had levied money, and had done other corporate acts in England, which could not be legally done without the sanction of the English Parliament. The English jealousy of commercial rivalry once roused, there could be no compromise which would make the speculation safe for the London capitalists. They forfeited their first instalments upon their shares. The angry mood of the English legislature had roused the public spirit in Scotland, and in six months from the opening of the subscription books, the sum of four hundred thousand pounds was subscribed. There were a few large subscriptions from the nobility and the higher mercantile classes; but the majority of the subscribers were professional men and shopkeepers. The ledgers of the Company show that some large subscribers were guaranteed by the directors. Twenty-five per cent. upon the subscriptions was, however, paid up within the year, or very nearly so. With this amount in hand, somewhat less than a hundred thousand pounds, the Company began to engage in magnificent undertakings. They issued bank notes; and with this device, and with the general confidence in their credit, they collected stores and built warehouses. But their means were still found inadequate to their ambition. They attempted to dispose of stock at Hamburg, but were interfered with by the English resident. Remonstrances were made to king William, but he afforded no redress to the complaints of his Scottish lieges. It was more than difficult for him to steer a just and prudent course as the sovereign of two kingdoms having such conflicting interests in their unnatural separation.

On the 26th of July, 1698, three vessels purchased from the Dutch, and armed as ships of war, sailed from Leith, with twelve hundred men on board. The destination of the adventurers was unknown to them. Paterson was on board one of the vessels, the Saint Andrew, but in no responsible position. Throughout the voyage the projector of the colony was at issue with the officers of the ship and the Council appointed by the Directors. The passengers were soon reduced to short allow ance. On the 4th of November, they landed at a point in the Gulf of Darien. This spot was a peninsula united to the mainland, and capable at its narrower junction of being fortified. The Colony was to be settled on that mainland, which was to be called New Caledonia. Seven gentlemen had been appointed for the government of the settlement. It had been ostentatiously proclaimed that the Scottish Colony was to be the great emporium of free commerce. The adventurers had little acquaintance with the difficulties of colonisation, and knew not the obstacles that would prevent a body of private men, unsupported by the strong arm of a government, from planting themselves on the Isthmus of Panama, and becoming the medium of commercial intercourse between the Atlantic and the Pacific. They sent civil messages to the governors of the neighbouring Spanish settlements. Their overtures were rejected with disdain. Soon they got into conflict with the Spaniards, in taking part in a dispute between them and some friendly Indians. At Carthagena a vessel of the Company, armed with fourteen guns, running into the bay, the captain and crew were seized and condemned to death as pirates. The English resident interfered and saved the men. The authorities of the Colony now declared war against Spain, and attacked the ships of that

A.D. 1695-1700. DISASTERS OF THE DARIEN COLONISTS. 481

power. The Court of Spain, by its ambassador, made a formal representation to the government in London, that its territory had been invaded by the subjects of king William. The proceedings in the Gulf of Darien had alarmed the English government previous to this remonstrance; and notice had been sent to the governors of English colonies in the West Indies, and in America, that the objects of the expedition had been unknown to the king, and that the proceedings of the adventurers had not his sanction. The colonists soon began severely to feel the want of food. No supply from home had reached them, for Scotland itself was suffering from a fearful deficiency of harvest. The unhappy settlers could find no exchangers amongst the Indians. They had sent in vain to Jamaica to obtain supplies, for a proclamation had been published prohibiting all English subjects from holding any sort of correspondence with them, under the severest penalties. In the huts which they had built pestilence found its seat, side by side with famine. In June, those who remained alive resolved to abandon the land to which they had gone with such eager hopes. They sailed away, sick and feeble, in their three vessels, two of which arrived in New York, and one at Jamaica, with the remnant of the colonists in a state of indescribable wretchedness. Paterson was amongst their number. In the meantime another expedition from Scotland had been organised. Two vessels with provisions were sent out in May; and in September, thirteen hundred men, ignorant of the unhappy fate of those who had gone before them, set sail from Leith. When the truth became known in Scotland, of their lamentable failure in the scheme which had raised the hopes of the nation to an extravagant height, the Directors sent out another squadron under military command; and ordered their officers to pay no respect to any authority but that of the Secretary of State for Scotland. The expedition which had left in September, as well as those which had preceded them, had been insufficiently provided with a stock of food. For the most part they kept on board the vessels, quarrelling with each other, and ready for any act of mutiny. Accounts at last reached them, that the Spaniards were preparing to attack the Scottish settlement with an overwhelming force. Then Campbell of Finab, who had come out with the warlike instructions of the Company, led two hundred men, by a wearisome march of three days, across the Isthmus; and finding a Spanish force on the river Santa Maria, took the post by storm. The Spaniards fled from this fierce onslaught; and Campbell and his band marched triumphantly back with their spoils of war. During their absence five Spanish men of war had arrived. The settlement was blockaded by an overpowering naval squadron. It was surrounded by large bodies of troops by land. A surrender was inevitable. On the 18th of March the settlement was abandoned, upon terms of capitulation which had been agreed upon with the governor of Carthagena.

