Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/446

432 and declare Mr. Wilson, the provost, incapable of again holding any public office. Nothing so furious and unstatesmanlike could ever have been imagined possible in the eighteenth century. Witnesses were called to the bar of both houses, and amongst them three Scotch judges in their robes were subjected to a sharp cross-questioning. Nothing, however, could be elicited except some degree of carelessness on the part of the city magistrates. The Scottish nation, with its usual spirit, highly resented the menaces of this impolitic bill. The duke of Argyll in the lords, and various members of the commons, as the lord advocate, the celebrated Duncan Forbes; Lindsay, the member for Edinburgh; lord Polwarth, the son of the earl of Marchmont, already greatly distinguished — denounced it as equally insulting and unjust. They were zealously supported by many English members, especially by Wyndham and Sir John Barnard, and the bill gradually shrank into an act disabling Mr. Provost Wilson from holding any office in future, and fining the city two thousand pounds for the benefit of the widow of captain Porteus; and, alluding to her original station, it was jocosely said, therefore, that all this terrible menace and debate ended in making the fortune of an old cookmaid.

There was still a clause retained in the bill which greatly annoyed the clergy of Scotland. It was one ordering the reading of a proclamation by the clergy once every month, calling on the people to exert themselves to bring the murderers of captain Porteus to justice. The clergy resented this order on two grounds. It seemed to desecrate their pulpits by making them the organs of a mere hue and cry; and, as the proclamation mentioned "the lords spiritual and temporal in parliament assembled," it appeared to give a sanction in them to episcopacy, which they still continued to regard as unchristian, and to denounce as such on all convenient occasions. The clause was a most impolitic one; it tended only to keep up the popular irritation on the subject, and gave so much offence generally, that government felt the effect of it sensibly in the next election in the Scotch burghs.

On the 1st of February, 1737, parliament met, and its first debates were on these Scotch affairs; but on the 9th of March Walpole moved that a sum of one million should be taken from the sinking fund, and applied to relieve some of the old South Sea annuitants. Sir John Barnard proposed that the house should resolve itself into a committee, and take the national debt into serious consideration, in order to its reduction. As the sinking fund was now regularly seized upon for other purposes. Sir John moved that money should be borrowed at three per cent, with which to pay off annuities which were receiving higher interest. The debt, it appeared, at this time amounted to forty-seven millions, eight hundred and sixty-six thousand five hundred and ninety-six pounds. This was clearly a wise and legitimate mode of reducing the national annual payment of interest. The landed proprietors were in favour of the plan, which thus would materially diminish the expenditure, and Sir John Barnard's high moral as well as financial character lent weight to the scheme. But the monied interest opposed it. It lowered the profit of funded securities, and Sir Robert Walpole opposed it as strenuously; for whatever reduced the debt or the interest of it, reduced the motives of a large class for supporting government and its measures. He referred to the South Sea and India Companies, which had, in the disastrous period of 1720, when they had the power to demand the whole of their funds, refrained from doing so. He contended that we were saved from ruin by them, and he demanded whether it were grateful to reduce their dividends. This was a very specious argument, which Sir Robert never wanted; but when the country had gone on paying extra interest to these parties for seven years, the argument would have been totally disregarded by Sir Robert himself, had his political interest leaned another way. His arguments and exertions succeeded, and the plan was rejected.

The attention of the public was now again drawn to those unnatural feuds which disturbed the royal family. The exhibition of domestic discord and hatred in the house of Hanover had, from its first ascension of the throne, been most odious and revolting. George I. had the most monstrous jealousy of his son, and that son, now George II., was equally averse to his son, Frederick, the prince of Wales, who repaid the paternal hatred with the most unfilial opposition and disrespect. These disgraceful and unchristian contentions of this singular family, were aggravated for their own purposes by the adverse parties round the throne. The quarrels of the present father and son, like those of the present and late king, had begun in Hanover, and had been imported along with them only to assume greater malignance in foreign and richer soil. The prince of Wales, whilst still in Germany, had formed a strong attachment to the princess royal of Prussia, who afterwards became margravine of Bareith, and has left us in her memoirs some strange sketches of her different relatives. The Prussian family did not bear a more amiable character than that of Hanover. The king was of a most brutal temper, and had the same inveterate hatred of his son and successor as George of Hanover had. He treated him with the most savage severity, and wished to have him beheaded. Nor did he confine his atrocious violence to his son; he beat and maltreated his daughter. What sort of a race the union of two such families might have produced it is really frightful to contemplate. But this was happily prevented by Frederick William of Prussia and George of England as cordially hating each other as they each hated their own sons. George it was who forbade the connection. But the prince of Wales, in that resistance to the paternal win which was innate in him, dispatched an agent of his, one La Motto, from Hanover, secretly to the queen of Prussia, to assure her that he was determined to marry her daughter, spite of his father, and that he should quickly arrive in Berlin in disguise for that purpose. The Prussian queen, in her delight at this news, defeated it by foolishly boasting of it to the English envoy at her court. The consequence was, that the prince was instantly summoned to England, where he duly arrived in 1728.

The prince found in the opposition in England the most unfortunate fosterers of his unfilial temper. Pulteney, Wyndham, Chesterfield, Carteret, Cobham, and, worst of all, Bolingbroke, became his associates, and the frequenters of his house. There he heard nothing but the most distorted description of his father's government and of his ministers. A more pernicious companion and mentor for a