On the other hand, if Satanic agencies continually convulsed those who were coming to the faith, divine judgments as frequently struck down those who opposed it. Every illness, every misfortune that befell an opponent was believed to be supernatural. Molther, the Moravian minister, shortly after the Methodists had separated from the Moravians, was seized with a passing illness. ‘I believe,’ wrote Wesley, ‘it was the hand of God that was upon him.’ 6 Numerous cases were cited of sudden and fearful judgments which fell upon the adversaries of the cause. A clergyman at Bristol, standing up to preach against the Methodists, ‘was suddenly seized with a rattling in his throat, attended with a hideous groaning,’ and on the next Sunday he died. 1 At Todmorden a minister was struck with a violent fit of palsy immediately after preaching against the Methodists. 2 At Enniscorthy a clergyman, having preached for some time against the Methodists, deferred the conclusion of his discourse to the following Sunday. Next morning he was raging mad, imagined that devils were about him, ‘and not long after, without showing the least sign of hope, he went to his account.’ 3 At Kingswood a man began a vehement invective against Wesley and Methodism. ‘In the midst he was struck raving mad.’ 4 A woman, seeing a crowd waiting for Wesley at a church door, exclaimed, ‘They are waiting for their God.’ She at once fell senseless to the ground, and next day expired. 5 ‘A party of young men rowed up to Richmond to disturb the sermons of Rowland Hill. The boat sank, and all of them were drowned.’ 6 At Sheffield the captain of a gang who had long troubled the field-preachers, was bathing with his companions. ‘Another dip,’ he said, ‘and then for a bit of sport with the Methodists.’ He dived, struck his head against a stone, and appeared no more. 7

By such anecdotes and by such beliefs a fever of enthusiasm was sustained. In many cases the devotions of the Methodists were almost or altogether delirious. Some of the Foundery Society professed to feel the blood of Christ streaming down their arms, backs, and throats. A man two or three days after his conversion rode into Newcastle shouting that God had revealed to him that he should be a king and should trample his enemies under his feet. Some persuaded themselves from the Book of Revelation that they were exempted from the common lot of men and would never die. A preacher named George Bell attempted to open the eyes of the blind, and prophesied the immediate destruction of the world. The strong spirit of superstitious terror which existed in England was most impressively shown on the occasion of the earthquake of 1750. The year was ushered in by an Aurora Borealis, which mantled the north-eastern sky in fire, and in February a terrific thunderstorm filled. Bristol with consternation. On February 8 and on March 8 severe shocks of earthquake were felt in London. No houses, indeed, were overthrown, and no lives were lost; but chairs rocked, church bells rang in the steeples, the porcelain rattled on the shelves, and a loud rumbling noise was heard. On the second occasion the shock was greater than on the first; it was especially felt in the western portion of the city. Several chimneys fell. Large collections of china were thrown down and broken in the house of a private collector in Piccadilly, and in a china, shop in St. James's Street. A maid in Charterhouse Square was flung out of her bed and broke her arm. The rarity of the event, and the fact that the shocks occurred with increasing violence on the same day of two successive months, added to the panic. A crazy soldier predicted that on April 8 the cities of London and Westminster would be destroyed. He was soon sent to Bedlam, but a wild terror was produced. Horace Walpole assures us that in three days 730 coaches of fugitives hastening to the country were counted at Hyde Park Corner. Women who were unable to leave London provided thick gowns, which obtained the name of ‘earthquake gowns,’ in order that they might pass the dreaded night in the open air. The churches were crowded with penitents; and open profligacy almost disappeared. Sherlock, the Bishop of London, called the people to repentance, in a pastoral of which no less than 100,000 copies are said to have been sold. He dilated especially upon the blasphemy that was everywhere heard, the multiplication of infidel works, the, innumerable brothels, the existence of unnatural vice, the lewd pictures that were exposed to view in the streets, the general neglect of public worship, the great and alarming increase of Popery. Romaine availed himself of the prevailing disposition to preach two of his most famous sermons, his ‘Alarm to a Careless World,’ and his ‘Duty of Watchfulness Enforced.’ On the evening of the fatal day the terror rose to its height. Thousands ran frantically through the streets. The Methodist chapels were thronged, and Charles Wesley preached for hours almost without intermission. Through the whole night the fields and open spaces about the metropolis were crowded, and towards midnight Whitefield took his stand in the middle of Hyde Park, preaching to a dense mass of awestruck and affrighted hearers upon the judgments of the Lord. It was not until the morning dawned that the panic subsided and the many streams of business and pleasure returned into their accustomed channels. 1

It is not wonderful that, mixing with the passionate devotion I have described, there should have been a certain tincture of baser elements. So much enthusiasm and so much credulity could hardly exist without attracting some impostors; the violently emotional character of Methodist piety was liable to dangerous reactions, and the habit of attributing every sudden impulse to a spiritual inspiration, and of habitually depreciating good works, was not always favourable to morality. An Antinomian tendency had early appeared among the Moravians, and Wesley had during the greater part of his career to repress the same spirit among his own followers. He has preserved part of his dialogue with an Antinomian teacher at Birmingham, who assured him that being no longer under the law he was the heir to all things, and had a right to take whatever goods and to lie with whatever woman he pleased. The well-known Dr. Dodd, who was hanged for forgery, had been at one time looked upon as an Evangelical preacher, and it was from Wesley that he derived much comfort in the days before his execution. James Wheatley, who was one of the most popular preachers of Methodism, lapsed into the worst licentiousness, and was at last found guilty of adultery and gross indecency. In Wesley's own family the same evil appeared. A young man named Hall—a pupil and intimate friend of Wesley—succeeded in winning the heart of Wesley's youngest sister. He then announced his intended marriage to her father and brother, stating that God had revealed to him that he must marry, and that his wife was to be Keziah Wesley. The marriage was agreed upon, when shortly before its celebration, to the astonishment of Wesley, he abandoned his intended bride, professed his attachment to her elder sister, and boldly declared that his inconstancy was due to a new divine revelation. The supposed revelation was obeyed, and the deserted sister fell into a lingering illness and died of grief, while Hall speedily developed into an open profligate. In at least one case the conduct of Wesley himself towards a reputed convert was more than injudicious. He selected a woman named Sarah Ryan, who had three husbands living, who lived apart from them all, and was at this time only thirty-three, to be his Bristol housekeeper, the matron of his Kingswood school, and the object of a correspondence that was conducted on his part in a strain of the most high-flown religious admiration and affection. It is not surprising that some scandal should have been caused, or that the naturally jealous disposition of his wife should have been goaded almost to madness.t lg 1

The movement was also marred by its full share of personal and sectarian antipathies. Whatever calumny, whatever injustice, whatever violence of language was displayed by the enemies of Methodism, they never equalled the ferocity exhibited by the saints in their internal quarrels. It was in 1770 that Wesley, alarmed at the progress of Antinomianism, and connecting it with the fatalism of the Calvinists, caused some minutes to be published reflecting on Calvinism, and censuring the general depreciation of good works. He was accused of teaching justification by works, and his speedy and emphatic disclaimer was not sufficient to prevent a schism between the Arminian and Calvinist Methodists. Whitefield, who had always laboured to heal divisions, and who alone could have prevented the scandal that ensued, had died a few months before. The Calvinistic party acknowledged Lady Huntingdon as their leader, and she excluded all Arminians from her chapels, and removed Fletcher of Madeley from his position at the head of her college of Trevecca. Soon after, the leaders of her party began an attack upon Wesley, which in its outrageous scurrility has never been surpassed. Berridge of Everton satirised him in doggerel verse as a fox

  • The most perfect and holy and sly,
  • That e'er turned a coat or could pilfer and lie,

while Toplady and Rowland Hill assailed him in the most abusive prose. Their pamphlets, though utterly worthless in themselves, are not without a certain historic interest, as the writers were among the special saints of a sect which has always professed a special sanctity; and they will appear the more remarkable when we remember that Toplady was then a young man of thirty, while Wesley, besides his other claims to respect, was now verging on seventy. Among the pamphlets which rapidly succeeded each other we find such titles as ‘An Old Fox Tarred and Feathered,’ ‘Farrago Doubly Distilled,’ ‘Pope John.’ ‘I much question,’ wrote Toplady, ‘whether a man that dies an Arminian can go to heaven.’ ‘Arminianism lies within a bowshot of Socinianism and Deism.’ He pronounced his great opponent to be ‘without honour, veracity, or justice;’ to be ‘the most rancorous hater of the Gospel system that ever appeared in this land;’ to be ‘a low and puny tadpole in divinity,’ actuated by ‘Satanic shamelessness and Satanic guilt.’ In his more charitable moments he contented himself with what Robert Hall calls ‘presenting a prayer in the spirit of an indictment,’ praying that ‘He in whose hands the hearts of all men are may make even this opposer of grace a monument of His almighty power to save.’ ‘God is witness,’ he added, ‘how earnestly I wish it may consist with the divine will to touch the heart and open the eyes of that unhappy man.’ Of the language of Rowland Hill a very short specimen will be sufficient. In a pamphlet of not more than forty pages he calls Wesley, among other names, ‘a designing wolf,’ ‘a dealer in stolen wares,’ ‘as unprincipled as a rook, and as silly as a jackdaw;’ ‘a grey-headed enemy of all righteousness,’ ‘a wretch,’ guilty of ‘wilful, gross, and abominable untruth,’ ‘a venal profligate,’ ‘a wicked slanderer,’ and ‘an apostate miscreant.’ He dwells with much more than the zest of Lavington upon the alleged impurity of the ‘Perfectionists,’ describes the followers of Wesley as ‘a ragged legion of preaching barbers, cobblers, tinkers, scavengers, draymen, and chimney sweepers;’ and declares that ‘the sum and substance of John's whole preachment is I, I, I, and my brother, my brother and I have done all the work of God that has been done in these nations.’ This pious production is in the form of a letter, and the author concludes it in his usual sanctimonious fashion, ‘Yours sincerely for Christ's sake.’ 1

On the other side, it must be admitted that the tone adopted was very different. Wesley himself wrote but little in the controversy, and that little was written with great moderation. The task of supporting the Arminian side was chiefly thrown upon Fletcher, Vicar of Madeley, a Swiss naturalised in England. He was a man of a singularly sweet and gentle disposition, and his many writings against the Calvinists, though not a little tedious to a secular reader, are at least perfect models of controversial amenity maintained under extreme provocation. 2 The Calvinists, however, collected a long string of violent and abusive expressions which the two Wesleys had at an earlier period hurled against their party, and after the death of Toplady they accused Wesley of having publicly asserted that Toplady died blaspheming, and in the horror of despair, and when the gross and glaring falsehood of this assertion was conclusively proved, of having kept a perfect silence, and refused to write a single line either denying the report of what he had said or expressing regret for the calumny which on his authority had been sedulously propagated through the sect. 1

But with all its divisions and defects the movement was unquestionably effecting a great moral revolution in England. It was essentially a popular movement, exercising its deepest influence over the lower and middle classes. Some of its leaders were men of real genius, but in general the Methodist teacher had little sympathy with the more educated of his fellow-countrymen. To an ordinarily cultivated mind there was something extremely repulsive in his tears and groans and amorous ejaculations, in the coarse anthropomorphic familiarity and the unwavering dogmatism with which he dealt with the most sacred subjects, in the narrowness of his theory of life and his utter insensibility to many of the influences that expand and embellish it, in the mingled credulity and self-confidence with which he imagined that the whole course of nature was altered for his convenience. But the very qualities that impaired his influence in one sphere enhanced it in another. His impassioned prayers and exhortations stirred the hearts of multitudes whom a more decorous teaching had left absolutely callous. The supernatural atmosphere of miracles, judgments, and inspirations, in which he moved, invested the most prosaic life with a halo of romance. The doctrines he taught, the theory of life he enforced, proved themselves capable of arousing in great masses of men an enthusiasm of piety which was hardly surpassed in the first days of Christianity, of eradicating inveterate vice, of fixing and directing impulsive and tempestuous natures that were rapidly hastening towards the abyss. Out of the profligate slave-dealer, John Newton, Methodism formed one of the purest and most unselfish of saints. It taught criminals in Newgate to mount the gallows in an ecstasy of rapturous devotion. 1 It planted a fervid and enduring religious sentiment in the midst of the most brutal and most neglected portions of the population, and whatever may have been its vices or its defects, it undoubtedly emancipated great numbers from the fear of death, and imparted a warmer tone to the devotion and a greater energy to the philanthropy of every denomination both in England and the colonies.

It is interesting to trace the successive stages of its progress. The colonial work devolved chiefly on Whitefield, who, in his many expeditions to Georgia, revived something of the old spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers. He made, however, no attempt to form a separate community, and the first Methodist society in America was created in 1766 at New York by some Irish emigrants under the direction of a local preacher named Embury. America, Whitefield regarded with a peculiar fondness; he became a fervent advocate of its independence, and he at last left his bones in its soil. The clergy in the colony were far more favourable to the Evangelical preaching than those in England; but, in the perhaps somewhat partial judgment of Wesley, the impression made upon the people was more transient. 2 This judgment, however, was not justified by the event. Methodism in America grew and flourished beyond all its rivals, and it is now the largest religious body in that great country, which is destined to be the most important centre of the English race. The great part which the Evangelical party took in abolishing the slave trade will be shown in a future chapter, but on this subject the early Methodists were profoundly divided. Wesley was one of the earliest and strongest opponents of slavery, and the last letter he ever wrote was to Wilberforce encouraging him in his crusade. 1 Whitefield, on the other hand, as strongly advocated slavery. His influence contributed largely to its introduction into Georgia. He purchased for his orphanage in Georgia a plantation which contained at the time of his death no less than seventy-five slaves; 2 both Hervey and Lady Huntingdon sent him donations for the special purpose of purchasing negroes; 3 and Newton, though he afterwards condemned the slave trade, declares that he never ‘knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion’ than in his last two voyages as a slave-dealer to Guinea. 4 Whitefield, however, devoted himself with praiseworthy energy to the conversion of the negroes, and Methodism speedily acquired that firm hold on the negro mind, which it has never lost. Watts's hymns produced a special enthusiasm among the converted slaves, and the missionaries noted with surprise their fine ear for music, and the ecstatic delight into which it threw them. 5

In England, as we have seen, the most brutal scenes of violence occurred among the miners of Staffordshire and Cornwall, but their untaught and passionate natures soon felt the attraction of Methodism; and, before the close of his career, Wesley preached to overflowing multitudes, and amid perfect silence, at Wednesbury, Newcastle, Bolton, Wigan, and St. Ives. Early in the present century a severe censor of the Methodists acknowledged that ‘all mines and subterraneous places belonged to them.’ 1 In general in England the preachers made least impression in the agricultural districts, and were most favourably received in the seaport towns. Liverpool, especially, welcomed them. Wesley describes it as ‘one of the neatest, best built towns in England, full twice as large as Chester,’ and likely in another forty years to become almost the equal of Bristol; and he tells us that its inhabitants were distinguished for their courtesy to those who lived among them, whether they were Jews, or Catholics, or Methodists. 2

In Wales Methodism became completely triumphant, but it triumphed only after a long and fierce struggle, attended with many striking and instructive incidents. In the beginning of the eighteenth century the Principality was in a condition of extreme and general religious languor. Scarcely any of the lower orders could read, and hardly any serious efforts were made to meet the difficulties arising from the language. ‘In many churches,’ according to the testimony of Howell Harris, ‘there was no sermon for months together; in some places nothing but a learned English discourse to an illiterate Welsh congregation.’ The gentry very generally abstained from church, and all classes were accustomed to spend Sunday afternoon in wrestling, dancing, playing on the harp, and other amusements equally heinous to a Methodist mind. Wesley pronounced the people to be ‘as little versed in the principles of Christianity as a Creek or Cherokee Indian.’ They were passionately musical, passionately wedded to tradition, and, like the Highlanders of Scotland, they preserved many relics of Catholicism, and even of Paganism. They crossed themselves in sign of horror; they blessed their beds in the name of the four Evangelists. When a dead man was lowered into the grave, his relations knelt upon its border and prayed that he might soon reach heaven. Many poetic legends were handed down from generation to generation, and were looked upon as almost as sacred as Scripture. Though now the very stronghold of Dissent, Wales was then almost wholly under the dominion of the Church. According to the largest estimate all the Nonconformists together did not form more than one-eighth of the population. In the south, it is true, there were many small congregations, and some zealous ministers, whose names have been carefully preserved, and whose importance has been probably somewhat magnified by the historians of Nonconformity. North Wales was almost wholly Anglican, and in 1735 it contained only ten, according to another account only six, congregations of Dissenters, most of them very small. In Wales, as in other parts of the kingdom, Arminian opinions had made much progress, and a great controversy arose, chiefly among the Non-conformists, between the Arminians and the Calvinists in 1729. In general, however, an extreme doctrinal and religious apathy prevailed, and the general tone of morals appears to have been very lax.

