No measure could possibly be more repugnant to Oxford’s declared convictions than the famous ‘Bill against Occasional Conformity,’ brought into the House of Lords by the Earl of Nottingham, at the close of the year 1711. It was part of a policy to which his very nature was antagonistic. But he was in vain entreated, by men who had been his life-long adherents, to oppose it. The passage of that Bill was the price, and, as it seems, the only price for which Nottingham and his band of followers would give their support to the foreign policy of the Government.

The growth of the internal dissensions in the administration kept pace with the growth of its external perils. Personal objects of the pettiest kind were made occasions of quarrel. In the summer of 1712, St. John, who had set his heart on the restoration in himself of that family Earldom of Bolingbroke which in the previous year had become extinct on the death of a distant relative, was made a Viscount. On the announcement of his creation he burst into open menaces of vengeance against the Treasurer, and renewed them with greater violence towards the close of the year, when he found himself excluded from another coveted dignity. An election of Knights of the Garter made, to use Lord Oxford’s own words about it, ‘a new disturbance which is too well remembered.’ Just as the breach with Bolingbroke had become plainly irreconcilable, the Treasurer found a new and equally bitter enemy in another old friend. He defeated a rapacious attempt made by Lady Masham on the Treasury. The first offence in that kind would never have been forgiven. But ere long it was repeated.

In both Houses of Parliament, Oxford’s veiled and vacillating policy was fast alienating men who had long supported him, and who to the last retained more confidence in him than in his brilliant rival. The crisis, however, was brought about, not by the increased strength of Parliamentary opposition, but by bed-chamber intrigues, such as those which he had himself stooped to employ six years before against Godolphin and Marlborough.

Meanwhile the Minister played into the hands of his opponents by exhibiting great irresolution. He dallied and procrastinated with urgent business. He relaxed in his attention to the Queen. At an unwary moment he even gave her personal offence, the results of which were none the less bitter for the absence of design. He showed more concern about comparatively distant perils than about those which were close at hand.

At the beginning of 1714 the best informed of the Jacobites had become fully convinced that Oxford was their enemy. They saw, to repeat the words of the Duke of Berwick, that he had been only keeping them in play. |Oxford’s correspondence with the Court of Hanover.| But at the Court of Hanover he was far from being regarded as an assured friend. Over-subtlety had been rewarded with almost universal distrust.

1714, April.

When in April of that year he sent to Hanover renewed protestations of fidelity, expressed in terms of unusual energy, they were looked upon by some of the Elector’s advisers as mere professions.[[37]] If now read side by side with contemporary documents, drawn up by secret emissaries of the Pretender, they acquire a stamp of sincerity which it is hard to doubt.

To Baron Wassenaer Duyvenworde Lord Oxford wrote thus:—‘I do in the most solemn manner assure you that, next to the Queen, I am entirely and unalterably devoted to the interests of His Electoral Highness of Hanover.... I am ready to give him all the proofs of my attachment to his interest, and to set in a true light the state of this country; for it will be very unfortunate for so great a Prince to be only Prince over a party, which can never last long in England.’ He then goes on to add that the one thing which would, under existing circumstances, imperil the Hanover succession is the sending into England of any member of that family without the Queen’s consent. Such an act would, in his judgment, ‘change the dispute to the Crown and the Successor, whereas now it is between the House of Hanover and the Popish Pretender.’

Oxford to Wassenaer; MS. Sloane, 4107. (B. M.)

He repeated the advice in another and not less urgent letter, after the occurrence of the visit made to the Lord Chancellor Harcourt by the Hanoverian Resident, to ask for a writ of summons for the Duke of Cambridge. But he also advised Queen Anne to consent to the issue of such a writ. He was opposed by a majority of his colleagues, under the leadership of Bolingbroke, as well as by the persistent unwillingness of the Queen herself.