Before I enter on subjects which will be more interesting to you than my own feelings, please allow me to say that I am deeply conscious of the honour which the Council conferred upon me last year in electing me, and you in confirming their election of me, as your President, and of the fact that I both succeed and preside over men far more worthy than I am to occupy that place. My earnest hope is that the Society may so prosper during my term of office that your choice may prove capable of defence. To secure such prosperity no effort shall be wanting on my part. Yet the fortunes of our Society, happily, depend more upon its Director, its Honorary Secretary, and its Honorary Treasurer than upon its President; and no Society could have more efficient or more zealous officers, and no President more genial allies or wiser counsellors than the gentlemen who fill these important posts. Relying on them and on the Council generally, who devote much earnest attention to our affairs, the Society may reasonably look forward to the future without misgiving.

In no quarter of the empire was Augustus' warning against further expansion more carefully heeded than on the Rhine, until with the death of Nero the ‘progeny of the Cæsars’ ended, and nowhere else was a scheme of frontier defence based on this policy more rapidly and completely developed. The territory lying along the left bank of the river was treated as a military district and placed under the control of the legates who commanded the two army corps of Upper and Lower Germany. Within this area there were, until the foundation of Cologne in 50 A.D., besides the legionary camps and the smaller forts garrisoned by auxiliaries, only the native settlements of the subject German tribes, themselves liable to be called upon to assist the Imperial forces in repelling or punishing raids by their kinsmen beyond the river. The two armies were of imposing strength, consisting of four legions each and of at least an equal number of auxiliaries. The head-quarters of the lower army were at Xanten (Vetera), facing the valley of the Lippe, and the route that led up it into the heart of Germany. Here two legions were stationed, the others being at Neuss (Novæsium) and at Bonn (Bonna). The upper army had its head-quarters at Mainz (Mogontiacum), commanding the lowlands of the Main, and the road to the country of the Chatti. At Mainz, as at Xanten, were two legions, while Strassburg (Argentoratum) and Windisch (Vindonissa) had one each. With the tribes on the further side, ‘among whom,’ as Seneca says, ‘our peace ceases,’ Rome only concerned herself so far as the safety of the frontier required.

Writers on Canning have published from time to time various versions of this so-called ‘rhyming despatch,’ all of them incorrect; and it may therefore be desirable that the Royal Historical Society should record the true version and also the circumstances in which it came to be written.

In order to understand the true import of the news which arrived at the Foreign Office from various quarters on July 16–23, 1807, it is necessary briefly to review the general situation. The coalition against France formed by the Powers, Russia, Prussia, Great Britain, and Sweden, entered upon a new phase when Russia and Prussia signed the Convention of Bartenstein, April 26, 1807. Its aims were to strengthen the alliance between those two Powers, and to bring Great Britain and Sweden into more active co-operation in the Continental War, to put an end to the vacillation of Austria and bring her into the field once more, and, lastly, if possible to secure the adhesion of Denmark. This last clause was worded as follows:—The allies proposed ‘à se concerter avec l'Autriche, l'Angleterre, et la Suéde pour faire accéder le Danemark à cette convention.’ These words clearly left it open to the allies to use force in bringing Denmark to their side. It should further be noticed, as bearing on one part of our inquiry, that the Courts of Russia and Prussia bound themselves never to dissociate their fortunes but to act in the closest accord. The terms of the Convention of Bartenstein were forwarded to Downing Street by Mr. George Jackson, British chargé d'affaires at the Court of Prussia, and received a hearty welcome from Canning.

The policy pursued by George I. in the north of Europe in the first years of his reign has not received much attention from historians, at least in England. The few paragraphs which authors of such merit as Lord Mahon or J. R. Green allot to the subject show that they did not think it worth while, or were not able, to inform themselves of the facts. They record, rightly enough, that George's own principal purpose was to add the Swedish provinces of Bremen and Verden to his electoral dominions, and they attribute to Charles XII. the design of invading Great Britain in revenge, with the object of placing James III. upon the throne. Though he does not appear to have ever seriously contemplated such a thing, the belief that he held it in view was, after the Jacobite rebellion, genuine and general. But nothing is said of the pressing importance to Great Britain of the Baltic commerce, with which Charles interfered and Peter the Great seemed likely to interfere. This it was solely that gave George I. the services of a British squadron in the Baltic in 1715, and this the principal cause of the estrangement between Great Britain and Russia, which lasted for over twenty years. The object of the present paper is to present a narrative of events up to the death of Charles XII., from which conclusions may be drawn. Details may be avoided, as these have appeared in papers by the author published in the ‘English Historical Review.’

