History of the English People Volume Vii Part 7

France in return engaged to support Spain at sea, and to aid her in the recovery of Gibraltar.

[Sidenote: England and Spain.]

The caution with which Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered this compact inoperative for the time; but neither of the Bourbon courts ceased to look forward to its future execution. The peace of 1736 was indeed a mere pause in the struggle which their union made inevitable. No sooner was the war ended than France strained every nerve to increase her fleet; while Spain steadily tightened the restrictions on British commerce with her American colonies. It was the dim, feverish sense of the drift of these efforts that embittered every hour the struggle of English traders with the Spaniards in the southern seas. The trade with Spanish America, which, illegal as it was, had grown largely through the connivance of Spanish port-officers during the long alliance of England and Spain in the wars against France, had at last received a legal recognition in the Peace of Utrecht. But it was left under narrow restrictions; and Spain had never abandoned the dream of restoring its old monopoly. Her efforts however to restore it had as yet been baffled; while the restrictions were evaded by a vast system of smuggling which rendered what remained of the Spanish monopoly all but valueless. Philip however persisted in his efforts to bring down English intercourse with his colonies to the importation of negroes and the despatch of a single merchant vessel, as stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht; and from the moment of the compact with France the restrictions were enforced with a fresh rigour. Collisions took place which made it hard to keep the peace; and in 1738 the ill humour of the trading cla.s.ses was driven to madness by the appearance of a merchant captain named Jenkins at the bar of the House of Commons. He told the tale of his torture by the Spaniards, and produced an ear which, he said, they had cut off amidst taunts at England and its king. It was in vain that Walpole strove to do justice to both parties, and that he battled stubbornly against the cry for a war which he knew to be an unjust one, and to be as impolitic as it was unjust. He saw that the House of Bourbon was only waiting for the Emperor's death to deal its blow at the House of Austria; and the Emperor's death was now close at hand. At such a juncture it was of the highest importance that England should be free to avail herself of every means to guard the European settlement, and that she should not tie her hands by a contest which would divert her attention from the great crisis which was impending, as well as drain the forces which would have enabled Walpole to deal with it.

[Sidenote: War with Spain.]

But his efforts were in vain. His negotiations were foiled by the frenzy of the one country and the pride of the other. At home his enemies a.s.sailed him with a storm of abuse. Pope and Johnson alike lent their pens to lampoon the minister. Ballad-singers trolled out their rimes to the crowd on "the cur-dog of Britain and spaniel of Spain." His position had been weakened by the death of the queen; and it was now weakened yet more by the open hostility of the Prince of Wales, who in his hatred of his father had come to hate his father's ministers as heartily as George the Second had hated those of George the First. His mastery of the House of Commons too was no longer unquestioned. The Tories were slowly returning to Parliament, and their numbers had now mounted to a hundred and ten. The numbers and the violence of the "Patriots" had grown with the open patronage of Prince Frederick. The country was slowly turning against him. The counties now sent not a member to his support. Walpole's majority was drawn from the boroughs; it rested therefore on management, on corruption, and on the support of the trading cla.s.ses. But with the cry for a commercial war the support of the trading cla.s.s failed him. Even in his own cabinet, though he had driven from it every man of independence, he was pressed at this juncture to yield by the Duke of Newcastle and his brother Henry Pelham, who were fast acquiring political importance from their wealth, and from their prodigal devotion of it to the purchase of parliamentary support.

But it was not till he stood utterly alone that Walpole gave way, and that he consented in 1739 to a war against Spain.

[Sidenote: The Austrian Succession.]

"They may ring their bells now," the great minister said bitterly, as peals and bonfires welcomed his surrender; "but they will soon be wringing their hands." His foresight was at once justified. No sooner had Admiral Vernon appeared off the coast of South America with an English fleet, and captured Porto Bello, than France gave an indication of her purpose to act on the secret compact by a formal declaration that she would not consent to any English settlement on the mainland of South America, and by despatching two squadrons to the West Indies. But it was plain that the union of the Bourbon courts had larger aims than the protection of Spanish America. The Emperor was dying; and pledged as France was to the Pragmatic Sanction few believed she would redeem her pledge. It had been given indeed with reluctance; even the peace-loving Fleury had said that France ought to have lost three battles before she confirmed it. And now that the opportunity had at last come for finis.h.i.+ng the work which Henry the Second had begun, of breaking up the Empire into a group of powers too weak to resist French aggression, it was idle to expect her to pa.s.s it by. If once the hereditary dominions of the House of Austria were parted amongst various claimants, if the dignity of the Emperor was no longer supported by the ma.s.s of dominion which belonged personally to the Hapsburgs, France would be left without a rival on the Continent. Walpole at once turned to face this revival of a danger which the Grand Alliance had defeated. Not only the House of Austria but Russia too was called on to join in a league against the Bourbons; and Prussia, the German power to which Walpole had leant from the beginning, was counted on to give an aid as firm as Brandenburg had given in the older struggle. But the project remained a mere plan when in October 1740 the death of Charles the Sixth forced on the European struggle.

