1748 CONGRESS OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE. 417 XXV. units. Pelham complained: " He did not know where the govern- CHAP, ment lived; that there was none". Newcastle's flatterers, among them the chancellor and Horatio Walpole, addressed him as "in a manner the Prime" [Minister], and as a consequence, the two brothers were so antagonistic that they only exchanged views through Andrew Stone, the duke's private secretary. Newcastle excepted, who "lived by the smiles in the closet," the feeling of the ministers was for peace. Overtures had already been made by Saxe through Ligonier. Saxe communicated to him for his government's information that Louis XV. was weary of the war and ready to grant generous terms. These it was determined to refer to a congress of the powers to be held forthwith at Aix-la-Chapelle. But upon the opening of parliament on November 12, the war party were gratified by the preparations for carrying on the struggle attested by the rise of the estimates to £13,000,000. The allies hoped to begin the next campaign in the Netherlands with 180,000 men. Cumberland, again elate with hopes of victory, left England for Holland in the middle of February, 1748. His departure synchronised with the resignation by Chesterfield of his office of secretary of state. Chesterfield was an advocate of peace,1 and it was remarked at the time that his acceptance of office was inconsistent with his professions. His place as secretary for the northern department was taken by Newcastle, upon whose recommendation the Duke of Bedford succeeded as secretary for the southern department. The dreams of Cumberland, the king, and Newcastle of coming conquest did not long outlast Cumberland's arrival in Holland. The entire allied army at Roermond on April 11 numbered only 35,000 men, and Cumberland was at last driven to the conclusion that "a tolerable peace is absolutely necessary," to which the king and Newcastle yielded a reluctant assent. While Saxe, at the head of 105,000 men, prepared to attack Maestricht, the congress had opened at Aix-la-Chapelle. On April 30, preliminaries were signed by the British and French plenipotentiaries. Conquests were to be reciprocally restored and former treaties revived. Don Philip was to be provided with the duchies of Parma and Guastalla and the city of Piacenza. Finale was to 1 Earl of Chesterfield to Robert Trevor, Aug. 13, 1745, Trevor MSS., pp. 127, 146, 149. VOL. IX. 27 XXV. CHAP. be restored to Genoa. Except Piacenza and Finale, the cessions made to the King of Sardinia by the treaty of Worms were to be confirmed. The Asiento treaty, four years of its term of thirty being unexpired at the outset of the war with Spain, was to be renewed for four years in favour of British subjects. France was again to guarantee the protestant succession. Silesia and Glatz were to be confirmed to Prussia. The pragmatic sanction was to be guaranteed, but so also, much to the empress-queen's disgust, was the Barrier treaty. These terms roused indignation at Turin and Vienna. The sacrifices made by France in the midst of a career of conquest were dimly recognised by Louis XV. who, indifferent to aught but the pleasures of Versailles, preferred "to treat as a king and not as a tradesman". The judgement of the French public summarised itself in the proverb, "Bête comme la paix". The question of the right of search, out of which the war had arisen, was passed over in silence. The fruit of years of expenditure of blood and treasure was the status quo ante bellum. Upon his return to France after so many adventures, Prince Charles was for a brief space the hero of the day. But to the prince's repeated solicitations for the assistance of 18,000 or 20,000 men towards a renewed invasion of Scotland, before the measures for the pacification of the highlands could take effect, Louis turned a deaf ear. When after the signature of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis urged him to leave the country, he treated the message with contempt. On December 9, he was given three days within which to quit Paris. On the second day after, as he was entering the opera house, he was arrested. A few days later he was released on condition that he should leave France. He withdrew to the papal territory of Avignon. On February 28, 1749, he rode out of Avignon with one attendant, Henry Goring, and for the next five years wandered in stealth. In 1750 he visited England,1 disguised, and "in the new church in the Strand" 1 In R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. II., bundle 114, no. 33, are some depositions taken on August 23 and 24, 1750, before Lord Stanhope, to the effect that the young pretender had lodged "on Saturday night last with Mrs. Isabel Sherriff at Star Court in the Minories". The evidence shews that a person, probably a Jacobite exile, was obtaining food and lodging by personating the prince. Charles kept notes of his visit, from which it appears that he left Antwerp on September 12, and arrived at London on the 16th. See A. Lang, Pickle the Spy (1897), p. 105. 1749 XXV. THE PARTY OF THE PRINCE OF WALES. 419 made a profession of embracing Anglicanism, a step of which CHAP. Pelham had expressed apprehension as not improbable two years before. But it was too late. His character, declining with drink and debauchery, rendered him no longer the idol of his party nor the terror of the house of Hanover. The Prince of Wales had, for a time, been discouraged by the defeat of his nominees at the recent general election. A new party was now forming round him after, as Horace Walpole sardonically expresses it, "the Pelhams had bought off every man of parts in his train". Dodington, a typical placehunter, acted as the chief wire-puller. Policy was directed by the restless Bolingbroke. On May 1, 1749, a meeting of the prince's friends, tories and Jacobites, at which the Jacobite Duke of Beaufort took the chair, proclaimed the success of these efforts and the cohesion of the new party. It was Bolingbroke's task to frame a programme and devise the catchword. The Spirit of