Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  (which in the Middle Ages we called “Flanders”

  and now call Belgium) to our Austrian ally;

  and the French and Spanish crowns were not united on the same head, which was what we had most feared. But the alliance of France and Spain remained, with hardly an interruption, a serious danger for us until 1808; and we had to fight four great wars against that alliance if we were to remain an Empire at all.

  In Anne’s last years, the question again came up — who was to succeed her? The

  Tories, who were in power, were almost inclined to say James III, in spite of his being a Papist.

  But “almost” is not “quite”; and while the

  Tories talked the Whigs were ready to act,

  and, on Anne’s death in 1714, George I became

  King. A Scottish rising on behalf of James in 1715 was put down with some difficulty;

  and the result was that both English and

  Scottish Tories remained sore and disloyal for many years, always with half an eye to the

  “King over the water.”

  The Whigs, however, got their King, a dull,

  honest, heavy fellow, and they allowed him no power whatever. All the officers of State were divided among a few great Whig families.

  George cared nothing for England, only for his native Hanover. The churchmen growled,

  the country gentlemen growled; but the Dissenters and merchants rejoiced, and made haste to become very rich. Ordinary quiet persons agreed to accept King George, but without enthusiasm. Affection for King and Crown entirely died away until it was revived by the wonderful goodness and high spirit of the great

  Queen Victoria.

  There is practically nothing to record of the reign of George I. The only important law passed was one which said there shall be a new Parliament every seven years, instead of every three years. Abroad there is nothing interesting either. France, which had been very hard hit by the war, only wanted peace.

  The new King of Spain occasionally growled at our holding Gibraltar, and twice tried to take it from us; which was unlucky for him, as we blew his fleet into the air.

  George I died in 1727, and the first few years of the reign of his son, George II, were almost as quiet as the late reign had been. The new

  King was a short, ridiculous, red-faced person,with great goggle-eyes. He cared as little for England and as much for Hanover as his father; but he had fought bravely in Marlborough’s wars when he was young, and was always longing to fight somebody. He at least knew how to swear in English, and he was rather too fond of swearing. His prime minister, till 1742, was Sir Robert Walpole,

  who had ruled his father since 1721. This man, though he shockingly neglected the Army and the Navy, managed money matters remarkably well; and the result was that our trade increased enormously.

  But the price of his neglect of the fighting services had soon to be paid. France, when she had recovered from Marlborough’s wars,

  made a close alliance with Spain, and in 1737

  Spain began to attack our trade in America.

  Sorely against his will, Walpole had to declare war on Spain to defend that trade. France came to Spain’s assistance and the war then grew much more serious. It was, in fact, a struggle for power and empire both in America and India and lasted for eight or nine years;

  and, as our old Austrian and Dutch allies were also attacked by France, she had to send soldiers to Germany and Flanders as well, though she could ill spare them, for it was quite possible that our own island might be invaded. Un-fortunately, we could hire, with our abundant

  British guineas, Dutch and German troops to fight our battles for us. I cannot imagine a worse plan than this for any country, but it remained a regular British habit down to our grandfathers’ days; and it still further increased the unwillingness of our own people to serve in their own army.

  Walpole was dreadfully badgered in Parliament over the badness of this plan, and over many other things, not so much by the few remaining Tory members as by those Whigs who were not actually in office, but wanted to get into office. And when they did come in,

  they had no better plans to propose. Walpole resigned in 1742, and his successor, Carteret,

  a far greater man than Walpole, was badgered almost worse, until he too resigned in 1744.

  Meanwhile King George himself had led British troops to a great victory at Dettingen in Germany, and his second son, the Duke of Cumberland, led them to a defeat almost as glorious at Fontenoy in Flanders, 1745. The French

  King had been seriously thinking of an invasion of Britain on behalf of the exiled King James

  III. But the French were justly afraid of risking their ships against the British navy;

  and so Prince Charles Edward, son of James

  III, resolved to strike for himself even without

  French help. He landed, with seven followers only, in the Western Highlands of Scotland in the summer of 1745.

  He called upon the well-known loyalty of the -Highlanders to his family; they answered him as only Highlanders can. Without guns or cavalry, five or six thousand of these men made themselves masters of all Scotland. They could march two miles for every one that the heavily laden English soldiers could march;

  and of course there were far too few of these regular soldiers in Great Britain. When the

  Highlanders met them, they would fire one volley from their muskets, throw them down,

  and charge with the “claymore,” the terrible

  Highland sword. The English soldiers, of whom, indeed, the best regiments were abroad when the Rising began, seemed on this occasion to have forgotten all Marlborough’s lessons; their generals were old, slow men; and the rank and file were terrified by the ferocious Highland charges. So Charles was able,

  in the winter of 1745, with never more than six thousand men, to advance into England as far as Derby. The few great Tory families in England who were supposed to favour the cause of King James III ought now to have come forward and helped his son, but they did nothing. There was, indeed, a real panic in

  London; and, if no one rose for King James,

  very few people seemed anxious to fight for

  King George. If Charles had gone on then,

  he might have taken London, but he was persuaded to turn back from Derby, and, in the following spring, was defeated by Cumberland at Culloden in Inverness-shire. That was the end of the Stuart cause in Britain. Cumberland swept the Highlands with fire and sword;

  and though he failed to catch Prince Charles,

  who, after five months’ wandering, escaped to

  France, he prevented any further outbreak.

