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1713

THE TREATY OF UTRECHT

697

which was then coveted as lucrative, and she also obtained the right of sending yearly to Panama a ship of 600 tons laden with goods for the Spanish colonists.

30. Effect of the Treaty of Utrecht on International relations. The general character of the Treaty of Utrecht is of greater historical importance than its details. It marks the end of a period of European history during which there was often some reality and always some pretence of combining together for common purposes of general interest, and not merely for the particular interests of the several states. Down to the Treaties of Westphalia (see p. 564) in 1648, Catholics had combined against Protestants and Protestants against Catholics. After that date, States which feared the overbearing insolence of Louis XIV. had combined against France. The Treaty of Utrecht ushered in a period lasting almost to the end of the eighteenth century, when each State stood up for its own interests alone, when no steady combinations could be formed, and when greed for material accessions was most conspicuous because no purpose of seeking the general good existed. Swift threw the blame upon the allies, and the Whigs threw the blame upon the Tories. The truth is that States combine readily through fear, and very seldom through a desire for the common good, and when Louis XIV. ceased to be formidable each State thought exclusively of its own interests.

31. England as a sea-power. 1713. The success of the Tory ministers seemed complete. In reality, the very terms of the Treaty of Utrecht revealed their weakness. In seeking to gain material advantages for England, Oxford and Bolingbroke had been forced to look for them in advantages to trade, and in the increase of colonial dominion by which trade might be encouraged. Thereby they strengthened the trading class, which was the main support of the Whigs, whilst the landed gentry, on whom their own power mainly rested, received no benefit. Not that the Tories could well help doing what they had done. During the two wars which had been waged since the fall of James II. an immense change had been taking place in the relations between England and the other European States, irrespective of the victories of Marlborough in the field. Both France and the States General of the Dutch Netherlands had been forced to wage an exhausting war on their land frontier. The consequence was that the Dutch were no longer able to compete with the English at sea, and that Louis being, af horkatie of age, compelled to limit his efforts either a or on hand, decided it them at sea. The * ZZ

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CIRCULATING DEPARTMENT.

result was, that though there were no important English naval victories between the battle of La Hogue and the Peace of Utrecht, the English navy at the end of the war was vastly superior to the navies of its only possible rivals, France and the Dutch Republic.

[graphic]

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke: from a picture by Sir Godfrey Kneller.

England was now the one great sea-power in Europe, not sc much through her own increasing strength as through the decay of the maritime vigour of other states.

1711-1714 THE TORIES AND THE SUCCESSION

699

32. Position of the Tories. 1711-1713. The increase of maritime power necessarily leading to an increase of the influence of the commercial class, the Tory leaders were filled with alarm about the future, and tried to secure their power by legislation which, as they hoped, might arrest the changes which seemed likely in the future, and to strengthen their party by artificial means against changes of public opinion, much as the men of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate had formerly tried to do. In 1711 the Occasional Conformity Act had gone far to prevent Dissenters from holding office or sitting in Parliament, and earlier in the same year had been passed a Property Qualification Act which enacted that no one who did not hold land worth at least 200/. a year should sit in the House of Commons, thus excluding mere traders, who were for the most part Whigs. In 1713 the Tories were confronted with a further difficulty. Anne's health was failing, and the legal heir, the Electress Sophia, and her son, the Elector of Hanover, were both favourable to the Whigs. The Tories began to talk of securing the succession to the Pretender, the son of James II., by force or fraud. If only he had changed his religion and had avowed himself a Protestant, it is almost certain that an effort, possibly successful, would have been made to place him on the throne when Anne died. The Pretender was a man of little capacity, but he was too honest to change his religion for worldly ends, and he flatly refused to do so. The Tories were split into hostile parties by his refusal. Some, the pure Jacobites, clung to him in spite of it; some went over to the Whigs. The bulk of them were too bewildered to know what to do. They were aware that their supporters, the country gentry and the country clergy, would refuse to submit to a Roman Catholic king, and yet they could not voluntarily support the claims of the Electress Sophia and her son, whose succession they feared. To add to the distractions of the party its leaders, Oxford and Bolingbroke, quarrelled with one another.

33. The Last Days and Death of Anne. 1714. In 1714 Swift suggested that the difficulty would be at an end if his friends would accept the Hanoverian succession, and at the same time so weaken the Whigs by repressive legislation that the new Hanoverian sovereign would be obliged to govern in accordance with the will of the Tories. In pursuance of this plan Bolingbroke carried through Parliament a Schism Act, by which no one was allowed to keep a school without license from the bishop. Oxford, who was always in favour of a middle course, and therefore disliked violent

measures against the Dissenters, was driven from office, and Bolingbroke then hoped to control the Government for some time to come. Before a successor to Oxford was appointed, whilst the ministers were without any distinct policy or acknowledged head, and whilst even Bolingbroke himself had not definitely made up his mind as to

[graphic]

The Choir of St. Paul's Cathedral church, looking west, as finished by Sir Christopher Wren from an engraving by Trevit, about 1710.

his future plans, the queen was taken ill. Bolingbroke's enemies, the Dukes of Somerset and Argyle, made their appearance unexpectedly in the Council, and obtained the consent of the queen to the appointment of the Duke of Shrewsbury as Treasurer. The queen died on August 1, and the Elector of Hanover, now heir to

1714

THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION

701

the Crown by the provisions of the Act of Settlement (see p. 672), in consequence of the recent death of his mother, the Electress Sophia, was at once proclaimed by the title of George I.

34. Politics and Art.—In art as in politics the end of the reign of Anne completes a change long in progress from the ideal to the convenient. As in affairs of state the material interests of the country gentleman and of the trader took the place of the great causes which called out the enthusiasm of Cavalier and Roundhead in the Civil War, so in art painting became a mode of perpetuating the features of those who were rich enough to pay for having their portraits taken; and architecture, which had long forgotten the life and beauty of the medieval churches, was losing even the stateliness which Sir Christopher Wren gave to such buildings as the new St. Paul's (p. 668) and Greenwich Hospital (p. 662). Even Wren could not give much of this high quality to steeples such as those of St. Bride's, Fleet Street (p. 681), because the horizontal lines of an architecture derived from the Greeks through the Romans are unsuited to the soaring motive of a mediæval spire; nor could his domestic buildings, such as those at Hampton Court (pp. 665, 666), altogether overcome the necessity of making the inmates comfortable at the expense of architectural beauty. His successor, Vanbrugh, in building Blenheim Palace (see p. 683), sought out combinations neither graceful nor dignified in the hope of thereby avoiding that which was merely commonplace; but on the whole it was the commonplace which was gaining ground, and which ultimately pervaded the domestic buildings raised during the greater part of the eighteenth century.

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