Shah Allum II., the nominal Mogul Emperor, the city of Delhi and its immediate vicinity, where, in his blindness, he remained an empty shadow of royalty. In 1803 the English under Sir Arthur Wellesley, afterward Duke of Wellington, after defeating the Mahrattas in the battle of Assayé, placed the immediate sovereignty of Delhi and Agra under the English East India Company, which pensioned off the last descendant of the mighty royal race of Baber. Thus ended the Great Mogul Empire in India; though the title of King of Delhi continued for more than a century to be given to the lineal descendant of the Grand Mogul dynasty, who still resided at Delhi as a pensioner of the English East India Company. CHINA. As we have seen, the long reign of the Chinese Emperor Kang-hi extended into the eighteenth century. Kang-hi was unhappy in his domestic relations, on account of the conduct of his two sons, who rebelled against their father, and were successively banished from China. In 1720 Kang-hi received the congratulations of his whole Empire upon the signal victory over the Eleuts, or Thibetans, who had ravaged China for several years-a victory which made Thibet a dependency of the Chinese Empire. In November of the same year the Czar of Russia visited Pekin with a splendid retinue in European costume, and was received at the Chinese court with all due respect, but failed to secure the adoption of measures for the establishment of a free intercourse between the Chinese and Russian Empires, which had been the object of his visit. Kang-hi 'died December 20, 1722, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, after a reign of sixty years; having just before his death declared his fourth son YUNG-CHING his successor. Yung-ching did not pursue his illustrious father's enlightened policy. The haughty conduct of the Jesuit missionaries in China aroused the new Emperor's suspicions; and he broke up their schools, imposed many restrictions upon them, and finally banished them from China, retaining at court only a few with whose services he could not dispense. The native Christians were then persecuted, not excepting those. of the imperial family. It must be confessed that the intriguing spirit of the Jesuits had given Yung-ching some reasonable grounds for alarm, and that their extravagant assertions of papal supremacy might have infused suspicion of their designing to render the Emperor of China dependent upon the Pope of Rome. In other respects Yung-ching was a good sovereign, assiduous and indefatigable in the discharge of his duties, steady and resolute in his disposition, endowed with a degree of eloquence and address, and attentive in answering the petitions which were addressed to him. He governed entirely himself, and no monarch was ever more absolute in his rule or more dreaded by his subjects. By this unlimited authority he was enabled to enforce a great many excellent laws and regulations, in the framing of which he had spent entire days and nights with the most unrelenting industry and perseverance. The most certain method of gaining his favor was by presenting him with some scheme tending to the public welfare or to the relief of his subjects in times of famine and pestilence-in the execution of which he spared no pains, if the measure seemed practicable. He preserved peace during his reign, and by his prudent precautions he averted the horrors of those famines and pestilences that periodically devastated China. The city of Pekin was almost destroyed by an earthquake, November 13, 1731-the severest earthquake that had ever been felt in China, and in which four hundred thousand persons are said to have perished. The first shocks were so sudden and so violent that a hundred thousand of the inhabitants of the Chinese capital were buried in the ruins of their houses. Three hundred thousand people perished in the surrounding country, and entire villages were laid prostrate. The Emperor Yung-ching was deeply affected by the great calamity, and ordered an account to be taken of the families that had suffered by it, with an estimate of the damage it had occasioned, while he himself advanced considerable sums for the relief of his suffering subjects. Yung-ching died in 1736, and was succeeded on the Chinese throne by his illegitimate son KIEN-LUNG, who, upon his accession, made a vow that if, like his grandfather Kang-hi, he were permitted to reign sixty years he would then abdicate his throne. In the estimation of Europe, Kienlung was the greatest of the sovereigns of the half-civilized nations during the last half of the eighteenth century. Kien-lung's long reign was spent almost entirely in wars with the barbarous nations on the entire western frontier of China. These wars were mainly a series of ruthless massacres. The Chinese conquered the greater part of Central Asia. The Emperor