]

The Jacobite rebellion had compelled the Government to withdraw some of
their troops from the continent. France for a while was flattered and
fluttered by a series of brisk successes which left almost the whole of
the Austrian Netherlands in her possession at the end of the campaign
of 1746. The battle of Lauffeld, near Maestricht, in Holland, in the
summer of 1747, in which the allied Austrian, Dutch, and English armies
were defeated, especially exhilarated the French Jacobites. The French
were commanded by Marshal Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy. The English
troops were under the command of Cumberland, and Lauffeld was therefore
regarded by them as in some sort avenging Culloden. The victory was
largely due at Lauffeld, as it had been at Fontenoy, to the desperate
courage of the Irish Brigade, who, in the words of one of their
enemies, "fought like devils," and actually came very near to capturing
Cumberland himself. But the tide of victory soon turned for France on
land and sea, and she became as anxious to make a peace as any other of
the belligerent powers could be. The French were sick of the war.
Henry Pelham was writing to the Duke of Cumberland to tell him that no
more troops were to be had by England, and that, if they were to be
had, there was no more money wherewith to pay them.

Political life in England had, during all this time, been passing
through a very peculiar period of transition. When we speak of
political life we are speaking merely of the life that went on in St.
James's Palace, in the House of Lords, and in the House of Commons.
The great bulk {240} of the middle classes, and the whole of the poorer
classes all over Great Britain, may be practically counted out when we
are making any estimate of the movement and forces in the political
life of that time. The tendency, however, was even then towards a
development of the popular principle. The House of Lords had ceased to
rule; the Commons had not yet begun actually to govern. But the
Commons had become by far the more important assembly of the two; and
if the House of Commons did not govern yet, it was certain that the
King and the Ministry could only govern in the end through the House of
Commons. The sudden shuffle of the cards of fate which had withdrawn
both Walpole and Pulteney at one and the same moment from their place
of command at either side of the field, brought with it all the
confusion of a Parliamentary transformation s