But whatever judgment we may be disposed to form as to the political necessity of leaving Spain and America in the possession of Philip, it is impossible to justify the course of that negotiation which ended in the peace of Utrecht. It was at best a dangerous and inauspicious concession, demanding every compensation that could be devised, and which the circumstances of the war entitled us to require. France was still our formidable enemy; the ambition of Louis was still to be dreaded, his intrigues to be suspected. That an English minister should have thrown himself into the arms of this enemy at the first overture of negotiation; that he should have renounced advantages upon which he might have insisted; that he should have restored Lille, and almost attempted to procure the sacrifice of Tournay; that throughout the whole correspondence and in all personal interviews with Torcy he should have shown the triumphant Queen of Great Britain more eager for peace than her vanquished adversary; that the two courts should have been virtually conspiring against those allies, without whom we had bound ourselves to enter on no treaty; that we should have withdrawn our troops in the midst of a campaign, and even seized upon the towns of our confederates while we left them exposed to be overcome by a superior force; that we should have first deceived those confederates by the most direct falsehood in denying our clandestine treaty, and then dictated to them its acceptance, are facts so disgraceful to Bolingbroke, and in somewhat a less degree to Oxford, that they can hardly be palliated by establishing the expediency of the treaty itself.
Intrigues of the Jacobites.—For several years after the treaty of Ryswick the intrigues of ambitious and discontented statesmen, and of a misled faction in favour of the exiled family, grew much colder; the old age of James and the infancy of his son being alike incompatible with their success. The jacobites yielded a sort of provisional allegiance to the daughter of their king, deeming her, as it were, a regent in the heir's minority, and willing to defer the consideration of his claim till he should be competent to make it, or to acquiesce in her continuance upon the throne, if she could be induced to secure his reversion.[318] Meanwhile, under the name of tories and high-church men, they carried on a more dangerous war by sapping the bulwarks of the revolution settlement. The disaffected clergy poured forth sermons and libels, to impugn the principles of the whigs or traduce their characters. Twice a year especially, on the 30th of January and 29th of May, they took care that every stroke upon rebellion and usurpation should tell against the expulsion of the Stuarts and the Hanover succession. They inveighed against the dissenters and the toleration. They set up pretences of loyalty towards the queen, descanting sometimes on her hereditary right, in order to throw a slur on the settlement. They drew a transparent veil over their designs, which might screen them from prosecution, but could not impose, nor was meant to impose, on the reader. Among these the most distinguished was Leslie, author of a periodical sheet called the Rehearsal, printed weekly from 1704 to 1708; and as he, though a non-juror, and unquestionable jacobite, held only the same language as Sacheverell, and others who affected obedience to the government, we cannot much be deceived in assuming that their views were entirely the same.[319]
The court of St. Germains, in the first years of the queen, preserved a secret connection with Godolphin and Marlborough, though justly distrustful of their sincerity; nor is it by any means clear that they made any strong professions.[320] Their evident determination to reduce the power of France, their approximation towards the whigs, the averseness of the duchess to jacobite principles, taught at length that unfortunate court how little it had to expect from such ancient friends. The Scotch jacobites, on the other hand, were eager for the young king's immediate restoration; and their assurances finally produced his unsuccessful expedition to the coast in 1708.[321] This alarmed the queen, who at least had no thoughts of giving up any part of her dominions, and probably exasperated the two ministers.[322] Though Godolphin's partiality to the Stuart cause was always suspected, the proofs of his intercourse with their emissaries are not so strong as against Marlborough; who, so late as 1711, declared himself more positively than he seems hitherto to have done in favour of their restoration.[323] But the extreme selfishness and treachery of his character makes it difficult to believe that he had any further view than to secure himself in the event of a revolution which he judged probable. His interest, which was always his deity, did not lie in that direction; and his great sagacity must have perceived it.