No people, however, from their excitable, and at the same time poetic, temperament, were more fitted for a religious revival than the Welsh, and their evangelists arose from among themselves at a time when the Methodist movement was yet unborn. The first, and perhaps the greatest, of these was Griffith Jones, a clergyman of the Established Church, who was born in 1684, and who received priest's orders in 1709. He appears to have been a man of the same type as the chief Methodist preachers of the next generation—a man of great popular eloquence, of admirable singleness of purpose, and of a zeal which was far too fiery to respect the discipline of his Church. He preached in the open air, itinerated, denounced fairs and wakes, was repeatedly arraigned before ecclesiastical courts for infractions of canonical discipline, and created a widespread religious excitement throughout the Principality. His special title, however, to the recollection of posterity is the system of ‘circulating schools,’ which he devised, and which forms one of the very few important steps in religious education that were taken in the empire during the early Hanoverian period. These schools were originated in 1730, and were intended chiefly to dispel the gross religious ignorance, that was prevalent among adults by the formation of a body of school-masters, who went from village to village teaching the people to read the Bible in Welsh, catechising them and instructing them in psalmody. The funds for their support were chiefly derived from the collections at the sacrament. A seminary was erected for the instruction of the teachers; and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge warmly supported the scheme, which soon attained very considerable dimensions. In ten years, more than 100 schools were established in Wales, and several thousands of scholars were under instruction. Twenty years later, as many as 10,000 scholars were taught in a single year. The schools continued steadily to multiply till 1779, when they were suspended in consequence of a lawsuit about some property, which had been bequeathed to them, and they were not revived till 1809.

Griffith Jones died in 1761. Another, and perhaps a better known Welsh revivalist was Howell Harris, who began to preach about 1736. He was a young, half-instructed layman, belonging to the Established Church, who had passed in silence through severe religious struggles, and whose fiery nature was at last fully kindled by a few chance words in a sermon by his vicar. He went to Oxford, but left after a single term, wearied, as he said, with ‘the irregularities and the wickedness that surrounded him;’ and from that time he devoted his whole life to the religious instruction of his countrymen. He was equally without fear and without discretion, and he began, without anyone to support or to encourage him, to itinerate through Wales, preaching the doctrine of justification by faith, the terrors of hell, and the sinfulness of the national amusements. He preached without any premeditation, usually three or four, sometimes five or six times a day. A letter from Whitefield, in 1738, warmly encouraged him, and he afterwards acted in full harmony with the Methodists. He seems to have given great provocation, and he certainly met with extreme hostility. He made it his special mission to inveigh against public amusements, and on one occasion during the races at Mon-mouth, when the ladies and gentlemen of the county were dining together in the town hall under the presidency of a Duke, Howell Harris mounted a table, which was placed against the window of the room where they were assembled, and poured forth a fierce denunciation of the sinfulness of his auditors. The people and clergy were furious against him. I have already noticed how Seward, who was one of his companions, was killed by the mob. On one occasion a pistol was fired at Howell Harris. On another, he was beaten almost to death; again and again he was stoned, with such fury that his escape appeared all but miraculous. He was repeatedly denounced from the pulpit. One clergyman was seen distributing intoxicating liquors among the mob in order to excite them. Another, who held no less a position than that of Chancellor of the diocese of Bangor, stirred up whole districts against him. Women in his congregation were stripped naked. Men were seized by the press-gang, and some of his coadjutors had to fly for their lives. But if he met with great opposition, Harris met also with passionate adherents. He preached everywhere to immense crowds, and created in most parts of Wales religious societies, like those which had been founded so abundantly in England at the time of the Revolution. Public diversions were suspended, the churches crowded, and family prayers, after a long desuetude, renewed. Though repeatedly refused ordination in the Church of England, he always remained attached to it, and towards the close of his career he made special efforts to draw the Nonconformists into its pale. In 1759, when there was a fear of invasion, he joined the Breconshire Militia, and afterwards preached much in regimentals.

Both Whitefield and Wesley passed frequently through Wales and preached with great effect, but they had naturally less influence than those who could address the people in their native tongue. It was in Wales that Lady Huntingdon established her missionary college, and the Calvinistic type of Methodism took the deepest root in the Principality. In 1742, Howell Harris wrote to Whitefield that there were then to his knowledge ten ‘awakened’ clergymen, and the number rapidly multiplied. Among others a curate of the Establishment, named Daniel Rowlands, who had begun his career almost at the same time as Howell Harris, obtained an extraordinary popularity and influence; he is said to have sometimes administered the sacrament on a single occasion to more than 2,000 communicants, and the folly of the Bishop of St. David's in withdrawing from him his licence on account of his itinerancy, was one of the causes that contributed most powerfully to precipitate Wales into Nonconformity. 1 The excitable Welsh natures were often thrown by the new style of preaching into the wildest delirium. Strong men screamed and fainted under the preaching of Howell Harris. Rowlands, on one occasion, preached for no less than six hours without intermission to a spell-bound multitude. A sermon of a preacher named Morris, on the last judgment, is said to have created such a panic that numbers rushed wildly through the streets, imagining that the last day had arrived. 2 But the most curious form which this fanaticism assumed was the sect of the Jumpers, who were accustomed to work themselves into a kind of religious madness and bound to and fro for hours during divine worship.

The change which was effected by the Methodist and Evangelical preaching in Wales had ultimately the very important effect of detaching the vast majority of the population from the Established Church. The Dissenters from the beginning welcomed, while the bulk of the clergy opposed, the new doctrines, and the advance of Nonconformity was, in consequence, steady and rapid. The complete severance of the Calvinistic Methodists from the Church took place in 1811, and the number of Nonconformist congregations in Wales, which in 1742 was only 105, amounted in 1861 to 2,927. 3

In Scotland the Methodist movement was much less important than in other parts of the island. It had not there to dispel the same ignorance or the same apathy, and it found a people accustomed to a higher standard of dogmatic preaching than in England. Whitefield first visited Scotland in 1741, at the invitation of Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, the two leaders of the Associate Presbytery, and they hoped that he would confine his exertions solely to their small schismatic body. White-field, however, whose one object was to teach what he believed to be the truth to all who would hear him, speedily quarrelled with the Erskines. They found that he was very indifferent to that ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ which they esteemed the most valuable of human documents, and to that question of Church patronage which they regarded as transcendently important; and they saw with indignation that his preaching in connection with the ministers of the Establishment tended rather to strengthen than to weaken the body from which they had seceded. Their indignation knew no bounds. The language of grave, sanctimonious flattery, the professions of a more than worldly affection, were at once changed for a torrent of the fiercest abuse. The conduct of the English missionary was pronounced scandalous, and his success diabolical. He was represented as ‘roaming about far and near, casting forth floods of doctrine calculated for transmitting devils into the hearts of men.’ A public fast was appointed in atonement for ‘the fond reception given to Mr. George Whitefield, notwithstanding it is notoriously known that he has sworn the Oath of Supremacy, abjured the Solemn League and Covenant, and endeavours by his lax toleration principles to pull down the hedges of government and discipline which the Lord hath planted about His vineyard in this land;’ and a ‘Declaration, Protestation, and Testimony of the suffering remnant of the anti-Popish, anti-Lutheran, anti-Prelatic, anti-Whitefieldian, anti-Erastian, anti-Sectarian true Presbyterian Church of Scotland,’ was issued, in which all the epithets of theological vituperation were hurled upon Whitefield, and upon the ‘diabolical delusion’ that led so many to crowd to his sermons. 1 Whitefield met the storm with an admirable good humour, and was not betrayed into a single offensive expression. His preaching at Cambuslang produced a great revival, accompanied by all the hysterical phenomena that were so common in England, and at a later period his preaching at Edinburgh is said to have had a considerable influence in checking the growth of the ‘Moderate’ party, whose large and tolerant views were gradually mitigating that narrow-minded and ignorant fanaticism which had made the Scotch Kirk notorious in Europe. 2 But on the whole Methodism took no deep root in Scotland. As might have been expected from his Calvinism, Whitefield was more successful than Wesley. In his excursions to Scotland, Wesley, indeed, was everywhere received with a decorum, a courtesy, and a propriety that he rarely found in England or Wales, but no extraordinary consequences followed his preaching, and he complained bitterly of the coldness and insensibility of the people. 3 Sir Walter Scott, when still a boy, heard him preach in Scotland, and he observes that his style was too colloquial for the Scotch taste.

Ireland, on the other hand, he found a soil preeminently suited for his seed. There were riots, it is true, in Cork and Kilkenny, and in the former town the magistrates showed themselves bitterly hostile to the Methodists; a Methodist chapel was wrecked in Dublin, and Joseph Healy, one of Wesley's itinerants, was nearly killed at Athlone; but for the most part Wesley met with little real opposition during his many journeys through that country, and he has left the most emphatic testimony to the manner in which he was received. ‘The people in general,’ he said, ‘are of a more teachable spirit than in most parts of England.’ ‘So civil a people as the Irish I never saw, either in Europe or America.’ ‘If my brother and I could have been here [at Dublin] for a few months, I question if there might not have been a larger society here than even in London.’ ‘So general a drawing I have never known among any people, so that as yet none even seems to oppose the truth.’ ‘What a nation is this! Every man, woman, and child (except a few of the great vulgar) not only patiently but gladly suffer the word of exhortation.’ ‘I have not seen in all the world a people so easy to be persuaded as the Irish.’ 1 During many successive years he preached in the streets and public market-places to vast and sympathising congregations, consisting chiefly of Catholics, who thronged to hear him, in spite of the opposition of the priests. But while speaking very warmly of the amiable qualities of the Irish people, he lamented the carelessness and instability of the national character and the religious ignorance prevailing among them, and he complained that the condition of the societies fluctuated violently from year to year. The opinion of so great a master of the art of government concerning the proper method of ruling Ireland is well worthy of quotation. ‘Nothing is wanted here but a rigorous discipline, which is more needful in this than in any other nation, the people in general being so soft and delicate that the least slackness utterly destroys them.’ 2

Wesley passed through most parts of Ireland at a time when the Whiteboy outrages were at their height, but yet his sympathies remained strongly in favour of the lower classes. ‘The poor in Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘in general are well behaved; all the ill-breeding is among well-dressed people.’ 1 He speaks on one occasion of some boisterous young officers as the ‘only wild Irish’ he had encountered, and he censures in strong terms the conduct of ‘the gentry, who are continually driving away hundreds, yea thousands, of those that remain, by throwing such quantities of arable land into pasture, which leaves them neither business nor food.’ 2 The foreign element was still very distinct. Wesley more than once attended the French service at Portarlington, there being still no English service in that town, 3 and he mentions the surprise of the French prisoners at finding in Dublin as good French spoken as they could have heard in Paris. 4 To the south of Limerick he found four villages still inhabited by the children of the German Palatines, who came over under Queen Anne. Having no minister among them, they had sunk into complete religious lethargy; but a revival took place under the preaching of the new evangelists, and the sobriety, honesty, and devotion of the German colonists distinguished them greatly from the wild population around them. A few years later Wesley found them rapidly dwindling, the exactions and tyranny of their landlords making it impossible for them, with all their diligence and frugality, to obtain the common necessaries of life. Some went to America, others were scattered up and down the kingdom, and only a small remnant remained in their old homes. 5

Protestantism, he noticed, was making little or no progress, ‘At least ninety-nine in a hundred of the native Irish remain in the religion of their forefathers. The Protestants, whether in Dublin or elsewhere, are almost all transplanted lately from England; nor is it any wonder that those who are born Papists generally live and die such, when the Protestants can find no better ways to convert them than penal laws and Acts of Parliament.’ 1 His journals can hardly, however, be said to give a very unfavourable picture of the clergy of the Establishment in Ireland. He repeatedly chronicles the impressive sermons he had heard in the parish churches, commends the efforts of the Archbishop of Dublin to spread religious books among the poor of Dublin, and acknowledges the sympathy he had met with from more than one bishop. He notices the prevailing custom of beginning the morning service at midday when the morning had terminated, and also the scandalous neglect into which Irish churchyards were suffered to fall, and, like most modern travellers, he was impressed with the marked contrast in material civilisation between Ulster and the rest of the country, and with the opulence and architectural beauty of Belfast, which was then a town of about 30,000 inhabitants.

In several cases he met with bitter opposition from the clergy of the Established Church, but on the whole that opposition appears to have been less general than in England, and Wesley severely censures the tendency of his own followers in Ireland towards Dissent, and the invectives of Methodist preachers against the clergy of the Establishment. But though a Dissenting body which now numbers nearly 50,000 souls was created, the most important work of the Methodist revival in Ireland was its indirect influence on the Protestant Episcopalians. That influence, it is true, was not very seriously felt till after the death of Wesley. 1 The Irish Church in the last years of the eighteenth century was singularly tolerant and undogmatic, and it was only in the early years of the nineteenth century that the Evangelical teaching acquired an ascendency. Political causes, which had revived the waning antagonism between Protestants and Catholics, predisposed the former in favour of a theology which was intensely anti-Catholic; and the Irish Establishment became by far the most Evangelical section of the Anglican Church. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the Evangelical movement produced many forms of charity, many holy lives, and many peaceful and triumphant deaths, but its general effects were, I think, very mixed. Stimulating the spirit of proselytism and deepening religious animosities, it added greatly to the social and political divisions of the nation, and its intellectual influence on the Protestants was extremely prejudicial. The popular preacher became the intellectual ideal, and the weakest form of religious literature almost the sole reading of large classes. Serious study and temperate and impartial thinking were discouraged, and a taste for empty and tawdry declamation, for false sentiment, and for confident and unsupported assertion, was proportionately increased.

The Evangelical movement not only spread over the surface of the Empire; it also more or less permeated every section of society. The school at Kingswood was not a hopeful experiment, but Methodism had ultimately a deep influence on the education of the young. Rowland Hill wrote hymns for children, which Cowper revised, and in the latter years of the eighteenth century the followers of Wesley bore a distinguished part in the great movement for the establishment of Sunday-schools. The Methodists appear to have preached especially to children, on whose sensitive nerves their highly coloured sermons often exercised a terrible influence. Many were thrown into convulsive paroxysms of agony; many others died in ecstasies of devotion; and Wesley speaks of great numbers ‘between the ages of six and fourteen’ who were deeply affected with religion, and whose piety had no small influence upon their parents. Having described, among other cases, a remarkable revival among children at Stockton-upon-Tees in 1784, he adds: ‘Is not this a new thing in the earth? God begins His work in children. Thus it has been also in Cornwall, Manchester, and Epworth. Thus the flame spreads to those of riper years.’ 1

Methodism also gradually acquired many disciples in the army. Whitefield himself, in 1745, preached at Boston to the colonial troops, who were about to set out for the expedition against Louisburg, and the malevolence with which the press-gangs singled out itinerant Methodists as their special victims scattered the seeds of religious revival through the regular forces. 2 It may be first traced in the army of Flanders in 1743, the year of the battle of Dettingen, when a small society, numbering at first three, then twelve, and soon after more than 200 persons, was formed among the regiments at Ghent, and Wesley has preserved several letters from the soldiers, which throw a novel and attractive light over the campaign. One soldier was accustomed to preach in the open air, near the camp at Ask. His congregation often numbered more than 1,000; many of the officers attended, and he sometimes preached thirty-five times in seven days. The society had its stated hours of meeting, and commonly two whole nights in every week were passed in devotion; two small tabernacles were built in the camp, near Brussels, and rooms were hired at Bruges and at Ghent. One of the leading Methodists dated his conversion from the battle of Dettingen, when the balls were raining around him, and he ended his career at Fontenoy, where he was seen by one of his companions laid across a cannon, both his legs having been taken off by a chain-shot, praising God and exhorting those about him with his last breath. 1 It was in order to meet the wants of this class of converts that the Methodists established their first Bible society, ‘the Naval and Military.’

Among the students of the universities the same spirit appeared. Oxford, though it had been the cradle, was the most virulent opponent of Methodism. In 1740, a student named Graves was compelled, in order to obtain his testimonial, to sign a paper formally renouncing ‘the modern practice and principles of the persons commonly called Methodists.’ 2 In 1757 Romaine was excluded from the university pulpit for having preached two sermons containing what would now be called the Evangelical commonplaces about justification by faith and the imperfection of our best works. In 1768 the Vice-Chancellor expelled six Methodist students from St. Edmund's Hall. Three of them, it is true, were uneducated tradesmen, who had come to the university for the purpose of qualifying for holy orders, and who were pronounced to be still ‘wholly illiterate and incapable of doing the statutable exercises of the Hall,’ but it is more than doubtful whether their ignorance would have led to their expulsion if it had not been connected with strong Evangelical principles. The other three cases were especially scandalous. There was no evidence that the students were idle, incompetent, or insubordinate. They had taken part in prayer-meetings in private houses or barns, but had immediately desisted from this practice on being informed that it was displeasing to those in authority, had promised to abstain from them for the future, and had actually done so for several months before their expulsion. They were expelled from the university, and their prospects in life seriously impaired, chiefly because they had taken part in these meetings, which the authorities pronounced to be illegal conventicles, and because they professed the doctrines ‘that faith without works is the sole condition of justification; that there is no necessity for works; that the immediate impulse of the Spirit is to be waited for; that the Spirit of God works irresistibly, and that once a child of God is always a child of God.’ They carefully guarded these doctrines in their explanations from every tendency towards Antinomianism, and they were expelled at a time when the discipline of the university had sunk to the very lowest point, and when blasphemy, gambling, and drunkenness were treated as the most venial offences. 1 Among the expelled students was Erasmus Middleton, afterwards the well-known author of the ‘Biographia Evangelica.’