The wrongs of the Indian and African Company were echoed from the English border to the remotest north. The Scottish Parliament was not propitiated by a temperate and conciliatory message from the king, that it had been to him a deep regret that he could not agree to the assertion of the right of the Company's Colony in Darien; that he was fully satisfied that his yielding in this matter would have infallibly disturbed the general

peace of Christendom, and have brought on a heavy war, in which he could expect no assistance. The Parliament agreed to a series of resolutions, in which the national grievances of Darien were recapitulated, as if Scotland rejected all considerations of the general peace of Christendom, and stood isolated amongst the nations, proud and defiant. The House of Lords addressed the king in terms of strong condemnation of the proceedings of the colonists at Darien, and of approbation of the means adopted by the colonial governor to discourage and injure them. William, in his reply, declared that he was very sensibly touched with the loss his Scotch subjects had sustained, and he took "this opportunity of putting the House of Peers in mind of what he recommended to his Parliament soon after his accession to the throne, that they would consider of a Union between the two kingdoms."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

IN 1698, the question of the succession to the throne of Spain was very complicated. Charles II. was equally enfeebled in body and mind, and he had no issue. Louis XIV. had married Charles's eldest sister; but upon their marriage, the Infanta of Spain, by a solemn contract, had renounced for herself and her successors, all claim to the Spanish crown. The emperor Leopold had married a younger sister, and she had made a similar renunciation, which, however, was considered of none effect, from not having been confirmed by the Cortes. Her daughter had married the elector of Bavaria, and their son, the electoral prince, was the inheritor of his mother's claim. The emperor himself was a claimant to the succession in his own person, for he was the grandson of Philip III. of Spain, and first cousin to Charles II. Thus, the question of the Spanish succession influenced the political combinations of Europe. William's most anxious hours had been given to discussions with Tallard, the French ambassador, of the terms of a treaty which would reconcile these conflicting claims. Tallard wrote to Louis that the English nation "consider the partition of the succession of the king of Spain as something in which they must take a part." The scheme of a partition of the vast dominions of the crown of Spain unquestionably originated with the court of France. It was formally proposed to Portland soon after his arrival in Paris, as "a thing of the greatest importance, and which demanded the greatest secrecy." In the summer of 1698, William made his usual journey to Holland. Tallard was invited to follow the king, and the negotiations were resumed at Loo. William negotiated these treaties upon purely defensive principles. They had no reference to the especial advantage of England or the States-General, beyond their protection against the first imminent danger of a vast addition to the power of France, or the secondary danger of a similar addition to the power of Austria. On the 24th of

A.D. 1698.

THE FIRST PARTITION TREATY.