  Fierce vengeance was taken on the gentlemen who had risen, and there were many cruel

  . executions which might well have been spared.

  The war with France had been fought in

  America and India as well as in Germany and

  Scotland. In the outlaying parts of our

  Empire, there was hardly any peace between the rival colonists and traders, French and

  English, even though there might be peace in Europe. You must remember how vast were the spaces, how few the people, in the

  America of those days; how long, before the time of steamships and telegraphs, it took to get troops or even orders across the Atlantic.

  In bad weather two months was no uncommon time for a voyage from Bristol to New York;

  to Calcutta, six or seven months was quiteusual. The Vast bill- empty French colony of Canada had not more than one sixth of the population of the British colonies in North

  America, then thirteen in number; but it was much better governed, fortified and equipped for war. Our colonists were never united amongst themselves, and did not want to be.

  They were none too loyal to the mother country,

  while the French Canadians were thoroughly loyal to France. That is why, between 1740

  and 1758, the French were able to press our people
in America so hard. Their great object was to occupy the valleys of the great rivers of Ohio and Mississippi. These lay right behind our colonies; and if the French could have held them, the British colonists would have been prevented from expanding westward, which was just what they were doing more and more every year.

  In India things were not quite so bad. France had an “East India Company” like our own for trading with the native states, and the two companies were natural rivals. Not far from our settlement of Madras lay the French settlement of Pondicherry; opposite to our Calcutta lay the French Chandernagore. Even when there was peace between France and England at home, the rival companies out there used to send their few white soldiers to help somenative prince who happened to be at war with another native prince. They also took into their pay native Indians, whom we call Sepoys.

  They drilled and armed them with European weapons, and made them capital soldiers.

  An army of two or three hundred French or

  English soldiers, with perhaps two thousand

  Sepoys, would beat any native army you liked to name, even if it were fifty thousand strong.

  In the war of 1740-8 the French did succeed in taking Madras; but, before that war was over,

  Major Stringer Lawrence and Robert Clive turned the tide of victory again. Clive, who began life as a clerk, was the real founder of the Indian Empire. When peace was made in 1748 by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle,

  Madras was restored to us.

  In Europe nothing was settled by that peace; and in India and America there was hardly peace at all. We may cheerfully forget the dull and stupid Whig ministers who ruled

  England from 1744 to 1756, but in the latter year William Pitt took office. And in 1757 he became an all-powerful war minister. England was then in a very bad way.

  The war had just begun again, and the late ministers had so obstinately refused to strengthen the Army or Navy that the King was forced to hire six thousand Germans to defendthe coast of Kent against an expected invasion!

  France had taken Minorca from us, and a very badly fitted-out British fleet, under Admiral

  Byng, had failed to rescue it. The fault was the Minister’s, who had neglected the

  Navy, but the Nation was angry with the

  Admiral, and, to save trouble to the Ministry,

  Byng was tried and shot on his own ship.

  Pitt changed all this very quickly. He called upon the Nation outside Parliament, upon

  Tory and Whig alike; and while he was War

  Minister these evil party names seemed to have lost their meaning. The spirit of the Nation, now united as it had never been since the days of

  Elizabeth, rose to his call. He terrified the quarrelsome House of Commons until it voted him whatever he asked for in the way of men,

  money, and ships; he put the militia for home defence on a new footing; he doubled the regular army, and enrolled whole regiments of those very Highlanders who, eleven or twelve years before, had been fighting against King

  George at home. He doubled the number of our ships of war. As our old ally, Austria,

  had gone over to the French, Pitt made a warm friend of the new German power, the

  King of Prussia; and, instead of borrowing from Germany troops to defend Britain, he sent regiment after regiment of British troopsto help Prussia in Germany against France and Austria.

  The war that began in 1756 was called the

  “Seven Years’ War.” It was far more clearly a war for empire than any earlier one. “I will win America for us in Germany,” was what

  Pitt said; and what he meant was that France,

  if thoroughly beaten in Germany, would be unable to spare troops to defend far-away

  Canada. But, being a thorough man, he also set about winning America in America itself.

