A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume I Part 1

A History of the Four Georges.

Volume I.

by Justin McCarthy.

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 pa.s.sing mood. While she was governed by the d.u.c.h.ess 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 taken steps, immediately after the Revolution of 1688, to prevent a restoration of the Stuart dynasty.

The Bill of Rights, pa.s.sed in the first year of the reign of William and Mary, declared that the crown of England should pa.s.s in the first instance to the heirs of Mary, then to the Princess Anne, her sister, and to the heirs of the Princess Anne, and after that to the heirs, if any, of William, by any subsequent marriage. Mary, however, died childless; William was sinking into years and in miserable health, apparently only waiting and anxious for death, and it was clear that he would not marry again. The only one of Anne's many children who approached maturity, the Duke of Gloucester, died just after his eleventh birthday. The little duke was a pupil of Bishop Burnet, and was a child of great promise. {4} Readers of fiction will remember that Henry Esmond, in Thackeray's novel, is described as having obtained some distinction in his academical course, "his Latin poem on the 'Death of the Duke of Gloucester,' Princess Anne of Denmark's son, having gained him a medal and introduced him to the society of the University wits." After the death of this poor child it was thought necessary that some new steps should be taken to cut off the chances of the Stuarts. The Act of Settlement, pa.s.sed in 1701, excluded the sons or successors of James the Second, and all other Catholic claimants, from the throne of England, and entailed the crown on the Electress Sophia of Hanover as the nearest Protestant heir, in case neither the reigning king nor the Princess Anne should have issue. The Electress Sophia was the mother of George, afterwards the First of England. She seems to have had good-sense as well as talent; her close friend Leibnitz once said of her that she was not only given to asking why, but also wanted to know the why of the whys. She was not very anxious to see her son George made sovereign of England, and appeared to be under the impression that his training and temper would not allow him to govern with a due regard for the notions of const.i.tutional liberty which prevailed even then among Englishmen. It even seems that Sophia made the suggestion that James Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he has since been called, would do well to become a Protestant, go in for const.i.tutional Government, and thus have a chance of the English throne. It is certain that she strongly objected to his being compared with Perkin Warbeck, or called a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. She accepted, however, the position offered to her and her son by the Act of Settlement, and appears to have become gradually reconciled to it, and even, as she sank into years, is said to have expressed a hope many times that the name of Queen of England might be inscribed upon her coffin. She came very near to the gratification of her wish. She died in June, 1714, being then in her eighty-fourth year--only a very few days before {5} Queen Anne received her first warning of the near approach of death.

Her son George succeeded to her claim upon the crown of England.

[Sidenote: 1714--The House of Brunswick]

The reigning house of Hanover was one of those lucky families which appear to have what may be called a gift of inheritance. There are some such houses among European sovereignties; whenever there is a breach in the continuity of succession anywhere, one or other of them is sure to come in for the inheritance. George the Elector, who was now waiting to become King of England as soon as the breath should be out of Anne's body, belonged to the House of Guelf, or Welf, said to have been founded by Guelf, the son of Isembert, a count of Altdorf, and Irmintrude, sister of Charlemagne, early in the ninth century. It had two branches, which were united in the eleventh century by the marriage of one of the Guelf ladies to Albert Azzo the Second, Lord of Este and Marquis of Italy. His son Guelf obtained the Bavarian possessions of his wife's step-father, a Guelf of Bavaria. One of his descendants, called Henry the Lion, married Maud, daughter of Henry the Second of England, and became the founder of the family of Brunswick.

War and imperial favor and imperial displeasure interfered during many generations with the integrity of the Duchy of Brunswick, and the Electorate of Hanover was made up for the most part out of territories which Brunswick had once owned. The Emperor Leopold constructed it formally into an Electorate in 1692, with Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Luneberg as its first Elector. The George Louis who now, in 1714, is waiting to become King of England, was the son of Ernest Augustus and of Sophia, youngest daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, sister to Charles First of England. Elizabeth had married Frederick, the Elector-Palatine of the Rhine, and her life was crossed and thwarted by the opening of the Thirty Years' War, and then by the misfortunes of her brother Charles and his dynasty. Elizabeth survived the English troubles and saw the Restoration, and came to live in {6} England, and to see her nephew, Charles the Second, reign as king. She barely saw this. Two years after the Restoration she died in London.

