and of
the Forces in Scotland..... The Rebels undertake the Siege
of Fort-William_

The discontents of England were artfully inflamed by anti-ministerial
writers, who not only exaggerated the burdens of the people, and drew
frightful pictures of the distress and misery which, they said,
impended over the nation, but also employed the arts of calumny and
misrepresentation, to excite a jealousy and national quarrel between
the English and Hanoverians. They affirmed that in the last campaign the
British general had been neglected and despised; while the councils
of foreign officers, greatly inferior to him in capacity, quality, and
reputation, had been followed, to the prejudice of the common cause;
that the British troops sustained daily insults from their own
mercenaries, who were indulged with particular marks of royal favour;
that the sovereign himself appeared at Dettingen in a Hanoverian
scarf; and that his electoral troops were of very little service in that
engagement. Though the most material of these assertions were certainly
false, they made a strong impression on the minds of the people, already
irritated by the enormous expense of a continental war maintained for
the interest of Germany. When the parliament met in the beginning
of December, a motion was made in the house of peers by the earl of
Sandwich, for an address, beseeching his majesty to discontinue the
Hanoverian troops in British pay, in order to remove the popular
discontent, and stop the murmurs of the English troops abroad. He was
supported by the duke of Bedford, the earl of Chesterfield, and all the
leaders in the opposition, who did not fail to enumerate and insist upon
all the circumstances we have mentioned. They moreover observed, that
better troops might be hired at a smaller expense; that it would be a
vain and endless task to exhaust the national treasure in enriching a
hungry and barren electorate; that the popular dissatisfaction against
these mercenaries was so general, and raised to such violence, as
nothing but their dismission could appease; that if such hirelings
should be thus continued from year to year, they might at last become
a burden entailed upon the nation, and be made subservient, under some
ambitious prince, to purposes destructive of British liberty. These were
the suggestions of spleen and animosity: for, granting the necessity of
a land war, the Hanoverians were the most natural allies and auxiliaries
which