[Sidenote: Fall of Walpole.]

The plan of the English Cabinet at once broke down. The new King of Prussia, Frederick the Second, whom English opinion had hailed as destined to play the part in the new league which his ancestor had played in the old, suddenly showed himself the most vigorous a.s.sailant of the House of Hapsburg; and while Frederick claimed Silesia, Bavaria claimed the Austrian Duchies, which pa.s.sed with the other hereditary dominions according to the Pragmatic Sanction to Maria Theresa, or, as she was now called, the Queen of Hungary. The hour was come for the Bourbon courts to act. In union with Spain, which aimed at the annexation of the Milanese, France promised her aid to Prussia and Bavaria; while Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. In the summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the Elector of Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had the House of Austria stood in such peril. Its opponents counted on a division of its dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain the Milanese, Bavaria the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second Silesia. Hungary and the Duchy of Austria alone were left to Maria Theresa. Walpole, though still true to her cause, advised her to purchase Frederick's aid against France and her allies by the cession of part of Silesia. The counsel was wise, for Frederick in hope of some such turn of events had as yet held aloof from actual alliance with France, but the Patriots spurred the Queen to refusal by promising her England's aid in the recovery of her full inheritance. Walpole's last hope of rescuing Austria was broken by this resolve; and Frederick was driven to conclude the alliance with France from which he had so stubbornly held aloof. But the Queen refused to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restoring its const.i.tutional rights; and British subsidies enabled her to march at the head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of Vienna, to overrun Bavaria, and repulse an attack of Frederick on Moravia in the spring of 1742. On England's part, however, the war was waged feebly and ineffectively.

Admiral Vernon was beaten before Carthagena; and Walpole was charged with thwarting and starving his operations. With the same injustice, the selfishness with which George the Second hurried to Hanover, and in his dread of harm to his hereditary state averted the entry of a French army by binding himself as Elector to neutrality in the war, though the step had been taken without Walpole's knowledge, was laid to the minister's charge. His power indeed was ebbing every day. He still repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful spirit; but in a new Parliament which was called at this crisis his majority dropped to sixteen, and in his own Cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant temper which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last.

"He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes his son, "now never sleeps above an hour without waking: and he who at dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without speaking and with his eyes fixed for an hour together." The end was in fact near; and in the opening of 1742 the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole to resign.

[Sidenote: Carteret.]

His fall however made no change in English policy, at home or abroad.

The bulk of his ministry had opposed him in his later years of office, and at his retirement they resumed their posts, simply admitting some of the more prominent members of opposition, and giving the control of foreign affairs to Lord Carteret, a man of great power, and skilled in continental affairs. Carteret mainly followed the system of his predecessor. It was in the union of Austria and Prussia that he looked for the means of destroying the hold France had now established in Germany by the election of her puppet, Charles of Bavaria, as Emperor; and the pressure of England, aided by a victory of Frederick at Chotusitz, forced Maria Theresa to consent to Walpole's plan of a peace with Prussia at Breslau on the terms of the cession of Silesia. The peace at once realized Carteret's hopes by enabling the Austrian army to drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742, while the new minister threw a new vigour into the warlike efforts of England itself.

One English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anch.o.r.ed in the bay of Naples and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to conclude a treaty of neutrality, and English subsidies detached Sardinia from the French alliance.

[Sidenote: Dettingen.]

The aim of Carteret and of the Court of Vienna was now not only to set up the Pragmatic Sanction, but to undo the French encroachments of 1736.

Naples and Sicily were to be taken back from their Spanish king, Elsa.s.s and Lorraine from France; and the imperial dignity was to be restored to the Austrian House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove the Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743; while George the Second, who warmly supported Carteret's policy, put himself at the head of a force of 40,000 men, the bulk of whom were English and Hanoverians, and marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His advance was checked and finally turned into a retreat by the Duc de Noailles, who appeared with a superior army on the south bank of the river, and finally throwing 31,000 men across it threatened to compel the king to surrender. In the battle of Dettingen which followed, however, on the 27th June 1743, not only was the allied army saved from destruction by the impetuosity of the French horse and the dogged obstinacy with which the English held their ground, but their opponents were forced to recross the Main. Small as was the victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated Germany. The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine; and a league between England, Prussia, and the Queen of Hungary, seemed all that was needed to secure the results already gained.

[Sidenote: Fall of Carteret.]

