28th of May, 1660. He was already, therefore, in his fifty-fifth year at the time of his accession. He had been elector of Hanover since 1698; nor was he obliged, under the terms by which he accepted the crown, to give up his electoral office. Indeed, the relation which England was now destined to sustain to Hanover was almost identical with that which she had held to Holland during the reign of William III. It was agreed, in the act establishing the succession, that so long as the crown should be worn by a male descendant of George I the kingdom and the electorate of Hanover should have a common head; but if a woman of this line should become queen of England, then the electorate should revert to the princes of Hanover.

In September following the death of Queen Anne the king-elect arrived with his son at Greenwich, and was soon afterwards publicly crowned. Thus far there had been no open opposition to the change of dynasty; but the Jacobites were still in the shadows of the horizon, and now came forth in the old-time fashion to undo the settlement of the kingdom. In Scotland the opposition raised the standard of rebellion, and a considerable force was thrown into the field, but was defeated at Preston a month after the king's coronation. The Pretender himself came over to Scotland in the following year, and attempted to organize a revolution; but the movement failed, and James was obliged to save himself by flight.

On the accession of George I the To party was overthrown, and anew Whig ministry, with Viscount Townshend and Sir Robert Walpole at the head, was appointed. The Earl of Oxford and Lord Bolingbroke were impeached as well as put out of office. One of the first parliamentary acts of the new administration was that of removing the restriction upon the length of time during which the House of Commons might remain in session. After the Restoration the limit had been fixed at three years; but now the movements of the Jacobites, in threatening to overthrow the new dynasty, gave a good excuse for extending the period to seven years, subject only to an earlier dissolution by the crown.

It will be remembered that, just before the death of Charles I, Baron Gortz well-nigh succeeded in effecting a Russo-Swedish alliance, and that one of the objects of that distinguished diplomatist was to restore the House of Stuart in England. This movement led, in January of 1717, to the formation of a triple alliance of England, France, and Holland against Sweden and Russia. The Swedish ambassador in London was arrested, and among his papers were found indubitable proofs of the scheme which had been hatched in the fertile brain of Gortz. It had been coolly determined by the conspirators of the North to use the Swedish embassy as the head-center of an English insurrection; while, at the same time, Scotland was to be invaded by Charles XII in person. Great excitement and animosity were produced by the discovery of this plot and by the arrest of the Swedish minister caught in such flagrant violation of international law. The dissension extended into the ministry itself, and that body was disrupted. A portion of the members, including Walpole, resigned, and the Earl of Stanhope became the responsible head of the government. In the following year the German Emperor was admitted to the triple