Patriotism and The Idea of a Patriot King, the titles of his expository treatises published in 1749, declared war against the party system and against the corruption on which it relied. The evils should be remedied when the prince's hands held the reins of power. Purity, integrity, economy, should be the order of the day, and those should be esteemed the "king's friends," to whatever party they might have belonged, who rallied to th's political reformation. Since the restoration the navy had chiefly been governed until 1749 by an act of the reign of Charles II. But frequent instances of disobedience to orders and the general slackness of the service led in that year to the introduction of an amending and consolidating bill which became an act commonly known as "the articles of the navy". The general tendency of this measure was to sharpen the penalties upon convicted officers. In the case of the army, which since 1715 had been governed by articles of war authorised in the statute I G. I., c. 9, an endeavour was made in 1747 by Fox, under the inspiration of Cumberland, to make half-pay officers subject to the mutiny act, a measure so unpopular that, though then passed, He was reported by Lord Albemarle, British ambassador in Paris, as having been at Nottingham in May, 1754. Lord Lansdowne's MSS., p. 141, Hist. MSS. Comm., 3rd Rep., App. 122 G. II., c. 33. XXV. CHAP. it was excluded from the mutiny act of 1749. In 1748 an oath of secrecy was imposed on courts-martial, except when dispensed with by acts of parliament. men. With the return of peace Pelham hastened to effect the economies he desired, especially the reduction of the interest on the debt of £78,000,000 from 4 to 3 per cent. He next proposed sweeping reductions in the services. Lord Barrington, representing the admiralty, moved the reduction of the navy to 10,000 men. Despite the opposition of Nugent, speaking for the prince's party, and of Sir Peter Warren on behalf of the navy, this extensive reduction was agreed to without a division on November 27, 1749. The army was fixed at nearly 19,000 Since the conclusion of peace the total discharges from the navy exceeded 40,000 and from the army 20,000 men. By these reductions the estimates for 1750, apart from the interest (£3,000,000) on the national debt, were lowered to less than £3,000,000. The consequences of the disbandments were speedily apparent. "You will hear little news from England," wrote Horace Walpole on January 31, 1750, "but of robberies; the numbers of disbanded soldiers and sailors have all taken to the road or rather to the street; people are almost afraid of stirring after it is dark." Executions multiplied. In the session of 1751, in response to a paragraph in the king's speech, the house of commons appointed a committee of inquiry into the best means of repressing crime. The outcome was a sharpening of the penal laws against criminal combinations and other offences. But as such remedies failed to touch the causes, so they were ineffective to suppress these social disorders. A more fruitful suggestion was that of the philanthropic Captain Thomas Coram, who in 1741 had established the Foundling Hospital, that provision might be made for those thrown out of employment in the colony of Nova Scotia. The settlement, formed with the assistance of government in October, 1749, took the name of Halifax, and numbered at that time 350 houses. During the king's stay at Hanover in the summer of 1750 his attention had chiefly been devoted to Electoral interests. His traditional sympathies with Austria and his dislike of his nephew Frederick II. rendered him anxious to conciliate Maria 1 See 24 G. II., cc, 45, 55, 57. 1750 TREATY OF MADRID. 421 Theresa, as well as to check the advance of Prussia towards the CHAP. hegemony of Germany. In order to prevent a contest of claims XXV. to the imperial throne when a vacancy should occur, he proposed to secure the dignity to the Habsburg family by the election as King of the Romans of the son of the Emperor Francis and of the queen-empress, the Archduke Joseph, then in his tenth year. Prussia was notoriously hostile to the plan; but the scheme of George, warmly supported by Newcastle, was to procure the assent of eight of the electors, which would leave Prussia isolated. Pelham, however, foreseeing the dissolution of his own schemes of economy in a shower of German subsidies, refused to do more than to guarantee the Elector of Bavaria alone the sum of £20,000, to which Holland added £10,000 for six years. The condition was that the elector should maintain 6,000 infantry at the disposal of the maritime powers, which were thus able to shew an ostensible equivalent for what was really the purchase of his vote. When parliament opened on January 17, 1751, a variety of vexatious matters of foreign policy were occupying the public mind. Several questions concerning commercial relations with Spain had been left at Aix-la-Chapelle for subsequent negotiation. This had been entrusted to Benjamin Keene, the author of the convention of January, 1739. That convention had been rejected at the stage at which the claims due from Spain had been agreed to at £95,000, while the Spanish king claimed £68,000 from the South Sea Company. Great, therefore, was the disgust in England with the outcome of Keene's new negotiation. By a treaty signed at Madrid on October 3, 1750, Great Britain surrendered the South Sea Company's Asiento rights, the company receiving within three months £100,000 as compensation, and all claims by the crown of Spain against the company being waived. On the other hand, in recognition of the greater losses of Spain at sea during the war, the other British claims were cancelled. Pitt, who twelve years before had thundered for "no search," now changed his tone. Eager to succeed to Bedford's post, he who had abused the convention of 1739 as “nothing but a stipulation for national ignominy," applauded the less favourable treaty of 1750. He had, he acknowledged, supported the address moved by Wyndham on November 27, 1739, praying the king not to make peace with |