ity of eighty against forty. It had still, however, to encounter some opposition in the Lords. The old Duke of Newcastle had been averse to it, and, though Pitt had insisted that something must be done to gratify the Tories, he would probably have seen it thrown out with pleasure. The Duke of Richmond and the earls of Gower and Hillsborough spoke against it, and Lord Hardwicke was lukewarm. Gower put it home to the bishops whether the bill would not multiply perjuries; but the bench seemed to have had a sudden and wonderful reliance on human virtue; though certainly, as observed by Walpole," perjury was not the crime at which most men stuck in that age; nor could it be hoped that they who made a seat in parliament the foundation of their fortune would not overleap any obstacle to obtain one." Lord Temple supported the bill, and made use of the old threat of disunion in the cabinet if it were not allowed to pass; and so it was passed by a majority of fifty against sixteen. General Murray, a brave and adventurous soldier, had been left to defend the half-ruined town of Quebec, and our fleet had retired to escape being frozen up in the St. Lawrence. M. Levi, who had succeeded Montcalm, spent the winter in making preparations for a desperate effort to recover all that the French had lost, and early in the spring he took the field with a mixed body of French, Cana- | dians, and Indians, exceeding in all 10,000 men. He marched from Montreal, and in the month of April, when the weather was still inclement, he appeared before Quebec. General Murray, with scarcely 7000 men, disdaining to wait a regular siege, marched out and attacked the enemy: but he was defeated, lost most of the guns he had taken out with him, was nearly cut off in his retreat, and got back to the city with great difficulty. As the ice cleared away, Levi brought up six French frigates, and began to form the siege by land and water. But, on the 9th of May, Lord Colville, with two good frigates, outsailing the rest of the English squadron, ascended the river and destroyed the French ships, under the eyes of Levi, who stood on the heights on the other side, but who presently decamped, and with such precipitation that he left his artillery and stores behind him. Nothing now remained to the French in Canada except Montreal; and that last strong-hold, wherein the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the governor-general, had collected all his magazines, was soon invested by General Amherst, General Murray, and Colonel Haviland; and, despairing of any succor from France, which could scarcely put a ship to sea, or spare a man from her wars in Europe, Vaudreuil capitulated on the 8th of September. Thus were the Canadas won, and the conquest of them had cost us comparatively but few men. This encouraged Pitt to call it "a bloodless war;" but, as he was conquering America through Germany, the blood spilled there was assuredly, in some measure, to be taken into the account; and there the carnage was and continued to be unprecedented in modern war. In the year 1758 the loss of the King of Prussia was estimated at 30,000 men, and that of his enemies at 100,000. The year 1759 : was scarcely less bloody and we shall presently see the monstrous waste of human life in the present year, 1760. On the 23d of June the Austrians under Laudon attacked the Prussians under Fouquet, near Glatz, in Silesia, and gained a victory which cost the Prussians 8000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners, and the Austrians themselves 3000 men; and after their victory the Austrian soldiers committed unspeakable atrocities in one or two towns which their unusual success opened to them. "At Landshut," says the royal cynic, "nothing was spared but misery and ugliness." These atrocities were of frequent occurrence, and to the fearful amount of lives and limbs lost in the field must be added the darker horrors committed on the peaceful townspeople and the unhappy peasantry during this seven years' war. From Glatz, Laudon advanced upon Breslau. Frederic's brother, Prince Henry, obliged him to raise that siege; but before the Austrians departed they had reduced the greater part of the thriving Breslau to a heap of ruins. Frederic himself, after a fruitless attempt to recover Dresden, was intercepted at Liegnitz, and almost completely surrounded by Austrians and Russians; but on the 15th of August, with a union of heroism and consummate skill, he cut his way through the Austrians, killing some 2000, and taking some 5000 prisoners. He himself lost in killed and wounded about 1200 men, but this he called "only a scratch." He then joined his brother Henry, and rescued the town of Schweidnitz, besieged by Daun. But, in the mean while, a Russian army under Tottleben and Czernichef, and an Austrian army under Lacy, after firing red-hot balls into the town, and bombarding it with shells and grenades, took Berlin, committed dreadful havoc, and threw out their Cossacks and Pandours to ravage all the country round about. Frederic struck away to rescue his capital, and Daun followed him. In a moment of despondency Frederic spoke, as he had done once or twice before, of committing suicide; but the Russians and Austrians ran away from Berlin as soon as they had heard of his approach, and his genius soon gave him fresh triumphs over the mediocrity or downright stupidity of his enemies' generals. The Hereditary Prince of Brunswick was defeated at Corbach, when Prince Ferdinand was at too great a distance to support him. In his retreat his army fell into