When the unwilling Walpole was driven into war with Spain in 1739 by the clamours of the nation, he believed that he was about to become responsible for a very dangerous struggle, for he had private knowledge of the existence of the "Family Compact," and knew that France was ready to back up Spain. England, on the other hand, was entirely without allies, having gone to war in defence of her maritime commerce, a subject in which no other power felt any interest. As a matter of fact, however, the war was necessary and wise, for we were bound to come into collision with France and Spain sooner or later on the matter of trade. They could not endure to look upon the rapid expansion of England's commercial and colonial power, which had been increasing at a prodigious rate since the peace of Utrecht. Our merchants were beginning to seize an ever-growing share of the trade of the world, and to oust the French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese from all the more distant markets, especially those of Africa, India, and the remoter East. In India the East India Company was making advances which exasperated its French rivals. In South America the Spaniards felt that their ancient monopoly was gradually slipping from their hands. In North America the prodigious growth in strength and population of our seaboard colonies threatened a speedy end to the French settlement in Canada. Since the acquisition of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland by the treaty of Utrecht, the English dominions seemed to shut out from the sea the vast but sparsely peopled tracts along the St. Lawrence which still belonged to King Lewis. In the West Indies, Jamaica and Barbados were gradually drawing away the wealth of the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Porto Rico, and Hispaniola, the old centres of the sugar and tobacco trade.

The French and Spaniards, therefore, had good reason to fear and hate England, and if we wished to keep our control of the commerce of the world, we were bound to fight for it. It was a misfortune, however, that we were committed to the struggle while Walpole was still minister. Disliking the war, he would not throw himself heartily into it, grudged spending money, and refused to undertake any serious operations. A few expeditions to Spanish America were all that he sent out. The first under Admiral Vernon, though composed of no more than six ships of war, took Porto Bello, one of the chief harbours of the Spanish Main (1739). But a second and much larger armament under the same leader failed disastrously before Cartagena, partly owing to mismanagement, partly to the marsh fever, which struck down the English in their trenches (1741). Walpole bore the discredit of his sluggish action and his failures; he was bitterly attacked in Parliament by all the Whigs whom he had been excluding from office for the last twenty years, and gradually saw the reins of power slipping from his hands. In time of war all his bribery and jobbing could not avail to save him; his bought majority dwindled away, and early in 1742 he was defeated in the House of Commons, and forced to resign. He retired into private life, and died three years later, making no further show in politics.

He was succeeded by a coalition of all the Whig factions, under the nominal premiership of Lord Wilmington, the greatest nonentity in the whole cabinet. The real chiefs of the new ministry were Lord Carteret, an able diplomatist with a vast knowledge of European politics, and the two Pelhams—Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, and Henry, his younger brother. These two kinsmen were a pair of busy and ambitious mediocrities, who stuck like limpets to office. They had been reared in Walpole's school, understood all his arts of management and corruption, and had served under him to the last, though for a year or more they had been quietly intriguing for his fall, in order that they might succeed to his power.

The Carteret-Pelham ministry had to face a much larger problem in European politics than the mere struggle with Spain. During the last year the whole continent had been set ablaze by the "War of the Austrian Succession." In 1740 died the Emperor Charles VI., the Archduke Charles who had been a claimant for the Spanish throne in the days before the peace of Utrecht. He was the last male of the house of Hapsburg, and his death opened a question somewhat resembling that of the Spanish succession in 1702. Charles had determined that his broad dominions—the Austrian archduchies, the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the Austrian Netherlands, and the duchies of Milan and Parma in Italy—should pass in a body to his daughter Maria Theresa. He chose to ignore the fact that his own elder brother, Joseph I., had left two daughters, who on any principle of hereditary succession had a better claim to the Hapsburg inheritance than their younger cousin. The elder princess Maria Amelia was the wife of Charles, the reigning Elector of Bavaria. Charles VI. spent the last twenty years of his life in arranging for his daughter's quiet succession. He drew up an instrument called the "Pragmatic Sanction," by which she was recognized as his heiress, and got it ratified by the estates of the various principalities of his realm. He also induced most of the powers of Europe at one time and another to guarantee this settlement; England, France, Spain, Prussia, and Russia had all been brought to assent to it by concessions of some sort. Only the Elector of Bavaria, the prince whose rights were infringed by the "Pragmatic Sanction," had consistently refused to accept any compensation for abandoning his wife's claims.

