ONE:The confederates endeavoured to keep their plans profoundly secret till they were ready to burst at once on the devoted King of Prussia; but Frederick was the last man alive to be taken by surprise. The secret was soon betrayed to him, and, at once waiving his dislike of the King of England, he concluded a convention with him in January, 1756, and bound himself, during the disturbances in America, not to allow any foreign troops to pass through any part of Germany to those colonies, where he could prevent it. Having his treasury well supplied, he put his army in order, and in August of that year sent a peremptory demand to Vienna as to the designs of Austria, stating, at the same time, that he would not accept any evasive reply; but the reply being evasive, he at once rushed into Saxony at the head of sixty thousand men, blockaded the King of Saxony in Pirna, and secured the queen in Dresden. By this decisive action Frederick commenced what the Germans style "The Seven Years' War." In the palace of Dresden Frederick made himself master of the secret correspondence and treaties with France, Russia, and Austria, detailing all their designs, which he immediately published, and thus fully justified his proceedings to the world.
FORE:The great philosopher of this period was John Locke (b. 1632; d. 1704). Locke had much to do with the governments of his time, and especially with that extraordinary agitator and speculator, Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury, whom he attended in his banishment, and did not return till the Revolution. Yet, though so much connected with government, office, and the political schemers, Locke remained wonderfully unworldly in his nature. His philosophical bias, no doubt, preserved him from the corrupt influences around him. He was a staunch advocate of toleration, and wrote three letters on Toleration, and left another unfinished at his death. In these he defended both religious and civil liberty against Jonas Proast and Sir Robert Filmer, advocates of the divine right of kings. His "Thoughts on Education" and his "Treatises on Government" served as the foundations of Rousseau's "Emile" and his "Contrat Social." Besides these he wrote numerous works of a theological kind, as "The Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity;" and in his last years, "A Discourse upon Miracles," "Paraphrases of St. Paul," and "An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles;" a work "On the Conduct of the Understanding," and "An Examination of Father Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing all Things in God." But his great work is his "Essay concerning the Human Understanding." This may be considered the first pure and systematic treatise on metaphysics in the English language; and though the pursuit of the science since his time has led to the rejection of many of his opinions, the work will always remain as an able and clearly-reasoned attempt to follow the method of Bacon in tracing the nature and operations of the understanding.
FORE:For the reasons here stated, early in the summer a powerful fleet was fitted out with the utmost dispatch and secrecy by the new Ministry, and sent to the Baltic. The fleet consisted of twenty-five sail of the line, more than forty frigates, sloops, bomb-vessels, and gun-brigs, with three hundred and seventy-seven transports to convey over twenty-seven thousand troops from Stralsund, a great part of which were Germans in British pay. Admiral Gambier commanded the fleet, and Lord Cathcart the army, having second in command Sir Arthur Wellesley. On the 1st of August the British fleet was off the entrance of Gothenburg, and Admiral Gambier sent Commodore Keats into the Great Belt to cut off any passage from Holstein for the defence of Copenhagen. Admiral Gambier himself entered the Sound, passed the castles without any attack from them, and anchored in Elsinore Roads. By the 9th of August the whole fleet and the transports were collected there, and Mr. Jackson, who had been many years British envoy in the north of Germany, and knew most of the Danish Ministers, was dispatched to Kiel, in Holstein, where the Crown Prince lay with an army of from twenty[541] thousand to thirty thousand men, to endeavour to induce him to enter into an alliance with Great Britain, and to deliver the fleet to its keeping till the peace, stating the necessity that the British commanders would otherwise be under of taking possession of it by force. The Crown Prince, though the British had made it impossible to cross over and defend the fleet, received the overture with the utmost indignation. Mr. Jackson returned to Admiral Gambier, and the Crown Prince sent a messenger to order Copenhagen to be put into a state of defence. But there was scarcely a gun upon the walls, and the population only numbered, excluding the sailors, some thirteen thousand men, inclusive of five thousand five hundred volunteers and militia. On the 17th several Danish gunboats came out of the harbour, fired at some of our transports coming from Stralsund, burnt an English vessel, and attacked the pickets of Lord Cathcart's army. These vessels were driven back again by bombshells, and