A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 7

they are not likely to allow it to be seen. It was not
lack of personal bravery that marred the chances of James Stuart.
[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's sympathies]
It is only doing bare justice to one whose character and career have met
with little favor from history, contemporary or recent, to say that James
might have made his way to the throne with comparative ease if he
would only consent to change his religion and become a Protestant. It
was again and again pressed upon him by English adherents, and even
by statesmen in power--by Oxford and by Bolingbroke--that if he could
not actually become a Protestant he should at least pretend to become
one, and give up all outward show of his devotion to the Catholic
Church. James steadily and decisively refused to be guilty of any
meanness so ignoble and detestable. His conduct in thus adhering to his
convictions, even at {13} the cost of a throne, has been contrasted with
that of Henry the Fourth, who declared Paris to be "well worth a mass!"
But some injustice has been done to Henry the Fourth in regard to his
conversion. Henry's great Protestant minister, Sully, urged him to
become an open and professing Catholic, on the ground that he had
always been a Catholic more or less consciously and in his heart. Sully

gave Henry several evidences, drawn from his observation of Henry's
own demeanor, to prove to him that his natural inclinations and the turn
of his intellect always led him towards the Catholic faith, commenting
shrewdly on the fact that he had seen Henry cross himself more than
once on the field of battle in the presence of danger. Thus, according to
Sully, Henry the Fourth, in professing himself a Catholic, would be
only following the bent of his own natural inclinations. However that
may be, it is still the fact that Henry the Fourth, by changing his
profession of religion, succeeded in obtaining a crown, and that James
the Pretender, by refusing to hear of such a change, lost his best chance
of a throne.
What were Anne's own inclinations with regard to the succession?
There cannot be much doubt as to the way her personal feelings went.
There is a history of the reign of Queen Anne, written by Dr. Thomas
Somerville, "one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary," and
published in 1798, with a dedication "by permission" to the King. It is
called on its title-page "The History of Great Britain during the Reign
of Queen Anne, with a Dissertation Concerning the Danger of the
Protestant Succession." Such an author, writing comparatively soon
after the events, and in a book dedicated to the reigning king, was not
likely to do any conscious injustice to the memory of Queen Anne, and
was especially likely to take a fair view of the influence which her
personal inclinations were calculated to have on the succession. Dr.
Somerville declares with great justice that "mildness, timidity, and
anxiety were constitutional ingredients in the temper" of Queen Anne.
This very timidity, this very anxiety, {14} appears, according to Dr.
Somerville's judgment, to have worked favorably for the Hanoverian
succession. [Sidenote: 1714--James the Third] The Queen herself, by
sentiment, and by what may be called a sort of superstition, leaned
much towards the Stuarts. "The loss," says Dr. Somerville, "of all her
children bore the aspect of an angry Providence adjusting punishment
to the nature and quality of her offence." Her offence, of course, was
the part she had taken in helping to dethrone her father. "Wounded in
spirit, and prone to superstition, she naturally thought of the restitution
of the crown to her brother as the only atonement she could make to the
memory of her injured father." This feeling might have ripened into

action with her but for that constitutional timidity and anxiety of which
Somerville speaks. There would undoubtedly have been dangers,
obvious to even the bravest or the most reckless, in an attempt just then
to alter the succession; but Anne saw those dangers "in the most terrific
form, and recoiled with horror from the sight." Moreover, she had a
constitutional objection, as strong as that of Queen Elizabeth herself, to
the presence of an intended successor near her throne. "She trembled,"
says Somerville, "at the idea of the presence of a successor, whoever he
might be; and the residence of her own brother in England was not less
dreadful to her than that of the electoral prince." But it is probable that
had she lived longer she would have found herself constrained to put up
with the presence either of one claimant or the other. Her ministers,
whoever they might be, would surely have seen the imperative
necessity of bringing over to England the man whom the Queen