The conduct of the university authorities at Cambridge, under far greater provocation, was very different. In 1766 a group of Cambridge students embraced the new opinions in their most aggressive form. Their leader was the well-known Rowland Hill, a young man of good family, of considerable abilities, and of indomitable zeal, but of the most turbulent and eccentric disposition. Not content with diffusing his doctrines among the students, and visiting the prisoners in the gaol and the sick in the town, he began, while still an undergraduate, to preach in the streets of Cambridge and in the adjoining villages. The novelty of the spectacle attracted much notice, and mobs were collected and riots began. Such proceedings were severely condemned by the authorities of the university; they were entirely incompatible with the maintenance of college discipline, and they were the more censurable because the parents of Rowland Hill pronounced in the most emphatic manner their disapprobation of his proceedings. He was, however, extremely insubordinate, and both Whitefield and Berridge encouraged him to defy the wishes of his parents and the university statutes and authorities which he had promised to obey. Under the circumstances a severe sentence would have been amply justified. The authorities of the university acted, however, as Rowland Hill was afterwards compelled to confess, with signal moderation. Whether it be through respect for his conscientious motives, through fear of scandal, or through regard to the position of his family, they carefully abstained from pushing matters to extremities, and at last consented to leave him unmolested as long as he abstained from disturbing the town by public conventicles or teaching any doctrine contrary to the Thirty-nine Articles. 1 His proceedings, however, were so irregular, and his character was so unruly, that no less than six bishops refused to ordain him, and he ultimately set up a chapel unconnected with any special religious denomination. Eighteen years later he was gratified by seeing Cambridge one of the great centres of Evangelical teaching. Among its prominent members were three Evangelicals of the most ardent type—Jowett, once well known as a devotional writer; Milner, afterwards Dean of Carlisle, and brother of the ecclesiastical historian; and Simeon, who for many years exercised an extraordinary influence at Cambridge, and who devoted a large fortune to purchasing advowsons in important towns, to be held by the members of his party. 1

We may trace, too, the widening circle of the movement in general literature. As might easily have been expected, it at first seldom found favour with cultivated minds, and the many absurdities and superstitions that accompanied it laid it open to great ridicule. Pope satirised Whitefield in the ‘Dunciad;’ Anstey ridiculed Methodism in ‘The New Bath Guide;’ Foote retorted the Methodist invectives against the drama by bringing the sect prominently on the stage. In Fielding and Smollett the Methodist is represented as a canting hypocrite. 2 In Horace Walpole he is a combination of a knave, a fanatic, and a Papist. Junius speaks of his ‘whining piety,’ and Dr. Johnson, though admitting that Whitefield had done good among the poor, describes his preaching as only noise and fury, and compares his popularity to that of a mountebank. But Methodism, or at least that Evangelical movement which grew out of it, soon left a deep impress upon the literature of its time. Cowper, the greatest English poet of the closing years of the eighteenth century, devoted his graceful and tender genius mainly to its service. It contributed powerfully to the popularity of the ‘Night Thoughts’ of Young; and it appeared prominently in the ‘Fool of Quality’ of Henry Brooke, and in all the writings of Hervey and of Hannah More. Its special literature has now probably few readers among the highly educated classes, and has scarcely obtained an adequate recognition in literary history. The ‘Ecclesiastical History’ of Milner, and the ‘Biblical Commentaries’ of Scott, are perhaps its most conspicuous monuments, but there was also a vast literature of purely devotional works which have awakened an echo in the hearts of thousands. The ‘Cardiphonia’ of Newton, the ‘Life of Faith’ of Romaine, the ‘Force of Truth’ of Scott, the ‘Devout Exercises’ of Jay, the ‘Village Dialogues’ of Rowland Hill, ‘The Complete Duty of Man’ by Venn, the ‘Olney Hymns,’ the ‘Practical View’ of Wilberforce, as well as innumerable sermons and religious biographies emanating from the same school, have exercised a deep and lasting influence upon the character and opinions of large sections of the English people. During the last years of the eighteenth century, and during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the books which in England acquired a great and general popularity in the religious world, were deeply impregnated with the Evangelical theology. In hymns the movement was especially rich. Both of the Wesleys, as well as Newton, Berridge, Shirley, and Rowland Hill, were hymn-writers. Both Madan and Gambold sometimes showed traces of a high order of poetry, and Toplady has left two or three of the most beautiful hymns in the language. Owing, perhaps, to the remarkable musical talent of the Wesley family, the Puritanical feeling so conspicuous in Methodism never extended to music. Some of Handel's oratorios were performed in Methodist chapels. The singing and organ in Surrey Chapel, where Rowland Hill officiated, were famous for their beauty, and the great composer Giardini supplied tunes for some of the Methodist hymns. 1

The progress of Evangelical opinions among the higher orders, though perhaps less sincere, and certainly less lasting, than among the poor, was also considerable. The success in this sphere was chiefly due to the Countess of Huntingdon. This very remarkable woman, who united no small mental powers with a most ardent and somewhat imperious character, was one of the members of the original Methodist society in Fetter Lane, and she devoted her whole life, and, after the death of her husband in 1746, her whole fortune, to organising the Calvinistic section of the Methodists. Her college at Trevecca was founded in 1768, and it sent forth missionaries to every part of the United Kingdom. Romaine and Whitefield were successively her chaplains. Her drawing-room in London was continually opened for Methodist preaching, and Whitefield there addressed brilliant but very incongruous assemblies, drawn from the fashionable world. Among his hearers we find Chesterfield and Bolingbroke. Chesterfield paid him a courtly compliment, and is said to have been deeply moved by his preaching. Bolingbroke assured him, in his stately manner, that ‘he had done great justice to the divine attributes in his discourse;’ and we afterwards find the old sceptical statesman perusing the works of Calvin, and expressing his warm admiration for his philosophy. 2 Among the occasional hearers at Lady Huntingdon's assemblies was the old Duchess of Marlborough. Lady Suffolk, the mistress of George II., attended once, but was bitterly offended because Whitefield, who was ignorant of her presence, introduced a passage into his sermon which she construed as an attack upon herself. The brilliant and eccentric Lady Townshend for a time coquetted with Methodism as well as with Popery. The haughty Duchess of Buckingham consented to hear Whitefield, but expressed her opinion of his doctrines in a letter to Lady Huntingdon, which is amusingly characteristic both of the writer and of her time: ‘I thank your ladyship,’ she wrote, ‘for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.’ 1

Several ladies and a few men of great position were deeply impressed with the new teaching. As early as 1741 Lady Mary Hastings, the sister-in-law of Lady Huntingdon, startled the fashionable world in London by her marriage with an itinerant Yorkshire preacher named Ingham. The half-brother of Bolingbroke was a sincere convert. Chesterfield and Horace Walpole have spoken in strong terms of the extreme avarice of Lord Bath, the old rival of Walpole, but he subscribed liberally to the orphanage at Georgia, and he was a frequent, and apparently devout, attendant at Whitefield's Chapel in Tottenham Court Road. 2 Lady Chesterfield, Lady Fanny Shirley, Lady Glenorchy, Lady Betty Germain, and Lady Dartmouth, were ardent Evangelicals Lord Dartmouth, who took a conspicuous but very unfortunate part during the American war, was fervently attached to the sect, and his piety has been commemorated by Cowper in a well-known line. 1 The Evangelical party also reckoned among its early members Sir C. Middleton, afterwards Lord Barham, who was First Lord of the Admiralty during the brilliant period of the triumphs of Nelson; Lord Buchan, the brother of the illustrious Erskine; and the rich merchant John Thornton, who expended an ample fortune in the most splendid charity, and who preceded Simeon in the practice of purchasing advowsons and bestowing them on Evangelical preachers. 2

By the exertions of all these patrons, Methodism for a time became almost fashionable. ‘If you ever think of returning to England,’ wrote Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, ‘as I hope it will be long first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. I really believe by that time it will be necessary; this sect increases as fast as almost ever any religious nonsense did.’ 3 Lady Fanny Shirley opened her drawing-rooms for preaching in London, and Evangelical opinions gradually spread to the fashionable watering-places. Wesley had repeatedly preached at Bath, and complained bitterly of the dull and worldly character of his congregations and of the little impression he made, but the social position of Lady Huntingdon at once introduced Methodism into Bath society. A chapel was erected, and Shirley, Venn, and Jay made many converts. Horace Walpole once visited this chapel when Wesley was preaching, and noticed its ‘true Gothic windows,’ and the ‘boys and girls with charming voices that sing hymns in parts.’ 1 Cheltenham, which was just rising into a great watering-place, became in time one of the most Evangelical towns in the kingdom. Lady Dartmouth opened her drawing-room there for preaching, but no chapel was erected till that founded by Rowland Hill in 1808. At Tunbridge Wells occasional preachings were held in the house of Sir Thomas I'Anson. A mission, under the immediate auspices of Lady Huntingdon, took place in 1763, and a chapel was opened in 1768. The eminently religious character of George III. favoured the movement in society; and the young King, though generally very inimical to everything approaching to Dissent, more than once spoke with warm admiration of the Methodists.

But the most important sphere of Evangelical progress was the Church of England. In 1738, at the beginning of the Methodist movement, Wesley observed, in a letter to Peter Böhler, that he knew ten clergymen in England who preached what he believed to be Evangelical doctrine. We have already seen how bitterly the majority of the English clergy at first opposed the movement, and we have seen, too, I think, that their opposition was not unnatural or altogether unwarrantable. Few things could be more irritating to a parochial clergyman than the Methodist preacher who invaded his parish, denounced him before his congregation as a Pharisee or a heathen, threw great numbers into convulsive paroxysms which he pretended to be supernatural, and never failed to leave behind him a long ground-swell of agitation. It is not surprising that High Church clergymen, filled with rigid notions about Church discipline, should have inveighed bitterly against proceedings that were so scandalously irregular, that wise and moderate men should have revolted against a preaching which produced so much fanaticism and so much misery, that young curates fresh from the boisterous life of the university or the public school should have been only too ready to encourage the riotous dispositions of their parishioners. Wesley, during almost the whole of his career, adopted a language that was studiously moderate and decorous; but Whitefield, as he himself assures us, in his early days ‘thought he had never well closed a sermon without a lash at the fat, downy doctors of the Establishment,’ and the coarse and virulent opposition of many of the lay preachers to the clergy was a perpetual subject of complaint. The seed, however, which was so abundantly cast abroad, germinated largely among the clergy. In 1764, when Wesley attempted to form an union of Evangelical clergymen, he addressed circulars to about fifty; 1 the number continually and rapidly increased, 2 and before the close of his career the violence of the opposition to him had almost ceased. His last journals are full of the most emphatic statements of the change that had occurred. The physical phenomena that had once so largely accompanied Methodist preaching had become very rare, and the great moral benefits that resulted from it were fully recognised. In 1777 Wesley had begun to ask, ‘Is the offence of the cross ceased? It seems, after being scandalous near fifty years, I am at length growing into an honourable man.’ 3 Two or three years later he found himself overwhelmed with invitations to preach in the pulpits of the Established Church. 1 The extraordinary power of Whitefield naturally produced a school of imitators, and as early as 1756 an essayist complained bitterly that ‘a wild and intemperate delivery,’ copied from the orators of the Foundery and Tabernacle at Moorfields, had become common in the parish churches. 2 The Evangelical doctrines, which for some generations had been almost excluded from Anglican pulpits, became once more commonplaces; and by the close of the century the Evangelical party, though still a minority, had become a large and important section of the English Church.

From the group of clergymen who most successfully co-operated with Wesley in effecting this great change a few names may be cited. The itinerant movement in the Church of England was chiefly represented by Berridge and Grimshaw. The first of these was Rector of Everton, in Bedfordshire. The son of a prosperous Nottingham grazier, he was sent to Cambridge, where he distinguished himself by his industry, became a Fellow of Clare Hall, and was presented to a living in the gift of his college. He was eccentric almost to insanity, born, as he himself said, with a fool's cap on his head, and accustomed to fill his letters, and sometimes his sermons, and even his prayers, with a strain of coarse and childish jesting. He wrote many hymns in doggerel verse and sometimes of a grotesque absurdity, and although the members of his party were accustomed to speak of him as a man of great natural genius, it would be impossible to find among his scanty remains a single page of real eloquence or a single thought of real originality. He brought, however, to the work of evangelising, an intense and a passionate earnestness, an unlimited supply of homely images, and occasionally a pithy humour, not altogether unlike that of Fuller. 1 The eccentricities of his style and the vehemence of his manner attracted thousands, and under his preaching great numbers underwent the physical distortions I have described. Madan and Romaine, at the request of Lady Huntingdon, went down to Everton to witness them, and came to the conclusion that they were decidedly supernatural. The squire, who ‘did not like strangers, and hated to be incommoded,’ complained bitterly of the throngs that were attracted by this strange preaching to his quiet church. The zeal of Berridge, however, speedily outleaped the boundaries of his parish. He habitually traversed all Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, and many parts of Hertfordshire, Essex, and Suffolk. His activity was truly amazing. ‘For twenty-four years,’ wrote one of his biographers, ‘he continued to ride nearly 100 miles and to preach some ten or twelve sermons every week.’ His whole fortune was expended in charity or in supporting lay preachers. The neighbouring clergymen, whose parishes he invaded and whose churches he emptied, repeatedly complained to the bishop, who frequently but vainly directed him to confine his preaching to the ordinary hours, to consecrated buildings, and to his own parish. Berridge answered that other clergymen were unmolested when they visited the bowling-grounds outside their own parishes, that whatever canon he might break he dared not break that which said ‘Preach the gospel to every creature,’ that he preached only at two times, in season and out of season. He began life as a violent Arminian, but afterwards identified himself completely with the Calvinistic Methodists, and in each stage of his career he abused frantically the party opposed to him. He had several powerful protectors, and probably owed something of his impunity to the firm friendship of Lady Huntingdon and of Thornton. One of his friends was on intimate terms with the elder Pitt, and that statesman is said on one occasion to have indirectly interposed to shield him from a prosecution. With all his eccentricities, and partly, perhaps, in consequence of them, Berridge made a deep and abiding impression over the large district which he traversed, and he appears to have been in a great degree the master and model of Rowland Hill. He remained unmarried, partly in order that he might devote his undivided energies to field-preaching, and partly because having opened his Bible at random, in order to learn, as he expressed it, ‘whether he should take a Jezebel,’ his eyes lighted on texts unpropitious to matrimony. 1 He died at a great age, in 1793, and before his death, his mind, which was never very sane, appears to have been thoroughly disordered. 2

Grimshaw was another example of an eccentric and irregular nature entirely dominated by religious zeal. He was born at Brindle, in Lancashire, in 1708, and having passed through Christ's College, Cambridge, he was ordained in 1731, and was for the next three years a clergyman of the ordinary eighteenth-century type: hunting, fishing, and playing cards without scruple, occasionally indulging in some convivial excesses, but in general discharging the ordinary clerical duties with respectable decorum. Religious impressions, however, made in childhood at last revived, and they were probably strengthened by the death of his wife, which destroyed the happiness of his home. For several years he continued in a morbid state of religious despondency. He imagined that he was damned, he was besieged by blasphemous thoughts, he was haunted by the dread of suicide. He abandoned every form of amusement. He persuaded himself that two distinct and vivid flashes of light proceeding from some pewter dishes directed his eye to a work of Owen on ‘Justification by Faith.’ On one occasion, as he afterwards related, when officiating in church, he was seized with a sudden dizziness, which prevented him from proceeding, his arms and legs grew cold as death, and he then passed into a strange trance. He found himself in a dark, narrow passage, divided by a wall from hell, and he heard above him God the Father and God the Son disputing about his fate. The former strenuously urged that he should be damned, as he had not yet relinquished his own righteousness. The latter took the opposite side, and at last thrust down into view His hands and His feet, and Grimshaw observed that the nail-holes were ragged and blue, and streaming with fresh blood. From this moment he revived, and ever after found perfect peace in the conviction of the utter worthlessness of all human works, and the complete and gratuitous salvation achieved by Christ.

His first scenes of labour were Rochdale and the neighbouring village of Todmorden, and he was afterwards appointed perpetual curate of Haworth, a village in one of the most secluded districts of Yorkshire, which in our own century has acquired in the eyes of thousands a deep interest as the home of the Brontës, and the scene from which they derived some of the happiest touches of their inspiration. From this centre Grimshaw spread the Evangelical doctrines over the greater part of Yorkshire and of the adjoining counties. The soil was not altogether a virgin one, for a few years before his arrival, Ingham, who had been one of the original Oxford Methodists, and one of the companions of Wesley in Georgia, and Nelson, a Yorkshire stonemason, who was one of the most zealous of Wesley's lay preachers, had been itinerating through the county; but their success was marred by a violent quarrel which broke out between them on the subject of the Moravians. The influence of Grimshaw was far wider, and his extraordinary zeal, as well as his repudiation of all pulpit conventionalities, and his habitual use of what he called ‘market English,’ gave him unrivalled power with the poor. He acquired—apparently with much justice—the nickname of ‘the mad parson,’ and many characteristic anecdotes of his proceedings are preserved. During the hymn before the sermon he was accustomed to issue from the church, and drive—sometimes, it is said, with a horsewhip—all the loiterers in the village into the sacred precincts. On one occasion he pretended to be a mischievous boy, and teased a blind woman with a stick, in order to ascertain whether she had attained a complete command of her temper and her tongue. On another he tested the charity of an ostentatious professor of religion by appearing in the garb of a beggar at his door; on a third he attired himself as an old woman, and took his stand near the door of a cottage prayer-meeting, which was frequently interrupted by some boys, in order that he might detect the offenders. In his parish he established so severe a despotism that a man riding on an urgent mission of charity on Sunday could not induce the blacksmith to shoe his horse till he had obtained the minister's permission; and drinkers in the public-house are said to have taken flight through the window when Grimshaw appeared in the street. He was peculiarly anxious to prevent his parishioners from walking in the fields on Sunday, and went himself in disguise to the place where they were accustomed to meet, in order that he might detect and rebuke the culprits. On one occasion, when Whitefield, preaching in his pulpit, spoke of the piety that would doubtless be found in a congregation which enjoyed the ministry of so faithful a pastor, Grimshaw interrupted him, exclaiming: ‘Oh, sir, for God's sake do not speak so! I pray you do not flatter them; I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with their eyes open.’ His prayers against the Haworth races were so fervent that a violent downpour of rain, which once lasted during the three days of their continuance, was regarded by the parishioners as a direct answer, and led to the cessation of the sport. He heartily supported the mission of Wesley, built a Methodist chapel in his own parish, invited itinerant lay preachers to assist him, and was once found cleaning the boots of one of them. In his own parish he was accustomed, besides the ordinary services and sermons, to read the Homilies of the Church, to give expositions of the Articles, and to visit his vast parish, in twelve different places monthly, convening in each the surrounding inhabitants for an exhortation, inquiring minutely into the condition of each member, reconciling enmities, and rebuking vice. The religious revival which he produced was very great. When he came to Haworth there were not twelve communicants in the parish. Before the close of his mission there were nearly 1,200, and on one occasion, when Whitefield was present, no less than thirty-five bottles of wine were used at the sacred table.

