What galled Marlborough as much as anything was that he had been in the House of Lords strongly supporting one of the most illiberal attempts of the Tories to destroy the effect of the Act of Toleration. The extreme Tories regarded the Church as entitled to confer all favours, and they were determined to give it a power by which all corporations and elections should be thrown into the hands of the Government. For this purpose Mr. Bromley, Mr. Annesley, and Mr. St. John, who, as a man of notoriously unorthodox principles, ought at least to have been tolerant, brought in the Occasional Conformity Bill. They complained that Dissenters and other disaffected persons took the oaths, and often went again to the Dissenting meetings; that this was a gross piece of hypocrisy, and left the Church exposed to much danger from them. They proposed, therefore, to insist that all who had taken the Sacrament and test for offices of trust, or for the magistracy of corporations, and afterwards went to any meeting of the Dissenters, should forfeit their employments, pay a fine of one hundred pounds, and five pounds for every day that they continued to hold their office after having been at a Dissenters' meeting, as well as be disabled from holding any other employment till after a year's conformity. The Bill was carried in the Tory Commons by an overwhelming majority; but it was as strongly opposed in the Lords, where the Whigs were not disposed to pull down the greatest trophy of their legislation. The Bishops generally voted against the Bill, and Burnet was extremely active against it. Probably few of them were actuated by a sense of the monstrosity of the Test and Corporation Acts, which compelled all to take the Sacrament, whether opposed to it in that form or not, and thus shut out the honest and pious, and let in those who had neither honesty nor religion. But they saw that it would again let loose all the detestable race of spies and informers from which the country was now happily free, and would, in reality, only injure instead of benefiting the Church, by making her an object of general hatred. The Tories themselves affected great veneration for the Toleration Act, whilst they would thus have stifled all toleration.

The queen and the whole Court exerted themselves to force the Bill through the Upper House, as they had done that for the prince's salary. Marlborough argued vehemently for it, but the Whig lords hit upon a way of defeating it by seeming to comply. They agreed to its passing on condition that all who took the test, and then went to conventicles, should simply be deprived of their employments and be fined twenty pounds. They knew that the Commons would not allow the slightest interference of the Lords with the money part of the Bill, and this proved to be the case. The Lords searched their rolls, and showed numerous cases in which they had altered fines, but the Commons refused to admit any such power. A conference in the Painted Chamber was held, but with a like result, and after long contention the Bill was, happily for the nation, dropped.

A Bill was next brought in to allow another year of grace to all who had not taken the oath abjuring the pretended Prince of Wales. The Tories contended that the Jacobite party had now come over to the queen; but it was shown on the other side that this was but a specious deception; that the agents of St. Germains were in as full activity as ever; were constantly coming and going; and whilst they appeared to favour the queen, it was only to get as strong a party as possible into the House, eventually to abolish both the abjuration and the Protestant Succession Bill: that to this end they now advised all persons to take the Abjuration Bill, and to be able to get into Parliament or power. The Bill was carried in the Commons; but the Lords again tacked two clauses to it, one declaring it high treason to endeavour to alter the succession as settled in the Princess Sophia, and the other to impose the oath on the Irish. These were not money clauses; whoever refused them must appear disinclined to the Protestant succession. The Commons were completely entrapped, and, to the surprise of everybody, they accepted the clauses, and thus the Bill, which was originally favourable to the Jacobites, became much more rigid against them. The queen sent the Lord Keeper, on the 27th of February, 1703, to prorogue Parliament.

Lord Rochester was now entirely removed from the queen's councils. His near relationship to the queen, and his being accounted the champion of the Church, made him presume in the Council, where he was blustering and overbearing. He was disappointed in not being placed at the head of the Treasury, and quarrelled continually with Lord Godolphin. He had now voted against Marlborough's grant of five thousand pounds a year, and thus incurred the mortal hatred of the all-powerful Lady Marlborough. It was clear that Rochester must give way, or the Council must be rent by continual feuds. He was opposed to the war—another cause of hostility from the Marlboroughs—to whom it was money, fame, and everything. He received such intimations from the queen as caused him to retire into the country in disgust. As he refused all summonses to attend the Council, her Majesty ordered him to proceed to his government in Ireland, where his presence was much needed. He replied with great insolence that he would not go to Ireland, and the post of Lord-Lieutenant was conferred on the Duke of Ormond. Still declining to attend the Council, the queen ordered that he should no more be summoned, and thus terminated Anne's connection with her relatives by the mother's side. The elder brother of Rochester, Lord Clarendon, had been excluded the Court for refusing the abjuration of the pretended Prince of Wales, and his son, Lord Cornbury, little better than an idiot, was sent to govern the North American colonies, that he might be out of the way, a system of colonial management by which these colonies were at length entirely estranged. Rochester survived this disgrace but a very few weeks.

