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May arrived at Darien in the rainy or winter season, to find a scene of desolation where they expected abundance. The expedition which had left in September arrived in the latter part of the winter, when the rains were passing away: the opening of the new year is the beginning of summer, in that climate. This numerous body of men, who had come with ardent expectations, but without any well-defined purpose, found themselves wanting in the immediate means of preserving life, on the barren spot where so many of their countrymen had perished. They, as well as those who had preceded them, had been insufficiently provided with a stock of food. For the most part they kept on board the vessels, quarrelling with each other, and ready for any act of mutiny. Accounts at last reached them, that the Spaniards were preparing to attack the Scottish settlement with an overwhelming force. Then the old spirit of many a foray, and of many a battle, was roused. Campbell of Finab, who had come out with the warlike instructions of the Company, led two hundred men, by a wearisome march of three days, across the Isthmus; and finding a Spanish force on the river Santa Maria, took the post by storm. The Spaniards fled from this fierce onslaught; and Campbell and his band marched triumphantly back with their spoils of war. During their absence five Spanish men of war had arrived. The settlement was blockaded by an overpowering naval squadron. It was surrounded by large bodies of troops by land. A surrender was inevitable. On the 18th of March the settlement was abandoned, upon terms of capitulation which had been agreed upon with the governor of Carthagena.

The incidents which illustrate this text of Burnet-"the nation was roused into a sort of fury upon it”—would be painful, and almost revolting, to look back upon, if we were not sure that such an event as the Darien scheme could never happen again, and if the very calamity had not been productive of the greatest blessing to Scotland and England, their political, commercial, and social union. When the Scottish Parliament took up the whole course of the Darien transactions in a revengeful mood-making no allowance for those trade jealousies which were as rife in Scotland as in England-looking at the position of the king as if he could govern England with his right arm upon one course of policy, and govern Scotland with his left arm upon a totally opposite course, -utterly rejecting the notion that anything in the world could be of more paramount importance than the interests of a body of shareholders who had paid up two hundred thousand pounds capital, to carry forward plans which sober-judging merchants and disinter

ested politicians considered as symptoms of insanity,—we can scarcely conceive any more effectual remedy for the national fever than the cold reserve of William. The wrongs of the Indian and African Company were echoed from the English border to the remotest North. The Jacobites were active in proclaiming the iniquity of a king who had sacrificed Scotland to preserve the Dutch possessions in the West Indies. Associations were formed to forbid the consumption of articles of English production. The Scottish Parliament was not propitiated by a temperate and conciliatory message from the king, that it had been to him a deep regret that he could not agree to the assertion of the right of the Company's Colony in Darien; that he was fully satisfied that his yielding in this matter would have infallibly disturbed the general peace of Christendom, and have brought on a heavy war, in which he could expect no assistance. The Parliament agreed to a series of resolutions, in which the national grievances of Darien were recapitulated, as if Scotland rejected all considerations of the general peace of Christendom, and stood isolated amongst the nations, proud and defiant. Whoever defended the king was a libeller of the nation; and to the fire of the common hangman were committed the few printed attempts to induce charity and forbearance. Such a fierce crackling of the thorns under the pot was of course soon at an end. The king appears to have been the only one who could see something bright beyond the passing smoke. The House of Lords addressed him in terms of strong condemnation of the proceedings of the colonists at Darien, and of approbation of the means adopted by the colonial governor to discourage and injure them. William, in his reply, declared that "he cannot but have a great concern and tenderness for his kingdom of Scotland, and a desire to advance their welfare and prosperity; and is very sensibly touched with the loss his subjects of that kingdom have sustained by their late unhappy expeditions, in order to a settlement at Darien. His majesty does apprehend that difficulties may too often arise with respect to the different interests of trade between his two king loms, unless some way be found out to unite them more nearly and completely, and therefore his majesty takes this oppor tunity of putting the House of Peers in mind of what he recommended to his Parliament soon after his accession to the throne, that they would consider of an Union between the two kingdoms."