But when Charles died in 1740, it was seen how little the promises of most of the European powers were worth. The accession to the Hapsburg heritage of a young princess with a doubtful title was too great an opportunity to be lost by the greedy neighbours of Austria. When Charles of Bavaria laid claim to his uncle's dominions, and presented himself as a candidate for the imperial throne, he got prompt assistance from many quarters. The first to stir was Frederic II., the able and unscrupulous King of Prussia. Frederic had some ancient claims to certain parts of the duchy of Silesia. He had also a devouring ambition and the best-disciplined army in Europe, an army which his eccentric father Frederic William had spent a whole lifetime in organizing. Without any formal declaration of war, Frederic II. threw himself on Silesia and swept out of it the armies which Maria Theresa hastily sent against him (1741).

Then France and Spain threw in their lot with the Elector of Bavaria. Lewis XV. had his eye on the conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, while the old Philip V. wanted the duchies of Parma and Milan for his younger son. Thus beset by France, Spain, Prussia, and Bavaria, it seemed certain that Maria Theresa must succumb. Her rival Charles was chosen Emperor by a majority of the electors, and it seemed as if the imperial sceptre was about to pass from the house of Hapsburg. The Austrian Netherlands, Silesia, Bohemia, and the Milanese were all invaded at once, and the armies of Maria Theresa could not make head at so many points against the numerical superiority of their foes. The only ally to whom she could look for aid was England, who was already the open enemy of Spain, and who could not tolerate the conquest of the Netherlands by France.

An appeal for aid to this quarter met with a ready response. George II. was anxious to help the Queen of Hungary because he disliked his nephew Frederic II., and did not wish to see a Bavarian Emperor. Carteret, the leading spirit in the ministry, was even more eager for the fight. He was a far-sighted man who had realized the fact that England must inevitably come into collision with France from their rivalry in trade and colonization, and he therefore held that France's enemies were our friends. It was his wish to see England embark boldly in the strife, and send a large army to Germany to aid the Austrians. If France were involved in an exhausting continental war, he held that she would be unable at the same time to keep up a maritime struggle with England. Accordingly, the ministry promised the Austrians a large subsidy, took 16,000 Hanoverian troops into British pay, and sent all the available strength of the national army to Germany. George II., who was burning for the fray, placed himself at the head of the Anglo-Hanoverian forces and moved rapidly down to the Main, to attack the flank of the French army which was invading Austria.

The fortunes of Maria Theresa now began to look more prosperous. Carteret got her to buy off the ablest of her assailants, the King of Prussia, by ceding him Silesia. When Frederic had withdrawn from the struggle, the French and Bavarians were driven back from Austria, and retreated up the Danube. It was against their flank that George was operating in 1743, when his rather rash advance into the midst of foes very superior in numbers brought on the battle of Dettingen (July 27, 1743).

Finding that he was beset by forces nearly double the strength of his own 30,000 men, the king faced about, to retire up the banks of the Main. But the van of the French army of the Duc de Noailles outmarched him, and threw itself across his path at the village of Dettingen, while the main body of the enemy was rapidly coming up on his flank. George hastily formed up his troops as they arrived, and dashed forward to cut his way through, leading the advance in person. He was entirely successful, drove the French into the Main with great loss, and completely extricated himself from his difficulties. This was the last occasion on which a king of England has ever been under fire.

Further successes followed the victory of Dettingen. The Austrians overran Bavaria, and the Emperor Charles was obliged to lay down his arms and ask for peace. Carteret, who had followed the king to Germany, called together a congress at Worms, at which the representatives of England, Holland, Sardinia, and Saxony, guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, and the integrity of the dominions of the house of Hapsburg. Next spring the allies pledged themselves to invade France, and Carteret, in his moment of triumph, drank to the restoration of Alsace to Germany—a wish not to be fulfilled for another 127 years.

But England and Austria were still far from their goal. The attack on France had to be postponed, because the unscrupulous Frederic of Prussia renewed the war in the North, and fell upon the rear of the Austrians. They withdrew great bodies of troops to face him, and were left comparatively weak on their western front.

