there was nothing either in his person or his surroundings to appeal to the popular imagination. A profound revolution, it was noticed, took place in the etiquette of the Court. The pomp and pageantry of royalty, which had long been dear to Englishmen, and which had reflected, and in some degree sustained, the popular reverence for the King, had almost disappeared.1 George I. brought to England the simple habits of a German Court. His wife was a prisoner in Germany. His favourites were coarse and avaricious German mistresses. He spoke no English; he was in his fifty-fifth year, and he had no grace of manner and no love of display. Under these circumstances his Court assumed a particularly simple and unimposing character, which the parsimony and the tastes of his two successors led them to maintain.

With the Divine right, the ascription of a miraculous power naturally passed away. The service for the miracle of the royal touch was, indeed, reprinted in the first Prayer-book of George I.2; but the power was never exercised or claimed by the Hanoverian dynasty, and thus one great source of the popular reverence for the monarchy disappeared. For some time, however, we may trace the faint glimmerings of a supernatural aureole in the exiled line. James II., having lost his crown mainly on account of his religion, and having shown in his latter years a deep and touching piety,3

was naturally regarded with great reverence by the more devoted of his co-religionists, and on his death there were some attempts to invest him with the reputation of a Saint. Worshippers flocked in multitudes to the church where his body was laid, to ask favour by his intercession. A curious letter is still preserved, written by the Bishop of Autun, in the December of 1701, to the widow of James, describing in much detail what the writer believed to have been a miraculous cure, of which he had himself been the object. For more than forty years, he said, he had been afflicted with a tumour beneath the right eye, which, when pressed, emitted matter. In the beginning of the preceding April the fluxion ceased, the tumour rapidly grew larger than a nut, and it became so painful that the patient had not a moment of repose. A surgeon lanced it, and from this time the fluxion re-commenced with such abundance that it was necessary to dress the sore eight or ten times in the twenty-four hours. The bishop came to Paris and consulted several leading physicians, but they told him that there was no remedy, and that he must bear the inconvenience for the remainder of his life. On September 19 and 20, two or three days after the death of James, two nuns, in two different convents, independently announced to him their persuasion that the first miracle of the deceased King would be in his favour, and promised to pray God, by the intercession of James, to effect a

A few days after, as the bishop was celebrating mass, in the nunnery of Chaillot, for the soul of the King, his tumour ceased to flow, and all traces of the malady disappeared. Another story was circulated, concerning a young man of Auvergne, who had been afflicted with fits, which were believed to be of a paralytic nature, had lost all use of his limbs, and had tried in vain many remedies, both medical and spiritual. Immediately upon the death of James, a friend, who had a great veneration for that prince, recommended the sufferer to seek help through the intercession of the saintly King. He did so, and vowed, if he recovered, to make a pilgrimage to his tomb. From that day he began to amend. On the ninth day he was completely

recovered, and a deposition was drawn up by the priest of his parish, and signed by himself, attesting the miraculous nature of the cure.1 Several other cases were narrated of miracles worked by the intercession of the King, and there is not much doubt that if the Stuarts had been restored, and had continued Catholics, he would have been canonised. Occasional rumours of cures of scrofula, effected by the touch of the Pretender, in Paris or in Rome, were long circulated in England, and the old ceremony was revived at Edinburgh in 1745.4 The credit that once attached to it, however, had almost passed, though the superstition long lingered, and is, perhaps, even now hardly extinct in some remote districts. In France, the ceremony was performed as recently as the coronation of Charles X., who touched, on that occasion, 121 sick persons. As late as 1838, a minister of the Shetland Isles, where scrofulous diseases are very prevalent, tells us that no cure was there believed to be so efficacious as the royal touch; and that, as a substitute for the actual living finger of royalty, a few crowns and half-crowns, bearing the effigy of Charles I., were carefully handed down from generation to generation, and employed as a remedy for the evil.6

Another very important cause of the decline of the power of royalty was the increased development of party government. The formation of a ministry, or homogeneous body of ruling states

These documents are preserved among the papers of the Cardinal Gualterio. British Museum. Add. MSS. 20311.