Kien-lung always thought that he had a just cause when he massacred whole tribes. After the defeat and massacre of the Kalmuck Tartars, he erected a stone tablet at Elee with the following inscription: "The tree which Heaven plants, though man may fell it, can not be uprooted. The tree which Heaven fells, though man may replant it, will never grow." To his own subjects Kien-lung was on the whole a just and good sovereign; but he inherited his father's dislike of the Christians, and for a time he cruelly persecuted them, accusing them of treasonable designs without the least shadow of reason. relentless fury which he thus displayed was eagerly seconded by the mandarins, who had been jealous of the superior intelligence of the Jesuit missionaries. The Kien-lung's fame extended to Europe; and missions from England, Holland and Russia were sent to his court. It was in 1793 that the famous British embassy under Lord Macartney arrived in China with the design of establishing commercial intercourse between Great Britain and China. It was in 1795 that the Dutch embassy under Titsing appeared in China. These embassies were not productive of the good results expected therefrom. The Chinese believed themselves the only enlightened nation in the world, and claimed homage from all others as barbarians. The Emperor Kienlung himself seems to have been free from these prejudices; but all his officers of state were opposed to an increase of foreign intercourse, which they feared would be fatal to their privileges. Kien-lung therefore pursued the narrow-minded, illiberal policy of his predecessors, and sternly refused to per mit the European powers to open commercial relations with China, making a single exception in favor of Russia, which country carried on a considerable commerce with the northern provinces of the Celestial Empire. Kien-lung's expressed desire to live to reign sixty years was granted; and, in accordance with the vow which he had made at the time of his accession, in 1736, he abdicated the Chinese throne in 1796, appointing his fifth son KIA-KING his successor. Kien-lung died February 11, 1799. Kiaking's twenty-four years' reign, A. D. 17961820, will be considered in the history of the nineteenth century. EMPIRES IN FARTHER INDIA. Farther India, or India beyond the Ganges, has been the seat of several empires. Of these Siam is very ancient, but Anam and Burmah only rose to importance in the eighteenth century. Pegu was an ancient kingdom of Farther India, which was conquered about 1755 by Alompra, the victo rious founder of the Empire of Burmah, who established the complete independence of Burmah, subdued the small neighboring kingdoms, invaded Siam, and, after a series of victories, besieged the Siamese capital. Only Alompra's sudden illness and death in 1760 prevented his entire subjugation of Siam. The Burmese army at once evacuated Siam. In 1767 a Chinese army invaded Burmah and approached its capital, but was. routed with great slaughter in a pitched battle. The Chinese failed in another invasion of Burmah some years afterward. Several subsequent wars between Siam and Burmah resulted in the extension of Burmese territory. SECTION IV.-EUROPE FROM 1714 TO 1740. HE death of the Princess Sophia of Hanover made her son, the Elector George Louis of Hanover, the heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland by the terms of the Act of Settlement passed by the English Parliament in 1701 and accepted by Scotland upon its constitutional, or Parliamentary Union with England in 1707. Upon Queen Anne's death, August 1, 1714, this German prince was instantly proclaimed King of Great Britain by the queen's counselors, with the title of GEORGE I.; thus beginning the reign of the present House of Brunswick, of which the present illustrious queen is the sixth on the throne of Great Britain and Ireland. It was believed that the Jacobites would endeavor to offer a forcible opposition to the accession of George I.; but they were taken by surprise by Queen Anne's death, and were therefore unprepared to make any resistance. George I. made no haste to take possession of his new kingdom, and did not arrive in England until six weeks after Queen Anne's death, when he and his eldest son landed at Greenwich. He was well received by his new subjects, but he utterly lacked the qualities essential to arouse the loyalty of the English people. Being a thorough German, he could not speak a word of English, and was obliged to learn by rote a few English words in which to reply to the addresses of his new subjects. He was fiftyfour years of age when he ascended the British throne, and was small of stature, awkward in manner and insignificant in appearance. His private life was scandalous; and when he came to England he left his wife, Sophia of Zell, behind him in Germany, a prisoner in one of his castles