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THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE.

THE Epic poem which was written by the late Lord Macaulay, under the title of the "History of England," terminated, as was fit, with the death of the hero King William. Another well-known work which bears the same title, but deserves it a great deal better, starts from the Treaty of Utrecht. Between these two an open space had lain for some years, which Lord Stanhope, by the advice of his friends, was persuaded to fill up. The present work is the result of his labours. And we suppose that it will ultimately be incorporated with his larger history, and constitute the first volume.

It is rather curious that so famous an age as the Augustan should have waited so long for its historian. We have histories in which it is included; we have biographies by which it is illustrated; we have annalists by whom its facts have been recorded; and we have the fragments of Swift which are superior to all the rest. Still they are but fragments. Nobody has picked it out for its own sake, as other epochs have been picked out; and even Lord Stanhope seems to have taken it up rather because he abhorred a vacuum than because he felt attracted by any special allurements of its own. And we think that this opinion is supported by a perceptible languor of style in his new volume, which is very unlike himself. It may be that the very brilliancy of its literary and social aspects has blinded men to its political interest; or that the common-place character of the Queen has deterred them from dealing with her reign, except in its place among others. Be this as it may, the political interest of the period is very great indeed. It opens with one of the most important wars which this country ever waged. It closes with a Treaty of Peace which settled Europe for a hundred years. In all the long roll of great Englishmen there are few more splendid names, if some more spotless, than the conductor of the one and the author of the other. The same period saw the union of the northern and southern parts of this island, which realised the visions the great Tudor statesmen, and contributed more than any other event of the time to the stability of the Revolution; while last, but not least, in the careers of Atterbury and Sacheverell the student of ecclesiastical history finds almost the last traces of that powerful and direct influence which the Church of England once exercised in politics. But over and above these particular sources of interest, the general interest attaching to a reign in which the Constitution was trembling in the balance. If the Stuarts had come back in 1714, it is highly improbable they would have been turned

out again for long years. Men would have said it was time that this excitement should abate, and that even parliamentary government was not worth perpetual agitation. It was difficult as it was to get up sufficient public feeling to prevent their restoration; it would have been impossible to get up enough to re-enact their expulsion. A fatal period of political apathy would have followed; and the constitutional system might never have made good its footing. When we think of this crisis in our fate, it is impossible not to look back with almost bated breath on the desperate party-struggles which eddied round the throne of Anne.

But there is a still more general source of interest even than this attaching to the period before us. The reign of Anne forms, as it were, the portal through which England passed from the old order to the new. The system of standing armies was consolidated by Marlborough. Feudalism breathed its last on the scaffold of Derwentwater. Queen Anne was the last Sovereign of these realms round whom still lingered something of the divinity that doth hedge a king, and her personal will and pleasure exercised a powerful influence on the Government. But not an unquestioned influence. As we shall see hereafter, the most powerful party in the State was already beginning to assert its dominant principle, and claim the right of nominating particular Ministers whenever the party as a whole was selected for the service of the Crown. With the suppression of the rebellion of 1715, the curtain falls upon the past; and, after the general election of the year following, it rises on that modern England which lasted substantially intact till the termination of the French war. The change which passed over this country between the Battle of the Boyne and the accession of George I., may be compared with that which took place between the Battle of Bosworth and the accession of Henry VIII. The parallel might be pursued, if necessary, into minute particulars; but the general resemblance sufficiently illustrates our meaning. And it is to be remarked, that what the aristocracy had lost under one form by the first transition, they regained under another by the second. For spears and castles they now had nominees and boroughs; and their power was none the less because exercised through the forms of freedom.

Lord Stanhope handles his materials in the same placid and contemplative spirit which distinguishes his larger work. Without any straining at effect; without either novelty in his view, or epigrams in his style; without the faintest approach to that pictorial luxuriance which is one of the plagues of modern literature; he writes with that complete mastery of his subject, and that well-bred simplicity of manner, which, if they are slower in catching the attention, never fail to keep it when caught. We know of no historian to whom the word "agreeable" is so applicable as it is

to him. He steers a middle course between Lord Macaulay and Mr. Froude. He does not throw off the impressions of his own. mind, simpliciter and without references, like the one; nor does he interpose whole pages of inverted commas between himself and his readers, like the other. He takes care to inform us of his authorities, but he weaves the information into his narrative with so much skill, that we imbibe our dry facts without feeling the taste of them. This very great merit in Lord Stanhope has not, we think, been sufficiently acknowledged. When he errs on either side, he errs on the side of Mr. Froude, but that is very seldom; and we observe it less in this volume than in either the Life of Pitt or the History of England. It is owing to this quality that Lord Stanhope is, as we have said, so eminently an agreeable writer. In the ordinary sense of the term, he has not the power of either of the two writers with whom we have been comparing him: he has not the fighting power of the one, nor the thinking power of the other. Yet even here, again, there is a species of intellectual power lying between these two for which Lord Stanhope is conspicuous, and which may serve to reduce the difference: we mean the power of condensation, and, with that, of intellectual self-control. We never read a work that was more symmetrical than his History of England. And the same may be said of this volume. All the parts are in due proportion to each other; and, though we miss something of the earnest and elevated thought which we find in Mr. Froude, and the felicitous rhetoric which is the special boast of Lord Macaulay, it may perhaps be considered by many people that these are the excellences as much of the historical essayist, as of the historian proper.