His whole life was devoted to a single object. It was his boast that whenever he died he would not leave a penny behind him. He preached usually more than twelve, sometimes as much as thirty, times in a week. When he met a stranger on the roads he was accustomed to induce him to kneel down with him at once in prayer upon the grass. Not content with traversing every part of his own large parish, or even of his own county, he went on missionary tours through Lancashire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire. He met with much opposition from clergymen into whose parishes he intruded, with some mob violence, and with great ridicule; but his zeal and his humility were proof against all these, and he lived to see many thousands affected by his words. A short time before his death, standing with John Newton on a hill near Haworth, he observed that when he first came there he could ride for half a day to the east or to the west, to the north or to the south, without seeing or hearing of a single truly devout man, whereas many hundreds in his own parish were now fervent believers. He died in 1762, of a putrid fever caught in visiting the sick. His last words were, ‘Here goes an unprofitable servant.’ 1

Among the more regular clergy also, we speedily find representatives of Evangelical opinions. In London the most important was probably William Romaine, the son of a Protestant refugee who had fled to England upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. After a distinguished University career, followed by ten quiet and studious years in a curacy in Surrey, Romaine came to London in 1748, and he spent the remainder of his life in preaching the doctrine of justification by faith, with extraordinary power, in many different quarters of the metropolis. For five years he was assistant morning preacher in St. George's, Hanover Square—a church which, was then the very centre of the rank and fashion of England; and he was at last dismissed from his post for the characteristic reason that the crowds who were attracted by his sermons disturbed the parishioners, and made it difficult for them to find their way to their pews. He was also for many years lecturer at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West; but an attempt was made to deprive him of his pulpit, and when it was defeated by a legal decision in his favour, the churchwardens refused to open the church till the exact hour at which the judgment ordered the lecture to begin, or to light it when it was opened. Until the Bishop of London interposed to arrest the scandal, the extraordinary spectacle was often witnessed of the preacher preaching in a crowded church by the light of a single taper, which he held in his own hand. Romaine was a warm friend of Lady Huntingdon and her coadjutors, preached frequently in her chapels as long as they were not separated from the Church, and became at last, partly through her influence, rector of St. Anne's, Blackfriars. He was sincerely attached to the Anglican Church, and sometimes spoke with much bitterness of the Dissenters, and he never appears to have been guilty of the disregard of Church discipline for which the early Methodists were conspicuous. In the learned world he acquired some reputation as editor of the ‘Hebrew Dictionary and Concordance’ of Marius de Calasio, and he held the Gresham Professorship of Astronomy in 1752, but his lectures in this capacity produced great opposition and dissension, and he was accused of availing himself of his chair to depreciate the very science he professed, on the ground that astronomical observations have no tendency to make men Christians. 1 His fame rests chiefly on the extraordinary popularity of his preaching and of his devotional writings, and on the conspicuous part which he took in opposition to the Jew Bill of 1753. His disposition appears to have been morose, unsocial, and intolerant, and he excited much hostility in every sphere in which he moved; but few contemporary clergymen exercised a deeper or wider influence, or displayed a more perfect devotion to the cause they believed to be true. 1

Many other remarkable names may be cited. Among them was John Newton, the friend of Cowper, the curate of Olney, and the rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, who, having been for many years an insubordinate sailor, a slave-dealer, and an unbeliever, and having passed, in his wild and adventurous life, through the lowest depths of misery and oppression, had been touched by the Evangelical doctrines, had acquired by indomitable perseverance the attainments requisite for a clergyman, and continued for the space of forty-four years one of the most devoted and single-hearted of Christian ministers. Among them were Venn, the rector of Huddersfield, who inoculated with the Evangelical doctrines the great manufacturing populations of Yorkshire; Rowlands, the itinerant missionary of Wales; Cecil of Bedford Row, Simeon of Cambridge, and Walker of Truro. With much narrowness and fanaticism of judgment, with little range of learning, and no high order of intellectual power, all these possessed, in an eminent degree, the qualities of heart and mind that influence great masses of men; and they and their colleagues gradually changed the whole spirit of the English Church. They infused into it a new fire and passion of devotion, kindled a spirit of fervent philanthropy, raised the standard of clerical duty, and completely altered the whole tone and tendency of the preaching of its ministers. Before the close of the century the Evangelical movement had become the almost undisputed centre of religious activity in England, and it continued to be so till the rise of the Tractarian movement of 1833.

But beyond all other men it was John Wesley to whom this work was due. Few things in ecclesiastical history are more striking than the energy and the success with which he propagated his opinions. He was gifted with a frame of iron and with spirits that never flagged. ‘I do not remember,’ he wrote when an old man, ‘to have felt lowness of spirits for a quarter of an hour since I was born.’ 1 He was accustomed to attribute, probably with much reason, to his perpetual journeys on horseback, the almost superhuman flow of health and vigour which he enjoyed. He lived eighty-seven years, and he continued his efforts to the very close. He rose long before daybreak. He preached usually at five o'clock in the morning. When he was eighty-five, he once delivered more than eighty sermons in eight weeks. In the very last year of his life he went on a missionary journey to Scotland, and on one occasion travelled seventy miles in a single day. During the greater part of his career he was accustomed to preach about 800 sermons a year, and it was computed that in the fifty years of his itinerant life he travelled a quarter of a million of miles, and preached more than 40,000 sermons. Like Whitefield, he had the power of riveting the attention of audiences of 8,000, 10,000, and sometimes even 20,000 souls, and, like Whitefield, a great part of his success depended on the topics he habitually employed; but in other respects his sermons bore no resemblance to the impassioned harangues of his great colleague. His style was simple, terse, colloquial, abounding in homely images, characterised above all things by its extreme directness, by the manifest and complete subordination of all other considerations to the one great end of impressing his doctrines on his hearers, animated by a tone of intense and penetrating sincerity that found its way to the hearts of thousands. He possessed to the highest degree that controlled and reasoning fanaticism which is one of the most powerful agents in moving the passions of men. While preaching doctrines of the wildest extravagance, while representing himself as literally inspired, and his hearers as surrounded by perpetual miracles, his manners and his language were always those of a scholar and a gentleman—calm, deliberate, and self-possessed. He was always dressed with a scrupulous neatness. His countenance, to the very close of his life, was singularly beautiful and expressive, and in his old age his long white hair added a peculiar venerableness to his appearance. Great natural knowledge of men, improved by extraordinary experience, gave him an almost unrivalled skill in dealing with the most various audiences, and the courage with which he never failed to encounter angry mobs, as well as the quiet dignity of manner which never forsook him, added greatly to the effects of his preaching.

His administrative powers were probably still greater than his power as a preacher. Few tasks are more difficult than the organisation into a permanent body of half-educated men, intoxicated with the wildest religious enthusiasm, believing themselves to be all inspired by the Holy Ghost, and holding opinions that ran perilously near the abyss of Antinomianism. Wesley accomplished the task with an admirable mixture of tact, firmness, and gentleness; and the skill with which he framed the Methodist organisation is sufficiently shown by its later history. Like all men with extraordinary administrative gifts, he had a great love of power, and this fact renders peculiarly honourable his evident reluctance to detach himself from the discipline of his Church.

He has, it is true, no title to be regarded as a great thinker. His mind had not much originality or speculative power, and his leading tenets placed him completely out of harmony with the higher intellect of his time. Holding the doctrine of a particular Providence in such a sense as to believe that the physical phenomena of the universe were constantly changed for human convenience and at human prayers, he could have little sympathy with scientific thought. Assuming as axioms the inspiration of every word of the Bible and his own inspiration in interpreting it, throwing the whole weight of religious proof upon what he termed ‘a new class of senses opened in the soul to be the avenues of the invisible world, the evidence of things not seen, as the bodily senses are of visible things,’ he was simply indifferent to the gravest historical, critical, and ethical questions that were discussed about him, and difficulties that troubled some of the greatest thinkers were imperceptible for him. No class of opinions are less likely to commend themselves to a judicial and critical intellect than those which he embraced. His mind was incapable of continued doubt. His credulity and confidence on some subjects were unbounded, and his judgments of men were naturally strongly biassed by his theological views. Thus Hume appeared to him merely as ‘the most insolent despiser of truth and virtue that ever appeared in the world,’ and he regarded Beattie as incomparably superior both as a writer and a reasoner. 1 Leibnitz he pronounced to be one of the poorest writers he had ever read. 2 He could not pardon Reid for having spoken respectfully of Rousseau, or Robertson for having referred without censure to Lord Kames, or Smollett and Guthrie for having treated witchcraft as a superstition. 3 Still even the literary side of his career is by no means contemptible. He was an indefatigable and very skilful controversialist, a voluminous writer, and a still more voluminous editor. His writings, though they are certainly not distinguished either by originality of thought or by eloquence of expression, are always terse, well reasoned, full of matter and meaning. Unlike a large proportion of his followers, he had no contempt for human learning, and in spite of the incessant activity of his career he found time for much and various reading. He was accustomed to read history, poetry, and philosophy on horseback, and one of the charms of his journals is the large amount of shrewd literary criticism they contain.

His many-sided activity was displayed in the most various fields, and his keen eye was open to every form of abuse. At one time we find him lamenting the glaring inequalities of political representation; that Old Sarum without house or inhabitant should send two members to Parliament; that Looe, ‘a town near half as large as Islington,’ should send four members, while every county in North Wales sent only one. At another he dilated on the costly diffusiveness of English legal documents, or on the charlatanry and inconsistency of English medicine. He set up a dispensary; and, though not a qualified practitioner, he gratuitously administered medicine to the poor. He was a strong advocate of inoculation, which was then coming into use, and of the application of electricity to medicine, and he attempted, partly on sanitary and partly on economical grounds, to discourage the use of tea among the poor. He was among the first to reprobate the horrors of the slave trade to call attention to the scandalous condition of the gaols, to make collections for relieving the miserable destitution of the French prisoners of war. He supported with the whole weight of his influence the Sunday-school movement. He made praiseworthy efforts to put down among his followers that political corruption which was perhaps the most growing vice of English society. He also took an active, though a very unfortunate part in some of the political questions of the day. He wrote against the concession of relief to the Catholics, and against the right of Wilkes to sit for Middlesex in 1768; and during the American struggle he threw into a more popular form the chief arguments in Dr. Johnson's pamphlet against the Americans, and had probably a considerable influence in forming the public opinion hostile to all concession. 1 It is a curious illustration of his activity that when Pitt, having defeated the Coalition Ministry, obtained supreme power in 1784, Wesley immediately wrote to him suggesting a plan for the readjustment of taxation, and urging him to check suicide by hanging the bodies of those who were guilty of it in chains.

The influence of men bears no kind of proportion to their intellects. Were it otherwise, the small group of men who have effected great changes or developments of religious belief would deserve to rank as the intellectual leaders of the world. No other class have had an influence which has been at once so wide in its range and so profound and searching in its character, and very few have exercised an influence which is so enduring. In these matters, however, character and intellect, preceding and surrounding circumstances, curiously combine; and some of those who have effected the greatest revolutions of popular opinion owe their success quite as much to their weakness as to their strength. It is probably true of Mohammed himself, it is certainly true of such men as Loyola and George Fox, that a vein of insanity which ran through their natures was one great element of their power. If Wesley had not been very credulous and very dogmatic, utterly incapable of a suspended judgment, and utterly insensible to some of the highest intellectual tendencies of his time, it may be safely asserted that his work would have been far less. He does not rank in the first line of the great religious creators and reformers, and a large part of the work with which he is associated was accomplished by others; but it is no exaggeration to say that he has had a wider constructive influence in the sphere of practical religion than any other man who has appeared since the sixteenth century. He lived to see the sect which he founded numbering more than 70,000 souls upon British soil, and about 300 itinerant and 1,000 local preachers raised up from his own people. The different branches of Methodists in the world are said now to number twelve millions of souls. 1 They have already far outnumbered every other Nonconformist body in England and every other religious body in the United States, and they are probably destined largely to increase, while the influence of the movement transformed for a time the whole spirit of the Established Church, and has been more or less felt in every Protestant community speaking the English tongue.

During the whole of his life Wesley looked upon himself as a clergyman of the Established Church. He began, as we have seen, with strong High Church opinions, and was long a fervent believer in Apostolical succession; and though he gradually modified his other doctrines, he continued to the end to profess his warm adherence to the creed and the worship of the English Church. Nothing can be more unjust than to attribute to him the ambition of a schismatic, or the subversive instincts of a revolutionist. Again and again he exhorted his followers to attend the services of the Church, to abstain from attacking the clergy, and to avoid connecting themselves with any Dissenting body. In the very last year of his life he published a letter, in which he wrote: ‘I live and die a member of the Church of England, and no one who regards my judgment or advice will ever separate from it.’ 2 But many circumstances—some of them not altogether in his control—tended visibly towards separation. It was, indeed, the inevitable destiny of a body which possessed a distinct and admirable organisation, and which, at the same time, was formed in defiance of the discipline of the parent Church. At first the Methodist services were held at such times as not to interfere with those of the parish church, but gradually they began to encroach upon the church hours. The lay preachers were a constant source of difficulty. Many of them were bitterly hostile to the clergy, and altogether indisposed to acknowledge the inferiority of their own ecclesiastical position. Wesley frequently but ineffectually endeavoured to obtain for them episcopal consecration. In 1763 he induced a Greek bishop who was visiting England to consecrate one of them; but the step caused so much discontent that it was not repeated, and when some other preachers without his consent obtained a similar consecration, Wesley was much displeased, and expelled them from the society. Some of the lay preachers began, without the consent or approval of Wesley, to administer the sacrament.

Charles Wesley was especially alarmed at these symptoms. His influence with his brother was always exerted in a conservative direction; he urged him to exercise much greater deliberation in the admission of lay preachers, and he gradually withdrew from all active participation in the movement. On the other hand, there were many urging Wesley to take more decided steps, and on one important question a great change had passed over his judgment. A careful study of Lord King's book on the constitution of the Primitive Church, and of the ‘Irenicon’ of Stillingfleet, had convinced him that bishops and presbyters were originally of one order, and that he had therefore as a presbyter as much right to ordain as to administer the sacrament. This right he hesitated to exercise until new circumstances arose which made the position of his body more difficult. The Toleration Act had given perfect liberty of worship to all Protestant Dissenters who admitted the Trinity, but it had made no provision for a body like the Methodists, who professed to be in full communion and agreement with the Established Church; and some of the clergy availed themselves of the advantage which this omission gave them to prosecute the Methodists, and thus reduce them to the alternative of closing their chapels, or having them licensed as Dissenting meetinghouses. One of the last important letters which Wesley wrote was a remonstrance with a bishop, who by taking this course was endeavouring to drive them into Dissent. A judgment given in 1781 against Lady Huntingdon placed her chapels legally in the position of Dissenting meeting-houses, and established that no Church of England clergyman had a right to officiate in them. From this time, Venn, Romaine, and other clergymen withdrew from the Methodist chapels.

Another serious complication speedily arose. Owing to some absurd jealousies on both sides, no American bishop had been consecrated before the revolution; and the Americans who desired episcopal ordination had to come over to England to receive it from an English bishop, and to swear in England the oath of allegiance. Bishop Butler had proposed, and Archbishop Secker had strenuously urged, the consecration of a bishop for America; but Dissenting jealousy interposed, 1 and the absurdity continued of a diocese separated by 3,000 miles from its diocesan. With the severance of the political tie, this state of things became of course untenable; and after some difficulty a missionary belonging to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was selected by the Americans, and consecrated in 1784 by Scotch bishops. The Methodists, however, laboured under still greater difficulties than the other Episcopalians. Episcopal clergymen were very thinly scattered in the colony, especially since the revolution, which had induced many of them to emigrate. Of those who remained, a large proportion were bitterly hostile to the Methodists, who often found themselves without anyone to administer to them the sacrament, or to baptise their children. Under these circumstances Wesley took the bold step of consecrating Coke Superintendent or Bishop of the American Methodists. He did not do so until he had vainly sought assistance from the Bishop of London, and till the American Methodists had shown a strong disposition to take the matter, if much further delayed, into their own hands. This decisive step was taken in 1784; and in the following year Wesley ordained ministers for Scotland.

The somewhat ambiguous position which Wesley occupied towards the Church has for a long time been more or less perpetuated by the sect which he founded. Ultimately it is probable that the position of the Anglican Church as an Establishment will be injuriously affected by the great numerical secession from its pale, and especially by the Nonconformity of Wales; but hitherto the Methodist body has proved faithful to the spirit of its founder, and does not appear to have participated largely in the jealousy of Dissent. What the Church lost in numbers it more than gained in vitality. The Evangelical movement, which directly or indirectly originated with Wesley, produced a revival of religious feeling that has incalculably increased the efficiency of almost every religious body in the community, while at the same time it has not seriously affected party politics. On the great American controversy, as we have seen, the leading Methodists were divided, Wesley and Fletcher of Madeley being strongly opposed to the American claims, while the bulk of the Calvinistic Methodists were inclined to favour them. The many great philanthropic efforts which arose, or at least derived their importance, from the Evangelical movement, soon became prominent topics of parliamentary debate; but they were not the peculiar glory of any political party, and they formed a common ground on which many religious denominations could co-operate.