Just alarm for the Hanover succession.—A more promising overture had by this time been made to the young claimant from an opposite quarter. Mr. Harley, about the end of 1710, sent the Abbé Gaultier to Marshal Berwick (natural son of James II. by Marlborough's sister), with authority to treat about the restoration; Anne of course retaining the Crown for her life, and securities being given for the national religion and liberties. The conclusion of peace was a necessary condition. The jacobites in the English parliament were directed in consequence to fall in with the court, which rendered it decidedly superior. Harley promised to send over in the next year a plan for carrying that design into effect. But neither at that time, nor during the remainder of the queen's life, did this dissembling minister take any further measures, though still in strict connection with that party at home, and with the court of St. Germains.[324] It was necessary, he said, to proceed gently, to make the army their own, to avoid suspicions which would be fatal. It was manifest that the course of his administration was wholly inconsistent with his professions; the friends of the house of Stuart felt that he betrayed, though he did not delude them; but it was the misfortune of this minister, or rather the just and natural reward of crooked counsels, that those he meant to serve could neither believe in his friendship, nor forgive his appearances of enmity. It is doubtless not easy to pronounce on the real intentions of men so destitute of sincerity as Harley and Marlborough; but, in believing the former favourable to the protestant succession, which he had so eminently contributed to establish, we accede to the judgment of those contemporaries who were best able to form one, and especially of the very jacobites with whom he tampered. And this is so powerfully confirmed by most of his public measures, his averseness to the high tories, and their consequent hatred of him, his irreconcilable disagreement with those of his colleagues who looked most to St. Germains, his frequent attempts to renew a connection with the whigs, his contempt of the jacobite creed of government, and the little prospect he could have had of retaining power on such a revolution, that, so far at least as may be presumed from what has hitherto become public, there seems no reason for counting the Earl of Oxford among those from whom the house of Hanover had any enmity to apprehend.[325]
The pretender, meanwhile, had friends in the tory government more sincere probably and zealous than Oxford. In the year 1712 Lord Bolingbroke, the Duke of Buckingham, president of the council, and the Duke of Ormond, were engaged in this connection.[326] The last of these, being in the command of the army, little glory as that brought him, might become an important auxiliary. Harcourt, the chancellor, though the proofs are not, I believe, so direct, has always been reckoned in the same interest. Several of the leading Scots peers, with little disguise, avowed their adherence to it; especially the Duke of Hamilton, who, luckily perhaps for the kingdom, lost his life in a duel, at the moment when he was setting out on an embassy to France. The rage expressed by that faction at his death betrays the hopes they had entertained from him. A strong phalanx of tory members, called the October Club, though by no means entirely jacobite, were chiefly influenced by those who were such. In the new parliament of 1713, the queen's precarious health excited the Stuart partisans to press forward with more zeal. The masque was more than half drawn aside; and, vainly urging the ministry to fulfil their promises while yet in time, they cursed the insidious cunning of Harley and the selfish cowardice of the queen. Upon her they had for some years relied. Lady Masham, the bosom favourite, was entirely theirs; and every word, every look of the sovereign, had been anxiously observed, in the hope of some indication that she would take the road which affection and conscience, as they fondly argued, must dictate. But, whatever may have been the sentiments of Anne, her secret was never divulged, nor is there, as I apprehend, however positively the contrary is sometimes asserted, any decisive evidence whence we may infer that she even intended her brother's restoration.[327] The weakest of mankind have generally an instinct of self-preservation which leads them right, and perhaps more than stronger minds possess; and Anne could scarcely help perceiving that her own deposition from the throne would be the natural consequence of once admitting the reversionary right of one whose claim was equally good to the possession. The assertors of hereditary descent could acquiesce in her usurpation no longer than they found it necessary for their object; if her life should be protracted to an ordinary duration, it was almost certain that Scotland first, and afterwards England, would be wrested from her impotent grasp. Yet, though I believe the queen to have been sensible of this, it is impossible to pronounce with certainty that either through pique against the house of Hanover, or inability to resist her own counsellors, she might not have come into the scheme of altering the succession.