But the prospect of peace was overthrown by the ambition of the house of Austria. In the spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples, with the purpose of transferring it after its conquest to the Bavarian Emperor, whose hereditary dominions in Bavaria were to pa.s.s in return to Maria Theresa. Its march at once forced the Prussian king into a fresh att.i.tude of hostility. If Frederick had withdrawn from the war on the cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than suffer so great an aggrandizement of the House of Austria in Germany.

His sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of the war; for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the Austrian army from the Rhine, Frederick was driven from Bohemia, while the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms and to ally itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's hopes at this moment that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for the division of the Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned, and the fatal results of Carteret's weakness in a.s.senting to a change in the character of the struggle which transformed it from a war of defence into one of attack became manifest. The young French king, Lewis the Fifteenth, himself led an army into the Netherlands; and the refusal of Holland to act against him left their defence wholly in the hands of England. The general anger at this widening of the war proved fatal to Carteret, or as he now became, Earl Granville. His imperious temper had rendered him odious to his colleagues, and he was driven from office by the Pelhams, who not only forced George against his will to dismiss him, but foiled the king's attempt to construct a new administration with Granville at its head.

[Sidenote: The Pelham Ministry.]

Of the reconst.i.tuted ministry which followed Henry Pelham became the head. His temper as well as a consciousness of his own mediocrity disposed him to a policy of conciliation which reunited the Whigs.

Chesterfield and the Whigs in opposition, with Pitt and "the Boys," all found room in the new administration; and even a few Tories, who had given help to Pelham's party, found admittance. Their entry was the first breach in the system of purely party government established on the accession of George the First, though it was more than compensated by the new strength and unity of the Whigs. But the chief significance of Carteret's fall lay in its bearing on foreign policy. The rivalry of Hanover with Prussia for a heads.h.i.+p of North Germany found expression in the bitter hostility of George the Second to Frederick; and it was in accord with George that Carteret had lent himself to the vengeance of Austria on her most dangerous opponent. But the bulk of the Whigs remained true to the policy of Walpole, while the entry of the Patriots into the ministry had been on the condition that English interests should be preferred to Hanoverian. It was to pave the way to an accommodation with Frederick and a close of the war that the Pelhams forced Carteret to resign. But it was long before the new system could be brought to play, for the main attention of the new ministry had to be given to the war in Flanders, where Marshal Saxe had established the superiority of the French army by his defeat of the Duke of c.u.mberland.

Advancing to the relief of Tournay with a force of English, Hanoverians, and Dutch--for Holland, however reluctantly, had at last been dragged into the war, though by English subsidies--the Duke on the 31st of May 1745 found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and redoubts with but a single narrow gap near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column, doggedly thrust themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and orderly retreat. The blow was followed up in June by a victory of Frederick at Hohenfriedburg which drove the Austrians from Silesia, and by the landing of a Stuart on the coast of Scotland at the close of July.

[Sidenote: Charles Edward Stuart.]

The war with France had at once revived the hopes of the Jacobites; and as early as 1744 Charles Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was placed by the French Government at the head of a formidable armament.

But his plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which wrecked his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had sailed in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however the young adventurer again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and landed on a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood almost alone; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his standard in Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen hundred men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed "James the Eighth" at the Town Cross; and two thousand English troops who marched against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut to pieces on the 21st of September by a single charge of the clansmen at Prestonpans.

Victory at once doubled the forces of the conqueror. The Prince was now at the head of six thousand men; but all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held aloof from his standard, and it was with the utmost difficulty that he could induce them to follow him to the south.

His tact and energy however at last conquered every obstacle, and after skilfully evading an army gathered at Newcastle he marched through Lancas.h.i.+re, and pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But here all hope of success came to an end. Hardly a man had risen in his support as he pa.s.sed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of its strength. The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show.

Catholics and Tories abounded in Lancas.h.i.+re, but only a single squire took up arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand pounds. From Carlisle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two hundred men. The policy of Walpole had in fact secured England for the House of Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the country, and the clemency of the Government, had done their work. The recent admission of Tories into the administration had severed the Tory party finally from the mere Jacobites. Jacobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles Edward saw that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand Highlanders.

[Sidenote: Conquest of the Highlands.]

He soon learned too that forces of double his own strength were closing on either side of him, while a third army under the king and Lord Stair covered London. Scotland itself, now that the Highlanders were away, quietly renewed in all the districts of the Lowlands its allegiance to the House of Hanover. Even in the Highlands the Macleods rose in arms for King George, while the Gordons refused to stir, though roused by a small French force which landed at Montrose. To advance further south was impossible, and Charles fell rapidly back on Glasgow; but the reinforcements which he found there raised his army to nine thousand men, and on the 23rd January 1746 he boldly attacked an English army under General Hawley which had followed his retreat and had encamped near Falkirk. Again the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for the Prince, but victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces dispersed with their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly back to the north before the Duke of c.u.mberland. On the 16th of April the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they were starving and dispirited, while c.u.mberland's force was nearly double that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung themselves in their old fas.h.i.+on on the English front; but they were received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few moments all was over, and the Stuart force was a ma.s.s of hunted fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France.

