and cold repelling manners, made him exceedingly unpopular both with parliament and people.

The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle had assembled early in the spring, and the conferences were opened on the 11th of March; but it was not until Marshal Saxe had invested several places, the Prince of Orange had failed in his warlike engagements, and thirty thousand Russians, subsidised by England, had proved that they could not come up in time to be of any service, that the notion of the renewal of the war was really given up, and that George consented to sign the preliminaries; and even after this he put the peace in jeopardy by insisting upon little advantages for his family, such as the reversion of the bishopric of Osnaburg, &c. But while the king went to Hanover his minister at Aix-la-Chapelle continued to attend the Congress, which came to a final settlement after numerous delays and difficulties in the month of October, upon the principle of the status quo ante bellum, with some exceptions. In other words, after a long and bloody war, every one was to keep what he had before the war began, and (save the exceptions) to get no more. The arrangement was most imperfect, and many clauses of the treaty were conceived in such loose terms as to allow double or treble interpretations, and to furnish grounds for new disputes and fresh wars 30 soon as either party should consider itself ready to take the field. The original causes of the war on our part seemed to be wholly forgotten; and yet Pitt, who had so materially helped to drive on the war against the inclination of Sir Robert Walpole, and who had graced a hundred harangues with the declaration that peace ought never to be made with Spain until that power renounced the right of search, continued to act with and to be part of a ministry that hurried on the treaty of Aixla-Chapelle, and, after that, began and concluded a separate Spanish treaty, without once mentioning this odious right, which, therefore, as far as diplomacy was concerned, was left on its old footing. Nor did the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle contain any satisfaction of the commercial claims England had upon Spain, nor did it in

any degree throw open the Spanish Main to our trade and shipping: it did nothing commercially, but revive for four years the assiento, or odious privilege of supplying Spanish America with African slaves.*

By an article in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis XV. bound himself to give up the cause of the Pretender and exclude the Stuarts from France. On the return of the young Pretender from Scotland Louis had behaved to him with considerable liberality, supplying him with money for his own necessities, and giving commissions in the French army, or pensions to the bravest of his Scotch followers-as Lochiel, Lord Ogilvie, and others; but at the same time Louis absolutely refused to supply him with men, money, and materials of war for another invasion of Scotland. Thereupon Charles turned his eyes in other directions; and early in 1747, unknown to, and against the inclinations of, the French court, he stole across the Pyrenees and went to Madrid to solicit aid from the impoverished Spaniards and their timid and pacific new king, Ferdinand VI. He saw that king and his prime minister, Calatrava, and one who was more than the minister, the Neapolitan musico, the far-famed Farinelli, who was equally the favourite of king and queen; but they could do nothing for him, and they very soon told him that his presence in Spain was unpleasant and embarrassing. The luckless adventurer returned to Paris. To his great annoyance the old Pretender had made a priest of his brother. A few months

*"This," says Horace Walpole, with more truth than always accompanies his diatribes, was the conclusion of the Spanish war! fomented to overturn Sir Robert Walpole, by Lord Granville, who had neglected it for a French war; by Lord Sandwich, who made a peace that stipulated for no onc of the conditions for which it was undertaken; by Pitt, who ridiculed and condemned his own orations for it, and who declared for a peace on any terms; and by the Duke of Newcastle, who betrayed all the claims of the merchants and the South Sea Company."--Memoirs of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George II.

after his brother had taken holy orders, and become a prince of the Roman Church,* a member of the conclave, with a chance of becoming pope himself, Charles endeavoured to marry a Protestant princess, and to strike up an alliance with Frederick of Prussia, who entertained an equal contempt for all religions or modes of faith. He sent Sir John Graham to Berlin with his instructions to "in a modest manner,' propose, a marriage with one of the princesses-Frederick's sisters or nieces-for that great captain had no children, and was not likely to have any; to declare that he never intended to marry any other than a Protestant; and, if his Majesty should decline his alliance, "to ask advice whom to take, as he was known to be the wisest prince in Europe." But this unpromising mission came to nothing, though Frederick, when it suited his purpose, continued to profess a friendship for Charles, who, seven months after this proposal, was driven out of France. There were many circumstances in his conduct likely to irritate Louis XV.; and the English government at the same time urged his most Christian majesty to observe the recent treaty. He, however, would have treated the chevalier mildly and generously; but Charles would not listen to his proposals, and refused to leave Paris when entreated so to do. The French court begged the old Pretender to make use of his authority, but Charles set at nought his father's letter and still refused to go: nothing, therefore, was left but force. On the evening of the 11th of December, as he was going to the opera, his coach was stopped by a company of the French Guards, who seized him, bound him hand and foot-for he had arms about his person, and threatened to use them, and carried him with a single attendant to the castle at Vincennes. But he did not lie there long, for in a few days he was conveyed to the frontier of Savoy, and there left to go whither he might choose. For some time he disappeared altogether from the eyes

