who had till now
served as chiefs of the Whigs. Though the first Hanoverian Ministry was
drawn wholly from the Whig party, its leaders and Marlborough found
themselves alike set aside. But even had they regained their old power,
time must soon have removed them; for Wharton and Halifax died in 1715,
and 1716 saw the death of Somers and the imbecility of Marlborough. The
man to whom the king entrusted the direction of affairs was the new
Secretary of State, Lord Townshend. His merit with George the First lay
in his having negotiated a Barrier Treaty with Holland in 1709 by which
the Dutch were secured in the possession of a greater number of
fortresses in the Netherlands than they had garrisoned before the war,
on condition of their guaranteeing the succession of the House of
Hanover. The king had always looked on this treaty as the great support
of his cause, and on its negotiation as representing that union of
Holland, Hanover, and the Whigs, to which he owed his throne.
Townshend's fellow Secretary was General Stanhope, who had won fame both
as a soldier and a politician, and who was now raised to the peerage. It
was as Townshend's brother-in-law, rather than from a sense of his
actual ability, that Walpole successively occupied the posts of
Paymaster of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of
the Treasury, in the new administration.

[Sidenote: The rising of 1715.]

The first work of the new Ministry was to meet a desperate attempt of
the Pretender to gain the throne. There was no real hope of success, for
the active Jacobites in England were few, and the Tories were broken and
dispirited by the fall of their leaders. The policy of Bolingbroke, as
Secretary of State to the Pretender, was to defer action till he had
secured help from Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, and had induced Lewis
the Fourteenth to lend a few thousand men to aid a Jacobite rising. But
at the moment of action the death of Lewis ruined all hope of aid from
France; the hope of Swedish aid proved as fruitless; and in spite of
Bolingbroke's counsels James Stuart resolved to act alone. Without
informing his new Minister, he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the
signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs
meant the continuance of the House of Argyle in power; and the rival
Highland clans were as ready to fight the Campbells under Mar as they
had been ready to fight them under Dundee or Montrose. But Mar was a