Sophia was her twelfth child: she had thirteen in all. One of Sophia's elder brothers was Prince Rupert--that "Rupert of the Rhine" of whom Macaulay's ballad says that "Rupert never comes but to conquer or to die"--the Rupert whose daring and irresistible charges generally won his half of the battle, only that the other half might be lost, and that his success might be swallowed up in the ruin of his companions.

His headlong bravery was a misfortune rather than an advantage to his cause, and there seems to have been one instance--that of the surrender of Bristol--in which that bravery deserted him for the moment. We see him afterwards in the pages of Pepys, an uninteresting, prosaic, pedantic figure, usefully employed in scientific experiments, and with all the gilt washed off him by time and years and the commonplace wear and tear of routine life.

[Sidenote: 1714--The "Princess of Ahlden"]

George inherited none of the accomplishments of his mother. His father was a man of some talent and force of character, but he cared nothing for books or education of any kind, and George was allowed to revel in ignorance. He had no particular merit except a certain easy good-nature, which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient.

His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age, against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil, who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of Luneberg. George was attached to another girl; the princess is supposed to have fixed her affections upon another man. They were married, however, on November 21, 1682, and during all her life Sophia Dorothea had to put up with the neglect, the contempt, and afterwards the cruelty of {7} her husband. George's strongest taste was for ugly women. One of his favorites, Mademoiselle Schulemberg, maid of honor to his mother, and who was afterwards made d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal, was conspicuous, even in the unlovely Hanoverian court, for the awkwardness of her long, gaunt, fleshless figure. Another favorite of George's, Madame Kilmansegge, afterwards made Countess of Darlington, represented a different style of beauty. She is described by Horace Walpole as having "large, fierce, black eyes, rolling beneath lofty-arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguishable from the lower part of her body, and no portion of which was restrained by stays."

It would not be surprising if the neglected Sophia Dorothea should have looked for love elsewhere, or at least should not have been strict enough in repelling it when it offered itself. Philip Christof Konigsmark, a Swedish soldier of fortune, was supposed to be her favored lover. He suffered for his amour, and it was said that his death came by the special order--one version has it by the very hand--of George the Elector, the owner of the ladies Schulemberg and Kilmansegge. Sophia Dorothea was banished for the rest of her life to the Castle of Ahlden, on the river Aller. In the old schloss of Hanover the spot is still shown, outside the door of the Hall of Knights, which tradition has fixed upon as the spot where the a.s.sa.s.sination of Konigsmark took place.

The Konigsmarks were in their way a famous family. The elder brother was the Charles John Konigsmark celebrated in an English State trial as the man who planned and helped to carry out the murder of Thomas Thynne. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, the accused of t.i.tus Oates, the "Wise Issachar," the "wealthy Western friend" of Dryden, the comrade of Monmouth, the "Tom of Ten Thousand," of every one, was betrothed to Elizabeth, the child widow--she was only fifteen years old--of Lord Ogle. Konigsmark, fresh from love-making in {8} all the courts of Europe, and from fighting anything and everything from the Turk at Tangiers to the wild bulls of Madrid, seems to have fallen in love with Thynne's betrothed wife, and to have thought that the best way of obtaining her was to murder his rival. The murder was done, and its story is recorded in clumsy bas-relief over Thynne's tomb in Westminster Abbey. Konigsmark's accomplices were executed, but Konigsmark got off, and died years later fighting for the Venetians at the siege of cla.s.sic Argos. The soldier in Virgil falls on a foreign field, and, dying, remembers sweet Argos. The elder Konigsmark, dying before sweet Argos, ought of right to remember that spot where St.

