Queen Anne was not a woman of strong intellect, but simple and homely in her tastes; weakly obstinate, like the Stuart race. In the earlier years of her reign, with the Whigs in power, she was under the stronger will of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough; in the later years, when the Tories held office, she was largely ruled by a Mrs. Masham. Her domestic story was a painful one. She passed through a motherhood of nineteen children, nearly all of whom died in infancy, only one son reaching the age of eleven years. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, was the very embodiment of dulness and stupidity. King James, his father-in-law, said of him, “I have tried George drunk, and I have tried him sober; drunk or sober there is nothing in him.” He took no part in public affairs. He died in 1708, and Anne, widowed, childless, and in broken health, was as lonely a woman as any within the three kingdoms which acknowledged her sovereignty.

There is no doubt that after she had lost all her own children, her sympathies were with her father’s son, generally known as The Pretender. She felt more and more as her life was ebbing to its end, that she had not been a dutiful daughter. In her own loneliness she must have had abiding thoughts of her young brother, expatriated from his father-land. Whilst she was living in royal estate, he, the legitimate heir of that estate, was a homeless waif,—ever tantalized by fruitless hopes and longings. What to her was this second cousin in Hanover,—a foreigner by birth and in all his interests? She was horror-stricken at, and absolutely refused to sanction, a Whig proposal, that Elector George should be invited to visit Britain, and make some acquaintance with the country which he was one day to rule over.

Anne’s two leading ministers—Oxford and Bolingbroke, at one in their Jacobite proclivities, were yet at personal variance. At a council meeting, on 27th July, 1714, at which the queen was present, they had a fierce quarrel, and, under the joint influence of Bolingbroke and Mrs. Masham, the Queen dismissed Oxford from office. But the triumph of Bolingbroke was short-lived, for the stormy council meeting so acted on the queen, that she next day fell into a lethargy, from which—with brief intervals of semi-consciousness—she never rallied.

On the 30th of July, when it was known that the queen was sinking, two Whig lords, the Dukes of Somerset and Argyle, took upon themselves, in virtue of their position as privy-councillors, to attend unsummoned the council board. They found the ministers in a state of utter perplexity and alarm; humble enough to agree to a proposal that in the present grave crisis, the queen should be asked to confer the premiership upon the Duke of Shrewsbury. He had taken a leading part in the revolution, been one of William’s chief secretaries of state, and was much respected by both parties. The dying queen gave, by a sign, her consent to his receiving the staff of office. That feeble sign was the last public action of the Stuart dynasty. Anne died on the 1st of August, and next day the Elector of Hanover,—through his mother and grandmother, a great grandson of James I.,—was, as George the First, proclaimed king in London.

The new king, knowing that the Whigs were his best friends, formed his ministry from their ranks. Three of Anne’s ministers, Oxford, Bolingbroke, and the Duke of Ormond, were impeached for high treason; Oxford was sent to the Tower; Bolingbroke and Ormond escaped to the Continent, where they joined the councils of the Pretender. The Tory party, although out of official power, comprised the bulk of the landowners, the clergy, and the learning of England; and the popular mind—as shewn in tumultuous crowds, cheering Jacobite speeches, and burning effigies of King William—was largely reactionary.

As tidings of British agitation and discontent were wafted across the Channel, so rose the hopes of the Pretender and his little court of adherents at St. Germains. Vessels were equipped at Havre and Dieppe, with arms and ammunition. The Pretender’s plan of operations turned upon the Duke of Ormond making a landing in England, and the Duke of Berwick in Scotland. The latter, a natural son of James II., by a sister of the Duke of Marlborough, had a high military reputation, and if he had had the general direction of the movement, the results might have been different. But on the 6th of September, 1715, the Earl of Mar, without any commission from the Pretender, set up his standard at Braemar, and proclaimed him King of Scotland.

Mar had got up Highland games and hunting expeditions, and being an eloquent speaker, he inflamed the minds of the chieftains with sanguine hopes of a successful issue to a general rising. Ten thousand men rallied round the flag of rebellion. And in Northumberland, under the Earl of Derwentwater, and Mr. Foster, a county member of Parliament, there was a simultaneous rising. Mar sent a thousand Highlandmen in aid; on their way they were joined by several noblemen and gentlemen of the south of Scotland. The little Northumbrian army marched into Lancashire, and occupied Preston; attacked there by royal troops, they, after an obstinate defence, surrendered.

