CAMEO mouth was shown up by the Earl of Carlisle, Lady Mary Fenwick's brother, as aware of the correspondence and actually engaged in it. The Duke of He made a vehement defence, but was sent to the Tower and severely Gloucester. censured. He raged and talked wildly, but after he had regained his liberty and succeeded to the title of Peterborough, a new career was open to him, and what he had done under his former name was forgotten. The Jacobite plans were thus disconcerted and were kept in abeyance for many years. The signature of the Peace of Ryswick was also a great blow, though William did not insist on Louis expelling the Stewart royal family, and accepted the stipulation that the dower of Mary Beatrice should be paid to her. In England there were great rejoicings at the peace-culminating in the consecration of the new St. Paul's by Bishop Compton, at which William himself was present. By a secret article in the treaty he had proposed to Louis XIV. to adopt his nephew, James Edward Francis, and make him heir; but the proposal was not accepted by the parents, involving as it did the formal renunciation of right by James II., and likewise that the boy should be educated in the English Church. Thus Princess Anne and her little son, the Duke of Gloucester, remained next in the inheritance. Of this child we have full accounts through his faithful attendant, Lewis Jenkins, who kept a sort of journal of his life, a piteous record of mismanagement accounting for the infant mortality of the period, so that the only wonder is how any one succeeded in growing up, and probably poor little William, Duke of Gloucester, suffered all the more because he was regarded as the most valuable child in the kingdom. He struggled through a sickly babyhood by the help of a fine healthy young Quaker foster-mother, who domineered over everybody in Camp. den House, Kensington, where he was nursed. He had a long, large head, which Jenkins says made it very difficult to fit him with a perukepoor child!-when he was not quite five years old. He had symptoms of water on the brain, and a blister was constantly kept on the nape of his neck at this time; but he is described as bright and handsome, active and lively, though, no doubt from giddiness, he could not go up or down stairs alone. On Easter day, 1694, when he was five years old, he was put into male attire, of white camlet, with silver loops and buttons, but beneath were stiff stays which hurt him; and he was very near punishing the poor tailor by mounting him on the wooden horse," which was supposed to be part of military discipline. 66 For the boy had a regiment of little fellows somewhat older than himself, in uniform, and provided with toy implements of war; and his great diversion was commanding them in mock battles and reviews. Sometimes he had grand field-days in the park, which amused the King himself; but they ended in annoyance to the neighbourhood, as the boys on the way home considered themselves licensed to maraud in any house they chose to enter. САМЕО XVI. The poor little Prince was finally forced into walking up and down stairs alone by a severe beating with a birch-rod from his father, whose ideas were all of the hardest, roughest sort of discipline, while his The Duke of mother was in constant alarm about him. He had a chaplain, who daily read the Morning Service before him ; but nobody seems to have taken the trouble to give him any explanation of the foundation of the faith till the summer when he was six years old, when he was sent for his health to Twickenham, where he was lodged in some houses belonging to Mrs. Davies, great-aunt to his governor, Lord Fitzhardinge. She was a noble, open-handed, openhearted old lady of more than eighty years old, and the little boy became devoted to her. It was she who taught him what prayer meant, and likewise to say the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and Commandments, and so worked upon him that he became fairly attentive to the prayers at home, and, by his own wish, went to church with his parents. His tutors seem to have gone on the principle of teaching him nothing themselves, and preventing any one else from doing so, for there was a great uproar when he repeated some stories from history told him by Lewis Jenkins, and showed some geometrical figures taken from his pocket. The usher was contemptuously forbidden to fill the Duke's head with such stuff, and was very near being disgraced. By eight years old the boy could read and write well, and had picked up a good deal of knowledge of different kinds, for he seems to have been a very intelligent child. He began to be catechised, together with all his little regiment, by Mr. Pratt, and whichever boy answered best was rewarded with a new shilling from the fresh coinage. When the Duke was asked, "How can you, being born a prince, keep yourself from the pomps and vanities of this wicked world?" his answer was, "I will keep God's commandments, and do all I can to walk in His ways." He was made a Knight of the Garter, and admitted in full chapter, spending a good deal of his time at Windsor, and being placed under the tuition of Bishop Burnet, who seems to have prescribed a very severe course of study, in which the boy made excellent progress; but in 1700, immediately after the rejoicings on his eleventh birthday, he was taken ill with scarlet fever. He was bled, and Dr. Radcliffe, on seeing him said, "You have destroyed him. You may finish him, but I will not prescribe." In five days more he died, on the 30th of July, 1700. And his mother no sooner had left his side than she wrote a long letter to her father, full of the keenest penitence, and declaring that she felt the bereavement that left her childless a judgment from God for her undutiful conduct. The King was at the time in Holland, at his favourite abode at Loo. He had been greatly hurt and displeased in the previous year by the remonstrances of Parliament against his grants of Crown lands to the foreign officers who had served in the army, not only Dutch but French Huguenots; but it was unfortunate that, coupled with these, was a huge Gloucester's 1700. CAMEO Act of Settlement. 