Not long afterwards Carteret, the soul of the continental war, lost his place at the head of the ministry. His jealous colleagues, the two Pelhams, were anxious to get rid of him, and took a mean advantage of his long absences in Germany. They allowed him to be attacked as favouring a Hanoverian, not an English policy, and as consulting the wishes of the king rather than those of the Parliament. Carteret was violently assailed by a young politician named William Pitt, whose cry was always that France should be assailed at sea and in her colonies, not on her continental frontiers. The Pelhams would not defend him, and suffered him to be loaded with many ungrounded accusations. The opposition called his ministry "the drunken administration," because he was somewhat flighty in his demeanour, and was known to love his bottle of port over-well. They accused him of lavishing on German allies money that should have gone to our own fleet, and raised such a storm of words against him that the Pelhams had their excuse for throwing him over—a feat which they accomplished in the end of 1744, to the great detriment of England. William Pitt, when a minister himself in later years, confessed that he had discovered in the course of time that Carteret's plans were excellent, and that he had himself put them into practice with success, after having so often denounced them as ruinous and reckless.

The Pelhams thus became supreme in the conduct of affairs, and stuck to office as closely as their master Walpole. Henry, the younger of the two—"a fretful, suspicious, industrious mediocrity"—was prime minister till he died in 1754. His elder brother the duke then succeeded him, and kept his feeble hand on the helm of state till he lost office in 1756. English policy under these two narrow and shifty borough-mongers soon lost the vigour that the guidance of Carteret had imparted to it.

The war with France continued, but no longer with the same success as before. In the spring of 1745 the armies of Lewis XV., under the able Maurice of Saxony, the Maréchal de Saxe as the French called him, fell upon the Austrian Netherlands. Maria Theresa had so few troops in this quarter that the defence of the Belgian provinces fell entirely upon the English and Dutch. The allied armies did not act together with much success, and the Dutch general, the Count of Waldeck, quarrelled with his colleague, George Duke of Cumberland, the younger son of George II. It was this want of co-operation which led to the loss of the bloody battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745). The French army was besieging Tournay, when Waldeck and Cumberland came up to relieve it, and found the enemy drawn up along a line of woods strengthened with redoubts on their flanks—a position much like the neighbouring field of Malplaquet, where Marlborough had won his last fight thirty-six years before.

While Waldeck skirmished feebly with the French wings, the stubborn and reckless young duke pushed into the centre of the hostile army with a solid column of English and Hanoverian infantry. He broke through two lines of the French, and cut their host in twain, but failed for want of support on the flanks. He was encompassed by the French reserves, and forced back with fearful loss to his old position, but the enemy were too maltreated to molest him further.

The campaign of 1745 was still undecided, when the greater part of the English army was suddenly called home to face a new and unexpected danger. The ministers of Lewis XV. had determined to try the effect of stirring up a Jacobite rebellion, hoping to distract the strength of England even if the house of Hanover could not be overthrown. James Stuart, the "Old Pretender," was now elderly and had always been apathetic, but his son Charles Edward Stuart was a young prince of a very different character. Reckless, adventurous, and light-hearted, he was the very man to lead a desperate venture. The French gathered an army of 15,000 men at Dunkirk, and promised to put it at his disposal if he would invade Scotland. But a storm scattered the transports, and the troops were ultimately drawn off to the war in Flanders.

Nevertheless, Charles Edward resolved to persevere, and, on hearing of the fight of Fontenoy, slipped off on a small privateer and landed in Invernesshire with no more than seven companions, "the Seven Men of Moidart," as the Jacobites called them. His arrival was quite unexpected, and he had nothing more to rely upon than the traditional attachment of the Highlanders to the house of Stuart. The chiefs of the West were dismayed at the recklessness of the venture, and it was with difficulty that the enthusiasm and personal charm of the young prince induced them to take arms. At first only a few hundreds of the Camerons and Macdonalds joined him, but the absolute imbecility displayed by the English Government encouraged him more and more to make the venture. The Marquis of Tullibardine, an exile since 1715, roused the Perthshire clans, and the insurrection spread to South and East.