Great, however, as was the importance of the Evangelical revival in stimulating these efforts, it had other consequences of perhaps a wider and more enduring influence. Before the close of the century in which it appeared, a spirit had begun to circulate in Europe threatening the very foundations of society and of belief. The revolt against the supernatural theory of Christianity which had been conducted by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists, the material conception of man and of the universe which sprang from the increased study of physical science and from the metaphysics of Condillac and Helvetius, the wild social dreams which Rousseau had clothed in such a transcendent eloquence, the misery of a high-spirited people ground to the dust by unnecessary wars and by partial and unjust taxation, the imbecility and corruption of rulers and priests, had together produced in France a revolutionary spirit, which in its intensity and its proselytising fervour was unequalled since the days of the Reformation. It was soon felt in many lands. Millions of fierce and ardent natures were intoxicated by dreams of an impossible equality and of a complete social and political reorganisation. Many old abuses perished, but a tone of thought and feeling was introduced into European life which could only lead to anarchy, and at length to despotism, and was beyond all others fatal to that measured and ordered freedom which can alone endure. Its chief characteristics were a hatred of all constituted authority, an insatiable appetite for change, a habit of regarding rebellion as the normal as well as the noblest form of political self-sacrifice, a disdain for all compromise, a contempt for all tradition, a desire to level all ranks and subvert all establishments, a determination to seek progress, not by the slow and cautious amelioration of existing institutions, but by sudden, violent, and revolutionary change. Religion, property, civil authority, and domestic life, were all assailed, and doctrines incompatible with the very existence of government were embraced by multitudes with the fervour of a religion. England, on the whole, escaped the contagion. Many causes conspired to save her, but among them a prominent place must, I believe, be given to the new and vehement religious enthusiasm which was at that very time passing through the middle and lower classes of the people, which had enlisted in its service a large proportion of the wilder and more impetuous reformers, and which recoiled with horror from the anti-Christian tenets that were associated with the Revolution in France.

The revolutionary spirit was of foreign origin, and its opponents were able to appeal to a strong national antipathy; but in England itself a movement, not less momentous, and in some of its aspects scarcely less menacing, was about the same time taking place. The closing years of the eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of a series of great mechanical inventions, which changed with unexampled rapidity the whole course of English industry, and in little more than a generation created manufacturing centres unequalled in the world. Scarcely any event in modern history has exercised a wider social and political influence than this sudden growth of the manufacturing towns, and it brought with it some political and moral dangers of the gravest kind. It was in many respects a movement of disintegration, breaking the ties of sympathy between class and class, and destroying the habits of discipline and subordination that once extended through the whole community. Forms of industry which had hitherto been carried on in the domestic circle, or in small establishments under the constant supervision of the master, were transferred to the crowded manufactory. Labour became more nomadic. All the ties of habit and tradition were relaxed. Working men, drawn from the most distant quarters, were agglomerated by thousands in great towns, bound to their employers by no other tie than that of interest, exposed to the fever of an immensely stimulated competition, and to the trying ordeal of sudden, rapid, and unforeseen fluctuations in their wages and their employments. The gambling spirit produced by these fluctuations, the vast progress in means of locomotion and of information, the cosmopolitan spirit of free trade, all tended to produce among them a restless discontent. The inflammable elements in the nation were massed together to an unprecedented extent, and temptations were greatly multiplied while restraints were weakened. The war between capital and labour began. Wealth was immensely increased, but the inequalities of its distribution were aggravated. The contrast between extravagant luxury and abject misery became much more frequent and much more glaring than before. The wealthy employer ceased to live among his people; the quarters of the rich and of the poor became more distant, and every great city soon presented those sharp divisions of classes and districts in which the political observer discovers one of the most dangerous symptoms of revolution.

It would be a gross exaggeration to represent these as the sole consequences of the vast growth in manufacturing industry which took place in England in the closing years of the eighteenth century, and which has advanced with accelerated rapidity to our own time. This is not the place to show how greatly it has stimulated the progressive forces of English political life, in how many ways it has improved the material and intellectual position of the working classes, how many paths of ambition formerly closed to them it has thrown open, or how greatly it has added to the material resources which the nation can command in every conflict with her enemies. But few thinkers of any weight would, I believe, now deny that the evils and dangers accompanying these benefits were greatly underrated by most of the economists of the last generation. The true greatness and welfare of nations depend mainly on the amount of moral force that is generated within them. Society never can continue in a state of tolerable security when there is no other bond of cohesion than a mere money tie, and it is idle to expect the different classes of the community to join in the self-sacrifice and enthusiasm of patriotism if all unselfish motives are excluded from their several relations. Every change of conditions which widens the chasm and impairs the sympathy between rich and poor cannot fail, however beneficial may be its other effects, to bring with it grave dangers to the State. It is incontestable that the immense increase of manufacturing industry and of the manufacturing population, has had this tendency; and it is, therefore, I conceive, peculiarly fortunate that it should have been preceded by a religious revival, which opened a new spring of moral and religious energy among the poor, and at the same time gave a powerful impulse to the philanthropy of the rich.

But the chief triumph of a religious movement is not to be found in its action upon large classes of the community, or within the noisy arena of politics. It is to be found rather in those spheres and moments of life which beyond all others are secluded from the eye of history. Every religion which is worthy of the name must provide some method of consoling men in the first agonies of bereavement, some support in the extremes of pain and sickness, above all, some stay in the hour of death. It must operate, not merely or mainly upon the strong and healthy reason, but also in the twilight of the understanding, in the half-lucid intervals that precede death, when the imagination is enfeebled and discoloured by disease, when all the faculties are confused and dislocated, when all the buoyancy and hopefulness of nature are crushed. At such a time it is not sufficient for most men to rest upon the review of a well-spent life. Such a retrospect to all of us is too full of saddening and humiliating memories. It is an effort too great for the jaded mind. It can at best afford but a cold and languid satisfaction amid the bitterness of death. It is at this moment that priestly influence is most felt. The Catholic priest asserting with emphatic confidence a divine power of absolving the sinner, arresting and overawing the wandering imagination by imposing rites, demanding only complete submission at a time when beyond all others the mind is least disposed to resist, and professing, on the condition of that submission, to conduct the dying man into an eternity of happiness, can provide a stay upon which sinking nature can rest in that gloomy hour. The immense consolation which has been thus infused into innumerable minds at the time when consolation is most needed, can be hardly overstated. To secure the efficacy of this last absolution upon the imagination of the dying, has been a main end of all the teaching and of all the ceremonies of the Church. For the sake of this, men have endured all the calamities which priest-craft has brought upon the world, have bartered the independence of their minds, and shut their eyes to the light of truth. By connecting this absolution indissolubly with complete submission to their sacerdotal claims, the Catholic priests framed the most formidable engine of religious tyranny that has ever been employed to disturb or subjugate the world.

It is the glory of Protestantism, whenever it remains faithful to the spirit of its founders, that it has destroyed this engine. The Evangelical teacher emphatically declares that the intervention of no human being, and of no human rite, is necessary in the hour of death. Yet he can exercise a soothing influence not less powerful than that of the Catholic priest. The doctrine of justification by faith, which diverts the wandering mind from all painful and perplexing retrospect, concentrates the imagination on one Sacred Figure, and persuades the sinner that the sins of a life have in a moment been effaced, has enabled thousands to encounter death with perfect calm, or even with vivid joy, and has consoled innumerable mourners at a time when all the commonplaces of philosophy would appear the idlest of sounds.

This doctrine had fallen almost wholly into abeyance in England, and had scarcely any place among realised convictions, when it was revived by the Evangelical party. It is impossible to say how largely it has contributed to mitigate some of the most acute forms of human misery. Historians, and even ecclesiastical historians, are too apt to regard men simply in classes or communities or corporations, and to forget that the keenest of our sufferings as well as the deepest of our joys take place in those periods when we are most isolated from the movements of society. Whatever may be thought of the truth of the doctrine, no candid man will question its power in the house of mourning and in the house of death. ‘The world,’ wrote Wesley, ‘may not like our Methodists and Evangelical people, but the world cannot deny that they die well.’

These have been the great benefits which flowed from the Evangelical revival of the last century. The evils that resulted from it I have already indicated. The foregoing narrative will supply abundant evidence of the religious terrorism by which it clouded or embittered many sensitive natures; of its austere and sour enmity to some of the most innocent forms of human enjoyment; of the extreme narrowness of its conceptions of life; of its hostility to culture and free research. Some, indeed, of the Methodist leaders were men of no contemptible knowledge. Wesley and Berridge were distinguished members of their university. Romaine was an accomplished Hebrew scholar. Dr. Walker, who took a conspicuous part in the revival in Ireland, was a Senior Fellow of Trinity College. But the great majority of the preachers were half-educated men, and those who were not so, usually discouraged and decried secular learning. ‘Human science’ was, indeed, one of their favourite topics of abuse. Their theory of religion laid no stress upon the voice of antiquity. They believed firmly in an ever-present Divine Spirit illuminating an inspired page, and they looked with suspicion and dislike upon every voluntary pursuit which was not directly subservient to religious ends. They soon discovered, too, that the most cultivated minds were precisely those that were least susceptible to those violent and unreasoning religious emotions which they ascribed to the direct action of the Holy Ghost. Methodism has long since taken its position as pre-eminently and almost exclusively the religion of the middle and lower classes of society; and the Evangelical school that sprang from it, though it obtained a temporary ascendency in the Church of the upper classes, had never any real sympathy with the intellect of England. Regarding all doubt on religious matters as criminal, discouraging every form of study that could possibly produce it, deifying strong internal persuasion, and shutting its eyes on principle against every discovery that could impugn its tenets, it has been essentially the school of those who form their opinions rather by emotion than by reasoning, and who deliberately refuse to face the intellectual difficulties of the question. Its teaching lends itself admirably to impassioned rhetoric, and it has accordingly been rich in popular preachers, but in the higher forms of intellect it has every generation been more conspicuously barren. In the face of physical science, of modern Biblical criticism, and of all the light which history and comparative mythology have of late years thrown on the genesis of religions; the old theory of verbal inspiration, the old methods of Biblical interpretation, and the old prescientific conception of a world governed by perpetual acts of supernatural interference, still hold their ground in the Evangelical pulpit. The incursions of hostile science have been met by the barrier of an invincible prejudice—by the belief, sedulously inculcated from childhood, that what are termed orthodox opinions are essential to salvation, and that doubt, and every course of inquiry that leads to doubt, should be avoided as a crime. It is a belief which is not only fatal to habits of intellectual honesty and independence in those who accept it, but is also a serious obstacle in the path of those who do not. The knowledge that many about him will regard any deviation from the traditional cast of opinions as the greatest of calamities and of crimes, seldom fails, according to the disposition of the inquirer, to drive him into hypocritical concealments or into extreme and exaggerated bitterness.

The Evangelical movement has thus seriously aggravated the dangers of a period of great religious transition. It has weakened the love of truth and the spirit of inquiry wherever it has passed. It has also revived religious animosities, brought semi-theological questions into a renewed prominence in politics, and in many ways strengthened the spirit of intolerance. Members of this party were among the bitterest opponents of the attempt that was made in 1778 to relieve the clergy from the subscription to the Articles, and among the most active agents in the later prosecution of sceptical writings; and one of the first effects of their influence in Parliament was an increased stringency of Sabbatarian legislation. To the strength of Methodist and Evangelical opinion is mainly due the strange anomaly that, at the present day, after nearly fifty years of almost uninterrupted democratic legislation, the great majority of public museums and galleries in England are closed on the only day on which the bulk of the people could enjoy them. The working classes have thus been deprived of a source of amusement and instruction of pre-eminent value, and the public-houses of their most formidable competitors. The Evangelical movement anticipated, in many of its aspects, that great reaction which passed over Europe after the French Revolution, and it contributed powerfully to perpetuate and intensify it.

But it is especially on the Catholic question that the political influence of the party was injurious. The Evangelicals are not, indeed, responsible for the scandalously intolerant laws that were passed against the Catholics after the Revolution, but they contributed very largely to retard the full acknowledgment of their claims. Wesley, as we have seen, wrote against the relaxation of the penal code. Scott, who was perhaps the most popular writer of the school, maintained that the removal of Catholic disabilities would be a great sin; 1 and from the time of the Lord George Gordon riots in 1780 to the time of Catholic emancipation in 1829 the bulk of the Evangelical clergy strained every nerve to prevent the concession of toleration and political power to the Catholics. Like all men who are endeavouring to oppose the main current of their age, they failed, but the evil they effected was not the less serious. They produced on both sides an enduring sectarian animosity, and an extreme exaggeration of distinctive doctrines, and they delayed the just and necessary settlement of this great question until the boon had lost all power of healing divisions and allaying discontent. Had the Catholic question been settled at the close of the last century, or even in the first decade of the present one, and had the settlement comprised a moderate endowment of the priests, Irish discontent might have long been a thing of the past. The most educated Catholic laymen were then the indisputable leaders of their co-religionists. The priests were by taste and profession almost wholly outside the circle of politics. Their interests might easily have been attached to those of the Government, and the prevailing spirit of the Vatican was singularly moderate and conciliatory. It is one of the great misfortunes of English history, that the emancipation of the Catholics was only conceded after a long and bitter agitation, which evoked the worst passions and principles that were dormant among them, broke the ascendency of the educated laymen, and, by forcing the priests into the forefront of the fray, introduced a new and dangerous element into English political life. Several causes concurred to produce the delay, but among them none was more powerful than that fierce anti-Catholic spirit which the Evangelical movement had maintained among the people of England.

CHAPTER IX.

One of the most difficult problems which the framers of constitutions are called upon to solve is that of providing that the direction of affairs shall be habitually in the hands of men of very exceptional ability, and at the same time of preventing the instability, insecurity, and alarm which perpetual and radical changes in the Government must produce. Among the many objections to hereditary despotism, one of the most obvious is that it implies that the members of a single family, educated for the most part under circumstances peculiarly fitted to enervate the character, shall, during many generations, be competent to discharge one of the most arduous of human undertakings, the direction of the complicated and often conflicting interests of a nation. Among the many objections to elective monarchy, the most serious is that it condemns the country in which it exists to perpetual conspiracies, tumults, and intrigues, which are fatal to the formation of settled political habits, and derange every part of the national organisation. Considered as a matter of pure theory, no form of government might appear more reasonable than that under which the leading men in the country assemble at each vacancy of the throne to choose the man who appears to them the most fitted for the crown. But no form of government has been more decisively condemned by experience. The elected sovereign is always likely to conspire with the assistance either of his own army or of foreign Powers to perpetuate the sovereignty in his family. The other great powers in the State, through fear of such conspiracy, are tempted to reduce the military establishments below what is necessary for the security of the nation. Bitter factions, profoundly detrimental to the well-being of the community, are inevitably formed among the great families who are competing to raise their candidates to the throne. Every illness of the sovereign gives rise to intrigues, conspiracies, and insecurity; his death usually leads to disorder, and sometimes to anarchy and civil war. Each new king ascends the throne tainted by the arts of electioneering, deeply pledged to one section of his people, the object of the vehement hostility of another section, and conscious that large classes are looking forward eagerly to his death. Such are the inevitable vices of elective monarchy, and they are so grave that, with the exception of the Papacy, which rests upon conditions wholly unlike those of any other monarchy, this form of government has been long extirpated from Europe. The crowns of Sweden and of Denmark became in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries strictly hereditary. The German Empire, and the kingdoms of Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia passed away or were absorbed, and they perished mainly by their own incurable weakness.

Several attempts have been made in the way of compromise to obviate these evils, and to combine the advantages of hereditary and of elective monarchy. One theory of government which was widely diffused in antiquity, and which may be traced far into the Middle Ages, but which has now passed altogether out of the sphere of practical politics, was that royalty was hereditary in a single family, but that the chiefs, tribes, or nations had the power of electing whom they pleased from among its members.

Another theory, which, if not openly avowed, has been sometimes practically adopted, is that the King holds his office only during good behaviour. In modern France the sovereign has always been an active power in the State, continually intervening in the direction of affairs, but liable, whenever he showed himself either incompetent or unpopular, to be displaced by a sudden revolution. To men who are firmly convinced that the ecclesiastical notion about the divine right of kings is a baseless superstition, that the sovereign is but the first magistrate of the State, and that the office he holds is intended for the benefit of his people, such a system appears at first sight very simple. In the natural course of events it must often happen that the sovereign, being selected by no principle of competition and being exposed to more than ordinary temptations, must be contemptible both in intellect and character, and large sections of his subjects come to look upon him as nothing better than an overpaid and inefficient official, who, on the first offence, should be unceremoniously discharged.