Albans Street joins Pall Mall, and where Thynne was done to death. The Konigsmarks had a sister, the beautiful Aurora, who was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, and so mother of the famous Maurice de Saxe, and ancestress of George Sand. Later, like the fair sinner of some tale of chivalry, she ended her days in pious retirement, as prioress of the Protestant Abbey at Quedlinburg.

[Sidenote: 1714--Wooden shoes and warming-pans]

George was born in Osnabruck, in May, 1660, and was therefore now in his fifty-fifth year. As his first qualification for the government of England, it may be mentioned that he did not understand one sentence of the English language, was ignorant of English ways, history, and traditions, and had as little sympathy with the growing sentiments of the majority of educated English people as if he had been an Amurath succeeding an Amurath.

When George became Elector, on the death of his father in 1698, he showed, however, some capacity for improvement, under the influence of the new responsibility imposed upon him by his station. His private life did not amend, but his public conduct acquired a certain solidity and consistency which was not to have been expected from his previous mode of living. One of his merits was not likely to be by any means a merit in the eyes of the English people. He was, to do him justice, deeply attached to his native country. He had all the {9} love for Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed. The ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to turn his thoughts to England.

The other claimant of the English crown was James Frederick Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, as he came to be afterwards called by his enemies, the Chevalier de Saint George, as his friends called him when they did not think it prudent to give him the t.i.tle of king. James was the step-brother of Queen Anne. He was the son of James the Second, by James's second wife, Maria D'Este, sister to Francis, Duke of Modena.

Maria was only the age of Juliet when she married: she had just pa.s.sed her fourteenth year. Unlike Juliet she was not beautiful; unlike Juliet she was poor. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic, and therefore was especially acceptable to her husband. She had four children in quick succession, all of whom died in infancy; and then for ten years she had no child. The _London Gazette_ surprised the world one day by the announcement that the Queen had become pregnant, and upon June 10, 1688, she gave birth to a son. It need hardly be told now that the wildest commotion was raised by the birth of the prince.

The great majority of the Protestants insinuated, or stoutly declared, that the alleged heir-apparent was not a child of the Queen. The story was that a newly-born child, the son of a poor miller, had been brought into the Queen's room in a warming-pan, and pa.s.sed off as the son of the Queen. It was said that Father Petre, a Catholic clergyman, had been instrumental in carrying out this contrivance, and therefore the enemies of the royal family talked of the young prince as Perkin or Petrelin. The warming-pan was one of the most familiar objects in satirical literature and art for many generations after. {10} A whole school of caricature was heated into life, if we may use such an expression, by this fabulous warming-pan. Warming-pans were a.s.sociated with bra.s.s money and wooden shoes in the mouths and minds of Whig partisans, down to a day not very far remote from our own. Mr. Jobson, the vulgar lawyer in Scott's "Rob Roy," talks rudely to Diana Vernon, a Catholic, about "King William, of glorious and immortal memory, our immortal deliverer from Papists and pretenders, and wooden shoes and warming-pans." "Sad things those wooden shoes and warming-pans,"

retorted the young lady, who seemed to take pleasure in augmenting his wrath; "and it is a comfort you don't seem to want a warming-pan at present, Mr. Jobson." There was not, of course, the slightest foundation for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne.

Some little excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere fact that there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be present at the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to make the report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one whose opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at the time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all. At the time, however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large proportion of the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the supposed warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the supporters of the Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the slightest chance whatever of a Stuart restoration. This story of a spurious heir to a throne repeats itself at various intervals of history. The child of Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed by many Legitimist partisans to be supposit.i.tious. In our own days there were many intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the unfortunate Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not the son of the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her sister, the d.u.c.h.ess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the French {11} people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist throne.

