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that if the patent were cancelled, the two houses would be CHAP. amenable and would vote Wood a compensation, Townshend XVIII. angrily asked whether the king was to drive bargains with the Irish parliament. In January, 1725, Boulter was repeating Carteret's advice. It was in vain, and Carteret determined on a final effort in favour of the halfpence. Persuasion, flattery, menace were lavishly distributed. Midleton felt his position no longer tenable and resigned in May. Yet the government dared not face popular obloquy by giving Whitshed his place. Time was wearing on. The Irish parliament was to meet in September. Ministers in England would do nothing; those in Ireland could do nothing. Boulter in July, and early in August Carteret, wrote to London acknowledging failure. The business of the session could not be carried through unless Carteret were authorised to declare at its opening that the patent was cancelled. On August 26, he was able to announce to the Irish privy council that the English ministry had yielded. Wood was granted a pension on the Irish establishment of £3,000 per annum for eight years, a small part, indeed, of the gross profit contemplated by him, which has been estimated at £92,248, but probably enough to indispose him to demand that his patroness should return his bribe. Of this, the first constitutional victory of the people of Ireland over Great Britain, Swift was the popular hero. Medals were struck in his honour. The "Drapier's head" became a common sign. Whigs and Jacobites, papists and protestants, united to acclaim the man whose pen had evoked from a country of distracted factions an effective sense of nationality.

While the tempest in Ireland was still at its height, trouble with Scotland began to add to the embarrassments of the ministry. The resistance to the imposition of the malt tax offered by the Scottish representatives in both houses in 1713, had so far been effective that the collection of the tax had been waived. To the English squires it appeared a flagrant injustice that their country should have imposed upon it a burden of £750,000 a year from which Scotland was exempt. With the hope, however, of avoiding a revival of the former controversy, Walpole proposed to substitute for the malt duty. of sixpence a bushel a duty of threepence a bushel for Scotland, with the proviso that if the sum derived thence did not

CHAP. reach £20,000 a surcharge to make up that amount should be XVIII. levied on the Scottish maltsters. The outcry against the union

was at once revived. Riots occurred in Glasgow. In Edinburgh Walpole's manager for Scotland, the Earl of Ilay, Argyll's brother, broke up a combination of brewers. Roxburghe, a sympathiser with the malcontents, was dismissed,' and the business of his office of Scottish Secretary was divided between the two English secretaries of state, Townshend and Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, who had succeeded Carteret on April 3, 1724, as secretary of state for the southern department. By the beginning of September all resistance was over. In the meanwhile General Wade, with the assistance of loyal highlanders,2 carried out a great disarmament of rebel clans. "We have once more," wrote Walpole to Townshend on September 3, 1725, "got Scotland and Ireland quiet, if we take care to keep them so."

1 On the plea of convenience of business. R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 64, no. 45

2 This appears to have been the first occasion, at any rate since the revolution, on which highlanders were raised and drilled as regular forces in the British service. Wade reported to Henry Pelham, then secretary at war, "that the highland companies are compleat and in good order; that they encamp with the rest of the troops and improve daily in their exercise and discipline". September 3, 1725, R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 64, no. 66. See also ibid., no. 169. They were six in number, in all 486 men.

CHAPTER XIX.

TREATIES OF VIENNA AND HANOVER.

XIX.

THE death of the industrious treaty-maker Stanhope, on Febru- CHAP. ary 5, 1721, left the powers of Europe constrained by obligations which, while they created a public sentiment adverse to the violation of peace, were nevertheless acquiesced in with reluctance. Spain remained, as before, the quarter from which disturbance was most threatening. After Alberoni's fall in 1719 power passed into the hands of Elisabeth Farnese, the second wife of Philip V., whose restless ambition it was to carry into effect the investiture of her son, Don Carlos, with the Italian duchies, as stipulated by the Quadruple alliance. Peace was, indeed, purchased by treaties signed at Madrid by France, on March 27, and by both England and France on June 13, 1721, pledging them to insist upon the execution of the emperor's concessions. But Charles was not only reluctant to fulfil these agreements; he also cherished ambitions viewed with distrust and hostility by the maritime powers. By the treaty of Utrecht the inhabitants of the Spanish, now Austrian Netherlands, had lost the privileges of trade with the West Indies derived from their former dependence upon Spain. It was the loss of a right which might be utilised for the advantage of the imperial revenue, and Charles accordingly designed to recover it. As early as 1714 he had issued commissions to shipowners of Ostend with powers to trade to the East Indies. For years these commissions had been the subject of expostulations by the Englis! and Dutch envoys at the court of Vienna, although, for lack others, the commanders were frequently English or Dutch. was felt by parliament that the infraction of the East India Company's charter by British "interlopers," most, if not all Jacobites, flying a foreign flag, was not to be tolerated. In