The Pelham cabinet only got news of the prince's coming three weeks after his landing in Moidart. They were in no small degree alarmed, for well-nigh the whole army was over-sea in Flanders, and no one knew how far disaffection might have extended in England and the Scottish Lowlands. The only troops in the North were four battalions of foot and two newly raised regiments of dragoons. This small army of 3000 men was entrusted to Sir John Cope, one of the incompetent men whom the Pelhams loved to employ, because they were pliant and docile. Cope hurried north, hoping to relieve the two isolated military posts of Fort William and Fort Augustus, the sole garrisons of the West Highlands. But finding the insurgents in possession of the pass of Corry-Arrack, over which his road ran, he swerved eastward to execute a long circular march by way of Inverness. Thus he was no longer placed between the enemy and the Lowlands, and left the way to Edinburgh open.

The prince's generalship was always bold even to recklessness; the moment that Cope had passed north of him, he dashed down into Perthshire and struck at the capital of Scotland. He met with no resistance till he was quite close to Edinburgh, when 600 dragoons, the only force left in the Lowlands, fled before him at the skirmish of Colt-Brig. The Scots of the South, Whigs and Presbyterians though they were, showed an extraordinary apathy. They did not join the prince, but they refused to take arms for King George. The militia of Edinburgh, whom the half-hearted magistrates had called to arms, dispersed when the Highlanders appeared at their gates. Thus Prince Charles was able to seize the city, to proclaim his father king at the market cross, and to hold his court at Holyrood.

Soon, however, he had to fight to preserve his conquest. Cope, on hearing that the Highland army had passed southward, had hurried to the coast and taken ship with his men, hoping to reach Edinburgh before the prince. But on landing at Dunbar he found that he was three days late, and that he must fight if he wished to recapture the city. Advancing to Preston Pans, he camped there in a strong position covered by a marsh. But the Highland army crossed the difficult ground in the dusk of dawn, and fell upon him in the early morning. Cope threw his men into line, and waited to be attacked. The result was a disgraceful rout; the wild rush of the clansmen carried all before it. The bayonets of the regulars proved no match for target and claymore, and the dragoons on the flanks fled in wild panic. Cope left the field among the first, and brought the news of his own defeat to Dunbar (September 21, 1745).

The news of the fall of Edinburgh and the battle of Preston Pans came like a thunderclap to the English Government. There was hardly a soldier in the land save the royal guards in London; the militia had not been called out, and the temper of the people was unknown. The imbecile Pelhams were at their wits' end, and it is said that Newcastle even made secret overtures to the Pretender. If Charles Edward could have marched forward the morning after his victory, there is no knowing where his success would have ended.

But the prince halted for five weeks, to allow the Highlanders to stow away their plunder, and to raise and arm new levies. This delay was fatal to him; it gave the ministry time to summon over the English troops from Flanders, and to call out the militia—a numerous if not a very serviceable body.

When Charles Edward moved forward again on November 3, his chance was already gone. Marshal Wade lay at Newcastle with 10,000 veterans; the Duke of Cumberland with the rest of the army of Flanders was ten days behind him. The guards and the militia of the southern counties lay on Finchley Common to protect London.

The prince, ignorant of the fact that Jacobitism had almost disappeared in England during Walpole's peaceful rule, imagined that Wales and the North would rise in his favour, if only he were to show himself beyond the Tweed with an army at his back. Leaving 4000 men to garrison Scotland, he crossed the border with 6000 picked clansmen, routed the Cumbrian militia at Carlisle, and pushed rapidly southward into Lancashire. Before he had been ten days in England, he saw that he had been deceived as to the temper of the country. Hardly a man joined him—not 200 recruits were found for him in the Tory county of Lancaster, which had put 2000 men in the field in the old days of "the Fifteen." Hoping against hope, the prince pushed on still further, skilfully eluding the armies of Wade and Cumberland, who tried in vain to enclose him between them. But the Highlanders began to melt away from him, to drive home the cattle they had lifted, and the Jacobite chiefs were dismayed at the utter apathy of the English Tories. By the time that Derby was reached the rebel army had dwindled down to 3000 men, and it seemed likely that if Charles Edward persisted in advancing, he would arrive at London alone. Overborne by the arguments of his followers, he gave the order to retreat (December 6, 1745).