  He even persuaded the disloyal colonists to help us to fight their battles for them, and he paid them to do so. His huge and victorious fleet prevented the French from sending any help to Canada. That colonly did, indeed,

  defend itself down to 1760 with true French gallantry. But when, by an amazing piece of daring, our General Wolfe took Quebec, the end was not far off. Three British armies,

  coming by different roads, gradually closed round the Canadian capital of Montreal, and in 1760 all was over, and North America was

  British from the Polar ice to Cape Florida; the one little French settlement on the Gulf of

  Mexico, Louisiana, had lost all importance.

  In India there is a similar story of conquest to be told. There, the native princes had, on the whole, inclined to the French side. Oneof them — Surajah Dowlah — took Calcutta in 1756, and allowed a number of English prisoners to be suffocated in a horrible dungeon called the “Black Hole.” Clive, with about two thousand Sepoys and Englishmen,

  came up from Madras to avenge this. He retook Calcutta, and won a victory, against odds of twenty-five to one, at Plassy in 1757.

  That victory extended the power of the East

  India Company far into Bengal. In the region of Madras our success was equally great; and in 1761 we took Pondicherry, and swept the

  French out of all India. All the native

  Princes at once went over to our side.

  What was it that gave us, a nation of less than eight millions of men, these amazing successes over a nation of at least twenty millions, more naturally warlike, quite as brave,

  and “much cleverer than ourselves? It was mainly one thing, sea power. The nation that commands the sea by having the greatest number of ships and the best-trained sailors will always beat its rivals in distant lands,

  simply because it commands the roads leading to those lands. If you look back to the beginning of things you will see that it was Cromwell,

  it was Elizabeth, nay, it was Henry VIII and

  Henry VII, who, by their early and wise care for our Navy, won for us America and India.

  We might, and we usually did, neglect our

  Navy in time of peace; but in time of war, it had got a mysterious habit of doubling itself,

  and of discovering great fighting sailors. In this war it had discovered three, Admiral Boscawen,

  who beat one great French fleet at Lagos, and

  Admiral Rodney, who played the same game in the West Indies. Perhaps the most daring of all was Sir Edward Hawke, who, as Mr.

  Newbolt sings, “came swooping from the

  West” one wild November afternoon onto the

  French fleet off the rocky coast of Quiberon,

  and fought a night battle on a lee shore:

  Down upon the quicksands, roaring out of sight,

  Fiercely beat the storm wind, darkly fell the night,

  But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon’s glare for light,

  When Hawke came swooping from the West!

  Meanwhile old King George II had died in

  1760; and his grandson, George III, aged twenty-two, had become King. And now,

  almost too late, the Spaniards came to the help of their French cousins. Pitt wanted to fly at them and smash them before they had time to declare war on us; but neither the new King nor the other ministers would agree to

  this; and Pitt, in a fit of anger, resigned his ^

  office. Yet even when Spain did declare war,

  at the opening of 1762, the spirit which Pitt had given to the fighting services carried all before it. We mopped up the remaining

  French West Indian Islands, and we took from the Spaniards their two richest colonies ^ Havana in the Isle of Cuba, and Manila in the far Eastern seas.

  But when Pitt retired, the union of King,

  Ministers, Parliament and People, which had lasted for five out of the seven years of war,

  was at an end. George III had his very valiant but obstinate mind set on only one thing, to raise the power of the Crown, and to get free from the government of the great Whig families.

  He meant to take as ministers whom he ple
ased.

  He knew that he could not keep such ministers in office if the House of Commons was always against them; and so he set himself to bribe the members of that House. He would distribute offices, pensions, and favours, to its members, until he had made a “Royal” party,

  which should oppose the “Whig” party. This

  Royal party would then vote with the ministers whom the King would choose. It took

  George nearly ten years to do this; but he had a good deal of success in the end. And the nation outside Parliament felt some sympathy

  for him; for every one knew how these great

  Whig families had kept all the richest jobs of the kingdom in their own hands. George was also very popular with the middle classes and the country gentlemen. In fact, he was a sort of Tory; and this new Royal party became a sort of new Tory party. George was at least a thorough Briton, brave, homely,

  dogged, and virtuous in his private life; but he was in such a hurry to carry out this political job, that he was quite ready to scuttle out of his glorious war, and desert his allies just as

  Anne’s ministers had done in 1713.

  Yet, like the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, the

  Treaty of Paris of 1763 could not fail to bring solid advantages to Great Britain. Though we gave back to Spain her rich colonies of

  Havana and Manila, and took from her only the useless American swamp, called Florida,

  we recovered Minorca. Though we gave back to France all her great and rich West Indian

  Islands, we retained several of the smaller ones;

  though we gave back to her her trading-stations in India, she had to promise never to fortify them again. And, finally, we kept our greatest conquest of all, Canada.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE AMERICAN REBELLION AND THE GREAT FRENCH WAR 1760-1815; REIGN OF GEORGE III

  ‘Twas not while England’s sword unsheathed

  Put half a world to flight,