Meanwhile, Mar, after occupying Perth, marched to join the English insurgents. At Sheriffmuir, near Dunblane, he was met by a royalist force under the Duke of Argyle, and on the same day as the surrender at Preston, a battle was fought. The left wing of both armies defeated its opponents; so it was technically a drawn battle. But it was tantamount to a rebel defeat; next morning Argyle occupied the field of action; Mar had retired to Perth. On December 22nd, the Pretender arrived in a small vessel at Peterhead. He made a quasi-royal progress to Perth, having himself proclaimed as James the Eighth in all the towns he passed through. Of a handsome person, he could be courteous in his manners; but he lacked animation; his general expression was sombre and uninviting, not one to raise enthusiasm in men engaged in a desperate enterprise. He entered Perth on 9th January, 1716, taking up his quarters at Scone, and giving instructions for his coronation.

But the dream of the crown, which had tantalized the prince from boyhood, vanished into thin air before the stern realities around him. Mar’s army was dispirited by inaction, and melting away by desertions. Argyle had been reinforced by English troops and Dutch auxiliaries, and had had a field-train from Berwick. On January 30th, he was in sight of Perth. The prospect of a battle raised the spirits of the clansmen, but the leaders had seen for weeks that their enterprise was hopeless, and Mar ordered a retreat. It had been an especially cold winter, the Tay, instead of being a strongly flowing river, was then a frozen highway, and in sullen discontent, the clans crossed over and began their retreat. They marched in good order, unmolested by Argyle. In four days they had reached Montrose, en route for Aberdeen; there, it was promised them they would meet a large body of French troops, and again, with bright hopes of success, march southwards.

On February 4th, the retreat was to be continued; the carriage and mounted guards of the prince were waiting before the gateway of his lodgings, but no prince appeared. He had slunk off by a back-way and, with the Earl of Mar, Lord Drummond, and the gentlemen of his suite, gone on board a small vessel in the harbour, lying ready for their reception. It was, perhaps, the meanest desertion by the leaders of a warlike enterprise in all history. The prince left a sealed letter, to be opened in Aberdeen. Its contents were found to be formal thanks for faithful services, permission to choose between dispersion, and as a body coming to terms with the enemy; and apprizing the men that their pay had now ceased. There was an outburst of rage and mortification, and then the clans, under great privations, sought their native glens and villages; the leaders tried to make their escape to the continent from the northern sea-ports.

During the twelve years of Anne’s reign there was not a single execution for treason, but now the headsman and hangman were again at work. Of those who took part in the English insurrection, the Earl of Derwentwater, Lord Kenmore, and about twenty other persons were executed. Foster and several others made rather marvellous escapes from prison. In Scotland about forty families of note lost their estates. But a trick of the government, in ordering that the commission for the trial of the Scottish rebels should sit in Carlisle, raised such a cry of injustice, and of being an infringement of the Articles of Union, that the accused were given to understand that if they did not challenge the authority of the Court, they would be mercifully dealt with. The result was, that although twenty-four were condemned, not one of them was executed.

After the native efforts of Jacobitism in 1715 had resulted in utter failure, it had certain glimmerings of success through foreign complications. King George never became in heart, in habits, or in policy, an Englishman. In his Hanoverian policy he embroiled Britain with Sweden and Spain. He purchased from the King of Denmark the duchies of Bremen and Verden, which duchies the King of Sweden—the redoubtable Charles XII.—claimed as his own. Charles now proposed to place himself at the head of a confederacy, to dethrone King George, and put the Pretender in his place. His idea was, to land with 10,000 men in the north of Scotland, to call upon the highland clans to again rally round a Jacobite standard, and, with the co-operation of a Spanish fleet, to march into England. It is one of the might-have-beens with which history abounds. But a cannon shot at the siege of Frederickshall, in 1718, ended the erratic course of Charles.

Next year the Pretender was received with royal honours at Madrid, and an expedition of ten ships of war, with 6,000 troops and much warlike stores on board, was placed under the command of the Duke of Ormond, and sailed for Scotland. A violent storm off Cape Finisterre scattered the expedition. Two frigates landed 300 men at Lewis; these surrendered to the royal troops sent against them. This same year the Pretender married a Polish princess; by her he had two sons,—Charles Edward, and Henry Benedict.