Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/347

A.D. 1715.] exile, at the age of eighty, in 1745. Lady Mary Wortley Montague saw him at Avignon, where, she says, he kept an assembly, where all the best company met twice a week; lived in great magnificence; was quite inoffensive, and seemed to have forgotten every part of his past life, and to be of no party.

The impeachment of Oxford immediately followed. On the 9th of July lord Coningsby, attended by a great part of the commons, carried up to the lords the articles against him, sixteen in number, to which afterwards six more were added. The first fifteen related to the peace of Utrecht; the sixteenth to the sudden creation of twelve peers in 1711, in order to create a tory majority, by which it charged him with highly abusing the constitution of parliament and the laws of the kingdom. When the articles had been read, it was doubted whether any of the charges amounted to high treason. To decide this as a legal point, it was moved that the judges should be consulted; but this motion was rejected, and another was made to commit him to the Tower; and, though reprieved a few days on account of an indisposition, he was committed accordingly, having made a very solemn plea of his innocence, and of having only obeyed the orders of the queen, without at all convincing the house.

Matthew Prior and Thomas Harley were arrested on the 10th of June. They were examined by the secret committee, and Prior, refusing to betray his principals by revealing his correspondence with them during his employment by them in Paris, was on the 17th of the same month, on the motion of Walpole for his impeachment, committed to custody; and in the following year he was found not only still lying in confinement at the mercy of the house, but was omitted in an act of grace passed then. Soon after, however, he was discharged, and quietly retired into the country, where he passed the remainder of his days, either at his own villa of Doun Hall, or at Wimpole, a seat of the earl of Oxford, where he died on the 18th of December, 1721. It was the misfortune of Prior, who appears to have been an active and skilful diplomatist, to have been employed in the worst of causes, and by the worst ministers who had for a long time been intrusted with power. Oxford continued to lie in the Tower for two years before he was brought to trial, matters of higher public interest intervening.

Whilst these proceedings were in agitation, the tory and Jacobite party, which had at the king's accession appeared stunned, now recovering spirit, began to foment discontent and sedition in the public mind. They set the pulpits to work, and the high church clergy lent themselves heartily to it. They maligned the king in their sermons; they represented him as of a morose and gloomy temper; his religion as presbyterian, and that the old tyranny of that religion was to be restored; they drew the most insidious distinctions betwixt a foreign prince and an English prince; they declared that we should be eaten up by Hanoverian rats and other foreign vermin. The cries were soon raised of "High church and Ormonde forever!" "Down with the puritans!" "Down with the dissenters!" When Oxford was conducted to the Tower, he was followed by vast mobs cheering and crying, "High church, Oxford, and Ormonde for ever!" The mobs were soon set to pull down the meeting-houses of the dissenters. Many buildings were destroyed, and many dissenters insulted. They did not pause there, but they blackened the character of the king, and denied his right to the crown, whilst the most fascinating pictures were drawn of the youth, and grace, and graciousness of the rightful English prince, who was wandering in exile to make way for the usurper. To such a length did matters go, that the riot act, which had been passed in the reign of Mary, and limited to her own reign, which was again revived by Elizabeth, and had never since been called into action, was now made perpetual, and armed with increased power. It provided that if twelve persons should unlawfully assemble to disturb the peace, and any one justice should think proper to command them by proclamation to disperse, and should they, in contempt of his orders, continue together for one hour, it should be felony without benefit of clergy. A subsequent clause was added, by which pulling down chapels or houses, even before proclamation, was made subject to the same penalties. Such is the act in force at this day.

But if the mob could not pull down any more chapels, or insult dissenters or whigs without danger, they took to the less manly amusement of insulting the king's mistresses. Unfortunately, George had brought with him several German ladies, who were as remarkable for ugliness and corpulence as Charles II.'s mistresses had been for beauty. In the eyes of an English mob, a king's mistress is a very sufferable personage if she is handsome; but it was regarded as a species of treason and an insult to the nation that king George should patronise ugly women. Accordingly, when they saw Madame Herrengard Melusina von Schulemberg, or the countess Platen, abroad, they pursued their carriages with howling and insults. They had the reputation of being very rapacious, and they saw that they were very corpulent and plain. One of these ladies in alarm put her head out of her carriage, and exclaimed, "Why do you abuse us, good people? We come for all your goods." To which a fellow bawled out, with an oath, "Yes, and for all our chattels too!" It was not till worse things than these insults had taken place, particularly in Staffordshire, which was long remarkable for its tory politics, that the riot act succeeded in securing peace.

During this year died two of the leading ministers, the lords Wharton and Halifax. Wharton was an able man, but of a most profligate character, and was succeeded by his son, still more able and still more abandoned. Halifax was a man of good talents, of literary taste, which he patronised in others. He was eloquent in parliament, a skilful financier, and an active man of business. His great faults were his excessive vanity and his ambition, which saw no post or prize too high for his imagined deserts. On the demise of Wharton the privy seal was put in commission; and the earl of Carlisle, a poor statesman and worse poet, was made first lord of the treasury; but he was soon found unequal to the office, and in October it was conferred on Walpole.

We come now to the rebellion of 1715. The succession of the house of Hanover had raised the pretender and his Jacobite faction in England to a pitch of excitement which made them ready to rush upon the most desperate measures. In England the destruction of the tory ministry, the welcome given to the new protestant king, and the vigour with