in his Electorate of Hanover. He was honest and well intentioned in his treatment of his new subjects, but could never learn to be an Englishman. He preferred his native Han over as a residence and visited that country yearly, thus causing constant annoyance and embarrassment to his Ministers in England. The English nation cordially disliked him, and tolerated him only because he was a constitutional monarch and the only Protestant heir to the British crown, and because he did not interfere with their liberties. George I. began his reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland by excluding the Tories from the government and forming a new Ministry consisting almost exclusivelyof Whigs, who were his natural supporters. He took no part in the government of his. new kingdom, leaving the affairs of state entirely to his Ministers. Queen Anne's Tory Ministers had dis-gusted the English nation by their plots for the restoration of the Stuarts to the British throne, and had thus made their party odiousto the great majority of Englishmen. Therestoration of the Stuarts would have been simply the undoing of the work of the Revolution of 1688, the repudiation of the national debt and the reëstablishment of Roman Catholicism by force. The Whigs were pledged to sustain theresults of the Revolution of 1688, and could not be suspected of disloyalty to the system which they had established, whatever their faults as a party were. The confidence of the English nation in the Whig party was not misplaced; as the plots of the Tory leaders, the Earl of Oxford and Lord Boling-broke, had left the Whigs the sole representatives of the principles of the Revolution of 1688, and of constitutional liberty and religious freedom. So overwhelmingly Whig was the first House of Commons summoned by GeorgeI. soon after his accession that it had less than fifty Tory members, and the Jacobite sympathies of these were so well understood that they had no influence in the government. In the new Whig Ministry, Lord Townshend was appointed Secretary of State; and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole, became successively Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of the Treasury. One of the first acts of the new Whig Parliament was to impeach Lord Bolingbroke, the Earl of Oxford and the Duke of Ormond for misconduct in the negotiations which resulted in the Treaty of Utrecht and for intriguing with the Pretender James Stuart. At the beginning of these proceedings Lord Bolingbroke fled to France, and was followed by the Duke of Ormond. The Earl of Oxford remained at home to face his Whig enemies, and was sent a prisoner of state to the Tower, but was acquitted and released two years afterward. Parliament passed Acts of Attainder against Lord Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormond. These proceedings of the Whig Parliament exasperated the Tory party, thus causing riots in various parts of England. These disturbances became so numerous and so serious that Parliament passed the Riot Act, making it a felony for members of an unlawful assembly to refuse to disperse when commanded by a magistrate to do so. The Pretender James Stuart was then residing in France, and the Tory disaffection and disturbances in England encouraged him to hope that he could succeed in an effort to recover his ill-fated father's throne. Lord Bolingbroke, who fully understood English public sentiment, urged the Pretender not to make the attempt, assuring him that it would certainly end in failure; but young James Stuart was as insensible to reason as his father had been, and ordered the Earl of Mar, the Jacobite leader in Scotland, to raise the standard of the Stuarts in that country. The Earl of Mar obeyed the Pretender's order by raising the standard of the young Stuart in the Highlands, September 6, 1715. The Earl of Mar believed that his revolt in Scotland would be followed by a Jacobite rising in the West of England, but he soon discovered his mistake. He was joined by a few Englishmen from the northern counties; but the vigorous meas ures of the government deprived him of material aid from England, where the leading Jacobites were arrested, thus depriving their party of its leaders. The Earl of Mar was incompetent and cowardly. He advanced southward into the Lowlands, and was joined at Perth by six thousand Highlanders. On the royal side the Duke of Argyle summoned his clansmen, the numerous and powerful Campbells, to take up arms for King George I. The hostile forces encountered each other at Sheriff-Muir, near Dumblain, November 6, 1715. The troops of the Earl of Mar were successful at the first onset; and General Whetham, the commander of a division in the army of the Duke of Argyle, fled in full gallop to Stirling, exclaiming that the king's Scotch army had been utterly beaten. However, in