Queen Anne.

  • Herbert Paul
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Queen Anne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    speroiis, and the mercantile community believed that their business would be threatened by a disputed succession. The Whigs had seized power while Anne was dying, and in power they Avere left. How little they could trust even such constituent bodies as then existed the Septennial Act of 1716 is enough to prove. They had no belief in the people. They believed in a ruling aristocracy, in themselves. They were not unwilling that this privileged class should from time to time be recruited from new men, such as Somers, Gowper, and Walpole. Their habit of marrying untitled heiresses prevented them from becoming a caste, and they had a genuine zeal for personal freedom. But the idea of the people governing themselves, through their representatives, or at all, was to them not even a dream. It was Utopianism or, in plain English, mid- summer madness. The principles of 1688 were to Englishmen then what the principles of 1789 are to Frenchmen now. As there are French Royalists now, so there were English, and still more Scottish, Jacobites then. But the bulk of the upper and middle classes, the vocal part of the nation, were loyal to the Act of Settlement as the sequel of the Bill of Rights. The hopes of the Jacobites, revived by the death of William, were destroyed by the death of Anne. They could no longer rely upon France, and Ireland outside the English Pale was politically dead. Exclu- sion of Catholics from all power in the State was sure to be strengthened rather than weakened by any rising on behalf of the Pretender, The Union with Scotland was denationalizing the Lowlands, and the Highlands were the one dangerous part of Anne's three kingdoms. To be a Jacobite in Great Britain under the first two Hanoverian Kings was to risk not merely political position, but also life and estate. Impeachment was still a regular constitutional process, conviction involved forfeiture, at least in England, and capital punishment for treason was inflicted without scruple. There Avas no possibility of a British Sovereign. The choice lay between a German and a Frenchman; a German in possession and a Frenchman in exile. Moreover the man in possession was a Protestant, and the refugee