all of their rivals when in office. So severe sides the new sovereign was encompassed were the strictures passed upon the late by enemies. Frenchified ministry" for their disloyal schemes for the restoration of the Pretender, and for their conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht-a treaty, said the Whigs, which had sold the nation to France-that Bolingbroke, who had fled to Paris, was impeached with others of his colleagues for high treason. The failure of the Jacobite insurrection, which now broke out in Scotland, tended all the more to prejudice the nation against the old Tory party, and to consolidate the accession of the house of Hanover to the English throne.

Yet so difficult is it to predict the result of political complications, no ruler's reign was more peaceable than that of George I. The king did as he pleased in his private life, and intrusted his political conduct to the hands of his ministers. The Jacobites were disappointed in their hopes of the return of the Pretender. Louis XIV. found it prudent to decline his support to the cause of the Stuart dynasty; consequently the Pretender circulated his manifestoes in vain, and the insurrection in Scotland turned out a complete failure. It was not long before the foreign powers came to the conclusion that England as an ally under the house of Hanover was preferable to England as a foe rejecting the house of Stuart. They soon, therefore, gave in their adherence to the new state of things, and the Pretender crossed the Alps, to become the recipient of the bounty of the Vatican.

On the accession of George I. the affairs of the nation were confided to a wholly Whig administration. The Treasury was put into commission with Lord Halifax as its head. Lord Townshend, brother-in-law of Sir Robert Walpole, and General Stanhope were the secretaries of state; Lord Cowper was lord chancellor; the Earl of Nottingham president of the council; Lord Sunderland lord lieutenant of Ireland; Marlborough captain-general and master of the ordnance. Walpole, however, was

One of the first acts of the Whigs was to introduce a measure which they had long advocated, and which during recent years a certain mischievous element in this country has been desirous of repealing. The Septennial Bill became law. This bill, it has been well said, marks the era of the emancipation of the House of Commons from its former dependence upon the crown and the peers. Men were now able to give to the state what they had formerly been obliged to give to their constituents. By the Triennial Act, which fixed the duration of Parliament at three years, so as to obviate a repetition of the tactics of the Stuarts from postponing at will the assembling of Parliament, a seat in the Lower House had been always more or less shifting and uncertain. Scarcely had a member become familiar with the atmosphere of Parliament, and was beginning to be of use in the assembly, than it became necessary for him

again to face his constituents and demand | to be gained by manipulating its majorities, re-election. The consequence was that preferred to remain in the Lower House. members of the House of Cominons who, unlike Walpole, did not represent family boroughs felt themselves compelled to be constantly working their interest among their constituents, attending local meetings, and dealing with purely, and often petty, local matters, so as to insure their return, instead of displaying their talents free and unfettered in the House of Commons. The need for reform in the duration of Parliament was well stated by Steele in his speech for the repeal of the Triennial Act: "Ever since the Triennial Bill has been enacted," he said, "the nation has been in a series of contentions. The first year of a triennial Parliament has been spent in vindictive decisions and animosities about the late elections. The second session has entered into business, but rather with a spirit of contradiction to what the prevailing set of men in former Parliaments had brought to pass than for a disinterested zeal for the common good. The third session has languished in the pursuit of what little was intended to be done in the second; and the approach of an ensuing election has terrified the members into a servile management, according as their respective principals were disposed towards the question before them in the House. Thus the state of England has been like that of a vessel in distress at sea; the pilot and mariners have been wholly employed in keeping the ship from sinking; the art of navigation was useless, and they never pretended to make sail." By changing the duration of Parliament from three to seven years the House of Commons gradually developed the powers intrusted to it by the system of parliamentary government till it assumed its present position-that of the centre and force of the state. Until the passing of the Septennial Bill the leader of either of the political parties had always a seat in the House of Lords. Walpole, the first to perceive the growth and strength of the House of Commons, and the advantages

Though now but thirty-nine years of age he had, on the death of Lord Carlisle, succeeded to the post of first lord of the Treasury. Associated with his brother-inlaw Townshend, the two were virtually the cabinet, and it was their advice and influence which directed and controlled all proceedings. The elements of disintegration, however, soon made themselves felt. The cabinet-like nearly all the cabinets of the eighteenth century-was divided by intestine jealousies-the mischievous Sunderland and the double-dealing Stanhope intriguing to oust Townshend and Walpole from office; the feud between the Prince of Wales and the king was cleverly made use of by the Tories-to which party the heir-apparent to the throne belonged, in order to spite his father-to hamper the Whigs; whilst the German Junto, consisting of the members of the royal harem and one or two scheming Hanoverian counsellors who ruled the king, cordially hated Walpole because he refused to grant the favours they demanded, and longed for his downfall. It was therefore very evident that it needed only time for the TownshendWalpole ministry to succumb to the tactics. of its enemies. Nor had the Tories and discontented Whigs long to wait. Townshend as secretary of state had opposed the foreign policy of the king, who wished, as an Hanoverian sovereign, to draw England into disputes which concerned Hanover alone. To this course the two leaders of the cabinet warmly objected; and the king, who was wholly German in his sympathies, played into the hands of the wily and pliant Sunderland and his fidus Achates Stanhope, who were both actively intriguing to succeed Townshend and Walpole; and in a fit of temper the German potentate gave Townshend his congé. Walpole took the part of his brother-in-law and sent in his own resignation, an example which was followed by several of his colleagues. A new Whig ministry was then framed. Stanhope became