that evening Admiral Gambier took up a nearer station north-east of the Crown battery, the Trekroner. He then proceeded to surround the whole of the island of Zealand, on which Copenhagen stands, with our vessels. The division of the army landed at Wedbeck having now marched up, was joined by other divisions, and proceeded to entrench themselves in the suburbs of Copenhagen. They were attacked by the gunboats, but, on the 27th, they had covered themselves by a good battery, and they then turned their cannon on the gunboats, and soon compelled them to draw off. On the 29th Sir Arthur Wellesley marched to Ki?ge, against a body of Danish troops that had strongly fortified themselves there in order to assail the besiegers, and he quickly routed them. The Danish troops then made several dashing sorties from Copenhagen, while their gunboats and floating batteries attacked our advanced vessels, and managed, by a ball from the Trekroner, to blow up one of our transports. The French had now arrived at Stralsund, and Keats was sent to blockade that port, to hinder them from crossing over into Zealand; nothing but the extreme rapidity of the movements of the British prevented a powerful army of French from being already in Copenhagen for its defence.But the Government was, at that juncture, very far from being a wise Government. Parliament was called together on the 23rd of November, and opened by the Prince Regent in person. In his Speech he spoke of the unsettled state of the country, and recommended measures of repression. The Addresses were in the same tone, and they were commented upon with great warmth by the Opposition, and amendments moved. Zealous debates took place in both Houses, especially in the Commons, where the discussion continued two evenings, and till five o'clock on the third morning. The Addresses, however, were carried in the Lords by one hundred and fifty-nine to thirty-four, and in the Commons by three hundred and eighty-one to one hundred and fifty. The Prince Regent sent down a mass of papers to both Houses relating to the condition of the disturbed districts, and a host of Bills, founded on these, were introduced. In the Lords, on the 29th of November, the Lord Chancellor Eldon introduced one in keeping with his alarms, namely, "An Act to prevent delay in the administration of justice in cases of misdemeanour." This was followed by three others, introduced by Lord Sidmouth; one to prevent the training of persons to the use of arms, and to the practice of military evolutions and exercises, another to prevent and punish blasphemous and pernicious libels. Amongst others, Hone was again at work, and ridiculing the despotically-spirited Ministers in his "Political House that Jack Built." The third was to authorise justices of the peace, in certain disturbed counties, to seize and detain arms collected and kept for purposes dangerous to the public peace. These were to continue in force till 1822. Not thinking he had yet done enough, on the 17th of December Lord Sidmouth brought into the Peers another Bill more effectually to prevent seditious meetings and assemblies, which he proposed should continue in force five years. In the Commons, in addition to all this, on the 3rd, Lord Castlereagh had introduced a Bill for imposing stamp duties and other regulations on newspapers, to prevent blasphemous and seditious libels, as if Sidmouth's Bill on that[153] subject had not fettered the press sufficiently. All these Bills were passed, notwithstanding the strongest remonstrances by the Opposition as so many infringements of the Constitution, and they became known as Sidmouth's and Castlereagh's Six Acts.
FORE:Paine, in his "Rights of Man," was far from restricting himself to the courtesies of life in attacking Burke. He had been most hospitably received by Burke on many occasions at his house, and had corresponded with him, and must therefore have seen sufficient of him to know that, though he might become extremely enthusiastic in his championship of certain views, he could never become mean or dishonest. Yet Paine did not hesitate to attribute to him the basest and most sordid motives. He branded him as the vilest and most venal of apostates. Paine had, in fact, become a monomaniac in Republicanism. He had been engaged to the last in the American Revolution, and was now living in Paris, and constantly attending the Jacobin club. He was hand-in-hand with the most rabid of the Republicans, and was fast imbibing their anti-Christian tenets. Paine fully believed that the French were inaugurating something much finer than any millennium; that they were going to establish the most delightful liberty, equality, and fraternity, not simply throughout France but throughout the world. Before the doctrines of the French clubbists and journalists, all superstition, all despotism, all unkindness were to vanish from amongst mankind, and a paradisiacal age of love and felicity was to commence. To those who pointed to the blood and fury already too prominently conspicuous in this business, he replied that these were but the dregs of corrupt humanity, which were working off in the great fermentation, and all would become clear and harmonious.