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CHAP. 1719 and 1721 bills were passed rendering such interlopers liable to imprisonment and heavy pecuniary penalties. Upon the suggestion of the intriguer, John Ker of Kersland, the emperor retorted by incorporating in December, 1722, an Ostend East India Company, the organised competition of which at once made itself felt in England and Holland. Both powers appealed to the sixth article of the treaty of Münster of 1648, which debarred "Castilians," which it was argued meant subjects of the Spanish crown, among them the inhabitants of the Netherlands, from the East India trade. But capital is not always a respecter of national interests, and there were signs that British investors were being attracted to this new field of profit. A statute of 1722, therefore, forfeited their subscriptions and triple their value, one-third of the forfeitures to go to the crown and two-thirds to the East India Company; British subjects found in India without authorisation from the company were made liable to imprisonment.

With this irritation growing between the maritime powers and the emperor their plenipotentiaries arrived at Cambray early in 1722. The business was to settle the outstanding differences between Spain and the emperor. To Elisabeth Farnese the most pressing concern was the immediate investiture of Don Carlos with the succession to the duchy of Parma. Some two years were consumed in dilatory negotiations bandied to and fro between the courts as to the conditions and form of the investiture. To solicit the active aid of France and England the Count de Monteleone was accredited to Paris and London in September, 1724. Miscalculating the effect on the English temper he took occasion to demand the restitution of Gibraltar. Although Townshend had expressed his willingness to exchange that fortress for Florida or valuable commercial concessions from Spain, this was scarcely a moment, when Spain came forward as a petitioner with empty hands, to advance a peremptory demand. To Monteleone's request for aid, therefore, Newcastle returned a refusal, and Philip and Elisabeth acquired a fresh grievance against England. In this tension the political adventurer, Ripperdá, then influential at Madrid, pressed as an alternative policy the establishment of friendly relations with the emperor by double marriages between the two houses. The emperor, on his side, began to look to Spain as able to confer

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XIX.

exclusive privileges on his Ostend company. In the spring of CHAP. 1725 the rejection of the Infanta as the bride of Louis XV. exasperated Spain against France, and as England declined to undertake the office of sole mediator between Spain and Austria at Cambray, Ripperdá was instructed to negotiate terms with Austria directly. By the treaty of Vienna (in three separate agreements dated April 30 and May 1, 1725), Spain guaranteed the emperor's pragmatic sanction, providing for the succession of Maria Theresa to his hereditary dominions, while the emperor confirmed the concessions to Spain of the Quadruple alliance. By the second agreement Charles undertook to assist Spain by friendly representations, though not necessarily by warlike means, to obtain the restitution of Gibraltar and Minorca. By the third, a treaty of commerce, the emperor's subjects were placed on a footing superior to that of Great Britain and Holland, and the trade of the Ostend company with the East Indies and the Spanish ports was formally sanctioned.

Of these treaties only the first was published. Philip and Elisabeth received the news with elation and, as if certain of the active aid of the emperor, summarily demanded the surrender of Gibraltar in July.1 "Choose," cried Elisabeth to Colonel Stanhope, "between the loss of Gibraltar and that of your trade with the Indies." The reply of Townshend, then in Hanover, was "that the king thinks it not consistent either with his or the nation's honour, after the treatment both his majesty and his people have received from the court of Spain, to lay his Catholick majesty's demand of the restitution of that place before the parliament; the late behaviour of Spain towards him and his kingdom having set him at liberty from any engagement his majesty might have been under of doing it "."

2

With the announcement of the treaty of Vienna the congress of Cambray dissolved. There was a general expectation of war. Ripperdá bragged of an intended Spanish invasion of England to restore the pretender, in co-operation with a Russian fleet from the Baltic. Against a combination threatening so much mischief it naturally fell to the lot of Great Britain to construct a counter-confederacy. France excepted, the principal members

1 Newcastle Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 32,743, f. 414.

2 December 3-14, 1725, R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 64,

no. 141.