CH. X. RISING DISCONTENT. 49 of the nature of commerce. No English statesman maintained more persistently than Pitt the advantages of commercial monopoly, or believed more firmly that the commercial interests 'of different nations were necessarily antagonistic.' If the peace had been made in a different spirit and by other statesmen, it would probably have been favourably received. The Court party, who observed the many signs of weariness in the nation, and who remembered that during the last two reigns the disposition of the sovereign to involve the country in German disputes had been the chief source of disaffection, hoped, not altogether unreasonably, that the young king, by putting an end to the German war and by showing decisively that he was governed by no German sympathies, would have reaped an abundant harvest of popularity. But all such expectations were soon falsified by the event. No character in England is more detested than that of a Court favourite, and the scandal about the relations of Bute and the mother of the King was eagerly accepted. In the very beginning of the new reign a paper was affixed to the Royal Exchange with the words, 'No petticoat government, no Scotch Minister, no Lord George Sackville,' and after the displacement of Pitt the popular indignation rapidly increased. The City gave instructions to its members to promote a strict inquiry into the disposal of the money that was voted, and to refuse their consent to any peace which did not secure to England all or nearly all the conquests `she had made. The example was widely followed. The unpopularity of Bute was such that he could not appear unattended or undisguised in the streets, and he was compelled to See the striking statement of his views on this matter, Parl. Hist. xv. 1265. The trade with these conquests [Martinique and Guadaloupe] is of the utmost lucrative nature and of the most considerable extent. The number of ships employed by it are a great resource to our maritime power; and, what is of equal weight, all that we gain on this system is made fourfold to us by the loss which ensues to France. But our conquests in North America are of very little detriment to the commerce of France' Thus in Jan. 1761, Lord Melcombe wrote to Bute: If the intelli enroll a bodyguard of butchers and boxers for his protection. He was insulted as he went to Parliament. On one occasion his chair was attacked by so fierce a mob that his life was in serious danger. The jack boot, which by a pun upon his name was chosen as his popular emblem, was paraded ignominiously through the streets, hung up on a gallows, or thrown into the flames,' together with a bonnet or a petticoat symbolising the Princess. The declaration of war against Spain, which signally vindicated the foresight of Pitt, the splendid victories that followed, which were universally accepted as the direct results of his policy, the formal resignation of Newcastle which brought the favourite into clear relief as the responsible leader of the ministry, all added to the flame. Never perhaps in English history were libels so bitter or so scurrilous, and the influence of Frederick the Great was employed to foment them.2 The story of Earl Mortimer, who was united by an illicit love to the mother of Edward III., and who by her means for a time governed the country and the King, became the favourite subject of the satirists. Among the papers left by Ben Jonson were the plot and the first scene of an intended play on the subject, and these were now republished with a dedication to Bute from the pen of Wilkes. But perhaps the most popular topic in the invectives against Bute was his Scotch nationality. In addition to the strong national antipathy of Englishmen to all foreigners, many reasons had made the Scotch peculiarly unpopular. They had for centuries been regarded as natural enemies. The Union had been almost equally disliked by both nations, and closer contact had as yet done very little to soften the animosity. The Scotch were chiefly known in London as eager placehunters, entering into keen competition with the natives for minor offices. They were poor, proud, sensitive, and pertinacious. Their strange pronunciation, the barrenness of their country, the contrast between the pride of their old nobility and the wretched shifts to which their poverty compelled them Walpole to Conway, Oct. 26, 1761. Walpole's Memoirs of George III. i. 85. Grenville Papers, i. 452. 2 See the very curious letter of Frederick to his Ministers Knyphau sen and Michell urging them to use all their influence to stir up writers and agitators against Bute.-Grenville Papers, i. 467, 468. CH. X. ENGLISH HATRED OF THE SCOTCH. 51 to resort, furnished endless themes of illiberal ridicule. During more than half a century that followed the Union, only a single Englishman had been elected by a Scotch constituency; and there were bitter complaints that a people so exclusive at home should be suffered to descend upon the rich fields of English patronage. Yet the very unpopularity of the Scotch drew them more closely together, and their tenacity of purpose enabled them in the race of ambition to distance many competitors. The contempt for poverty which is one of the most conspicuous signs of the deep vein of vulgarity that mingles with the many noble elements of the English character, and a more than common disposition to judge all foreigners by their own standard of manners, combined with other and somewhat more serious reasons to make the English look down upon the Scotch. As we have already seen, the Scotch members were as yet an unhealthy and a somewhat inferior element in English political life. They had been the last members who received wages for their services. They were still exempt from the property qualification which was required from most English members. They had very little interest in English affairs. They usually voted together, and their venality was notorious.3 The rebellion of 1745 raised the national antipathy to fever heat. The Highland march to Derby and the disgraceful panic it produced in London, were remembered with a bitterness that was all the more intense because it was largely mixed with shame. And now, when a Scotch representative peer of the name and lineage of the Stuarts had become almost omnipotent at the Court, when Jacobite Scotchmen were received with marked favour by the Sovereign; when Scotch birth was believed to be one of the best passports to English promotion, Chauncy Townsend, the Member for Wigtown, who died in 1770. -Annual Register, 1770, p. 114. 