But the evils which have resulted from the predominance of such a way of thinking in a community are so great that they have led many who have no personal sympathy with the superstitious estimate of royalty, as a matter of expediency, rather to encourage than oppose it. An hereditary monarchy which subsists only on the condition of the monarch being a superior man must be in a chronic state of insecurity, and the stability of the government is one of the first conditions of national well-being. Every revolution brings to the surface the worst elements in the community, demoralises public life, impairs material interests, and weakens the empire of the law. It is a great calamity for a people when its criminal classes have learnt to take an active part in politics. It is a still greater calamity when the appetite for organic and revolutionary change has taken hold of large classes, when the political enthusiasm of opposition assumes the form of rebellion, and when the prevailing disposition is to undervalue the slow process of constitutional reform, and to look upon force as the natural solution of political questions. This habit of regarding revolution as in itself admirable and desirable, and making, in the words of Burke, the extreme remedy of the State its habitual diet, is perhaps the most fatal of all the diseases which now affect political bodies in Europe. It necessarily throws the rulers into the posture of self-defence, and makes them nervously and constantly jealous of their subjects. It produces reactions in which the most important reforms are endangered, drives from politics the very class whose co-operation is most valuable, and exposes every nation in which it exists to the opposite evils of despotism and anarchy. Political liberty, whether in Parliament or in the Press, is only safe and permanently possible when oppositions are content to act within the lines of the Constitution and the limits of the law, and the amount of freedom which any nation can endure is measured much less by its positive civilisation and intelligence, than by the weakness of the element of anarchy that is within it.

There are also other evils, if possible more serious, which follow in the train of revolutions. Every deposed dynasty has its devoted followers, and the nation is thus cursed with the calamity of a disputed succession, which often leads to civil war, and always makes it impossible for the Government to command the whole national energies in great emergencies of the State. No other influence is so fatal to the spirit of patriotism. Through hostility to the Government a large proportion of the heroism, fidelity, and devotion of the nation is permanently alienated from its affairs, and forms a clear deduction from its strength. Subjects learn to look with indifference or complacency upon the disasters of their country, and to throw perpetual obstacles in the course of its policy. Rulers learn to pursue two policies—a national one intended to benefit the nation, and a dynastic one intended to benefit themselves. It was the great merit of the conciliatory policy of Walpole that it saved England during the period of its disputed succession from a large part of these evils; but in France, during the period that has elapsed since the Revolution, they have all been abundantly displayed. A soil once peculiarly fertile in political genius blasted by repeated revolutions; large classes wholly separated from the management of affairs, or animated by an insane passion for anarchy; a Government embarrassed by dynastic and revolutionary Opposition in the most critical moments of its foreign policy, and vainly seeking by wild military adventures to divert to foreign channels the passions that are dangerous at home; an administration, both civil and military, deeply tainted with corruption; a great empire invaded, humiliated and dismembered, and finally all the elements of disorder rising into fierce insurrection against the Government at the very time when a foreign enemy was surrounding the capital; these have been in our own day the fruits of that diseased appetite for organic change and that contempt for all constituted authority which the Great Revolution implanted in the chief cities of France. Blind indeed must be that politician who fails to perceive their significance, who has not learnt from this long train of calamities the danger of tampering with the central pillars of the State, and letting loose those revolutionary torrents which spread such ruin and desolation in their path.

The problem of combining stability, capacity, and political freedom has, in modern constitutional monarchies of the English type, been most fully met by a careful division of powers. The sovereignty is strictly hereditary, surrounded by a very large amount of reverence, and sheltered by constitutional forms from criticism or opposition, but at the same time it is so restricted in its province that it has, or ought to have, no real influence on legislation. The King, according to a fundamental maxim, ‘can do no wrong.’ The responsibility of every political act rests solely with the minister, and, as he has the whole responsibility, he has a right to claim the whole management. The credit of success and the stigma of failure belong alike to him. The King is placed altogether above the vicissitudes of party and of politics; he is confined to the discharge of certain offices which are universally admitted to be useful and essential, and which at the same time require not more than ordinary abilities. The chief efficient power, on the other hand, in a constitutional monarchy, is virtually, though not avowedly, as truly elective as in a republic, for although the Sovereign chooses the minister, he is restricted in his choice to the statesman whom the dominant political party has selected as its leader, and who has obtained the confidence of Parliament.

In this system the direct political power of the Sovereign is very small, but yet the position which he occupies is more important than might at first sight be imagined. In the first place, as the head of society, the patron of art, the dispenser of international courtesies, the supreme representative of his country in the council of nations, he discharges social, and, so to speak, ornamental functions, both of dignity and value, and in the next place he contributes very largely to foster the patriotic enthusiasm which is the animating principle and moral force of national greatness. The great majority of men in political matters are governed neither by reason nor by knowledge, but by the associations of the imagination, and for such men loyalty is the first and natural form of patriotism. In the thrill of common emotion that passes through the nation when some great sorrow or some great happiness befalls the reigning dynasty, they learn to recognise themselves as members of a single family. The throne is to them the symbol of national unity—the chief object of patriotic interest and emotion. It strikes their imaginations. It elicits their enthusiasm. It is the one rallying cry they will answer and understand. Tens of thousands of men who are entirely indifferent to party distinctions and to ministerial changes, who are too ignorant or too occupied to care for any great political question, and to whom government rarely appears in any other light than as a machinery for taxing them, regard the monarch with a feeling of romantic devotion, and are capable of great efforts of self-sacrifice in his cause. The circle of political feeling is thus extended. The sum of enthusiasm upon which the nation in critical times can count is largely increased, and, however much speculative critics may disparage the form which it assumes, practical statesmen will not disdain any of the tributary rills that swell the great tide of patriotism. Even in the case of more educated men, it is extremely conducive to the strength, unity, and purity of the national sentiment, that the supreme ruler of the nation should be above the animosities of party, and that his presence at the head of affairs should not be the result of the defeat of one section of his people. In a great composite empire, consisting largely of self-governed colonies, the importance of the monarchy as a bond of unity is especially great. In such colonies the Parliament of the mother country can claim no authority and inspire no enthusiasm, and any extension of its power is viewed with jealousy. In the outlying portions of the Empire, the throne, more than any other part of the Constitution, symbolises imperial unity and elicits loyal affection. No wise statesman can doubt that the cohesion between the different parts of the British Empire would be most seriously affected if the monarchical constitution of that Empire were destroyed.

To these advantages it must be added that the monarchical form of government provides a simple and admirably efficacious machinery for effecting without convulsion the necessary ministerial changes. In no other form of government do profound mutations of men and policy, violent conflicts of opinion, disordered ambitions, and glaring instances of administrative incapacity, affect so slightly the stability of the Constitution, A ministerial crisis has no affinity to a revolution. The permanence of the supreme authority, unchallenged and undisturbed amid all the conflicts of parties, calms the imaginations of men. The continuity of affairs is unbroken. The shock is deadened. The changes take place with regularity and in a restricted orbit, and the country is saved from an insecurity which long before it touches the limit of anarchy is disastrous to the prosperity of nations. Indirectly the monarchy has a great political influence, for if it did not exist the aristocracy could hardly subsist as a considerable political power. In the distribution of non-political patronage the Sovereign may not unreasonably claim a real voice, and if he be an able man the experience derived from an official connection with many successive ministries, and the peculiar sources of knowledge arising from his relations with foreign Courts, will never be wholly unfelt in the councils of the nation. In a few rare cases of nearly balanced claims he has a real power of deciding to whom he will entrust the task of forming an administration; in a few rare cases, when a ministry commanding a majority in Parliament is pursuing a course which appears plainly repugnant to the feelings of the country, he may justifiably exercise his prerogative to dissolve Parliament, and submit the question to the decision of the country. But in the immense majority of cases he is at once neutral and powerless in party politics. He simply puts in motion a machine the action of which is elsewhere determined, and is no more responsible for the policy to which he assents than a judge for the laws which he administers. The spirit of loyalty, while it remains a powerful adjunct to the spirit of patriotism, has thus ceased to be in any degree prejudicial to liberty. The position of the King in the Constitution resembles that of the Speaker in the House of Commons, and like that dignitary his political neutrality and the deference with which he is regarded contribute largely to his utility.

The extreme importance of freeing the Sovereign from all responsibility and withdrawing him from all official influence in politics, wherever the Parliament is a real exponent of the people's will and is at the same time the most powerful body in the State, may be easily proved. In the great majority of cases he must necessarily be a man of very ordinary ability, and even were it otherwise, his exclusion from Parliament and from the common life of his people deprives him of the kind of experience which is most essential for a popular statesman. And no statesman, though he possessed the ability and experience of a Walpole, a Chatham, or a Peel, could conduct the policy of the nation for the period of a long reign without occasionally incurring violent unpopularity and differing from the majority of the legislators. In a purely constitutional country this causes little disturbance, for the minister at once retires and is replaced by a statesman who shares the views of the majority. But in the case of the Sovereign no such expedient is possible. He must remain at his post. He must eventually carry out the policy of his Parliament, and select advisers in whom it has confidence. If then he regards himself as personally responsible for the policy of the nation, and if he be a man of strong, conscientious political convictions, his position will soon become intolerable. He cannot resist without danger, or yield without humiliation. He will be in the position of an irremovable Prime Minister, compelled to carry out a policy which he detests, and to select his subordinates from among his opponents. A more painful, a more insecure, a more fatally false position could hardly be conceived, but it must be that of every sovereign who in a constitutional monarchy is an active party in politics. If the collision be public, it may shake the monarchy to its basis. If it be confined to the precincts of the council-room, it is only a little less dangerous. A secret influence habitually exercised is sure to be suspected, to be exaggerated, and to be misrepresented. The national policy will almost inevitably be weakened when the confidence of the Sovereign is withheld from the ministers, or when he is perpetually interfering with their conduct. Court intrigues, secret and unofficial advisers, responsible ministers surrendering their real convictions in deference to the wishes of an irresponsible sovereign, are the natural results; and even if the firmness of ministers succeeds in averting them, it is no small evil that the duty of discussing in detail every political step with the Sovereign should be added to the almost overwhelming burden which already rests upon parliamentary statesmen. The King may retain a great influence in the management of affairs where Parliament is altogether a subordinate body, restricted in its functions and authority. He may even retain it, though more precariously, when Parliament has become the strongest body of the State, if the composition of that Parliament is so exclusive or aristocratic that he can sway it by the influences at his disposal. But whenever Parliament has become a direct expression of the people's will, and especially whenever the existence of a free press and the aggregation of a large proportion of the population in great towns has given popular opinion an irresistible volume and momentum, the withdrawal of the Sovereign from the arena is equally essential to his security and to his dignity. The only political power he can reasonably be suffered to exercise is that of a suspensory veto, preventing hasty legislation, and above all delaying the decision of Parliament on great questions till they have been brought directly before the constituencies by an election. But this power—which should certainly be lodged somewhere in the Constitution—is exercised as efficiently and much less invidiously by the House of Lords, and the royal veto has accordingly fallen into desuetude and has not been employed since the reign of Anne.

The gradual but substantial realisation of this ideal of constitutional monarchy has since the period of the Act of Settlement, been only slightly due to legislation, or at least to legislation which was intended to affect the position of the Crown. It has resulted partly from a series of historical facts growing out of the accession of the House of Hanover which have been described in a former volume, and partly from the steady subsequent growth of the popular element in the Constitution. The reigning Sovereign has exactly the same legal power of vetoing bills passed by both Houses of Parliament as William III. or the Stuarts, but it is a power which it has become impossible to exercise with safety. The Cabinet, which has gradually drawn to itself nearly all the ancient powers of the Privy Council, which sits without the presence of the Sovereign, and which determines the policy of the Government, is a body entirely unknown to the law and to the theory of the Constitution; and it is no special enactment, but only the silent strengthening of party government, that has virtually deprived the Sovereign of his legally unrestricted power of choosing his ministers. Even the power so largely exercised by the Tudors and by James I. of changing the composition of the representative body by summoning previously unrepresented towns to send members to Parliament, was in theory untouched by the Revolution, and no less a writer than Locke defended the propriety of extinguishing the rotten boroughs and readjusting the proportion of members to electors by a simple exercise of prerogative. 1 Such schemes soon became impossible, but the form which popular government has assumed in England is mainly to be attributed to the Whig party, who, while they have combated steadily the Tory doctrine of the divine right of kings, and the conception of monarchy that flows from it, and have restricted within very narrow limits the political functions of the Sovereign, have at the same time, unlike many continental Liberals, carefully respected his dignity and his office, and made it a main object to place both outside the sphere of controversy. But in the eighteenth century the Whig ideal was still far from its attainment, and George III. is the last instance of an English sovereign endeavouring systematically to impose his individual opinion upon the nation, and in a great degree succeeding in his attempt.

When George II. died, on October 25, 1760, his grandson and successor had but just completed his twenty-second year. The life of the young Prince had hitherto been very unsuitable for the task he was to fulfil. Since his thirteenth year, when his father died, he had lived entirely with his mother, and he exhibited during his whole career the characteristic merits and defects of a female education. His mother was a woman of a somewhat hard, reserved, and tortuous character; with few friendships and several bitter enmities; with a power of concealing her true sentiments which baffled even those who came in closest connection with her; strict in the observance of her religious duties, and in her care of her nine children; eminently discreet in her dealings with a bad husband and a jealous father-in-law; deeply imbued with the narrow prejudices of a small German Court, fond of power, unamiable, and somewhat soured by adversity. The early death of her husband had deprived her of the prospect of a crown, and although after his death Leicester House ceased to be a centre of active opposition, the old King looked upon both the Princess and his grandchild with jealousy, and they had in consequence little intercourse with the Court circle, with the Whig ministers, and even with the other members of the royal family. The education of the young Prince was feebly and fitfully conducted; and it is remarkable that among his preceptors Scott had been recommended by Bolingbroke, while Stone had been suspected of Jacobitism. They appear to have discharged their functions very ill; for George III. was always singularly deficient in literary culture. Lord Waldegrave, who was much the ablest of his governors, described him as a boy of respectable abilities, but great constitutional indolence; scrupulous, dutiful, ignorant of evil, and sincerely pious, but neither generous nor frank; harsh in his judgments of others. with strong prejudices, indomitable obstinacy, and great command over his passions, exceedingly tenacious of his resentments, and exhibiting them chiefly by prolonged fits of sullenness. His indolence he succeeded in completely overcoming, but the other lines of this not very pleasing picture continued during his whole life.

He mixed little in the world—scarcely at all with the young nobility. His mother said that their lax manners would probably corrupt her son. Her enemies declared that the real explanation of this strange seclusion was her own insatiable avarice of power, which made her wish beyond all things to establish a complete ascendency over his mind, and to withdraw him from every influence that could rival her own. Like most members of German royal families, she exaggerated the prerogative of monarchy to the highest degree, and her favourite exhortation, ‘George, be a king!’ is said to have left a deep impression on the mind of her son. The most important figure in the small circle was John, Earl of Bute, a Scotch nobleman who had held an office in the household of Frederick. Prince of Wales, had lived after his death for some years a life of more than common retirement in Scotland, and, on the establishment of the household of the young Prince, had been placed at the head of it as Groom of the Stole. He was a man of some literary and artistic taste, but of very limited talents, entirely inexperienced in public business, arrogant, reserved, and unpopular in his temper, and with extreme views of the legitimate powers of royalty. The very confidential relations of Bute with the Princess gave rise to a scandal which was widely spread and generally believed. 1 He became the chief adviser or instructor of her son, and strengthened in his mind those plans for the emancipation of the royal authority which George III. pursued steadily throughout his whole life.

The new Sovereign came to the throne amid an enthusiasm such as England had hardly seen since Charles II. restored the monarchy. By the common consent of all parties the dynastic contest was regarded as closed, and after two generations of foreign and unsympathetic rulers, the nation, which has always been peculiarly intolerant of strangers, accepted with delight an English king. The favourable impression was still further confirmed when the more salient points of the private character of the King became generally understood. Simple, regular, and abstemious in all his tastes and habits, deeply religious without affectation or enthusiasm, a good son, a faithful husband, a kind master, and (except when he had met with gross ingratitude) an affectionate father, he exhibited through his whole reign, and in a rare perfection, that type of decorous and domestic virtue which the English middle classes most highly prize. The proclamation against immorality with which he began his reign; the touching piety with which, at his coronation, he insisted on putting aside his crown when receiving the sacrament; his rebuke to a Court preacher who had praised him in a sermon; his suppression of Sunday levees; his discouragement of gambling at Court; his letter of remonstrance to an Archbishop of Canterbury who had allowed balls in his palace; his constant attendance and reverential manner at religious services; his solemn and pious resignation under great private misfortunes, contrasted admirably with the open immorality of his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and with the outrageous licentiousness of his own brothers and of his own sons. He never sought for popularity; but he had many of the kingly graces. and many of the national tastes that are most fitted to obtain it. He went through public ceremonies with much dignity, and although his manner in private was hurried and confused, it was kind and homely, and not without a certain unaffected grace. Unlike his two predecessors, he was emphatically a gentleman, and he possessed to a rare degree the royal art of enhancing small favours by a gracious manner and a few well-chosen words. His country tastes, his love of field sports, his keen interest in the great public schools, endeared him to large classes of his subjects; and, though he was neither brilliant nor witty, several of his terse and happy sayings are still remembered. He was also a very brave man. In the Wilkes riots, in 1769, when his palace was attacked; in the Lord George Gordon riots, in 1780, when his presence of mind contributed largely to save London; in 1786, when a poor madwoman attempted to stab him at the entrance of St. James's Palace; in 1795, when he was assailed on his way to Parliament; in 1800, when he was fired at in a theatre, he exhibited the most perfect composure amid danger. His habit in dating his letters, of marking, not only the day, but the hour and the minute in which he wrote, illustrates not unhappily the microscopic attention which he paid to every detail of public business, and which was the more admirable because his natural tendency was towards sloth. In matters that were not connected with his political prejudices, his sincere appreciation of piety, and his desire to do good, sometimes overcame his religious bigotry and his hatred of change. Thus he always spoke with respect of the Methodists, and especially of Lady Huntingdon; he supported Howard, and subscribed to a statue in his honour; he supported the Lancaster system of education, though Lancaster was a Dissenter, and was looked upon with disfavour by the bishops; he encouraged the movement for Sunday-schools. He was sincerely desirous of doing his duty, and deeply attached to his country, although stronger feelings often interfered both with his conscientiousness and with his patriotism.

