Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/481

A.D. 1742.] Elizabeth sympathised with her sister monarch. She sent her a considerable sum of money; yet, not to appear too much a partisan, she at the same time congratulated the elector of Bavaria on his elevation to the imperial throne. Elizabeth ordered the counts Osterman, Munich, and the other adherents of the deposed czar, to be tried, and they were condemned, but their lives were spared, their sentence being commuted to banishment to Siberia. She was crowned in May, and then prosecuted the war against Sweden with augmented vigour. The Swedes, who had till then carried all before them, and refused to make peace unless all the conquests of Peter were restored to them, now were driven by general Lasci to surrender at Helsingfors. The Swedish generals, Lewenhaupt and Bodenhock, were condemned to death by a court-martial on their return home.

In Italy, the ambition of the queen of Spain had produced fresh commotions. As she had established her son Don Carlos as king of Naples and Sicily, she now endeavoured to carve out a kingdom in northern Italy for her son Don Philip. The Spaniards had already a large army in northern Italy under the duke of Montemar, and Philip was to march a second army into Savoy. On learning these intentions, the king of Sardinia, who had greatly aided the Spaniards in the conquest of Naples, now suddenly made peace with Austria, and marching against Montemar, drove him to take shelter in the kingdom of Naples. But whilst he was doing this, Don Philip appeared in Savoy with his army, and the king left Montemar and marched against Philip. At his approach Philip retreated into Dauphiné. Then the marquis de Minas, an able general, arrived from Madrid to take the command of Philip's army, who compelled the king of Sardinia to retreat into Piedmont, and he himself marched his Spaniards into Savoy. The army of Montemar, now commanded by count Gages, again advanced into Italy as far as the Bolognese and Romagna, where it went into winter quarters, whilst the king of Sardinia and the Austrians took up theirs in Modena and Parma. Thus there was a prospect of sharp fighting in Italy in the spring.

The incursion of Spaniards would have been much greater this summer in Upper Italy had it not been for the spirited conduct of commodore Martin, with five ships of the British line. Don Carlos was mustering a large army to follow that of Montemar under Gages, when Martin suddenly appeared before Naples, and sent in a message to say that the king of England, as the ally of Austria, and at war with Spain, proposed that Naples should maintain a strict neutrality in this war. As Naples was utterly defenceless, and possessed of the meagerest garrison, Don Carlos and his court were thunderstruck. In order, however, to gain time, they sent on board to the British commodore a man of high rank, to enter into a discussion, and put off any decided action. But the commodore was not the man to be played with. He pulled out his watch, laid it on the table, and laconically informed the envoy, that if he did not within two hours receive a satisfactory answer to his proposal, he should bombard the city. This produced its effect: the king at once gave the required promise, and wrote, at the desire of the commodore's emissary, an order to the duke of Castropignano, to quit the Spanish army in Italy, and march home with the Neapolitan troops. The commodore's emissary insisted on reading this letter himself before it was dispatched, and he then returned on board, and the fleet sailed away. After the departure of the fleet, Don Carlos, warned by this startling visit, erected some defences of the city and port, and began to build some ships of war; but he was careful not to violate the neutrality till the Austrians attacked him in his own kingdom.

Admiral Haddock, who had continued nearly inactive in the Mediterranean, was recalled, and admiral Matthews sent to take his command with seven additional ships. He found all his attempts against the Spaniards still baffled by the French, who, though there was yet no declaration of war, continued to protect the Spanish fleet; but Matthews resolved to pay no attention to the French, and on the first opportunity he pursued five Spanish galleys into the French port of St. Tropez, and there, under the very guns of the French batteries, attacked and destroyed them. In May he sent commodore Rowley to cruise off Toulon, and there seized a great number of Spanish vessels. It was he who dispatched commodore Martin to Naples, who so promptly executed his mission, and again joined the admiral in the road of Hieres. He landed a body of men at St. Remo, in the territory of Genoa, and destroyed the magazines of the Spaniards there. After these and other decisive measures he selected the port of Hieres for his winter station.

Little was done by our fleet elsewhere. Vernon and Wentworth, after the reinforcements sent from England, planned an attack on the town of Panama, on the isthmus of Darien. They were joined by the governor of Jamaica, and sailed from that island on the 9th of March; but this expedition was as unfortunate as the one against Carthagena. They had chosen their time in the midst of the rainy and unhealthy season again; and, after losing a number of men by sickness, they returned to Jamaica. In August they made the insignificant conquest of the small island of Rattan, in the bay of Honduras; and in September these wretched commanders were called home, with the miserable remains of their fine armament, where they arrived amid the scorn and execration of the public. A more satisfactory conduct was displayed by general Oglethorpe in the new colony of Georgia. This was attacked by a Spanish force of four thousand men and six-and-thirty ships, under the command of Don Marinal de Monteano, who began his march on Frederica; but Oglethorpe, with a mere handful of men, gave them such a reception that they were glad to retire to their vessels and abandon the enterprise.

Parliament met on the 16th of November, when the king told them that he had augmented the British forces in the Low Countries with sixteen thousand Hanoverians and six thousand Hessians. In fact, it had been his design, accompanied by his son, the duke of Cumberland, to go over and take the command of the combined army of English, Hanoverians, Austrians, and Dutch; but the arrival of the earl of Stair, who had been the nominal commander of these troops, and the return of lord Carteret from the Hague, with the news that the Dutch could not be moved, had caused him to