483

August Portland communicated to Mr. Secretary Vernon, the proposed conditions of a treaty, which he was to show to the Lord Chancellor, for the purpose of Somers deciding to whom else they should be imparted, "to the end," wrote the king, "that I might know your opinion upon so important an affair, and which requires the greatest secrecy." The important secret was communicated to Shrewsbury, Orford, and Montague. On the 8th of September Somers wrote to the king an elaborate letter, conveying their joint opinions. The whole tone of this despatch was to the effect that the king, who had always been his own minister for foreign affairs, was a better judge of such matters than the advisers of his domestic policy. William had written, "If it be fit this negotiation should be carried on, there is no time to be lost, and you will send me the full powers, under the great seal, with the names in blank, to treat with count Tallard." The Lord Chancellor made not the slightest objection to sending the king this blank commission. Before it arrived, William had signed the draft of the treaty, with a note at the foot, "in which he declares it to be converted into a treaty, if the king of Spain should die before the exchange of the ratifications." This treaty, known as the First Partition Treaty, was definitively signed at the Hague on the 11th of October, by the earl of Portland and sir Joseph Williamson, as the two Commissioners whose names were inserted in the blank space of the commission sent by Somers. It was stipulated that the kingdom of Spain, with the Indies and the Netherlands, should be assigned to the electoral prince of Bavaria; that Naples and Sicily should belong to the dauphin of France; and that the duchy of Milan should be allotted to the archduke Charles, the second son of the emperor. Only four months after the treaty had been signed, the electoral prince of Bavaria, then in his eighth year, died. He had been named by the king of Spain as his successor, by a will made in 1698, with a condition that the vast Spanish dominions should not be dissevered. The Partition Treaty had become known, although William had been persuaded not to communicate it to Spain or to the emperor. In 1700, a Second Partition Treaty was concluded, which gave Spain, the Indies, and the Netherlands to the archduke Charles. The Bourbons were now to have the Milanese, or an equivalent territory, in addition to the arrangements of the former treaty.

The new Parliament assembled on the 6th of December, 1698. In his speech to the House, William said, "The flourishing of trade, the supporting of credit, and the quiet of people's minds at home, will depend upon the opinion they have of their security; and to preserve to England the weight and influence it has at present in the councils and affairs abroad, it will be requisite that Europe should see you are not wanting to yourselves." The Commons met William's exhortations with unusual discourtesy. They voted no address in answer to the speech from the throne; and they passed a resolution that all the land forces of England, in English pay, exceeding seven thousand men, should be forthwith paid and disbanded; that the seven thousand should consist of natural born subjects; and that all the forces exceeding twelve thousand men in Irc

Tallard to Louis.

land, these also natural born subjects, should be paid and disbanded. This bill was carried through with unusual rapidity. The agony of mind which the king endured overthrew, for once in that troubled life entirely, his wonderful command of temper, and self-sacrificing discretion. He came to the resolution of abandoning the government of England. In the British Museum there is preserved a speech to that effect, written in William's own hand in French, which he intended to deliver to the Parlia ment. However, the equal mind soon came back to this extraordinary man. He finally gave his assent to the Disbanding Bill in these words: "I am come to pass the Bill for disbanding the army as soon as I understood it was ready for me. Though, in our present circumstances, there appears great hazard in breaking such a number of troops; and though I might think myself unkindly used, that those guards who came over with me to your assistance, and have constantly attended me in all the actions wherein I have been engaged, should be removed from me; yet it is my fixed opinion that nothing can be so fatal to us as that any distrust or jealousy should arise between me and my people." On the 18th of March, William sent a message to the Commons, that he intended to send his Dutch guards away immediately, "unless, out of consideration to him, the House be disposed to find a way for continuing them longer in his service, which his majesty would take very kindly." The House would not even appoint a Committee to consider this message, but drew up an address, in which the king was bluntly told "that nothing conduces more to the happiness and welfare of this kingdom than an entire confidence between his majesty and his people, which could no way be so firmly established as by entrusting his sacred person with his own subjects." The king's answer to this address was a model of forbearance: "I came hither to restore the ancient constitution of this government. I have had all possible regard to it since my coming, and I am resolved through the course of my reign to preserve it entire in all the parts of it.

It shall be my study to the utmost of my power to perform the part of a just and a good king; and as I will ever be strictly and nicely careful of observing my promise to my subjects, so I will not doubt of their tender regards to me."

The Parliament was prorogued on the 4th of May, after having appointed a Commission to inquire into the extent of the Irish forfeitures of estates, “in order to their being applied in case of the subjects of England.” The king had granted some of these estates to Portland, Albemarle, and other favourites, and a very natural and proper jealousy was excited. This measure was tacked to a money-bill, so that it could not be discussed in the House of Lords, or rejected by the Crown. In the next Session of Parliament, which commenced on the 16th of November, 1699, the Commissioners of Inquiry presented their report. A Bill of Resumption was brought in, by which the whole of the Irish forfeitures were to be applied to the public uses. The Whigs moved an amendment, to resume all grants of lands and revenues of the Crown made since the 6th of February, 1684-the date of the accession of James II. This was a much more sweeping resumption than the opponents of William contemplated. But they had the decency not to resist its adoption. Fierce disputes ensued