2 See the very curious extracts from the Nairne Papers, in Macpherson's Original Papers, i. 595-599. Bolingbroke noticed in 1717 how James 'passes already for a saint and reports are encouraged of miracles which they suppose to be wrought at his tomb.' - Letter to Windham.

Thus the Nonjuror historian Carte relates the case of a young man from Bristol named Christopher Lovel, known to himself, who was cured by the Pretender at Paris in 1716 (Carte's Hist. of England, i. VOL. I.

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291-292). This anecdote is said to have seriously impaired the success of Carte's history. See, too, a tract called A Letter from a Gentleman in Rome giving an account of some surprising Cures of the King's Evil by the touch, lately effected in the neighbourhood of that city (1721).

4 Chambers' Hist. of the Rebellion of 1745, p. 125.

• Annuaire Historique, 1825, p. 275.

• New Statistical Account of Scotland, xv. p. 85. A seventh son was also believed to have the power of curing scrofula by his touch. See a case in Sinclair's Statistica! Account of Scotland, xiv. 210. See too Aubrey's Miscellanies, art. Miranda.

men of the same politics, deliberating in common, and in which each member is responsible to the others, has been justly described by Lord Macaulay as one of the most momentous and least noticed consequences of the Revolution. It was essential to the working of parliamentary government, and it was scarcely less important as abridging the influence of the Crown. As long as the ministers were selected by the sovereign from the most opposite parties, as long as each was responsible only for his own department, and was perfectly free to vote, speak, or intrigue against his colleagues, it is obvious that the chief efficient power must have resided with the sovereign. When, however, the conduct of affairs was placed in the hands of a body forming a coherent whole, bound together by principle and by honour, and chosen out of the leaders of the dominant party in Parliament, the chief efficient power naturally passed to this body, and to the party it represented. Although, in the reign of William, the advice of Sunderland and the exigencies of public affairs had induced William to fall back upon government by a single party, yet he never renounced his preference for a mixed ministry, composed of moderate Whigs and moderate Tories; during almost the whole of his reign he succeeded, in some degree, in attaining it, and he always held in his own hands the chief direction of foreign affairs. His successor, in this respect at least, steadily pursued the same end, and the moderate and temporising policy, as well as the love of power, of Godolphin and Harley assisted in perpetuating the old system. The first ministry of Anne, to almost the close of its existence, was a chequered one, and although at last the Whig element became completely predominant, the introduction of the Whig junto was distasteful to Godolphin, and bitterly resented by the Queen. Her letters to Godolphin, when the accession of Sunderland to the ministry had become inevitable, express her sentiments on the subject in the strongest and clearest light. She urged that the appointment would be equivalent to throwing herself entirely into the hands of a party; that it was the object of her life to retain the faculty of appointing to her service 'honourable and useful men on either side; that if she placed the direction of affairs exclusively in the hands either of Whigs or Tories, she would be entirely their slave, the quiet of her life would be at an end, and her sovereignty would be no more than a name. On the overthrow of Godolphin, it was the earnest desire both of Harley and of the Queen that a coalition ministry should be formed, in which, though the Tories predominated, they should not possess a monopoly of power. Overtures were made to Somers and Halifax; and Cowper was urgently and repeatedly pressed by the Queen to retain the Great Seal. The refusal of the Whig leaders made the Government essentially Tory, but, as we have already seen, it was a bitter complaint of the October Club that several of the less prominent Whigs were retained in office, and the habit of balancing between the parties still continued. 'I'll tell you one great state secret,' wrote Swift to Stella, as early as February 1710-11; 'the Queen, sensible how much she was governed by the late ministry, runs a little into t'other extreme, and is jealous in that point, even of those who got her out of the other's hands.' 'Her plan,' said a well-informed writer, 'was not to suffer the Tory interest to grow too strong, but to keep such a number of Whigs still in office as should be a constant check upon her ministers.' 3 Harley, who dreaded the extreme Tories, fully shared her view; he was always open to overtures from the Whigs, and it was this policy which at last produced the ministerial crisis that was cut short by the death of the Queen.

With the new reign all was changed. In the first anxious month after the accession of George I., it was doubtful whether he would throw himself entirely into the hands of the Whigs,