Sir or seven years passed over, during which the Darien affair was a constant source of irritation in Scotland against the English government and the English people. The East India Company

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had become prosperous beyond expectation, in the amalgamation of the New Company with the Old. The more prosperous that great association, the more jealous and angry were the Scots, who believed that their Company, unless ruined by the tyranny of king William, might have opened the whole commerce of the East to their favoured nation. In the negotiations for the Union in 1706, the Scots Commissioners clung firmly to the principle that the charters, rights, and privileges of the African and Indian Company should be maintained. The English Commissioners as firmly resolved, that the condition of free intercourse, which was the basis of the Union, should not result in "a perfect laying open the East India trade, or at least erecting a new East India Company in Britain." * A compromise was effected, in a manner which smoothed many of the difficulties which the Darien affair presented to the establishment of cordiality between Scotland and England. The Lords Commissioners for England,-" being sensible that the misfortunes of that Company have been the occasion of misunderstandings and unkindnesses between the two kingdoms,and thinking it above all things desirable that upon the union of the kingdoms the subjects of both may be entirely united in affection,"-agreed to purchase the shares of the particular members of that Company. The stock "had been a dead weight upon many families; the sums paid were given over as utterly sunk and lost; and after all this, to find the whole money should come in again, with interest for the time, was a happy surprise to a great many families, and took off the edge of the opposition which some people would otherwise have made to the Union in general." †

The patriotic aspirations of king William, in the largest sense of patriotism, for the removal of the difficulties with respect to "the different interests of trade in his two kingdoms," were slowly realised. A way was found out "to unite them more nearly and completely." In less than a quarter of a century the fatal rivalries were completely at an end. The merchants of Glasgow and the merchants of Liverpool traded upon equal terms. The two kingdoms, thus united, went forward in a career of prosperity beyond the hopes of the most ardent imagination. In a century and a-half, when Great Britain had planted new colonies in regions known only as the lands of savages; when the North American Plantations had amalgamated into a great republic; when the gold discoveries of California and Australia had given a new impulse to the commerce of the world;-over that Isthmus of Panama where Scotland vainly attempted to establish a settlement amidst the hostility of "History of the Union," p. 178. • Ibid., p. 180.

the Spanish ciaimants of its territory, was constructed a railway, by which the great highways of North and South America were connected by the wonder-working powers of Science, devoted to the magnificent object of gradually making the human race or great family.

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CHAPTER IV.

Question of the Succession to the Crown of Spain.-The Partition Treaties.-Negotiations at Loo.-Correspondence of the king with his ministers.-First Partition Treaty signed. The new Parliament.-The troops disbanded.-William's mortification.-A rash resolve, and a calmer judgment.-The Dutch guards dismissed.-Penal law against Catholics.-Portland and Albemarle.-Admiral Rooke in the Baltic.-Policy of Louis the Fourteenth.

IN 1698, Charles II., the son of Philip IV., had been for thirty. four years king of Spain and the Indies. He had become the head of that corrupt and decaying monarchy when a child of four years of age. His early life had been spent under the tutelage of his mother, and of his illegitimate brother, Don John of Austria. He had one glimpse of happiness in his affection for his young wife, the princess Louisa of Orleans, whom he soon lost. Under his second wife, a princess related to the emperor, he was governed as in his childish days. His body and mind were equally enfeebled. In June, 1698, Stanhope, the English ambassador, wrote from Madrid, "The name the doctors give to the disease of the king is alfereyn insensata, which sounds, in English, a stupid epilepsy." Charles had no issue. The question of the succession was very complicated. Louis XIV. had married Charles's eldest sister; but, upon their marriage, the Infanta of Spain, by a solemn contract, had renounced for herself and her successors all claim to the Spanish Crown. The emperor Leopold had married a younger sister, and she had made a similar renunciation. Her daughter had married the Elector of Bavaria, and their son, the electoral prince, was the inheritor of whatever claim his mother might have upon the Spanish Crown; for her renunciation was considered of none effect from not having been confirmed by the Cortès, as the renuncia. tion of the elder sister had been. The Emperor himself was a claimant to the succession in his own person, for he was the grandson of Philip III. of Spain, and first cousin to Charles II. Thus the legitimate heir, the dauphin of France, was barred by that renunciation of his mother which was considered valid. The next in order of inheritance, the electoral prince of Bavaria, had a less doubtful claim, for his mother's renunciation was held invalid. The emperor, who was farthest removed in blood, was not fettered