In England fifty of his followers were hanged; three Scotch lords, Lovat, Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block; and forty persons of rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures of repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up and transferred to the Crown. The tartan, or garb of the Highlanders, was forbidden by law. These measures, and a general Act of Indemnity which followed them, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the clansmen pa.s.sed away, and the sheriff's writ soon ran through the Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Widening of the War.]

Defeat abroad and danger at home only quickened the resolve of the Pelhams to bring the war, so far as England and Prussia went, to an end.

When England was threatened by a Catholic Pretender, it was no time for weakening the chief Protestant power in Germany. On the refusal therefore of Maria Theresa to join in a general peace, England concluded the Convention of Hanover with Prussia at the close of August, and withdrew so far as Germany was concerned from the war. Elsewhere however the contest lingered on. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe inflicted new defeats on the English and Dutch at Roucoux and Lauffeld.

The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of France at last brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a peace at Aix-la-Chapelle, by which England surrendered its gains at sea, and France its conquests on land. But the peace was a mere pause in the struggle, during which both parties hoped to gain strength for a mightier contest which they saw impending. The war was in fact widening far beyond the bounds of Germany or of Europe. It was becoming a world-wide duel which was to settle the destinies of mankind. Already France was claiming the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and mooting the great question whether the fortunes of the New World were to be moulded by Frenchmen or Englishmen.

Already too French adventurers were driving English merchants from Madras, and building up, as they trusted, a power which was to add India to the dominions of France.

[Sidenote: Clive.]

The intercourse of England with India had as yet given little promise of the great fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of Elizabeth's reign, a century after Vasco de Gama had crept round the Cape of Good Hope and founded the Portuguese settlement on the Goa Coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The trade, profitable as it was, remained small in extent; and the three early factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during the century which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of but six fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George; that of Bombay was ceded by the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza; while Fort William, with the mean village which has since grown into Calcutta, owes its origin to the reign of William the Third. Each of these forts was built simply for the protection of the Company's warehouses, and guarded by a few "sepahis," sepoys, or paid native soldiers; while the clerks and traders of each establishment were under the direction of a President and a Council. One of these clerks in the middle of the eighteenth century was Robert Clive, the son of a small proprietor near Market Drayton in Shrops.h.i.+re, an idle daredevil of a boy whom his friends had been glad to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's service as a writer to Madras. His early days there were days of wretchedness and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by the haughty shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by home-sickness. Twice he attempted suicide; and it was only on the failure of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.

[Sidenote: Dupleix.]

A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.

Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius, besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his clerks.h.i.+p for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne, the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.

[Sidenote: Arcot.]

Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and seated a creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but brought to surrender when Clive, in 1751, came forward with a daring scheme for its relief. With a few hundred English and sepoys he pushed through a thunderstorm to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital, entrenched himself in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days against thousands of a.s.sailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas, who had never before believed that Englishmen would fight, advanced and broke up the siege. But Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran away at the first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon as the cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French and their Indian allies, foiled every effort of Dupleix, and razed to the ground a pompous pillar which the French governor had set up in honour of his earlier victories.

[Sidenote: The American Colonies.]

Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West.

From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England States, Ma.s.sachusetts, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primaeval forest, and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed before a new settlement, which received its t.i.tle of Georgia from the reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the persecuted Protestants of Germany.

[Sidenote: Their progress.]

Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother country. Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Ma.s.sachusetts saw five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with, the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives in houses such as those of Fairfax and Was.h.i.+ngton. Throughout New England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry, their love of equality and tendency to democratic inst.i.tutions, remained unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of America. "Every towns.h.i.+p," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able to read and write.

[Sidenote: Their political condition.]

Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.

Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the Const.i.tutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But the circ.u.mstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the worst abuses which clogged the action of const.i.tutional government at home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and members of the legislative a.s.semblies were subject to annual re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of a.s.sembly elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected, sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.

[Sidenote: English control.]

With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost America because he read the American despatches, which none of his predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were secured by royal charters. Their a.s.semblies alone exercised the right of internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.

It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the Americans enjoyed as British subjects.

[Sidenote: French aggression.]

As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax, the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company was formed, and its agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky; while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia.

A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort.

A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless attack on it under George Was.h.i.+ngton, a young Virginian, who had been despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was left in the hands of France.