1701. grant to Elizabeth Villiers, Countess of Orkney, the woman who had been the bane and misery of Queen Mary's life. Through the power over the supplies, the Commons had likewise insisted on the dismissal of the King's faithful Dutch friends, a very serious mortification to them. He pleaded their cause in person, and when he failed was heard to exclaim, "By Heaven! if I had a son, the Dutch guards should not go!" It was even said that only Lord Somers's strong persuasions prevented him from abdicating in favour of Anne; and he was greatly depressed and displeased with the whole course of affairs in England, and the fresh aggressions that he saw in preparation in France. Marlborough was sent with the official information of the little Duke's death to Loo; but William, having been told of Anne's letter to her father, was too much displeased to make any response for three whole | months, from July to October, nor to send formal announcement to the King of France, without which, as there was at present peace, it was not etiquette for the Court to go into mourning. That Anne might yet have an heir was still far from improbable, for a babe had been born to her that very spring, which did not live long enough for baptism; nevertheless, the electress Sophia of Brunswick made a visit to William at Loo, ostensibly to bring her daughter, the Electress of Brandenburg, to consult him on erecting the margraviate into a kingdom, but no doubt with a view to discovering how the land lay with regard to a kingdom for herself. A letter from her is extant to one Mr. Stepney, a small poet in London, where she observes, "If I were thirty years younger, I should have sufficient good opinion of my blood and my religion to believe that people might think of me in England; but as there is little likelihood that I should survive two persons (King William and Princess Anne), both very much younger, though more sickly than I am, it is to be feared that my sons will be regarded as strangers." It was true that the Whigs were universally looking to her and her family. After one more vain attempt on William's part to adopt the Prince in St. Germains, there seemed to all who dreaded a Roman Catholic sovereign no other alternative. After all, the measure was brought forward in Parliament by a Tory, in order to forestall the Whigs, and though the idea was so distasteful that the members came to the House in very small numbers, there were enough to carry the motion that the Crown, failing heirs of Princess Anne or King William, should be settled on the Electress Sophia of Brunswick and her heirs, being Protestants and in communion with the Church of England. The Lords passed the Bill, and the King ratified it, at the same time sending Lord Macclesfield to carry the Order of the Garter to Duke Ernest of Hanover. The Duchess of Savoy, daughter of Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, the next in regular order of hereditary succession to Anne and William himself, sent a protest, which was disregarded, as her religion excluded her as entirely as her cousin in France, IT was at this time that an entirely new feature in civilized life appeared, namely, money speculation. The lending sums on interest which had hitherto been only done by Jews, Lombards, and gradually by goldsmiths, had become the established profession of bankers, and private persons had begun to consider investments the best mode of disposing of their capital. Moreover, after the discovery of the New World, companies for trade and discovery had been formed, even in the days of Elizabeth and James I. The East India Company had gained a great step by the acquisitions made through Catherine of Braganza's dowry, and there was a general feeling in favour of loans, increased by the establishment of the Bank of England. William Paterson, who had so much aided in this scheme, was the son of a Scotch farmer in Dumfriesshire. At sixteen he went to a kinswoman in Bristol, and there obtained some knowledge of commerce, so as to turn to profit the sum he inherited from her. He became a merchant, and spent some years in the West Indies, and there learnt that the Isthmus of Panama, or Darien as it was then called, was not formally included in the western dominions of Spain, and with a mind leaping forward to the perception of its present importance as the key alike to the East and West Indies, and ignorant of the fatal character of the climate, he conceived the scheme of a colony there. He could however at first get no one to attend to the plan, though he obtained considerable weight and influence in London, among the merchants, and thus was able to bring forward the scheme, for the Bank of England was founded. His success and prudence in that undertaking and his very high character recommended his other proposals, and he again put forward his project of a company which CAMEO XVII. Paterson. CAMEO South Sea Bubble. 1697. was to establish a colony on the Isthmus to facilitate the trade between Europe and the Indies. It was very eagerly taken up, especially by Lord Stair, and by Fletcher of Saltoun, who, it may be remembered, had been caused by a personal quarrel to withdraw in good time from Monmouth's army. Great numbers of Scots subscribed, expecting to make their fortunes, and in London £300,000 was immediately promised. The Dutch, hoping to have a ready short cut to their possessions in the Asiatic islands, took the matter up, and so did Hamburg, where £200,000 was subscribed. But the East India merchants were in dread for their trade, and so were the Turkey and Muscovy Companies; and the whole spirit of the English had been for a long time past to prevent as much as possible all rivalry. So an address was presented by the two Houses of Parliament, with Lord Halifax and John Locke at their head, not only representing the scheme as chimerical, but likely to cause a war by giving umbrage to Spain, and, moreover, that the Scotch would have a great advantage in the East Indian trade, and undersell the English. It was even proposed to impeach Paterson before the House of Commons. William accepted the petition, and answered it in the same short-sighted He even showed his displeasure by depriving Lord Stair of the Secretaryship of State. As Sir Walter Scott observes, Stair, who had not lost his place for the massacre of Glencoe, lost it for trying to benefit the commerce of his country. manner. The plan went on in Scotland, but the London merchants were afraid of it, and very little of the £300,000 promised by them came in, and the Hamburgers likewise failed. By 1697, a capital of £400,000 had been raised, but there was still a delay in preparing ships at Leith. During this time, Paterson went to Amsterdam to purchase stores, placing £8,000 in the hands of a London merchant named James Smith, who fraudulently made away with it. The blow was terrible, and Paterson did his best to compensate the company from his private means, though he was free from all blame. The distrust thus inspired made the company deprive him of the command of the first batch of colonists, who sailed in five vessels from Leith on the 16th of July, 1697, 1,200 in number, under the direction of seven "marine chancellors" of equal authority, who made it their business, as it seemed, to quarrel with one another, and browbeat Paterson, the only man among them with any experience. Each was to rule, week about, which, as he truly said, was making a mere May game of the government. However, the ships reached their destination, and the colonists were landed at a place named Acta, where they founded a city which they named New Edinburgh, and the entire settlement Caledonia. The season was cool when they arrived, and their hopes were high; but their provisions were soon exhausted, and, when they sent to the islands of Jamaica and Barbadoes for supplies, |