Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/368

354 quarrel from generation to generation." We may trust that the present happy reign will falsify this prediction. But at this moment it created a painful difficulty. The king could not take his departure in peace if the prince of Wales was to be made regent, according to custom, in his absence. He proposed, therefore, through his favourite, Bothmar, that the powers of the prince should be limited by rigorous provisions, and that some other persons should be joined with him in commission. Lord Townshend did not hesitate to express his sense of the impolicy of the king's leaving his dominions at all at such a crisis; but he also added that to put any other persons in commission with the prince of Wales was contrary to the whole practice and spirit of England. Driven from this, the king insisted that, instead of regent, the prince should be named "guardian and lieutenant of the realm"—an office which had never existed since the time of the Black Prince. Nor would he even permit him this title except under certain restrictions. He was extremely jealous of the counsels of the duke of Argyll, who had attached himself to the prince, and was his groom of the stole, and insisted on his being removed from his office and from about the person of the prince. Upon this pitiful display of a mean jealousy of his own son—a jealousy equally insulting to the nation, which had shown itself so careful of his rights and claims—George set sail for Hanover, a far less popular monarch than he came.

The retreat of George to Hanover was not merely to enjoy his native scenes and old associations; he felt himself insecure even on the throne of England, and the rebellion for the present quelled, and he was anxious to form or renew alliances on the continent to give strength to his position. The part which England had taken at the end of the war seemed to have alienated all her confederates of the grand alliance, and transferred their resentment to himself with his accession to the British crown. Holland was, perhaps, the least sensible of the past discords; she had kept the treaty, and lent her aid on the landing of the pretender; but she was now in a condition very different to that in which she was when William was stadtholder, and Fagel and Heinsius at the head of his administration. "The government of the United Provinces," said Horace Walpole, now minister at the Hague, "was become a many-headed, headless government, containing as many masters as minds." That stupid obstinacy which had so often tried Marlborough had only increased as the vigour of their great minds had disappeared. As for the emperor, he was more feeble and sluggish than he had shown himself as the aspirant to the throne of Spain. He was a bigoted catholic, little disposed to trouble himself for securing a protestant succession, although it had expended much money and blood in defence of his own. On the contrary, he felt a strong jealousy of George, the elector of Hanover, as king of England, and therefore capable of introducing, through his augmented resources, aggressive disturbances in Germany. The king of Prussia, his son-in-law, was rather a troublesome and wrangling ally than one to be depended upon.

Taking this view of his continental neighbour, George was driven to the conclusion that his only safety lay in firmly engaging France to relinquish the pretender. The means of the attainment of this desirable object lay in the peculiar position of the regent. Betwixt him and the throne of France stood only the weakly boy, Louis XV. Philip V. of Spain had, as we have seen, renounced solemnly all right to the succession in case of the decease of the infant king of France, but that circumstance gave no security to the regent's mind. He knew, as De Torcy had declared to Bolingbroke, that the hereditary practice of France sanctioned no such renunciations, he knew that Louis XIV. had renounced all claim on the Spanish throne on his marriage with the infanta, Maria Theresa; yet there was a grandson sitting on that throne in consequence of hereditary claim, and in defiance of that renunciation. He knew more, that Philip made the renunciation of the throne of France with mental reservation, and with a determination to assert his right to it in case of the decease of the young French king. It was, therefore, clearly the interest of the regent to strengthen his chance of succession by an alliance with England for support in case of a struggle; but then this alliance must be purchased by guaranteeing George's British throne against the pretender. So long as the chances of the pretender appeared tolerable, the regent had avoided the overtures on this subject, but the failure of the expedition to the Highlands had inclined him to give up the pretender, and he now sent the abbé Dubois to Hanover to treat upon the subject.

There was another point, however, which king George had in view, and without which the treaty was not likely to be accomplished—the port of Mardyk. By the peace of Utrecht France was bound to destroy the port of Dunkirk; but, with true French finesse, having carried out that demolition, she began to construct another port, even better and stronger, at Mardyk, at a short distance from Dunkirk. The English ministry had protested against this barefaced evasion of the treaty of Utrecht on that point both before and since the present king's accession, but with no effect. The French replied that they had faithfully observed the treaty; that they had destroyed the port of Dunkirk, and that Mardyk was not Dunkirk, nor Dunkirk Mardyk. But however much George I. desired the proposed alliance and mutual guarantee for the two successions, he was resolved not to conclude it without the suppression of the new port of Mardyk. It was now that the regent, reflecting on the casualties of his own position and the augmented strength of England, resolved to concede something, if not the whole, regarding Mardyk to achieve the other object. He therefore withdrew the negotiation on this point from M. Chateneuf, the French resident at the Hague, and placed it in the more able and willing hands of the abbé Dubois.

The abbé was at once the most infamous and the most adroit man of his time. The son of a poor apothecary near Limoges, he had contrived to mount by degrees into the confidence of the duke of Orleans, in whose service he had filled the post which Chiffinch filled to Charles II.—the manager of his infamous amours, the panderer to his vices, the paid seducer of women into his toils. This he did whilst he was the tutor of Orleans, and this he continued when he was regent and duke of Chartres. But be was not only the agent of that profligate man's pleasures; he was also his diplomatic envoy, first at one court and then at another. We have seen him coming and going betwixt England and