But, if neither the queen nor her lord treasurer were inclined to take that vigorous course which one party demanded, they at least did enough to raise just alarm in the other; and it seems strange to deny that the protestant succession was in danger. As Lord Oxford's ascendancy diminished, the signs of impending revolution became less equivocal. Adherents of the house of Stuart were placed in civil and military trust; an Irish agent of the pretender was received in the character of envoy from the court of Spain; the most audacious manifestations of disaffection were overlooked.[328] Several even in parliament spoke with contempt and aversion of the house of Hanover.[329] It was surely not unreasonable in the whig party to meet these assaults of the enemy with something beyond the ordinary weapons of an opposition. They affected no apprehensions that it was absurd to entertain. Those of the opposite faction, who wished well to the protestant interest, and were called Hanoverian tories, came over to their side, and joined them on motions that the succession was in danger.[330] No one hardly, who either hoped or dreaded the consequences, had any doubts upon this score; and it is only a few moderns who have assumed the privilege of setting aside the persuasion of contemporaries upon a subject which contemporaries were best able to understand.[331] Are we then to censure the whigs for urging on the elector of Hanover, who, by a strange apathy or indifference, seemed negligent of the great prize reserved for him; or is the bold step of demanding a writ of summons for the electoral prince as Duke of Cambridge to pass for a factious insult on the queen, because, in her imbecility, she was leaving the Crown to be snatched at by the first comer, even if she were not, as they suspected, in some conspiracy to bestow it on a proscribed heir?[332] I am much inclined to believe, that the great majority of the nation were in favour of the protestant succession; but, if the princes of the house of Brunswick had seemed to retire from the contest, it might have been impracticable to resist a predominant faction in the council and in parliament; especially if the son of James, listening to the remonstrances of his English adherents, could have been induced to renounce a faith which, in the eyes of too many, was the sole pretext for his exclusion.[333]
Accession of George I.—The queen's death, which came at last perhaps rather more quickly than was foreseen, broke for ever the fair prospects of her family. George I., unknown and absent, was proclaimed without a single murmur, as if the Crown had passed in the most regular descent. But this was a momentary calm. The jacobite party, recovering from the first consternation, availed itself of its usual arms, and of those with which the new king injudiciously supplied it. Many of the tories who would have acquiesced in the act of settlement, seem to have looked on a leading share in the administration as belonging of right to what was called the church party, and complained of the formation of a ministry on the whig principle. In later times also, it has been not uncommon to censure George I. for governing, as it is called, by a faction. Nothing can be more unreasonable than this reproach. Was he to select those as his advisers, who had been, as we know and as he believed, in a conspiracy with his competitor? Was Lord Oxford, even if the king thought him faithful, capable of uniting with any public men, hated as he was on each side? Were not the tories as truly a faction as their adversaries, and as intolerant during their own power?[334] Was there not, above all, a danger that, if some of one denomination were drawn by pique and disappointment into the ranks of the jacobites, the whigs, on the other hand, so ungratefully and perfidiously recompensed for their arduous services to the house of Hanover, might think all royalty irreconcilable with the principles of freedom, and raise up a republican party, of which the scattered elements were sufficiently discernible in the nation?[335] The exclusion indeed of the whigs would have been so monstrous both in honour and policy, that the censure has generally fallen on their alleged monopoly of public offices. But the mischiefs of a disunited, hybrid ministry had been sufficiently manifest in the two last reigns; nor could George, a stranger to his people and their constitution, have undertaken without ruin that most difficult task of balancing parties and persons, to which the great mind of William had proved unequal. Nor is it true that the tories, as such, were proscribed; those who chose to serve the court met with court favour; and in the very outset the few men of sufficient eminence, who had testified their attachment to the succession, received equitable rewards; but, most happily for himself and the kingdom, most reasonably according to the principles on which alone his throne could rest, the first prince of the house of Brunswick gave a decisive preponderance in his favour to Walpole and Townshend above Harcourt and Bolingbroke.
