Page:The life and times of King Edward VII by Whates, Harry Richard 1.djvu/40

22 22 LIFE AND TIMES OF EDWARD VII. the problem for England than to have a Protestant Sovereign, be he popular or otherwise, and whatever risks might be run in putting him there risks not slight, for Bolingbroke was among those who averred that no German Prince, least of all George Lewis, would reign for long in England. Thus things went on, with intrigues intermin- able and baffling confusions, until 1714, when George Lewis was blund- eringly invited to England. He did not come, but the intrigue of which the proposed visit was the outcome led to a quarrel be- tween Anne and the Electress, the English Queen or Bolingbroke for her writing what Dr. A. W. Ward, a mas- terly historian of the period, described as letters couched " in terms of intolerable arrogance and violent menace." They reached the aged Electress, now in her eighty-fourth year, on the 5th and 6th of June, and they gave her a shock from which she died. Her husband endeavoured to conciliate the Queen, but he kept his emissaries active in England. As July advanced Queen Anne became alarmingly ill. On the ist of August she died, and on that day King George I. was proclaimed in London, in accordance with arrange- ments previously devised. The nation took the accession as a GEORGE I. matter of course. He was a Protestant Sovereign and the succession was assured. These were the main things to be kept in view. He tarried in the Low Countries until September, and on the i8th landed in Greenwich, bringing his mistress with him. On the 2Oth he made his entry into London, where he was received without extraordin- ary enthusiasm. Thus inauspicious- ly did the House of Guelph furnish England with a dynasty a dynasty which was, how- ever, to produce a Queen Victoria and an Edward the Seventh. In their living descendants there is, happily, no like- lihood of a rever- sion to the personal follies and political ineptitudes of their eighteenth century fore-runners. Rather is there every pro- mise that the reigns of these two illustrious Sovereigns will be equalled, if not sur- passed. Certain is it that as time marches on, and the waste spaces of the British Empire fill up, the opportunities for kingcraft and statesmanship enlarge. There are glories to be won in this age such as were not open in the days when Europe was the theatre of incessant war, and the Guelphs won their way to a principality by the sword not glories of conquest such as those in which the ruling families of the West took their