confusion, and the greater part of the infantry would have been cut off had not the Hereditary Prince made a brilliant charge in person at the head of the British dragoons. The prince was wounded in the action. A few days after this affair, while the Duke de Broglie was encamped on the heights of Corbach, the Hereditary Prince defeated a detached corps at Exdorf, and took the commander of it and five entire battalions prisoners. Here the British horse distinguished themselves, Elliot's dragoons, a new regiment which had never been in the field before, charging five several times, and breaking the enemy's line at each charge. Soon after this exploit the Hereditary Prince was detached to the Lower Rhine, which ie crossed in September. He took the ancient city of Cleves and then invested Wesel. But the French, under M. de Castries, attacked him in his positions, and, after two days' hard fighting, he was compelled to retire beyond the Rhine, which he crossed in admirable order, though in presence of a far superior and victorious force. His loss had been very considerable, and had fallen heaviest on the British part of his army. His own person, which he had exposed like a common trooper, was covered with wounds. Lord Doun, a gallant, accomplished, and amiable young man, received three wounds, and, after languishing some weeks, died in torment. Prince Ferdinand, who had with him nearly 20,000 British troops, gave the French a complete defeat at Warburg, and drove them into the Dimel, where many of them were drowned. The British grenadiers, artillery, dragoons, and the Highlanders particularly, distinguished themselves in this sharp encounter, and the gallant Marquis of Granby was always found charging at the head of the horse. Such, however, was the numerical superiority of the French, who now called in their detachments and got reinforcements across the Rhine, that they were soon enabled to overrun Hesse and threaten the electorate of Hanover once more. But George II., who had already spent nearly all his privately accumulated treasure and vast savings in defending his electorate, looked confidently to the arms of his nephew, Frederic, and the increasing poverty and disorganization of the French monarchy, and if he had any tender apprehensions about Han AUTOGRAPHS OF KING WILLIAM, QUEEN ANNE, KING GEORGE I., AND KING GEORGE II. Willien H. George I over-he had been victorious for the last two years everywhere else - they were soon quieted in the grave. On the 25th of October, the temperate, methodical old man rose, as usual, at six o'clock and drank his chocolate. At a quarter after seven he went into a little closet. Presently his German valet heard a noise as of some one falling, and, running into the closet, he found the king dead on the 1 In the course of the summer the Duke of Cumberland had a stroke of palsy. He soon recovered the use of his speech and of his limbs, but one of his eyes remained distorted, and the grossness of his habit, and other disorders, seemed to threaten a brief and miserable residue of existence. floor: in falling he had cut his face against the corner of a bureau. They carried him to a bed | and applied the lancet, but not a drop of blood followed: the ventricle of his heart had burst and caused an instantaneous and painless death. "Full of years and glory, he died without a pang and without a reverse. He left his family firmly established on a long-disputed throne, and was taken away in the moment that approaching extinction of sight and hearing made loss of life the only blessing that remained desirable.”1 1 Walpole, Memoirs. T CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OF RELIGION. HE Settlement, as it used properly to be styled, of 1689, was in the church as well as in the state much less of a revolution than was either the abolition of the ancient government in 1649, or its restoration, in 1660. The change in regard to the one as well as the other was not of institutions, but only of persons. As the monarchy remained, with only a new king, so did the established church, with only the substitution of some new bishops and other clergymen. Both in church and state this Revolution, or, rather, this winding up and stoppage of the Revolution, was, more remarkably than any thing else, a victory of Protestantism over popery, or, rather, of the half-Protestantism of the Anglican and Scottish churches over the principle of absolutism (which is the essence of popery) alike in religion and in politics. The Restoration, in 1660, again, was, in spirit and in effect, the restoration of absolutism and of popery. Neither the one nor the other, indeed, was openly or formally reestablished; the state of the country and of the popular feeling made that impracticable at the moment; but both were introduced in disguise an abolished and forbidden thing. the work of preparation for their complete reës- | power in the church, absolute power in the state tablishment was begun-and in the mean time, every was also necessarily put an end to; and the settleinstitution in the kingdom, even while retaining its ment made in 1689 was, therefore, the commenceold form, took their character, and worked for their ment of a new era of political as well as of religious ends. The crown proceeded from violating the liberty. The most self-willed of despots did not constitution to trampling upon the laws; the parlia- foresee, or consider, that when he cast off the sument was coerced until it became the obedient ally premacy of the pope he was making the first move of the court; the law was perverted