2 University members and sons of peers were in England exempt. Townshend's History of the House of Commons, ii. 406. Their subservience had been very bitterly noticed by Jekyll in the last reign. When Walpole's special tax on Papists and Nonjurors was imposed, the Scotch were exempted. Jekyll said: 'I know not why the Scotch should be excused from paying their proportion of this extraordinary tax, unless it was because forty-five Scotch representatives in that House always voted as they were directed.' Townshend's Hist. of the House of Commons, ii. 52, 53. Montesquieu, in his Notes sur l'Angleterre, which were written in 1730, had said, 'Il y a des membres écossois qui n'ont que deux cents livres sterling pour leur voix et la vendent à ce prix.' there arose a cry of hatred and indignation which rang through Churchill, in his Pro- the length and breadth of the land. phecy of Famine,' and Wilkes, in his most powerful exponents. The former, in lines of savage vigour, depicted Scotland as a treeless, flowerless land formed out of the refuse of the universe, and inhabited by the very bastards of creation; where famine had fixed her chosen throne, where a scanty population, gaunt with hunger, and hideous with dirt and with the itch, spent their wretched days in brooding over the fallen fortunes of their native dynasty, and in watching with mingled envy and hatred the mighty nation that had subdued them. At last their greed and their hatred were alike gratified. What Force could not accomplish had been done by Fraud. The land flowing with milk and honey was thrown open to them. Already the most important places were at their disposal, and soon, through the influence of their great fellow-countrymen, they would descend upon every centre of English power to divide, weaken, plunder, and betray. With less genius, but with even greater effect, Wilkes collected in his weekly libels, every topic that could inflame the national hatred against the Scotch. He contended that a Scot had no more right to preferment in England than a Hanoverian or a Hottentot;' and he pointed out with bitter emphasis how the Scotchman Mansfield was Chief Justice of England, how the Scotchman Loudon commanded the British forces in Portugal, how the Scots Sir Gilbert Elliot and James Oswald were at the Treasury Board, how the Scotchman Ramsay was Court painter, and the Scotchman Adam Court architect; how a crowd of obscure Scotchmen had obtained pensions or small preferments paid for from the earnings of Englishmen. Buckingham Palace was nicknamed Holyrood on account of the number of Scotchmen who entered it. The Duke of Cumberland had long been one of the most unpopular men in the kingdom, partly on account of the severities that followed Culloden, but these severities were now not only forgiven, but applauded; and as he was in opposition to Bute, he speedily became a hero, and was extolled as the second deliverer of England. The distinction between the two nations was so deep Walpole to Montagu, June 8, 1762. CH. X. ENGLISH HATRED OF THE SCOTCH. 53 and marked that Horace Walpole gave the Scotch birth of Sir Gilbert Elliot as a conclusive reason why he should not lead the House of Commons, and the Duke of Bedford assigned the same reason as one of the objections to the appointment of Forrester to the Speakership.' Junius himself never wrote with a more savage hatred than when he reminded the King of the treachery of the Scotch to Charles I., and dilated on the folly of any sovereign of any race who should hereafter rest upon their honour. These instances are sufficient to show how far the great work of uniting the two nations was from its accomplishment. The dislike of the Scotch continued for many years unchecked, and among the Whigs it was greatly strengthened by the strong vein of Toryism, if not of Jacobitism, which was at this time conspicuous in Scotch writers. In the volumes of his history published in 1754 and 1756, Hume had devoted a grace of style, a skill of narration, and a subtlety of thought, which no English historian had yet equalled, to an elaborate apology for the conduct of the Stuarts. Smollett was one of the most conspicuous and most violent of the writers in defence of the Court. The Memoirs of Great Britain,' by Sir John Dalrymple, which appeared in 1771 and 1773, for the first time revealed the damaging fact that Algernon Sidney, whose memory had been almost canonised by his party, had received money from the French ambassador, and in 1775 the Original Papers' published by Macpherson gave an almost equal shock to the Whig tradition by proving the later communications of Marlborough with the Stuarts. The writings of Horace Walpole sufficiently show the indignation with which these books were regarded by Whig politicians, while the popular dislike was incessantly displayed. Macklin painted the Scotch in the most odious and despicable light in the character of Sir Pertinax MacSycophant in the Man of the World.' Hume wrote in 1765 that the English rage against the Scotch was daily increasing, and he added that it was such that he had frequently resolved never to set his foot on English soil.2 At a time when the passion for representing plays of Shake1 Bedford Correspondence, iii. xxxiii. Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 665. 6 |