He was ignorant of the effect that his advance had caused in the South. Panic prevailed in London, and on the "Black Friday" when the news of his arrival at Derby arrived, the timid ministers had been preparing for the worst. The king's plate had been sent on shipboard, the Bank of England had paid away every guinea in its reserve, and the militia at Finchley were fully persuaded that they were to be attacked on the next day by 10,000 wild clansmen.

The Highland army slipped back to Scotland with little difficulty, evading both Wade and Cumberland, whose heavy regiments could make no speed over the snowy December roads. On recrossing the Border Charles called up his reserves, and was soon at the head of 10,000 men. He trusted to maintain his hold on Scotland, even if England was unassailable. When the royal troops advanced, he inflicted a smart check on their vanguard at the battle of Falkirk (January 17, 1746). But the English came pouring northward in numbers which he could not hope to resist; the fiery Duke of Cumberland had more than 30,000 men on the march by the spring of the New Year, and fresh levies were forming behind him. The Jacobite leaders saw that the day was lost, though hitherto all the fighting had been in their favour. Their undisciplined bands began to disperse once more, and the prince must have known that, unless the French came to his aid, the ruin of his cause was at hand. He was constrained to retire northward, first to Perth, then to Inverness, with an ever-dwindling host. Cumberland pushed on in his rear with 8000 picked men, resolved to revenge the disgraceful days of Preston Pans and Falkirk; the rest of the English army followed at leisure.

Charles Edward would not yield without one final blow. With the 5000 men who still followed his standard, he marched out from Inverness, and attacked the Duke on Culloden Moor (April 16, 1746). Cumberland was ready for the fight; he had warned his troops to receive the Highland rush as if it were a cavalry charge, doubling the files and presenting a triple line of bayonets by making the front ranks kneel, while cannon were placed in the intervals between the regiments. The clansmen charged with their usual fury, but were staggered by the artillery fire, and almost blown to pieces by the triple volley of three ranks of infantry delivered at a distance of only fifty paces. The survivors straggled up only to perish on the bayonets. The prince's left wing, where the Macdonald clan had held back on a foolish point of tribal jealousy, was still intact; but when the English cavalry advanced, Charles saw that the day was lost, and bade his followers disperse. Cumberland tarnished the glory of his victory by the savage cruelty which he displayed. He gave no quarter, shot 200 prisoners in cold blood, and burnt every dwelling in the glens of the rebel clans. A price of £30,000 was put upon the head of Charles Edward, who lurked for five months in the West Highlands before he could find a ship to take him to France. He passed through countless perils in safety, and found no man among his unfortunate followers mean enough to betray him in the day of adversity. The story of his romantic escape to Skye in the disguise of the maidservant of Flora Macdonald is well known to all.

After this gallant if reckless expedition, Charles Edward never appeared again in English politics. He did not at first despair of striking another blow, and in 1750 paid a secret visit to Britain to see if a second insurrection were possible. But in England the Jacobites were almost extinct, while in Scotland they had been so sorely crushed that they had no power to stir again. The prince had to return, having accomplished nothing. Hope long deferred makes the heart sick, and in middle life Charles Edward grew apathetic, took to drinking, and became only the wreck of his old self. When his father died in 1765, he proclaimed himself king as Charles III., but never made another attempt to disturb the peace of England down to his death in 1788. With his brother Henry, a cardinal of the Roman Church, the male line of the Stuarts expired in 1807.

The English Government dealt very hardly with the insurgents of 1745-6. Three Scottish peers, the Lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino, and Lovat, were beheaded, as was Colonel Townley, the only Englishman of rank who had joined the prince. Many scores of men of less note were hanged or shot. A series of bills was passed in Parliament for weakening the clans and sapping their loyalty to their chiefs. One forbade the wearing of the Highland dress with its tribal tartans. Another abolished the feudal jurisdiction, which gave the chiefs power over their followers. Another made the possession of arms a penal offence. Good roads were pushed up into the remoter valleys, and an attempt was made to get rid of the Gaelic language by making English compulsory in schools. A few years later William Pitt took the wise step of endeavouring to turn the restless military energy of the Highlanders into patriotic channels, and raised several of the kilted regiments which have since distinguished themselves on so many British battle-fields. By the end of the century the Highlands were as quiet as any English shire, and Jacobitism had faded away into a romantic sentiment.