into the most against the supremacy of his own prerogative. convenient instrument of oppression, the judges Then was really begun the long contest between themselves serving as the mere beagles and blood- absolutism and constitutionalism, which, after many hounds of the royal tyranny; the corporations and fluctuations, was finally decided in favor of the latter municipal franchises-those sheltering depositories in 1689. But yet this result, whatever it was esof the liberties of the nation in the worst times, sentially, or in its more remote operation, took the were now either extinguished, or forced, like every shape at the time rather of a victory over popery thing else, into conformity and subserviency to the than a victory over the prerogative. The royal one dominant authority in the state, the power of prerogative, in fact, was not formally curtailed by the monarch. Finally, the established church, half- any of the changes they made; but popery, as an popish at any rate, as every established church es-element of the constitution, was expressly declared sentially is, was made, as far as possible, except in mere name and profession, to conceal and suppress its Protestantism, and to give way to its inclinations of an opposite kind; that is to say, the pressure to which it was subjected from the court, and by which, of course, it was swayed to a certain extent, was all in that direction. Thus in England it signalized itself by a vigorously coercive, or, as others termed it, a persecuting policy toward dissenters, from which it required dextrous management on the part of the crown to protect the Roman Catholics themselves; while in Scotland, where the Catholics were few in number, besides going faster and farther in the same course, it assumed, of the two forms or constitutions, the Episcopalian and Presbyterian, which, ever since the Reformation, had been struggling for the mastery in that country, the one— namely, the Episcopalian-which was most opposed to democracy and to the popular sentiment, and had in it the largest infusion of the principle of popery and absolutism. All these three successive revolutions, or, rather, grand shiftings of the scene in the progress of one revolution, were alike reactions, brought about by the opposite principle, or system, having in each case been previously carried out to the point at which it was no longer endurable. The absolutism and at least semi-popery of the early part of the reign of Charles I. produced the violent Protestantism and anti-monarchism of 1649. Republicanism and sectarianism were swept away together, in 1660, by a returning tide of all but absolute power in the crown, and of the most rigorous intolerance of dissent in the church. Partly from the natural tendency of things, partly from circumstances personal to Charles II. and his successor, the ascendency acquired by the royal authority after the Restoration was employed, more perseveringly than for any other object, first in the protection and ultimately in the open encouragement and promotion of popery; and, accordingly, the chief characteristic of the next and final phasis of the Revolution, the settlement made in 1689, was its anti-papal spirit. It may be regarded as the completion of the Reformation begun by Henry VIII. a century and a half before. The victory, then, was really in the main a victory of Protestantism, and, as such, a victory of the established church. Yet, notwithstanding this cha acter of the result, and notwithstanding also the fatt that it had been principally brought about by means of the church, there is no doubt that the Revolution was far from being acceptable to the generality of the clergy. That event, indeed, brought with it no new laws directly affecting the established church in England-no alteration of any thing in either its internal or external condition, in its doctrines, its discipline, its endowments, or its position in the state. On the contrary, all its ancient rights and liberties, some of which had been recently attempted to be infringed, were confirmed and more distinctly recognized than they had been at any former period. But still there were obvious enough reasons why such a body as the established clergy should be in general dissatisfied with such a change as the Revolution. It is certain, in the first place, that, although the resistance of some of the heads of the church, in which they were backed by the nearly universal body of the clergy as well as of the laity, had been principally instrumental in driving the late king from the throne, yet that was a consequence of their conduct which was neither foreseen nor desired either by some of themselves or by the great multitude of their inferiors by whom they were supported and applauded. Whether they would have taken the course they did if they had rightly discerned to what it was to lead, may be doubted; some of them might have thought the assumption and exercise of a dispensing power-in other words, of an absolute despotism-by the king a less, others a greater evil, than the expulsion of the reigning family from the throne; all we can say is, that, after they had gained their immediate object, the vast majority of the clergy would have been very glad if they could have there stopped the wheel of change they had set in motion, and reduced the Revolution to a mere triumph over the crown in a trial at law. And, in truth, if it had come to a show of hands, they would probably have had the It is true, indeed, that, with the fall of absolute majority of the nation with them in this sentiment. |