We may point out, however, before quitting this branch of our subject, that there is one particular in which it seems probable that Lord Stanhope was much indebted to Lord Macaulay. All our readers will remember the Essay upon History, which was one of Lord Macaulay's earliest critical performances. They will recollect his animated picture of what a history ought to be: showing forth not only great public events, but the society in which they took place; giving, that is, the national life as a whole, and not merely those aspects of it which are perhaps the least characteristic, and common to the lives of all nations. It seems to us that Lord Stanhope must have taken the hint; for his History of England, published some ten years after the appearance of this Essay, is the first which to our knowledge makes any attempt to comply with these conditions-where we see for the first time the introduction of those picturesque details by which the dignity of Clio had up to that time been unassailed.

Lord Stanhope, who thinks that a Tory of the present day is the

same as a Whig of Queen Anne's day, takes, of course, the Whig view of English history during her reign. Thus, he says of the War of the Succession: "So far as regards the great events of this war, the two parties, looking only to their tenure of power, are entitled to divide the credit between them. The Tories held office during Blenheim and Ramillies; the Whigs held office during Oudenarde and Malplaquet. But, as regards the policy which led to these successes, the praise, as I conceive, belongs almost wholly to the Whigs." By which he means, that England's participation in the war was due to the continental policy of William III., which was supported exclusively by the Whigs: and he is quite right. The only remark we care to add is, that as no English interests were promoted by this war, it is to be justified solely as part of the price we had to pay for the Revolution of 1688. William III. was necessary to England: and a war with France was necessary to William III. We had to take both, or neither. The Whigs had the sense to see this truth, and the courage to act on it. But that is the extent of the service for which we are indebted to them. Lord Stanhope likens the policy of William, and its consummation by Marlborough, to the policy of Pitt and its consummation by Wellington. We cannot say that the parallel is incorrect; yet to accept it unconditionally is to overlook some very important considerations. It is true that Mr. Pitt combined the Great Powers against Napoleon, as William III. had previously combined them against Louis; and that what Marlborough did for the latter confederacy, Wellington did to some extent for the former. But here the resemblance terminates. Mr. Pitt and his alleged prototype took widely different views of the part which it behoved Great Britain to take in this confederacy. It appears to us that William III. did in effect do exactly what Burke complained that Mr. Pitt did not, that he did "preach a crusade" against French ambition, and throw into the contest the whole military strength of Britain. Marlborough had with him forty thousand men in Flanders, while eight or ten thousand more were serving under Charles in Spain. Considering that Wellington himself never had a larger force of British troops under his command in the Peninsula, and only very seldom so large a one, we must confess that for the age of Queen Anne, when we had only just formed a standing army, the above was a prodigious effort. Fifty thousand men in Queen Anne's time represent eighty thousand in Mr. Pitt's. And Mr. Pitt considered ten thousand men a large force to send to Holland. Thus we see at once the essential difference between the principles which governed the two statesmen. Pitt's idea-whether just or not is nothing to the purpose was the old Tory idea of keeping ourselves clear of the continent, and confining our exertions to the sea. He was obliged,

against his will, to undertake more. But his heart was not in it, and egregious failures were the consequence. His heart was in our naval war, in spite of Lord Chatham. The result was Trafalgar and the Nile. Pitt, moreover, true to his Tory instincts, was always solicitous for peace. Marlborough, who, we must remember, was both minister and general, was equally solicitous for war. We care not to impute to him the sordid motives which others have assigned for this conduct. His allowances were no doubt enormous. But the enthusiasm of a great soldier, combined with the splendid vision of destroying the French monarchy, was quite sufficient to account for his attachment to the camp, without supposing him to have been influenced against his own convictions by fifty thousand pounds a year. Nevertheless, the fact remains. And the only period in our later history which can fairly be likened to the days of Blenheim and Ramillies, are the days of Vittoria and Waterloo. Then, no doubt, Great Britain had at last bestirred herself, and was showing the same energy in prosecuting hostilities by land as she had done in the reign of Anne. But these were not the days of Pitt. That Pitt, had he lived, would have comprehended the reasoning of the Duke of Wellington on the policy of defending Spain, and that he would have carried on the war with more vigour than the Portlands and the Percivals, nobody can doubt for one instant, who reflects on his political genius, and his impregnable fortitude. He would have seen that the case of Spain was an exception. Still, as a matter of history, the schemes of Wellington were not worked out in conformity with the views of Pitt; and we have only probabilities to support us in believing that they ever would have been.

But, after all, we must remember there is a wider difference even than that we have recorded between the Whig crusade against Louis, and the Tory fight against Napoleon. What England had to fear from the King, admits of no comparison with what she had to fear from the Consul. Louis was bent on territorial aggression, but it was such as we have come to regard in these days with considerable indifference. Napoleon was bent besides that on the propagation of political principles destructive of all forms of government and all social systems which differed from those of France. Louis had no jealousy of England; he wanted neither to conquer her nor to quarrel with her. Napoleon was actuated by the most determined and vindictive animosity to this country. The war carried on by Mr. Pitt was a matter of life and death. The war carried on by William, as far as it affected England, referred to remote contingencies. Whether the independence of these islands would have really been imperilled if France and Spain had been united under one head, is perhaps a debateable question. But as we had to fight the two countries

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