of cruelty, or even severity, an exterminating war would have ensued, as disgraceful to humanity as that which desolated Ireland in the latter years of queen Elizabeth.

Anne's great seal was cancelled on occasion of the Union, and a new one designed: instead of her figure being delineated as formerly in equestrian progression, with greyhounds coursing by the side of her steed, her majesty was represented seated on a rock as Britannia, with the Union flag flying near her, and the intersected cross of St. Andrew and St. George on her shield.'

Of course, the attendance of the Scottish members of parliament in London, and the sixteen peers elected as the slender representation of the Scottish noblesse, drew some of the most wealthy and influential persons of that nation to London. The presence of so many of the Scotch nobility afforded some protection to the queen, and aided her in balancing the power of the faction that oppressed her. National jealousy, and party jealousy, forthwith took the alarm, and spoke, in their accustomed organs of lampoons and squibs, against the northern inbreak. The well-known asseveration of the queen, in her first speech after her accession, "that her heart was entirely English," had passed into a sort of motto-proverb, and was inscribed on various of her medals. These words were retorted by English satire as a taunt on her supposed partiality to the Scotch after the Union:

"The queen has lately lost a part,
Of her "Entirely English heart,"
For want of which by way of botch,
She pieced it up again with Scotch."

kings (whatsoever advances they pretended towards it) to have no union with Scotland, though, in his opinion, it would be an advantage, for it could not be done without admitting a good number of Scotch members into both houses of parliament, who must depend upon the crown for subsistence."" The king added, "that he was not desirous that the experiment should be made in his reign, for he had not the good fortune to know what would satisfy a Scotchman!" From this speech it may be inferred, that he was no more willing to take any steps towards a union with Scotland, than the monarchs he had supplanted, and whom he censured on that account; wherefore the failure was more criminal in them than in him, who drew from taxation fifteen times the revenue of any Stuart king, it would be difficult to decide; as he had a swarm of Dutchmen to satisfy, he was not likely to make trial as to what might "satisfy a Scotchman." He certainly meditated providing for his Scottish Celtic subjects, by extermination, of which the Glencoe massacre was a prelude, and the unfortunate colonists at Darien were far "from satisfied," being by his machinations deliberately starved to death. -[See Encyc. Brit. Sir J. Dalrymple's Hist. and Appendix.]

Engravings of Medals and Seals. Brit. Museum.

Apparently the Scotch were ill-treated at this juncture: on pretence of the return of the sixteen peers elected to the British house of lords at every new parliament, the English legislature denied seats in the house of lords to those Scottish lords who possessed English peerages.

Such was a great wrong, for the very small number of sixteen, elected as their representatives by the Scottish nobles, had been fixed with reference to the number who sat in the house of lords as English peers. As a consolatory mark of favour for the injury of denying the duke of Hamilton his seat in the house of lords as duke of Branden, the queen stood godmother in person for his third son, and, following the example of the celebrated queen of Louis XII., Anne of Bretagne, her majesty gave the boy her own name of Anne, unsheltered by the addition of any masculine baptismal name. The noble young Hamilton was, perforce, called "lord Anne," from his infancy, to his arrival at guardsman's estate,-for lord Anne Hamilton, although not quite so much celebrated, was (like his partner in nominal affliction, the great Anne duke de Montmorency) a valiant soldier.1

Among the current events of the sixth year of queen Anne, an odd circumstance occurred in regard to the ambassador of Peter the Great, which occasioned remarkable alterations in the laws of this country concerning foreign ministers. Prince Matveof, after attending the queen's levee, and taking formal leave of her, when recalled to Russia was arrested in St. James's Street, on the writ of Mr. Morton, laceman of Covent Garden, July 27, 1707, and hurried, with much indignity, to a spunging-house." The noble Russian, who did not seem to comprehend the cause of the attack, resisted his capture manfully, laid several

1 In 1726, Lockhart of Carnwath wrote to his titular king, James III., "that the duke of Hamilton was soliciting a commission in the guards of king George, for his younger brother, lord Anne, but that was no reason why the duke should not prove a true Jacobite according to promise, when the time was ripe." Lord Anne Hamilton, nevertheless, lived and died practically faithful to the Georgian monarchs. His wife, Mary Pownal, lost her baptismal name in the appellation of Lady Anne Hamilton. This lady, when a widow, was appointed a lady of the bed chamber on the marriage of Charlotte, princess of Mecklenburg, with George III. The author

of these biographies has been favoured by Mrs. Shickelthorpe, of Norfolk, with the examination of an autograph letter addressed by lady Anne to a relative of hers, describing the royal wedding.

2 Lord Dartmouth's Notes to Burnet.

Toone's Chronology.

of the bailiff's possé low in the kennel, and wounded seriously more than one of them. There does not appear to have been the slightest occasion for violence, or any intention to wrong the tradesman, the amount of that and other debts being only 50%., for which satisfaction was instantly given. Of course the Russian ambassador left England in great disgust, and made a very serious complaint to the czar of the insult. All beneficial intercourse of trade was immediately stopped by the czar, who likewise threatened a declaration of war; on which queen Anne entered into an elaborate explanation, that the insult did not originate from any wrong intended by her or by her ministers, but arose from the rudeness of a tradesman that prince Matveof had incautiously employed. But this explanation, however reasonable it might seem in the eyes of an English queen and her ministry, was by no means satisfactory to czar Peter. It caused him, however, to write a very naive and original epistle, requesting "the high and mighty princess Anne, queen of Great Britain and Ireland, to return him by bearer the head of Morton, the laceman, of Covent Garden, together with the heads and hands of any of his aiders and abettors in the assault on prince Matveof, that her majesty might have incarcerated in her dungeons and prisons."