the meantime, the Duke of Argyle's own division had defeated the body of the Earl of Mar's troops confronting them, but upon returning to the field met the victorious insurgents. As neither party seemed inclined to renew the struggle, they stood looking at each other for several hours, after which they withdrew in different directions, each claiming the victory. One of the Jacobite songs alluding to this drawn battle began thus: "There's some say that we won, At a', man. "But one thing I'm sure, Which I saw, man. Though the fight at Sheriff-Muir was a drawn battle, the Duke of Argyle had all the fruits of a victory, as the effect of the conflict was to check the progress of the Jacobite rebels and thus practically to give the triumph to the royal side. The Pretender arrived in Scotland, December 22, 1715, attended by only six gentlemen. Expecting the whole Scotch nation to rise in his cause, he fixed January 16, 1716, as the day for his coronation at Scone, where his ancestors for centuries had been crowned Kings of Scotland; but before the arrival of the appointed day he was so closely pursued by the Duke of Argyle that he was glad to relinquish his enterprise and return to France, taking the Earl of Mar with him, and leaving the rest of his partisans to their fate. On the very day of the battle of SheriffMuir, November 6, 1715, the Jacobite rebels in the North of England under the Earl of Derwentwater and Mr. Forster, aided by Lords Kenmuir and Nithisdale and other Scotch gentlemen, were defeated at Preston by the royal troops and forced to surrender, thus practically ending the Jacobite revolt of 1715. The Earl of Derwentwater, Lords Kenmuir and Nithisdale, and the other prisoners, were treated with great cruelty. The leaders were sent to London and led through the streets to the various prisons, pinioned like common malefactors. Earl of Derwentwater and Lords Kenmuir and Nithisdale were condemned to be beheaded, and the former two were executed in that manner, but Lord Nithisdale effected his escape from prison and from the country in disguise and in a very romantic manner through the aid of his devoted wife. About thirty other Jacobite rebels were hung, and more than one thousand were exiled to America. The In 1716 Lord Townshend and Sir Robert Walpole retired from the Ministry, which then passed entirely under the control of Lord Stanhope. The House of Commons had now become the ruling power in Great Britain; and, in order to establish a proper basis for its influence, Parliament passed the Septennial Act in 1716, making seven years the longest period for which a British Parliament could sit. As we have seen, LOUIS XV. was a child of five years when he became King of France upon the death of his great-grandfather, Louis XIV., September 1, 1715. The profligate Philip, Duke of Orleans, at once violated the will of Louis XIV. by setting aside the Council of Regency and usurping all the powers of government, thus making himself sole regent. Though possessing some good qualities, he was on the whole a bold, bad man; and his regency was one of the most corrupt periods in the history of France. Like his former preceptor, the Abbé Dubois, whom he now madehis Prime Minister, he was a man of intellect and talent, but of most profligate morals, despising religion and virtue, outragingdecency and morality by his dissolute and voluptuous life, and squandering the revenues of the state. The Duke of Orleans and the Abbé Dubois. adopted arbitrary measures to improvethe financial condition of France, but these measures failed to produce the desired effect. The profligate Abbé Dubois was. in the pay of England, and induced the Duke of Orleans to reverse the foreign policy of Louis XIV. by discountenancing the Pretender and cultivating the friendship of England as an offset to the ambition of Spain under her Bourbon king. The Whig Ministry of England was pledged to a peace policy in its relations with foreign powers, and sought to carry out its pledges by a fai faithful observance of the Treaty of Utrecht.. In 1714 Sultan ACHMET III. of Turkey, the successor of Mustapha II., who had been deposed by a revolt of the Janizaries: in 1703, began a war against the Republic of Venice for the purpose of regaining possession of the Morea. In 1716 Austria: joined Venice in the war; and the Austriam army, under the great Prince Eugene, defeated the immense hosts of the Turks at Peterwardein in 1716, and at Belgrade in: 1717. By the Peace of Passarovitz, in 1718,. the Porte surrendered Belgrade and Temesvar to Austria; but Venice ceded the Morea. to the Sultan. Notwithstanding the pacific disposition. of the governments of France and England, the peace of Europe was disturbed in 1717 by the mad ambition of Charles XII. of Sweden and by the intrigues of Cardinal Alberoni, the Prime Minister of Philip V.. |