It is not surprising that a sovereign of whom all this may be truly said should have obtained much respect and admiration; and it must be added that, in his hatred of innovation and in his vehement anti-American, anti-Catholic, and anti-Gallican feelings, he represented the sentiments of large sections—perhaps of the majority—of his people. The party which he drew from its depression has naturally revered his memory, and old age, and blindness, and deafness, and deprivation of reason, and the base ingratitude of two sons, have cast a deep pathos over his closing years.

All these things have contributed very naturally to throw a delusive veil over the political errors of a sovereign of whom it may be said, without exaggeration, that he inflicted more profound and enduring injuries upon his country than any other modern English king. Ignorant, narrow-minded, and arbitrary, with an unbounded confidence in his own judgment and an extravagant estimate of his prerogative, resolved at all hazards to compel his ministers to adopt his own views, or to undermine them if they refused, he spent a long life in obstinately resisting measures which are now almost universally admitted to have been good, and in supporting measures which are as universally admitted to have been bad. He espoused with passionate eagerness the American quarrel; resisted obstinately the measures of conciliation by which at one time it might easily have been stifled; envenomed it by his glaring partisanship, and protracted it for several years, in opposition to the wish and to the advice even of his own favourite and responsible minister. He took the warmest personal interest in the attempts that were made, in the matter of general warrants, to menace the liberty of the subject, and in the case of the Middlesex election to abridge the electoral rights of constituencies, and in the other paltry, violent, and arbitrary measures by which the country was inflamed and Wilkes was converted into a hero. The last instance of an English officer deprived of his regiment for his vote in Parliament was due to the personal intervention of the King; and the ministers whom he most warmly favoured were guilty of an amount and audacity of corruption which is probably unequalled in the parliamentary history of England. All the measures that were carried or attempted with the object of purifying the representative body—the publication of debates, the alteration of the mode of trying contested elections, the reduction of sinecures and pensions, the enlargement of the constituencies—were contrary to the wishes of the King. Although his income during the greater part of his reign was little less than a million a year, 1 although his Court was parsimonious to a fault, and his hospitality exceedingly restricted, and although he succeeded to a considerable sum that had been saved by his predecessor, he accumulated in the course of his reign debts to the amount of no less than 3,398,061 l. ; 2 and there can be little doubt that contemporary public opinion was right in attributing a great part of these debts to corrupt expenditure in parliament or at elections. Of all the portions of the Empire none was so impoverished, distracted, and misgoverned as Ireland, but every attempt to improve its condition found in the King a bitter adversary. He opposed the relaxation of the laws by which Irish commerce had been crushed, although his own Tory ministers were in favour of it. He opposed Catholic emancipation with a persistent bitterness, although that measure alone could have made the Irish union acceptable to the people, and although his minister had virtually pledged himself to grant it, and by his refusal he consigned the country to a prolonged and disastrous agitation, the effects of which may never disappear. He opposed the endowment of the Catholic clergy, although statesmen of the most various schools concurred in the belief that no other measure would act so beneficially on the social condition of Ireland, or would so effectually tranquillise the minds of its people. He refused to consent to throw open the higher ranks in the army to the Catholics, although that measure had already been conceded to the army in Ireland by the Irish Parliament; and he flung the country into all the agonies of a ‘No Popery’ dissolution at the very time when a fearful struggle with France was demanding the utmost unanimity, and when thousands of Catholic soldiers were fighting bravely in his cause. In the same spirit he supported the slave trade; he described the Test and Corporation Acts as the palladium of the Constitution, and was inexorably opposed to their abolition, and he created Tory peers in such lavish numbers, and with such an exclusive view to their political subserviency, that he seriously lowered the character and fundamentally altered the tendencies of the House of Lords. In a word, there is scarcely a field of politics in which the hand of the King may not be traced—sometimes in postponing inevitable measures of justice and reform, sometimes in sowing the seeds of enduring evil.

The root, however, of his great errors lay in his determination to restore the royal power to a position wholly different from that which it occupied in the reign of his predecessor; and this design was in many respects more plausible than is now generally admitted. Every functionary has a natural tendency to magnify his office, and when George III. ascended the throne he found his position as an hereditary constitutional sovereign almost unique in the world. In France, in Spain, in Austria, in the smallest principality in Germany, the sovereign was hardly less absolute than in Russia or Turkey. And the power of the English sovereign had for many years been steadily declining, and the limitations to which he was practically subject went far beyond the mere letter of the law. The time had indeed long passed when Elizabeth directed her Parliaments to abstain from discussing matters of state, and when James I. declared that, ‘as it is atheism and blasphemy in a creature to dispute what the Deity may do, so it is presumption and sedition in a subject to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power;’ but even after the Revolution, William III. had been a great political power, and Anne, though a weak and foolish woman, had exercised no small amount of personal influence. What the position of the English Sovereign was in the eyes of the English Church was sufficiently shown by the long series of theologians who proclaimed in the most emphatic terms that he possessed a divine right, different, not only in degree but in kind, from that of every other power in the State; that he was the representative or vicegerent of the Deity; that resistance to him was in all cases a sin. The language of English law was less unqualified, but still it painted his authority in very different colours from those which, an historian of George I. or of George II. would have used. The ‘Commentaries’ of Blackstone were not published till George III. had been for some time on the throne; but Bute had obtained a considerable portion of them in manuscript from the author, for the purpose of instructing the Prince in the principles of the Constitution. 1 ‘The King of England,’ in the words of Blackstone, ‘is not only the chief, but properly the sole magistrate of the nation, all others acting by commission from and in due subordination to him.’ ‘He may reject what bills, may make what treaties, … may pardon what offences he pleases, unless when the Constitution hath expressly, or by evident consequence, laid down some exception or boundary.’ He has the sole power of regulating fleets and armies, of manning all forts and other places of strength within the realm, of making war and peace, of conferring honours, offices, and privileges. He governs the kingdom: statesmen, who administer affairs, are only his ministers. 2

It is not surprising that the contrast between such language and the actual position of George II. during the greater part of his reign should have vividly impressed a young sovereign surrounded by Tory followers, and naturally extremely tenacious of power, or that he should have early resolved to bend all his faculties to the task of emancipating his office from the restrictions that surrounded it. The period of his accession was in some respects exceedingly propitious to his design. Among the causes of the depression of royalty one of the most obvious and important had been the long exclusion from office of that great Tory party which naturally exalts most highly the royal prerogative. It had originally been defended, and perhaps justified, by the Jacobitism of Bolingbroke and of his colleagues; but it had been perpetuated through party motives, and the borough system, assisted by royal favour, had enabled a few great Whig families gradually to command the chief power in the State. But with the extinction of Jacobitism the necessity for this exclusion had ceased. Scotland had been completely pacified by the abolition of hereditary jurisdictions; the English Jacobites were shown by the Rebellion of 1745 to be few and insignificant. The animosity against George II. on account of the severities that followed the Rebellion was not extended to his successor. The dislike to a foreign king, which had hitherto been the strongest support, had now become one of the most formidable difficulties of the Jacobites. George III, was English by birth, by education, by character, and by creed. The Pretender was at once a foreigner and a Papist, with few or no English tastes, and sunk, according to common report, in habitual drunkenness. 1 So many years had elapsed since the Act of Settlement that the new dynasty had struck its roots firmly in the soil, and all those large classes who were most attached to the theory of legitimacy were only waiting for the death of George II. to rally around his successor as they had rallied around Anne or around Charles II.

The propriety of breaking down the system of exclusion seemed manifest. The Tory sentiment of the country had long found no adequate expression in the Government. The party which carried with it the genuine sympathies both of the country gentry and of the country clergy had been so discouraged that after the death of Bolingbroke and of the Prince of Wales it was scarcely represented in Parliament, and its political eclipse had been followed by a great increase both of oligarchical influence and of corruption. There was something manifestly unhealthy in the continuance, during many years, of a Government like that of Walpole, which was supported chiefly by a majority of members of nomination boroughs in opposition to the large majority of the county votes; and nothing but the wisdom and moderation with which the Whig party used their ascendency could have repressed serious discontent in the country. Bolingbroke, in works which seem to have suggested the policy of George III., had strongly urged the necessity of disregarding the old party distinctions, and building up the royal authority on their decay. Carteret, after the fall of Walpole, had designed a mixed ministry, in which Tories as well as Whigs could be admitted largely to power. Pitt had long chafed bitterly against the system of government by connection, and it was noticed that although the higher offices in the Government were still occupied exclusively by Whigs, the country party, who had remained sullenly indifferent to preceding Governments, rallied warmly around him, and that in his militia appointments he entirely overlooked the distinction of Whig and Tory. 1

The object of Pitt was to check the corruption that prevailed and to extend the area of patriotic feeling. The object of George III. and of the little group of politicians who surrounded and counselled him was very different, but their means were in some respects the same. In order to estimate their policy it is necessary in the first place to form a clear conception of their aims and methods. It is probable that Burke, in the famous pamphlet in which he described the condition of English politics in the first years of George III., considerably exaggerated the systematic and elaborate character of the plan that was adopted, but its leading features are sufficiently plain. ‘Prerogative,’ as Horace Walpole said, had once more ‘become a fashionable word,’ 1 the divine right of kings was once again continually preached from the pulpit, and the Court party never concealed their conviction that the monarchy in the preceding reign had fallen into an essentially false position, and that it should be the first object of the new sovereign to restore it to vigour.

They had, however, no wish to restrict or override the authority of Parliament, or to adopt any means which were not legal and parliamentary. Their favourite cries were abolition of government by party or connection, abolition of corruption at elections, emancipation of the Sovereign from ministerial tyranny. No class of politicians were to be henceforth absolutely excluded, but at the same time no class or connection were to be allowed to dictate their policy to the King. The aristocracy, it was said, had obtained an exaggerated place in the Constitution. A few great families, who had been the leading supporters of the Revolution, who were closely connected by family relationships, by friendship, by long and systematic political co-operation, had come to form a single coherent body possessing so large an amount of borough patronage and such vast and various ramifications of influence, that they were practically the rulers of the country. 1 This phalanx was beyond all things to be broken up. If a great nobleman consented to detach himself from it and to enter into new combinations; if on a change of ministry subordinate officials were content to abandon their leaders and to retain their places, such conduct was to be warmly encouraged. The system of divided administrations which had existed under William and Anne was to be revived. The ministers were to be as much as possible confined to their several departments; they were to be drawn from many different connections and schools of policy, and they were not to be suffered to form a coherent and homogeneous whole.

The relations of the Crown to the ministry were to be changed. For a considerable time the Treasury, the ecclesiastical patronage, the Cornish boroughs, and all the other sources of influence which belonged nominally to the Crown, had been, with few exceptions, at the disposal of the minister, and were employed to strengthen his administration. They were now to be in a great degree withdrawn from his influence, and to be employed in maintaining in Parliament a body of men whose political attachment centred in the King alone, who looked to him alone for promotion, who, though often holding places in the Government, were expected rather to control than to support it, and, if it diverged from the policy which was personally acceptable to the King, to conspire against it and overthrow it. A Crown influence was thus to be established in Parliament as well as a ministerial influence, and it was hoped that it would turn the balance of parties and accelerate the downfall of any administration which was not favoured by the King.

There were many sources from which ‘the King's friends,’ as this interest was very invidiously called, 1 might be recruited. Crown and Court patronage was extravagantly redundant, and it was certain in the corrupt condition of Parliament that many politicians would prefer to attach themselves to the permanent source of power rather than to transitory administrations. The popularity of the King strengthened the party. The Tories, who resented their long exclusion from power, and who recognised in the young sovereign a Tory king, supported it in a body; the divisions and jealousies among the Whig nobles made it tolerably certain that some would be soon detached from their old connections and would gather round the new standard, and the personal influence of the Sovereign over the leading politicians was sufficient to secure in most ministries at least one member who was content to draw his inspiration from him alone.

It must be remembered, too, that the conception of the Cabinet as a body of statesmen who were in thorough political agreement, and were jointly responsible for all the measures they proposed, was still in its early stage, and was by no means fully or universally recognised. A great step had been taken towards its attainment on the accession of George I., when the principle was adopted of admitting only the members of a single party into the Government. The administration of Walpole, in unity, discipline, and power, was surpassed by few of the present century. After the downfall of that administration the Whigs defeated the attempt of the King's favourite statesman to mix the Government with Tories, and a joint resignation of the Government in 1746 obliged the King to break finally with Bath and Granville, and admit Pitt to his councils. But, on the other hand, the lax policy of Pelham and the personal weakness of Newcastle had led to great latitude and violent divergences of policy in the Cabinet which they formed. Fox and Hardwicke, in the debates on the Marriage Act, inveighed against one another with the utmost bitterness, though the one was Secretary of State and the other Chancellor in the same Government. Fox and Pitt made their colleagues, Murray, Newcastle, and Robinson, the objects of their constant attacks, and these examples rendered it more easy for the King to carry out his favourite policy of a divided Cabinet.

A very remarkable pamphlet, called ‘Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the new Reign and the new Parliament,’ appeared in 1761, defending the new system of government, and it soon attracted much attention from the fact that it was understood to be the composition of no less a person than Lord Bath, the old rival of Walpole and the old colleague of Carteret. 1 The question, the writer said, for the Sovereign to determine was, ‘Whether he is to content himself with the shadow of royalty while a set of undertakers for his business intercept his immediate communication with his people, and make use of the legal prerogatives of their master to establish the illegal claims of factitious oligarchy.’ He complains that ‘a cabal of ministers had been allowed to erect themselves into a fourth estate, to check, to control, to influence, nay, to enslave the others;’ that it had become usual ‘to urge the necessity of the King submitting to give up the management of his affairs and the exclusive disposal of all his employments to some ministers, or set of ministers, who, by uniting together, and backed by their numerous dependants, may be able to carry on the measures of Government;’ that ‘ministerial combinations to engross power and invade the closet,’ were nothing less than a ‘scheme of putting the Sovereign in leading-strings,’ and that their result had been the monstrous corruption of Parliament and the strange spectacle of ‘a King of England unable to confer the smallest employment unless on the recommendation and with the consent of his ministers.’ He trusts that the new King will put an end to this system by showing ‘his resolution to break all factious connections and confederacies.’ Already he has ‘placed in the most honourable stations near his own person, some who have not surely owed their place to ministerial importunity, because they have always opposed ministerial influence,’ and by steadily pursuing this course, the true ideal of the Constitution will be attained, ‘in which the ministers will depend on the Crown, not the Crown on the ministers.’ But to attain this end it was necessary that the basis of the Government should be widened, the proscription of the Tories abolished, and the Sovereign enabled to select his servants from all sections of politicians. ‘Does any candid and intelligent man seriously believe that at this time there subsists any party distinction amongst us that is not merely nominal? Are not the Tories friends of the royal family? Have they not long ago laid aside their aversion to the Dissenters? Do they not think the Toleration and Establishment both necessary parts of the Constitution? and can a Whig distinguish these from his own principles?’ One glorious result of the new system of government the writer confidently predicts. With the destruction of oligarchical power the reign of corruption would terminate, and undue influence in Parliament was never likely to be revived.

The young King came to the throne when rather more than three years of almost uninterrupted victory had raised England to an ascendency which she had scarcely attained since the great days of Henry V. The French flag had nearly disappeared from the sea. Except Louisiana, all the French possessions in North America, except St. Domingo, all the French islands in the West Indies, had been taken, and the last French settlements in Hindostan were just tottering to their fall. The wave of invasion which threatened to submerge Hanover had been triumphantly rolled back, and the nation, intoxicated by victory, and roused from its long lethargy by the genius of its great statesman, displayed an energy and a daring which made it a wonder to its neighbours and to itself. No sacrifice seemed too great to demand, yet in spite of every sacrifice, commerce was flourishing and national prosperity advancing. The sudden growth of the colonial empire of England, and the destruction of her most formidable rival on the sea, had an immediate effect, and it was computed that in 1761 English commerce was a fifth greater than in the last year of the preceding peace. 1

A ministry which had achieved such triumphs, and which was supported by such a tide of popular favour, would have been able, had it been cordially united, to defy any attempt to subvert it. But it was divided by deep fissures, distracted by bitter jealousies and animosities. Its war policy had hitherto been directed absolutely by Pitt, who almost monopolised the popular enthusiasm, and who could count in the Cabinet upon the firm alliance of his brother-in-law Lord Temple, the head of the Grenvilles. The great wealth and position of Temple had given him some political weight, and he was usually entrusted with the defence of the policy of Pitt in the Lords; but his character, at once grasping, arrogant, and intriguing, seldom failed to alienate those with whom he co-operated. With this exception, Pitt had scarcely a cordial friend in the Cabinet. Personal jealousies and rivalry, real differences of opinion, but above all the unbounded arrogance with which Pitt treated his colleagues, had raised against him a weight of animosity which it needed all his genius, popularity, and success to repress. In the council the other ministers cowered like timid schoolboys before him. More than once, when doubts were expressed whether the Treasury would be able to furnish with sufficient celerity or in sufficient quantity the necessary supplies for the expeditions that were prepared, Pitt cut short the debate by declaring that in case of the smallest failure he would at once impeach the Commissioners of Treasury, or Newcastle himself, before Parliament. He compelled no less a man than Anson to sign orders as First Lord of the Admiralty which he was not allowed even to read, and he constantly gave orders relating to the war, in different departments, without even informing the responsible heads of those departments of his intentions. 1 Newcastle lived in a continual state of mingled terror and resentment. Fox could not forget that he had been once deemed the equal of Pitt, and that his lucrative post of Paymaster of the Forces was in truth purely subordinate. Lord Granville, the old President of the Council, who had stood in the foremost rank of English politics before Pitt had even entered the House of Commons, could hardly brook the imperious tone of his younger colleague, and a powerful section of the ministry looked with great alarm upon the rapidly increasing debt, and desired at all hazards to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. The Duke of Bedford, who had a large number of personal adherents, strongly maintained this opinion, and predicted nothing but calamities, and his view was warmly supported by the Duke of Devonshire, by Lord Hardwicke, and above all by George Grenville, who, though he had not yet obtained a seat in the Cabinet, was already looked upon as the best man of business in the Government.