The war with France and Spain dragged on for three years more, under very indifferent management on both sides. The withdrawal of the English army from Flanders in 1745 had given the French an advantage in the Netherlands, from which they had greatly profited. They had overrun the whole of the Austrian provinces, and in 1746 threatened the frontier of Holland. Cumberland and his army were recalled, after the suppression of the Scottish rising, to check the advance of the Maréchal de Saxe. But the duke suffered at Lawfeldt, in front of Maestricht, a defeat of much the same character as that of Fontenoy (July 2, 1747). Nevertheless, the French in the following winter consented to treat for peace; they had fared badly along their frontier on the Rhine and in Italy, and looked upon their successes in Belgium as only sufficient to entitle them to ask for a mutual restitution of all conquests. Moreover, their maritime trade had been completely ruined by the war, and several of their colonies had fallen into English hands.

Hence came the treaty of Aachen (Aix la Chapelle), signed in the spring of 1748, to which all the powers who had been engaged in the War of the Austrian Succession gave their assent. Maria Theresa had finally to acquiesce in the loss of Silesia to the King of Prussia, and to make smaller territorial concessions in Italy to Spain and Sardinia, giving Parma to one, and a long slip of the duchy of Milan to the other. The remainder of her vast dominions she maintained intact, while her husband, Francis of Lorraine, was acknowledged by all parties as Emperor, in succession to the unfortunate Charles of Bavaria, who had died in 1745.

England, France, and Spain restored to each other all that each had taken—no very considerable amount—and left the great question of their colonial and commercial rivalry quite unsettled. Another and a greater war was required to decide it. The results of the fighting beyond the seas between 1739 and 1748 had not been very important. We have already mentioned how the English had failed at Cartagena in 1741. On the other hand, they had captured the French island of Cape Breton, off the mouth of the St. Lawrence, in 1744, and had maintained with success a desultory struggle with the enemy along the inland frontier of Canada. One hazardous expedition against the Pacific ports of Spanish America had been carried to a brilliant end by Commodore Anson, who followed in the steps of Drake by capturing the great Acapulco galleon, with the yearly hoard of the mines of Mexico on board (1743). Like Drake, too, Anson returned to Europe by the Cape route, and brought his ship, the Centurion, back to Spithead in 1744, thus completing the circumnavigation of the world in three years.

While these comparatively unimportant events had been happening on the American side of the globe, the first war waged between England and France in India had been giving promise of more serious results. Down to the commencement of the eighteenth century the great empire of the Moguls had dominated Hindostan, and the traders of the English and French East India Companies had been no more than visitors to the coast, allowed to build factories at convenient ports by the bounty of the Great Mogul. But in 1707 had died Aurungzebe, the last powerful monarch of that house, and since his death the vast Mohammedan empire which his ancestors had built up was falling rapidly to pieces. Everywhere the Mogul viceroys, or "nawabs," were making themselves independent of their imperial master at Delhi. The native tribes of India also, more especially the brave Mahrattas of the Western Deccan, had been throwing off the Mussulman yoke and starting on a career of conquest. The European settlers in the ports of Southern India profited immensely by this relaxation of the central control which the Mogul government had been wont to exercise, and assumed a much less deferential tone when dealing with the revolted nawabs who now ruled in the Carnatic, Bengal, and the Deccan.

It was first during the War of the Austrian Succession that the English and French ventured to engage in hostilities with each other, without paying attention to the native powers, whose sovereign rights they were thereby impugning. The factories of the two powers were scattered along the Coromandel coast in curious alternation, and it was here that the struggle took place. The English were based on their chief settlement at Madras, the French on their stronghold of Pondicherry.

Four years of fighting gave a decided superiority to the French, who were headed by Dupleix, a man of great energy and far-reaching views. He was the first to discover the part that might be played in Indian politics by native troops officered and drilled by Europeans. These Sepoys (Sipahis is the more correct form) had originally been small armed guards employed by the governors of the factories. Dupleix discovered, from a chance encounter at St. Thomé (1746), that a small body of these disciplined mercenaries could defeat whole hordes of native cavalry, and used his discovery with skill and promptitude. Raising large numbers of Sepoys, he built up the first regular army that had been seen in India. In his struggle with the English he was very successful. Madras and almost all the other English factories fell into his hands, and it looked as if the French were to be the sole power in Southern Hindostan. The complete triumph of Dupleix was only prevented by his quarrels with his colleague Labourdonnais, the governor of the Mauritius, who had come to his aid at the head of a fleet. They were both energetic and arbitrary, refused to fall in with each other's plans, and so failed to completely expel the English from the Coromandel coast. The other settlements of the East India Company—the island port of Bombay, the old dowry of Catherine of Portugal, and the factory of Fort William at Calcutta in Bengal—were not molested.