*He was styled Cardinal York, or Cardinal Duke of York.

of the world, and, bearing many names and many disguises, he continued a dissipated wanderer till the year 1766, when his father died, and he returned to Rome to seek a reconciliation with his brother, the cardinal. During this strange vagabond-life he came, at least once, into England. It is certain that he visited London in the year 1754, and it has been affirmed that he was here again in 1760, and was actually present at the coronation of George III.

A.D. 1749.-The public rejoicing for the peace of Aixla-Chapelle was soon succeeded by loud complaints that ministers had sacrificed the interest and honour of England; but the overbearing eloquence of Pitt kept the House of Commons in order, and the feeble voice of opposition in parliament was almost hushed. This fiery patriot of former days seems to have stuck at nothing that was recommended by the court. When the Pelhams and Sandwiches, as if ashamed of their own work, preserved a silence about the recent treaty, Pitt stood forward and defended it as one of the best treaties that had ever been made; and when the king, the Duke of Cumberland, and ministers wanted to extend the operation and increase the severity of the Mutiny Bill, Pitt was there to advocate the measure and to carry it by a large majority. Of the two brothers that divided the chief authority of government between them, Mr. Pelham, first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer, was incomparably the superior in point of ability, being in fact thoroughly a man of business and one of the best financiers and managers of an office; and yet Pitt, the arbiter of their quarrels, generally sided not with Pelham but with Newcastle. It has, indeed, been suspected that he had now an eye to Pelham's place of chancellor of the exchequer, and thought that the Duke of Newcastle would be glad to have him in that office instead of his brother, and to make him his leader in the House of Commons. In this very session, while Pelham was carrying a rigorous reduction of the army and navy, and trying to relieve the country by reducing the interest of the national debt, he more than once found himself op

posed by Pitt. The army, however, was reduced to 19,000 men and the navy to 8000.

A.D. 1750.-During the session several bills were passed for the encouragement of our trade, and for the establishment of fisheries which might compete with those of the Dutch. The session was closed on the 12th of April. George then prepared to go as usual to Hanover, and the government was vested as usual in a regency of Lords Justices. The king's back was scarcely turned when fresh dissensions broke out in the cabinet, for the Duke of Newcastle was anxious to liberate himself from his intractable colleague the Duke of Bedford, who, by means of Lord and Lady Sandwich, had secured the favour and protection of the Duke of Cumberland and his sister the Princess Amelia, who had taken offence at Newcastle's paying too much court to Lady Yarmouth.

In the course of the summer a strong British colony was settled in Nova Scotia, and the troops withdrawn from Cape Breton were sent to its support. The town of Halifax, fortified with a palisade, began to rise in the waste, and, as reduced officers and soldiers continued to flock to that part of America, Nova Scotia soon became a very important colony, to the great mortification of France, which pretended that such an establishment was an infraction of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Nearly at the same time some bodies of English and Scotch began to settle on the Mosquito coast, in the gulph of Mexico, and this caused equal or greater irritation to the court of Spain. A French ambassador at Madrid worked upon this discontent with the view of inducing Ferdinand VI. to join in a new war against England; but the Spanish king was exceedingly pacific; his consort Barbara, a Portuguese princess, was strongly attached to the English; and our envoy, Mr. Keene, one of the best negotiators of the day, and one that knew Spain and the Spanish character thoroughly, succeeded in concluding a commercial treaty with the court of Madrid. By this treaty, which was signed on the 5th of October, 1750, the British were restored to various privileges and put on the footing of the most favoured nations; we renounced