The queen, who had very little knowledge regarding the varied customs and manners of the kingdoms of the earth, was at once amazed and fretted at this oriental demand of the heads and hands of Mr. Morton and his assistants; she desired her secretary "to assure the czar, that she had not the disposal of any heads in her kingdom, but those forfeited by the infraction of certain laws, which Mr. Morton and his possé had not infringed." Czar Peter either could not, or would not believe such was the case, and yet he had himself been long enough in England, in the preceding reign, studying ship-carpentry at Say Court, Deptford, to know that Englishmen did not have their heads and hands chopped off at the caprice of the crown. However, if he knew better, his boyars did not, and the angry correspondence between him and queen Anne, or her officials, continued for two years.' But to make an end of the incident, it

1 The State Paper Office contains a voluminous correspondence on this incident.

must be noted here, that the queen luckily thought of sending one of her officials, Mr. Whitworth, who understood Muscovite usages, to say, "That although nothing had been acted against prince Matveof but what the English law allowed, yet those laws were very bad and inhospitable ones, and that her majesty had had them repealed, so that his imperial majesty's ambassadors could never be subjected to such an insult and injury again."

Such concession was no compliment, but mere matter of fact, which the queen, for the sake of the peace of her capital, was glad to apply to all the ambassadors and resident ministers who came to England. From the reign of Anne, the persons of ambassadors and individuals of their suites have remained sacred from arrest.'

According to court regulations, the persons of ambassadors had previously been sacred in England, but not, it seems, beyond the precincts of the royal residences. The regulations of queen Anne2 prevented the recurrence, not

A wise and just law, since no tradesmen are compelled to give them credit, or to deal otherwise than for ready money, while previously the most infamous impositions were known to have taken place on the inexperience of foreigners. Indeed, the general usages of England respecting foreign envoys and resident ministers savoured strongly of recent barbarism. At Westminster Abbey, among the other sights with which the public were then regaled, were the embalmed corpses of two ambassadors, said to be those of Sardinia or Portugal, who had died in London. Their English creditors had arrested them for debt, and taken possession of their corpses when about to be buried; but, in the course of a few months, finding that the poor corpses were still Jess able to pay them when dead than when alive, and being, withal, quite tired of their company at their own dwellings, the creditors sent the bodies in their coffins to be deposited in Westminster Abbey, where they remained above ground, for being Roman catholics there was no priest to perform their obsequies. Now, the said ambassadorial corpses, being very well dressed in cut velvet, and remarkably well embalmed, the English public thought it a high treat to obtain a peep of their defunct excellencies; and the vergers found it for a century and a half a mighty profitable concern to show them for an additional penny per head. This respectable peep-show continued to be in vogue so lately as 1794, if not into this century. Mr. Hutton of Birmingham mentions seeing the mummy ambassadors that year, in his Tour through the Sights of London.

2 Instead of giving ambassadors precedence, as at present, according to the date of their several arrivals, they contended for precedence according to the supposed rank of the sovereigns they represented; and such being a point of fierce contest always at issue between France and Spain, on the martial and political arena of Europe, their ambassadors in England debated it at swords' point, fighting, aided by their retinues, at all public processions, and cutting the traces of each other's coaches, lest the line should be broken, and one dash in before the other. The London populace infinitely enjoyed these frays, and even preferred seeing the "mounseers" fight to witnessing

only of discontent, but of more violent or savage scenes. Perhaps, the czar was the more exacting, on account of the indignity offered to his ambassador, because the duke of Marlborough, that summer, was paying great diplomatic homage to his rival, Charles XII., and treating him as the umpire of the war in Germany. The deference paid to the young warlike Swede did not last very long; the duke of Marlborough did not bestow on him any further attention when he had bowed and complimented him out of his way. It is said that Charles XII. was indignant at the finery of Marlborough's dress; yet even his rugged temper felt the insinuating power of the thoroughpaced diplomatist. Marlborough, in his turn, was shocked at the want of French, and bad writing, of the Swedish hero. The following message was sent to queen Anne from both renowned warriors, written by Marlborough to Godolphin in the summer of 1707: "I am to make the king of Sweden's (Charles XII.) excuse, that his letter to her majesty, queen Anne, is not in his own hand; the reason given me was, that the king could not write French; but the truth is, the handwriting of Charles XII. is so bad, her majesty could not have read it."

1

The queen's unwise condescension in making herself a party at the secret marriage of Abigail Hill and Samuel Masham had now given to the duchess of Marlborough a tangible object to the suspicions of rivalry in royal favour, which had long caused her the most restless researches. From that moment, every instance of the queen's avoidance of her violence, or manifestation of resentment for her unbearable insolence, was construed into the effects of the artful misrepresentations of a supplanter. Henceforth, she loudly rang all possible changes on the words "gratitude"

their own pugilistic encounters. The mob resorted, by appointment with each other, wheresoever an ambassadorial procession was to take place. Johnny Bull examined, with much deliberation and judgment, the pugnacious qualities of the foreign cavaliers of the retinues of France and Spain, who fought round the coaches of their ambassadors. Pepys mentions his especial delight at witnessing a specimen of these contests, when more than one of the combatants lost their lives. The evil certainly remained in the recent days of queen Mary; for Lamberty, it will be remembered, mentions the anger of the ambassador of the emperor and other ministers at the precedence the queen gave, out of favour, to "Mr. Hop," the ambassador extraordinary of the States of Holland.

1 Coxe MS. Brit. Museum.