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At the time of which I am now speaking, 1703, for I forgot to relate what follows in its proper place, forgers of writings were in the ascendant, and became so common, that a chamber was established composed of councillors of state and others, solely to judge the accusations which this sort of criminals gave rise to.
Two years before, in 1703, the Scotch Parliament had passed an Act of Security, the object of which was to proclaim a different sovereign from that of England, unless Scotland should be guaranteed her own religious establishment and her laws. Now this year, 1705, the Parliament in London placed severe restrictions on the Scotch trade with England, and ordered the Border towns to be fortified.
To prevent Russia and Saxony from uniting against the new king, Charles carried the war into Saxony, and forced Augustus, in the Peace of Altranstaedt, to renounce his claim to the Polish crown, and to surrender Patkul, the rebel, who had become a subject of Russia, whom he put to death with circumstances of cruelty. In 1703 Peter laid the foundations of the new city of St. Petersburg.
It had another claim to slight distinction as being the resort of Dr. John Armstrong, the poet of the "Art of Preserving Health," and a man so generally unsociable that one acquaintance described him as having a rooted aversion against the whole human race, except a few friends, and they were dead! Judging from a poetical allusion of 1703, Tom's coffee-house was at that time a political resort.
After passing some months in the United Provinces, he returned about the close of the year 1703 to England. He was there cordially received by his friends, and introduced by them into the Kitcat Club, a society in which were collected all the various talents and accomplishments which then gave lustre to the Whig party.
I will only add here that her return took place in due time; and that her influence became more paramount than ever. In relating what happened to Madame des Ursins upon her return to Spain, I have carried the narrative into the year 1705. It is not necessary to retrace our steps. Towards the end of 1703 Courtin died. He had early shone at the Council, and had been made Intendant of Picardy.
To the day his last illness began, her husband never went out without her going to the window to watch him till he was out of sight of those kind, bright, beautiful eyes, through which shone as beautiful a soul as any that ever made the earth a better and a happier place for having been in it. Grisell Home was Lady Grisell Baillie when, in 1703, her mother died.
"But that, in the year 1703, when a new assembly was to be chosen, which, by the constitution, is chosen once in two years, the election was managed with very great partiality and injustice, and all sorts of people, even aliens, Jews, servants, common sailors and negroes, were admitted to vote at elections: That, in the said assembly, an act was passed to incapacitate every person from being a member of any General Assembly that should be chosen for the time to come, unless he had taken the sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the church of England; whereby all Protestant Dissenters are made incapable of being in the said assembly; and yet, by the same act, all persons who shall take an oath that they have not received the sacrament in any dissenting congregation for one year past, though they have not received it in the church of England, are made capable of fitting in the said assembly: That this act was passed in an illegal manner, by the governor calling the assembly to meet the 26th of April, when it then stood prorogued to the 10th of May following: That it hath been ratified by the Lords Proprietors in England, who refused to hear what could be offered against it, and contrary to the petition of one hundred and seventy of the chief inhabitants of the colony, and of several eminent merchants trading hither, though the commons of the same assembly quickly after passed another bill to repeal it, which the upper house rejected, and the governor dissolved the house.
The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade.
George De Benneville was the son of a Huguenot, who fled to England from persecution, and was employed at court by King William. His mother was a Granville, and died soon after his birth in 1703.
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