[Sidenote: 1714--The "Old Pretender"]

James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history begins. Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed discrowned. He had led an unhappy life--unhappy all the more because of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it. He is described as tall, meagre, and melancholy. Although not strikingly like Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the Stuart aspect. Horace Walpole said of him many years after that, "without the particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the strong lines and fatality of air peculiar to them all." The words "fatality of air" describe very expressively that look of melancholy which all the Stuart features wore when in repose. The melancholy look represented an underlying habitual mood of melancholy, or even despondency, which a close observer may read in the character of the "merry monarch" himself, for all his mirth and his dissipation, just as well as in that of Charles the First or of James the Second. The profligacy of Charles the Second had little that was joyous in it.

James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the abilities and the culture of Charles the Second, and he had much the same taste for intrigue and dissipation. His amours were already beginning to be a scandal, and he drank now and then like a man determined at all cost to drown thought.

He was always the slave of women. Women knew all his secrets, and were made acquainted with his projected political enterprises. Sometimes the fair favorite to whom he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled all over Versailles or Paris of what she had heard, and in some instances, perhaps, she even took her newly-acquired knowledge to the English Amba.s.sador and disposed of it for a consideration. At this time James Stuart is not yet married; but marriage made as little {12} difference in his way of living as it had done in that of his elderly political rival, George the Elector. It is strange that James Stuart should have made so faint an impression upon history and upon literature. Romance and poetry, which have done so much for his son, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," have taken hardly any account of him. He figures in Thackeray's "Esmond," but the picture is not made very distinct, even by that master of portraiture, and the merely frivolous side of his character is presented with disproportionate prominence.

James Stuart had stronger qualities for good or evil than Thackeray seems to have found in him. Some of his contemporaries denied him the credit of man's ordinary courage; he has even been accused of positive cowardice; but there does not seem to be the slightest ground for such an accusation. Studied with the severest eye, his various enterprises, and the manner in which he bore himself throughout them, would seem to prove that he had courage enough for any undertaking. Princes seldom show any want of physical courage. They are trained from their very birth to regard themselves as always on parade; and even if they should feel their hearts give way in presence of danger, they are not likely to allow it to be seen. It was not lack of personal bravery that marred the chances of James Stuart.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's sympathies]

It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have met with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that James might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even by statesmen in power--by Oxford and by Bolingbroke--that if he could not actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become one, and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic Church.

James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any meanness so ign.o.ble and detestable. His conduct in thus adhering to his convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted with that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a ma.s.s!" But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard to his conversion. Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him to become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart.

Sully gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of Henry's own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and the turn of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith, commenting shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself more than once on the field of battle in the presence of danger. Thus, according to Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic, would be only following the bent of his own natural inclinations.

However that may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by changing his profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown, and that James the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change, lost his best chance of a throne.

What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession? There cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went. There is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and published in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King. It is called on its t.i.tle-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign of Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Concerning the Danger of the Protestant Succession." Such an author, writing comparatively soon after the events, and in a book dedicated to the reigning king, was not likely to do any conscious injustice to the memory of Queen Anne, and was especially likely to take a fair view of the influence which her personal inclinations were calculated to have on the succession. Dr.

Somerville declares with great justice that "mildness, timidity, and anxiety were const.i.tutional ingredients in the temper" of Queen Anne.

This very timidity, this very anxiety, {14} appears, according to Dr.

Somerville's judgment, to have worked favorably for the Hanoverian succession. [Sidenote: 1714--James the Third] The Queen herself, by sentiment, and by what may be called a sort of superst.i.tion, leaned much towards the Stuarts. "The loss," says Dr. Somerville, "of all her children bore the aspect of an angry Providence adjusting punishment to the nature and quality of her offence." Her offence, of course, was the part she had taken in helping to dethrone her father. "Wounded in spirit, and p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion, she naturally thought of the rest.i.tution of the crown to her brother as the only atonement she could make to the memory of her injured father." This feeling might have ripened into action with her but for that const.i.tutional timidity and anxiety of which Somerville speaks. There would undoubtedly have been dangers, obvious to even the bravest or the most reckless, in an attempt just then to alter the succession; but Anne saw those dangers "in the most terrific form, and recoiled with horror from the sight."