To the intense disgust of Dupleix, the treaty of Aachen stipulated the mutual restoration of conquests, and the English settlements were all given back in 1748. In India, as in America, all was left unsettled, and the struggle for supremacy had to be deferred for a space.

Eight years of uneasy peace followed the indecisive and vague treaty of Aachen (1748-1756). England, under the feeble rule of the two Pelhams, seemed to have sunk back into the same condition of prosperous lethargy which had been her lot in the uneventful days of Walpole. In her political history there is nothing of moment to relate; the Pelhams had almost silenced opposition by the simple expedient of finding places in the cabinet or the public service for any one who might have made himself dangerous to them. Even the eloquent and energetic William Pitt, the consistent denouncer of all ministers, had been quieted for a time by the gift of the lucrative post of Paymaster of the Forces. Room was found for so many and diverse persons in the Pelham cabinet, that it was known as the "Broad-Bottom Administration."

The Pelhams, though using the old Whig catchwords about liberty and reform, were, like Walpole, only anxious to keep things quiet and to preserve themselves in office. Hence there is little or nothing to record of their doings. We may mention, however, the creation of our celebrated 3 per cents. by Henry Pelham, who was somewhat of a financier, his sole accomplishment. The National Debt, then a sum of £78,000,000, was paying 4 per cent. at the time of the treaty of Aachen. The premier, seeing that the public credit was good, and money cheap, resolved to reduce the rate of interest. This he accomplished by borrowing money at 3 per cent. to pay off all those national creditors who would not accept the new scale. The conversion was accomplished with ease, and relieved the revenue of some £500,000 a year of expenses. The debt, thus reduced and simplified, received its new name of "Consols," all the old loans having been consolidated into one (1750).

A word may be also given to the reform of the Calendar in 1752. England up to this time had used the "Old Style," or Julian Calendar, invented by Julius Cæsar eighteen centuries before. A slight error in the calculation of the great Roman had made the year too short, and in the lapse of the ages this error had grown by accumulation into as much as eleven days. England, later than most nations, adopted the reformed or Gregorian Calendar—named after Pope Gregory XIII.—during the Pelham administration. Thus, the change being made on September 2, 1752, the day that followed became the 14th instead of the 3rd. This bewildered the multitude, and was made a serious charge against the minister by many ignorant folks, who complained that they had been defrauded of eleven days of their lives!

In such comparatively trifling events the middle years of the eighteenth century passed away. The stagnant times of the old Whig oligarchy were drawing towards their close, and the movements which were to stir England so deeply in the next generation were beginning to develop.

We have already spoken of the increasing commercial supremacy of England in the period. This growth in foreign trade was now beginning to be supplemented by an increased activity in manufacturing industry, which was to be the distinguishing mark of the second half of the century. But the first signs of it were already apparent before 1750. The earliest attempt for the improvement of the inland communications of the kingdom may be traced to 1720, when the Irwell canal was opened to Manchester. As important a landmark is the discovery of the process of smelting iron by means of coal in 1740. Up to this time iron had always been worked with charcoal, and the manufacture of it had been almost confined to the wooded districts of southern England, most especially to the Sussex Weald. But the new process opened up the Yorkshire iron mines, which were to completely supersede those of the South, for in the North iron and coal are found together in most convenient proximity. All this development, however, belongs to the times of George III. rather than those of George II.