The beginnings of the alliance between England and Portugal are to be sought almost at the beginning of the latter's history as an independent kingdom. Though the distance between these two countries must have seemed greater in the Middle Ages than it does now, they were very soon brought into friendly relationship through the crusading energy of England in the twelfth century, and the convenient position of Portugal as a stopping-place for ships sailing to the Holy Land, which made it possible for the English to help the early Portuguese kings in their long struggle with the Moors.

In an Annual Address delivered two years ago the late President of this Society took occasion to lament the neglect in Great Britain of the serious and scientific study of the history of Europe since the close of the Napoleonic wars; and unfortunately there cannot be any doubt as to the full justice of his complaint. It applies in some measure to the history of our own country, but it is especially true of the development of the States of Continental Europe. To this neglect many facts bear witness. There is first the paucity of textbooks; we have as yet in English no good general history of the period, or even of a part of it, on any comprehensive plan; the only large work is that by Fyffe, which is incomplete in many respects, and has other defects; and the various smaller books, though some of them have real merit, are all very far from adequate. Both Fyffe and the lesser books, for example, are extremely weak in regard to those economic forces and policies which have been of such vast importance throughout the century: to take only a single illustration, none of the writers seem to have had any conception of the true relation of the economic policy of the Zollverein to the political problem of the positions of Prussia and the Austrian Empire in the Germanic Confederation, or of the extent to which that policy was manipulated for political purposes. This tendency to ignore or underestimate the play of economic forces is indeed characteristic of most that has been written in English on Continental history since 1815, though in face of the great amount of work done in this field by foreign investigators, particularly in Germany, the attitude of the English writers is scarcely excusable.

The idea that at the Restoration the Government of Charles II. wantonly attacked a Church that otherwise would have remained at peace and in the enjoyment of hardly-won liberties is not in accordance with facts. The Church was divided into two warring factions—that of the Remonstrants or Protesters and that of the Resolutioners. The former were the extreme Covenant party and had as their symbol the Remonstrance of the Western army after the Battle of Dunbar, in which they refused to fight any longer in the cause of Charles II. The Resolutioners were the more moderate party, which accepted him as a Covenanted King, and they derived their name from their support of certain Resolutions passed in the Parliament and General Assembly for the admission of Royalists to office under certain conditions. The Protesters—who numbered perhaps about a third of the Presbyterian clergy—claimed, probably not without reason, to be more religious than their opponents. They were very eager to purge the Church of all those whose opinions they regarded as unsatisfactory, and to fill up vacant charges with those who uttered their shibboleths. In their opposition to the King they naturally drew somewhat closely into sympathy with the party of Cromwell, though, with the fatal skill in splitting hairs which has afflicted so many of their nation, they were able to differentiate their political principles from what they called ‘English errors.’ The Resolutioners, on the other hand, adhered steadily to the cause of Charles II., and came under the disfavour of the Government of the Commonwealth for their sympathy with the insurrection under Glencairn and Middleton which had been so troublesome to the English authorities.

A popular movement like the Rebellion of the Earls can always be treated from two distinct standpoints, the national and the local. Hitherto, the Rebellion has always been treated from the national standpoint, with the result that, so far as I am aware, there is no book dealing with the Rebellion alone. All accounts of it must be sought in general histories such as those named below. I would specially mention the chapter in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ in which Mr. Law has anticipated all the conclusions which I have been able to draw from my own examination of the sources. The local point of view, on the other hand, has been almost wholly ignored, and affords more opportunity for investigation; to it, therefore, I have confined myself. I cannot pretend that the essay is exhaustive, as circumstances have prevented me from investigating the local sources, such as Corporation and Town Records, Parish Registers and the like. Nevertheless, this contribution may not be wholly without value, since it is based on a careful study of the material preserved at the Public Record Office and in the British Museum.