Moreover, she had a const.i.tutional objection, as strong as that of Queen Elizabeth herself, to the presence of an intended successor near her throne. "She trembled," says Somerville, "at the idea of the presence of a successor, whoever he might be; and the residence of her own brother in England was not less dreadful to her than that of the electoral prince." But it is probable that had she lived longer she would have found herself constrained to put up with the presence either of one claimant or the other. Her ministers, whoever they might be, would surely have seen the imperative necessity of bringing over to England the man whom the Queen and they had determined to present to the English people as the destined heir of the throne. In such an event as that, and most a.s.suredly if men like Bolingbroke had been in power, it may be taken for granted that the Queen would have preferred her own brother, a Stuart, to the Electoral Prince of Hanover. "What the consequence might have been, if the Queen had survived," says Somerville, "is merely a matter of conjecture; but we may {15} p.r.o.nounce, with some degree of a.s.surance, that the Protestant interest would have been exposed to more certain and to more imminent dangers than ever had threatened it before at any period since the revolution."

This seems a reasonable and just a.s.sertion. If Anne had lived much longer, it is possible that England might have seen a James the Third.

{16}

CHAPTER II.

PARTIES AND LEADERS.

[Sidenote: 1714--Whig and Tory]

All the closing months of Queen Anne's reign were occupied by Whigs and Tories, and indeed by Anne herself as well, in the invention and conduct of intrigues about the succession. The Queen herself, with the grave opening before her, kept her fading eyes turned, not to the world she was about to enter, but to the world she was about to leave. She was thinking much more about the future of her throne than about her own soul and future state. The Whigs were quite ready to maintain the Hanoverian succession by force. They did not expect to be able to carry matters easily, and they were ready to encounter a civil war.

Their belief seems to have been that they and not their opponents would have to strike the blow, and they had already summoned the Duke of Marlborough from his retirement in Flanders to take the lead in their movement. Having Marlborough, they knew that they would have the army.

On the other hand, if Bolingbroke and the Tories really had any actual hope of a restoration of the Stuarts, it is certain that up to the last moment they had made no substantial preparations to accomplish their object.

The Whigs and Tories divided between them whatever political force there was in English society at this time. Outside both parties lay a considerable section of people who did not distinctly belong to the one faction or the other, but were ready to incline now to this and now to that, according as the conditions of the hour might inspire them.

Outside these again, and far outnumbering these and all others combined, was the great ma.s.s of the English {17} people--hard-working, much-suffering, poor, patient, and almost absolutely indifferent to changes in governments and the humors and struggles of parties. "These wrangling jars of Whig and Tory," says Dean Swift, "are stale and old as Troy-town story." But if the principles were old, the t.i.tles of the parties were new. Steele, in 1710, published in the _Tatler_ a letter from Pasquin of Rome to Isaac Bickerstaff, asking for "an account of those two religious orders which have lately sprung up amongst you, the Whigs and the Tories." Steele declared that you could not come even among women "but you find them divided into Whig and Tory." It was like the famous lawsuit in Abdera, alluded to by Lucian and amplified by Wieland, concerning the ownership of the a.s.s's shadow, on which all the Abderites took sides, and every one was either a "Shadow" or an "a.s.s."

Various explanations have been given of these t.i.tles Whig and Tory.

t.i.tus Oates applied the term "Tory," which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish plot, and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York. The word "Whig" first arose during the Cameronian rising, when it was applied to the Scotch Presbyterians, and is derived by some from the whey which they habitually drank, and by others from a word, "whiggam," used by the western Scottish drovers.

The Whigs and the Tories represent in the main not only two political doctrines, but two different feelings in the human mind. The natural tendency of some men is to regard political liberty as of more importance than political authority, and of other men to think that the maintenance of authority is the first object to be secured, and that only so much of individual liberty is to be conceded as will not interfere with authority's strictest exercise. Roughly speaking, therefore, the Tories were for authority, and the Whigs for liberty.

The Tories naturally held to the principle of the monarchy and of the State church; the Whigs {18} were inclined for the supremacy of Parliament, and for something like an approach to religious equality.