Even more important in the history of the social life of England than the expansion of her commercial resources, was another change which began about the middle of the eighteenth century, in the sphere of spiritual things. The Whig supremacy in the State, which had begun in 1714, had the most deplorable results on the Church. Walpole and his disciples were men quite out of sympathy with any religious impulse; their lives and morals would not bear looking into, and they openly scoffed at religion. To them the Church was simply a field of patronage for friends and dependents, and a machine for supplementing the working of the State. Down to the time of Anne's death the Tory party had been supreme within the bounds of the establishment, and the Whigs therefore viewed the whole body of the clergy with suspicion. They stopped in 1717 the meetings of Convocation, which had existed from time immemorial, wishing to prevent the clerical body from finding a mouthpiece. They systematically officered the Church with Whig bishops, of whom nothing was asked but political orthodoxy. As was likely, men chosen on this principle were often most unfit pastors of the Church. A Walpole or a Pelham was not likely to select men whose characteristics were fervour or enthusiasm. The Whig bishops were generally of two classes—either they were prominent political clergy, court chaplains and the like, who laid themselves out to win preferment by their sermons, or they were "Greek-play bishops"—to use an expressive phrase—mere scholars, whose title to promotion was to have edited a classic author or ruled a public school. Both classes were, as a rule, very inefficient; many were scandalous non-residents, and seldom went near their dioceses, dwelling in London all the year round and haunting the court. Remote sees like Bangor or Carlisle hardly knew the face of their bishops. Some of these prelates were more notable for their political than their religious orthodoxy; of these "Latitudinarian" bishops perhaps the best known is Hoadley, whom the Whigs promoted to four sees one after another, in spite of the fact that his views on the Trinity were hardly consistent with his position as a member of the Church.

It was not to be expected that such prelates would be in touch with their subordinates the country clergy, who still for the most part remained Tory in their views, looked on the least measure for the political emancipation of Dissenters or Romanists with horror, and nourished a strong personal dislike for the two first Georges and their ministers. Hence came such a breach in the unity and organization of the Church as had never been seen before. The upper clergy were careless and unspiritual, the lower clergy grew lethargic and apathetic under the neglect of their superiors. There was a general tendency to praise common sense and morality, and to sneer at theological learning or evangelical fervour.

This general deadness in the Church could not long continue without causing a reaction. The great feature in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was the appearance of the "Methodist" movement, of which John Wesley was the originator. Shocked by the want of energy and enthusiasm among the clergy, Wesley, a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, devoted himself to active evangelical work, and especially to public preaching. He is first heard of as preaching to the poor of neglected Oxford parishes, and to the prisoners in the jail (1729). A few years later he went out as a missionary to America, and laboured in the backwoods of Georgia. Returning in 1738, he resumed his work in England, passing from place to place, and addressing large congregations of all sorts and conditions of men. His fervent eloquence and enthusiasm came as a revelation to the neglected masses of the cities, or to congregations condemned to many years of sermons on dry morality. He spoke of sin and conversion with an earnestness which had not been seen since the days of early Puritan enthusiasm. Wesley and the numerous followers who sprang up to join him might have inspired the Church with a new spirit of fervour, if they had but been permitted to do so. But, unfortunately, the Latitudinarian bishops disliked his emotional harangues and his clear-cut dogma, and the parish clergy often treated him as an intruder when he appeared inside their cures. Hence, though a strong Churchman at first, he was gradually driven into schism, and became the founder of a new Nonconformist sect, instead of the restorer of the spirituality of the Church from within. Towards the end of his sixty years of labour (1729-91), he took the final step of ordaining preachers and allowing them to celebrate the sacraments, thus committing his followers to abandoning the national Church. His work, however, was not without its effect inside the Church of England; many who sympathized with him remained Churchmen, and from them came the Evangelical, or newer Low-Church party, within the establishment.

From Wesley and his contemporaries began a decided improvement in the moral life of England. After remaining at its lowest ebb in the eighty years that followed the Restoration, it began to mend about the middle of the century. The change is marked in all the most characteristic spheres of action, by an increased humanity to prisoners, paupers, and slaves, an improved tone in literature and the drama, and a growing demand for the observation of a higher standard of morals by public men. Political corruption and ostentatious ill living, which had been the rule in the beginning of the eighteenth century, had become the exception at its end.

But if England was more serious and more moral by the end of the century, no small share in that result must be attributed to the sobering effect of three long and desperate wars, which more than once seemed about to be the ruin of the realm. Between 1756 and 1815 there were to be thirty-six years of war to twenty-three of peace, and two whole generations were bred up in times of stress and trouble, which developed the sterner virtues, and taught men no longer to sneer at fervour, whether displayed in patriotism or in religion.