It was proposed between the Emperor of Germany and the Allies that the campaign of 1703 should be opened with effect, and by measures which should go far to paralyse France. The Archduke Charles, the Emperor's second son, was to declare himself King of Spain, to propose for the hand of the Infanta of Portugal, and to proceed to that country to prosecute his claims on Spain by the assistance of the English and Dutch fleets. Meanwhile the Emperor promised to take the field with such a force as to drive the Elector of Bavaria, the active and able ally of France, out of his dominions. But Louis, as usual, was too rapid in his movements for the slow Germans. He ordered Marshal Villars, who lay with thirty thousand men at Strasburg, to pass the Rhine, and advance into Bavaria to the support of the Elector. The war was thus skilfully diverted by Louis from the Rhine into the very neighbourhood of the Emperor. On the other hand, Marlborough, who was the soul of the war on the Lower Rhine, had been detained by his exertions to counteract the efforts of Louis XIV. in another quarter. Insurrections had broken out amongst Louis's Protestant subjects in the Cevennes, who had been barbarously oppressed. Marlborough, who cared more for the paralysing of Louis than for the interests of Protestantism, strongly proposed in the Council that assistance should be sent to the mountaineers of the Cevennes. This was fighting Louis with his own weapons, who was exciting insurrection in Hungary and Bohemia amongst the subjects of the Emperor. Nottingham and others of the Council as strongly opposed this measure, on the principle of not exciting subjects against their legitimate sovereign; but Marlborough prevailed. Arms and ammunition were forwarded to the Cevennes, and direct communications were ordered to be opened with the insurgents, which would have compelled Louis to detain a large force for the subjugation of these rebels, which otherwise would have gone to the Rhine; but these aids never reached the unfortunate mountaineers.

Marlborough reached the Hague on the 17th of March, much earlier still than William used to arrive there. Nor had the war paused for his arrival. He had stimulated the Prussians to be in action much earlier. In February they had reduced the fortress of the Rhineberg, and then proceeded to blockade Guelders, the last place in the power of France on the frontiers of Spanish Guelderland. It was fortunate, for the unity of command, that Athlone and Saarbrück, Marlborough's jealous rivals, were both dead; so that now Marlborough had only the Dutch camp deputies as clogs on his movements, but they were quite sufficient often to neutralise his most spirited projects. He found Villeroi and Boufflers posted on the frontiers of the Spanish Netherlands, and his design was to attack and drive them out of Flanders and Brabant. But here, in the very commencement, he was obliged by the States-General to give up his own views to theirs. They desired an immediate attack on Bonn, persuading themselves that the Elector of Cologne would rather capitulate than risk the ruin of the town. Marlborough went reluctantly but not inertly into this plan, foreseeing that it would waste much precious time, and prevent him from falling on Villeroi and Boufflers at the right moment, when the attempt to support the Elector of Bavaria had drawn many of their forces away into Germany. He was the more chagrined the more he saw of the want of energy in the Allies. He proceeded to Nimeguen to arrange with Cohorn the plan of the siege of Bonn. He visited and inspected the garrisons at Venloo, Ruremond, Maestricht, and the other places which he took in the previous campaign on the Meuse. Arriving at Cologne, he found preparations made for a siege, but in a most negligent manner; and Cohorn especially excited his disgust by proposing to defer the siege of this place till the end of summer. But Marlborough knew too well the necessity of preventing an attack from that quarter; ordered the place to be invested, and then marched on Bonn with forty battalions, sixty squadrons, and a hundred pieces of artillery. The trenches were opened on the 3rd of May, and it was assaulted from three different quarters at once; on one side by the forces under the hereditary prince of Hesse-Cassel, on another by those under Cohorn, and on the third by Lieutenant-General Fagel. The city capitulated on the 15th, and the commander, the Marquis D'Allegré, and his garrison were conducted to Luxemburg. During the siege continually arrived the news of the successes of the Elector of Bavaria, and the failures of the Imperial troops; and Villeroi and Boufflers advanced, took Tongres, and menaced the Allies from that quarter with forty thousand men.

H.R.H. THE PRINCESS ANNE OF DENMARK, AFTERWARDS QUEEN OF ENGLAND.

From the Painting by W. Wissing and J. Vandervaart.

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