The change which had taken place in the spirit of the Court appeared from the very beginning. Bute at once obtained the dignity of Privy Councillor, to which, however, as an old servant of the new Sovereign, he had an undoubted right; 1 and the first royal speech to the Council was composed by the King and Bute without any communication with the responsible ministers of the Crown. The sentences in which it spoke of ‘a bloody and expensive war,’ and of ‘obtaining an honourable and lasting peace,’ were justly interpreted as a covert censure upon the great minister who was conducting the war; and it was only after an altercation which lasted for two or three hours that Pitt induced Bute to consent that in the printed copy the former sentence should be changed into ‘an expensive, but just and necessary war,’ and that the words ‘in concert with our allies’ should be inserted after the latter. It was speedily spread abroad from lip to lip that, although the King for the present retained his old ministers, he would not be governed by them as his grandfather was. Bute became the medium of most private communications between the King and the more prominent statesmen, and he was generally understood to be the real centre of power. The necessity of drawing together the divided elements of the ministry was very manifest, and it is said that Pitt invited New-castle to join with him in a closer union; 1 but the old statesman, who, though he sometimes spoke of resigning office, was in truth as wedded to it as ever, had already turned towards the rising star. Both the King and Bute skilfully flattered Newcastle, and aggravated the jealousy with which he regarded Pitt, and Newcastle, though one of the oldest and most experienced states-men in England, actually offered to serve under Bute. 2

It was noticed in the first days of the new reign that the great Jacobite families who had long been absent from Court now crowded the antechamber. Horace Walpole, who was present at the first levee, was favourably struck with the affable behaviour of the King, and its contrast to the half-shy, half-sullen manners of his predecessor. 3 Much scandal, however, was caused by the warm reception given to Lord G. Sackville, who was an intimate friend of Bute, but whose conduct at Minden had deeply tarnished his reputation; 1 and much criticism was provoked by a sentence which the King himself inserted in his first speech to Parliament. Queen Anne was believed to have reflected on her predecessor when she described herself, on a similar occasion, as ‘entirely English’ at heart, and George III. indicated a somewhat similar spirit in the sentence, ‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton.’ ‘What a lustre,’ replied the House of Lords, in a strain of almost Oriental servility, ‘does it cast upon the name of Briton, when you, Sir, are pleased to esteem it among your glories!’ 2 In a different spirit, but with almost equal absurdity, the King was afterwards accused of insulting his English subjects by ‘melting down the English name’ into that of Briton. 3

The chief business of the first short session of Parliament was to regulate the civil list and the supplies. The first was fixed at 800,000 l. , and the second at a little less than twenty millions, and in order to supply what was defective a new duty of 3 d . a barrel was imposed on beer and ale. One act, however, was accomplished in this session at the recommendation of the King, by which, at the cost of a very small diminution of the prerogative of his successors, he acquired great popularity for himself. The Act of William III. making the judges irremovable, except by the intervention of Parliament, during the lifetime of the King, had effectually checked the gross sycophancy and subserviency that had long disgraced the judicial bench, but it still left it in the power of a new sovereign to remove the judges who had been appointed by his predecessor. Such a power could hardly be defended by any valid argument; it was inconsistent with the spirit of the Act; its legality had been disputed on the death of William by Sir J. Jekyll, and it had been very sparingly exercised. 1 On the accession of George I., Lord Trevor, who was a notorious Jacobite, was removed from the chief justice-ship of the King's Bench, and a few minor changes had been recommended by the Chancellor. 2 A judge named Aland was removed by George II., but no change was made by his successor, and the young King recommended the Parliament to provide that the commissions of the judges should no longer expire on the demise of the sovereign. The measure was a wise and liberal, though not a very important one, and, although the concession was made entirely at the expense of his successors, it was accepted in the then state of men's minds as if it were an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

A general election was necessary, by Act of Parliament, within six months of the accession, but before that time several changes were effected. George Grenville, who was known to be conspicuously opposed to the prosecution of the war, obtained a place in the Cabinet. Lord Henley, afterwards Earl of Northington, exchanged the position of Lord Keeper for the fuller dignity of Chancellor. He was a coarse, drunken, and unprincipled lawyer, of no very extraordinary abilities, who had early attached himself to the Leicester House faction, and who, partly through a desire to conciliate that faction, and partly through jealousy of Lord Hardwicke, had been appointed Lord Keeper in the Coalition Ministry of Pitt and Newcastle; but George II. refused to raise him to the House of Lords until the trial of Lord Ferrers, when there was a difficulty in finding a lawyer who would preside as Lord Steward. 1 In the new reign he became one of the most docile and useful agents of the policy of the King. The enterprise of giving Bute high political office was found somewhat difficult, but a characteristic method was adopted. Lord Holdernesse, who, though a man of very insignificant abilities, was a Secretary of State, agreed with Bute, as early as November 1760, to quarrel with his colleagues, and throw up his office in seeming anger. 2 The resignation was for a time deferred; but it was accomplished in March 1761. Lord Holdernesse obtained a pension of 4,000 l. a year for life, and a reversion of the Cinque Ports, and his place was filled by the favourite. Nearly at the same time, Legge, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had some time before quarrelled with Bute about a Hampshire election, was dismissed with circumstances of great discourtesy, and his place was filled by Lord Barrington—an honest man, but one who adopted and avowed the principle that it was his duty always, except in case of the gravest possible causes of difference, to support the ministers selected by the King, whatever party or connection they belonged to, and whatever might be his opinion of the men and of their measures. 3 He was thus completely identified with the King's friends, and by the wish of the King was kept in office through several successive administrations. The brilliant but versatile and unprincipled Charles Townshend filled his place, and a few other changes were made which, though unimportant in themselves, showed that Tory tendencies, and especially personal devotion to the Sovereign, had become the passports of favour. Notwithstanding the professions of purity that were made by the King's friends, it was noticed that the general election which now took place was one of the most corrupt ever known in England, that large sums were issued by the Treasury, that the King took an active part in naming the candidates, and that the boroughs attached to the Duchy of Cornwall, which had hitherto been at the disposal of the ministry, were now treated as solely at the disposal of the Crown. 1

It was evident that it was intended, in the first place, to strike down Pitt; 2 and an opportunity soon occurred. The great question now impending was the negotiation for peace. The arguments in favour of terminating a war are always strong, but in this case they had a more than common force. The debt was rapidly increasing, and the estimates had arisen to a most alarming extent. The total sum granted by Parliament for 1761 was more than nineteen millions. The British forces in different parts of the world amounted to no less than 110,000 soldiers and 70,000 seamen, besides 60,000 German auxiliaries in British pay. 3 The success of England had hitherto been almost unparalleled, but there was now but little left for her to gain, and she had many dangers to fear. She had hitherto been very successful in Germany, but a German war could not fail to be extremely bloody and expensive. The interests of England in it were very subordinate, and as the colonial empire of France was passing away, it was certain that the war would be concentrated chiefly in this quarter. In a continental war the normal strength of France was so great that the chances were much in her favour, and, in the opinion of some good judges, there was much danger lest the King's German dominions should be ultimately absorbed. 1 The Tory party had always looked with great aversion on continental wars, and, as we have seen, there was a strong minority in the Cabinet, including Newcastle and Hardwicke, who were prepared to sacrifice much for a peace. 2 A very able pamphlet, called ‘Considerations on the German War,’ appeared about this time, and exercised an influence which was probably greater than that of any other English pamphlet since Swift's ‘Conduct of the Allies.’ Its author was an obscure writer named Mauduit, and it was said to have been published under the countenance of Lord Hardwicke. The writer fully approved of the capture of the French islands, and of the destruction of the naval power of France; but he argued with much force, that no policy could be more manifestly suicidal than to squander larger sums than were expended for the whole land and sea service during the Duke of Marlborough's campaigns, in a German war waged between two great German Powers, for the possession of a remote German province which might belong to either without affecting in any way the real interests of England. The burden of the war was beginning to be seriously felt. In March 1761, when there were rumours of an approaching peace under the superintendence of Pitt, the funds rose four per cent. When the three years' term of service in the militia expired, and a new ballot was about to take place, there were riots in several of the Northern counties. At Hexham, in Northumberland, a body of Yorkshire militia were attacked by six or seven thousand rioters armed with clubs, and a serious struggle ensued, in which forty-two persons were killed and forty-eight others wounded. 1 The expedition against Belleisle caused many murmurs, for it cost much bloodshed, and the island was little more than a barren rock, of no value to England, and at the same time so near the French coast that it was tolerably certain that it would be restored at the peace. The unhealthy quarters to which English conquests had recently extended, made the mortality among the troops very great. Bounties rose to an unexampled height, and there were fears that if the war continued it would be a matter of great difficulty to fill the ranks. 2

Negotiations for peace had taken place as early as November 1759, and they were resumed in the spring of 1761, but neither party appears to have entered very keenly into them. Pitt had just sent out his expedition against Belleisle, and he was anxious that nothing should be done until it succeeded. He told the King that he by no means thought ill of the state of the war in Germany; that he thought the total destruction of the French power in the East Indies, the probability of taking Martinique as well as Belleisle, and the probable results of the next German campaign, would enable us to secure all Canada, Cape Breton, the neighbouring islands, and the exclusive fishery of Newfoundland, and that he would sign no peace on lower terms. It was quite certain that the French were not prepared to accede to such terms, and both the King and Newcastle strongly remonstrated against the determination of Pitt to lay them down as indispensable at the very outset of the negotiations. 1 On the French side, also, new prospects were opening out which produced an equal hesitation. Charles III., who had very recently exchanged the throne of Naples for that of Spain, still remembered with bitterness how the English had threatened to bombard Naples in 1742. He looked forward with great dread to the complete naval supremacy which England was rapidly attaining; he inherited the old Spanish grievances against England about Gibraltar and the trade of the Indies; he was closely connected with the French sovereign, and he also saw a prospect of obtaining in Portugal conquests of great value at little cost. These various considerations were rapidly drawing him into closer alliance with France. 2 Belleisle was captured by the English on June 7, 1761. On the 15th of the following month, the French negotiator took the very significant and very startling step of presenting a memorial in behalf of Spain, claiming the restitution of some prizes bearing the Spanish flag which had been taken by the English, the right of the Spaniards to fish upon the banks of Newfoundland, and the demolition of the English settlements on the disputed territory in the Bay of Honduras. 1

Such demands, made by a Power with which England was at perfect peace, through the intervention of a Power with which England was at war, could have but one meaning, and Pitt loftily expressed to the French agent his opinion of the transaction. ‘His Majesty,’ he answered, ‘will not suffer the dispute with Spain to be blended in any manner whatever in the negotiations of peace between the two Crowns, and it will be considered as an affront to his Majesty's dignity, and as a thing incompatible with the sincerity of the negotiations, to make further mention of such a circumstance. Moreover, it is expected that France will not at any time presume a right of intermeddling with such disputes between England and Spain.’ The rupture of the negotiations between France and England soon followed. It is not necessary to examine the proceedings in great detail; it is sufficient to say that Pitt was prepared to purchase the restitution of Minorca by restoring Belleisle, Guadaloupe, and Marie-Galante to the French, and that he consented to a partition of the Antilla Isles; but he maintained that England should retain all the other conquests. He refused the French demands for a participation in the fisheries of Newfoundland, for the cession of Cape Breton in America, for the restoration of either Goree or Senegal as a depôt for the French slave trade in the West Indies, and for the re-establishment in Hindostan of the frontier of 1755. He refused equally the demand for the restoration of prizes made before the declaration of war, and he insisted, in the interest of the King of Prussia, that the French should withdraw their armies from Germany, while England still retained her right of assisting her ally. 1

The spell of success which had so long hung over the British arms was still unbroken. The capture of Belleisle in June 1761; the capture of Dominica, by Lord Rollo, in the same month; the tidings of new successes in Hindostan, and a victory of Prince Ferdinand at Vellinghausen in July, contributed to raise the spirits of the country, and formed the best defence of the demands of Pitt. Nor is there any reason to doubt that he sincerely desired peace, if he could have obtained it on terms which he deemed adequate. 2 The alliance, however, between France and Spain was rapidly consummated. On August 15, 1761, the family compact between the French and Spanish kings was signed, binding the two countries in a strict offensive and defensive alliance, and making each country guarantee the possessions of the other. Mr. Stanley, the vigilant English agent who had been negotiating in Paris, obtained secret knowledge of one of the articles, and confidential communications from other quarters corroborated the account. 3 Pitt, who had for some time watched with great suspicion the armaments of Spain, perceived clearly that the declaration of war was only delayed till the naval preparations of Spain were completed and the treasure-ships which were expected from Mexico and Peru had arrived safely in port. He acted with characteristic promptitude and decision. Spain had committed no overt act which could be reasonably taken as a pretext for war. The evidence of the family compact was somewhat doubtful, and, being derived exclusively from secret information, it could not be publicly produced. The Spanish Government loudly disclaimed all hostile intentions, and asserted that the ships of war which were building in the Spanish arsenals were only such as were required for convoying merchant vessels from Naples to Spain and repressing the Barbary pirates. Pitt, however, was prepared to take the responsibility of a war which it was very difficult to justify to the world, and he resolved to strike, and to strike at once. Expeditions were speedily planned against the most assailable parts of the Spanish dominions, and on September 18 a cabinet council was held in which Pitt proposed to his colleagues the immediate withdrawal of the English ambassador from Madrid, and a declaration of war against Spain based upon the warlike demands she had made through the intervention of the French negotiator in the preceding July. 1

Frederick the Great afterwards expressed in warm terms his admiration for the sagacity and enterprise displayed by Pitt in this conjuncture, and the event showed that the policy of the great minister was as wise as it was daring. It must be owned, however, that modern public opinion would have seldom acquiesced in a war the avowed and known reasons of which were so plainly inadequate, and it was probably by no means only a desire to expel Pitt from the ministry that actuated those who rejected his advice. The King was strongly opposed to the policy of Pitt and much irritated by his conduct. 1 In three successive cabinet councils the question was debated, and in the last Pitt, finding himself supported by no one but Lord Temple, rose with great warmth, declaring that ‘he was called to the ministry by the voice of the people, to whom he considered himself accountable for his conduct, and he would not remain in a situation which made him responsible for measures he was no longer allowed to guide.’ He was answered by old Lord Granville, the President of the Council, who made himself the representative of the majority, and who exhibited on this occasion one last flash of his old fire. ‘I can hardly,’ he said, ‘regret the right honourable gentleman's determination to leave us, as he would otherwise have compelled us to leave him; but if he be resolved to assume the right of advising his Majesty and directing the operations of the war, to what purpose are we called to this council? When he talks of being responsible to the people, he talks the language of the House of Commons and forgets that at this board he is only responsible to the King. However, though he may possibly have convinced himself of his infallibility, still it remains that we should be equally convinced before we can resign our understandings to his direction and join with him in the measures he proposes.’ Pitt and Temple persisted in their determination, and on October 5, 1761, they placed their resignations in the hands of the King. 2

So ended an administration which had found England in a condition of the lowest depression, and by the efforts of a single man had raised her to a height of glory scarcely equalled in her annals. It is true, indeed, that with the exception of James Grenville, who resigned the insignificant post of Cofferer, no other official accompanied Pitt and Temple into retirement, but with Pitt the soul of the administration had passed away. As Burke truly said, ‘No man was ever better fitted to be the minister of a great and powerful nation, or better qualified to carry that power and greatness to their utmost limits. … With very little parliamentary, and with less Court influence, he swayed both at Court and in Parliament with an authority unknown before, and under him, for the first time, administration and popularity were united.’ The seals of Secretary of State were offered to George Grenville, but he refused them, though accepting the leadership of the House of Commons, and they were then given to Lord Egremont, an avowed Tory, and son of Sir W. Windham, the Tory leader in the last reign. 1 The Duke of Bedford soon after replaced Temple as Privy Seal.

So far the policy of the secret counsellors of the young King had been brilliantly successful. In less than twelve months, and in the midst of the war, the greatest war minister England had ever produced was overthrown, and the party with which the King personally sympathised had become the most powerful in the State. But grave dangers still hung around the Court, and no one was more conscious of them than Bute. ‘Indeed, my good Lord,’ he wrote in answer to the congratulations of Lord Melcombe, ‘my situation, at all times perilous, is become much more so, for I am no stranger to the language held in this great city, “our darling's resignation is owing to Lord Bute … and he must answer for all the consequences;” which is in other words for the miscarriage of another's system that he himself could not have prevented.’ 1 Newcastle, on the other hand, was filled with a delight which he took little pains to conceal, 2 and he wrote triumphantly that according to information just received from the ambassador at Madrid, Wall had expressed his concern and surprise at the idle reports that Spain was to come to a rupture with England, and had assured Lord Bristol that there never was a time when the King of Spain wished more to have the most perfect friendship with the King of Great Britain than at present. ‘This,’ adds the Duke, ‘seems a flat contradiction to all Mr. Pitt's late suppositions and assertions.’ 3