bestowed on her namesake the first wife of Richard II., expired on the 1st of August, 1714. THE HOUSE OF BRUNSWICK, A.D. 1714. The provisions which had been enacted for Peaceable securing the Protestant succession proved to work accession of George I. well, and the parliamentary successor, George I., mounted the throne in derogation of the hereditary title as peaceably as about a century before James I., the hereditary successor, had done in derogation of the parliamentary settlement. the succession in Naturally the press had not been silent during Anne's reign on the question of the succession. In 1703 an English translation of Sir Thomas Books upon Craig's elaborate treatise, originally written in Latin, in favour of James I.'s hereditary right, Anne's reign. was published. In 1706 a version of the Jesuit Translation Parsons' work of "Leicester's Commonwealth " of Craig's work, 1703. appeared under the title of "Secret Memoirs of A version Dudley, Earl of Leicester." The editor professed ter's to have taken it from a manuscript, of which the Commonauthor was unknown. This was doubtless to disguise its jesuitical parentage. But in 1713 Harbin's was published an original treatise, known as Treatise, "Bedford on the Crown," but really written by George Harbin, a non-juring clergyman, formerly Chaplain of that Bishop Ken, who was at once of Leices wealth. 1713. the most virtuous and moderate of the nonjurors. This work differed in one important particular from those of Parsons and Craig. They had written whilst the parliamentary claims of the descendants of Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, were still formidable, and had laboured to demonstrate that Mary's descendants could not claim such a title, even if Parliament could confer it. Harbin, writing when these claims were no longer important, insisted that their parliamentary title was indefeasible, so far as Parliament could make one. But then he triumphantly pointed out how notwithstanding this, the hereditary title had prevailed. The moral was obvious. But in other respects the analogy did not hold. In Elizabeth's time both the hereditary and parliamentary competitors were Protestants. In Anne's the hereditary claimant was a Roman Catholic, the parliamentary a Protestant. Again, one of the disLord Beau- advantages under which Lord Beauchamp, Queen champ's Elizabeth's parliamentary heir at the time of her obscurity. death, had laboured was the comparative obscurity of his birth. No such disadvantage attached to Antiquity George I., heir of the House of Guelph-Este, and lustre whose antiquity and lustre were unrivalled House of amongst the sovereign families of Europe. The Paternal king's paternal ancestors, Marquises of Este, who claimed descent from a Roman patrician family, had long held broad possessions in Italy, when, in of the Brunswick. ancestry. The Italian Estes. ries Cune the Eleventh Lion. Bouvines, the eleventh century, the Marquis Azo relin- Azo marquished them to a younger line on acquiring gunda, still vaster dominions in Germany in right of his heiress of wife Cunegunda, heiress of the Guelphs. The Guelphs. power of the Guelph-Estes culminated in Henry century. the Lion, who married Matilda, daughter of our Henry the Henry II., but was stripped by the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa of all his feudal fiefs, and left with only his allodial dominions of Brunswick. Notwithstanding this disaster, the family produced at the end of the twelth century an Emperor in the person of Otho IV., who, Otho IV. after his defeat in the battle of Bouvines, fought Battle of in 1214, retired to his paternal dominions. These 1214. remained in the numerous branches of his house up to the time of George's succession to the crown of Great Britain. It is remarkable that the family of Guelph, thus called on account of their The steady adherence to Protestantism to the throne champions of the greatest of Protestant kingdoms, had in of the Pope the Middle Ages been regarded as the champions middle of the Pope. Soon after George I.'s accession it became rebellion evident that the Jacobites, though stunned for the moment by the suddenness of Queen Anne's death, would not long leave the new king in Death of quiet possession of his throne. But at this 1715, Sepcrisis they lost their most powerful ally by the tember 1. death, on the 1st of September 1715, of Louis of 1715. Guelphs in the ages. Jacobite imminent. Louis XIV., Rebellion James Edward marries Sobieski, 1718. XIV. Nevertheless, the rebellion of 1715 broke out, but was soon suppressed. Not long after Clementina this disappointment of the hopes of the Jacobites, in 1718 James Edward contracted a marriage, as judicious as it was competent to him in his peculiar circumstances to make, with the Princess Their two Clementina, a granddaughter of the heroic John Sobieski, King of Poland. They had two sons, Edward, Charles Edward, that ill-fated darling of romance, sons. Charles born 1720, December' born on the 13th of December 1720, and Henry, afterwards the Cardinal of York, born on the 13. Henry born, 1725, 26th of May 1725. May 26. To the elder of these two at least his mother transmitted from the Sobieskis a vein of heroism which had become not wholly unneeded by the blood which Charles Edward derived through his father from a hundred and odd kings. Charles Edward was born in the midst of the confusion and discontent which prevailed in England just after the bursting of the South Sea bubble. The hopes of the Jacobites, revived by the birth of bury's con- their Prince of Wales and by the disaffection spiracy in England, culminated in 1722 in Atterbury's abortive conspiracy. During the rest of George I.'s reign the Jacobites intrigued, but vainly, with almost every Court in Europe. The king died 1727, June. suddenly in June 1727, on a journey to Hanover, Accession and George II. mounted the throne without a of George shadow of opposition. Under the administration Atter Death of Edward 1745, of Walpole, who steadily pursued his two principal Walpole. lines of policy, one that of abstaining from harassing the Jacobites, the other that of avoiding foreign wars, no opportunity opened to the exiled family until 1739, when Walpole reluctantly con- War with sented to a declaration of war against Spain, 1739, OctoSpain, which was not long after followed by war with ber 19. France. The opportunity for the Jacobites had come. Charles Edward, burning to regain the Charles crown lost by his grandfather, landed on the wilds lands in the of Moidart on the 25th of July 1745. He came highlands, unattended with that foreign force which the July 25. English Jacobites had uniformly declared to be essential to the success of any enterprise against the established government. Charles Edward endeavoured to combat their reluctance by the chivalrous declaration that he desired his father to owe his crown to his own people only. This declaration may be held to have increased the heroism of Charles's attempt, but it absolves the English Jacobites from that charge of bad faith which has so often been thrown in their teeth. On the 17th of September 1745 Charles Edward Charles entered the Scottish capital of his ancestors. Edinburgh, Then was proved the immense importance to the 1745, Sepparliamentary dynasty of the union of the two Importance kingdoms. To a certain extent the union was Union to injurious to the cause of the reigning family, but the it was still more advantageous to it. Charles dynasty. enters tember 17. of the reigning |