Great disaffection in the kingdom.—The strong symptoms of disaffection which broke out in a few months after the king's accession, and which can be ascribed to no grievance, unless the formation of a whig ministry was to be termed one, prove the taint of the late times to have been deep seated and extensive.[336] The clergy, in very many instances, were a curse rather than a blessing to those over whom they were set; and the people, while they trusted that from those polluted fountains they could draw the living waters of truth, became the dupes of factious lies and sophistry. Thus encouraged, the heir of the Stuarts landed in Scotland; and the spirit of that people being in a great measure jacobite, and very generally averse to the union, he met with such success as, had their independence subsisted, would probably have established him on the throne. But Scotland was now doomed to wait on the fortunes of her more powerful ally; and, on his invasion of England, the noisy partisans of hereditary right discredited their faction by its cowardice. Few rose in arms to support the rebellion, compared with those who desired its success, and did not blush to see the gallant savages of the Highlands shed their blood that a supine herd of priests and country gentlemen might enjoy the victory. The severity of the new government after the rebellion has been often blamed; but I know not whether, according to the usual rules of policy, it can be proved that the execution of two peers and thirty other persons, taken with arms in flagrant rebellion, was an unwarrantable excess of punishment. There seems a latent insinuation in those who have argued on the other side, as if the jacobite rebellion, being founded on an opinion of right, was more excusable than an ordinary treason—a proposition which it would not have been quite safe for the reigning dynasty to acknowledge. Clemency however is the standing policy of constitutional governments, as severity is of despotism; and, if the ministers of George I. might have extended it to part of the inferior sufferers (for surely those of higher rank were the first to be selected) with safety to their master, they would have done well in sparing him the odium that attends all political punishments.[337]
Impeachment of tory ministers.—It will be admitted on all hands, at the present day, that the charge of high treason in the impeachments against Oxford and Bolingbroke was an intemperate excess of resentment at their scandalous dereliction of the public honour and interest. The danger of a sanguinary revenge inflamed by party spirit is so tremendous that the worst of men ought perhaps to escape rather than suffer by a retrospective, or, what is no better, a constructive, extension of the law. The particular charge of treason was, that in the negotiation for peace they had endeavoured to procure the city of Tournay for the King of France; which was maintained to be an adhering to the queen's enemies within the statute of Edward III.[338] But, as this construction could hardly be brought within the spirit of that law, and the motive was certainly not treasonable or rebellious, it would have been incomparably more constitutional to treat so gross a breach of duty as a misdemeanour of the highest kind. This angry temper of the Commons led ultimately to the abandonment of the whole impeachment against Lord Oxford; the upper house, though it had committed Oxford to the Tower, which seemed to prejudge the question as to the treasonable character of the imputed offence, having two years afterwards resolved that the charge of treason should be first determined, before they would enter on the articles of less importance; a decision with which the Commons were so ill satisfied that they declined to go forward with the prosecution. The resolution of the Peers was hardly conformable to precedent, to analogy, or to the dignity of the House of Commons, nor will it perhaps be deemed binding on any future occasion; but the ministers prudently suffered themselves to be beaten rather than aggravate the fever of the people by a prosecution so full of delicate and hazardous questions.[339]
One of these questions, and by no means the least important, would doubtless have arisen upon a mode of defence alleged by the Earl of Oxford in the house, when the articles of impeachment were brought up. "My lords," he said, "if ministers of state, acting by the immediate commands of their sovereign, are afterwards to be made accountable for their proceedings, it may, one day or other, be the case of all the members of this august assembly."[340] It was indeed undeniable that the queen had been very desirous of peace, and a party, as it were, to all the counsels that tended to it. Though it was made a charge against the impeached lords, that the instructions to sign the secret preliminaries of 1711 with M. Mesnager, on the part of France, were not under the great seal, nor countersigned by any minister, they were certainly under the queen's signet, and had all the authority of her personal command. This must have brought on the yet unsettled and very delicate question of ministerial responsibility in matters where the sovereign has interposed his own command; a question better reserved, it might then appear, for the loose generalities of debate than to be determined with the precision of criminal law. Each party, in fact, had in its turn made use of the queen's personal authority as a shield; the whigs availed themselves of it to parry the attack made on their ministry, after its fall, for an alleged mismanagement of the war in Spain before the battle of Almanza;[341] and the modern constitutional theory was by no means so established in public opinion as to bear the rude brunt of a legal argument. Anne herself, like all her predecessors, kept in her own hands the reins of power; jealous, as such feeble characters usually are, of those in whom she was forced to confide (especially after the ungrateful return of the Duchess of Marlborough for the most affectionate condescension), and obstinate in her judgment, from the very consciousness of its weakness, she took a share in all business, frequently presided in meetings of the cabinet, and sometimes gave directions without their advice.[342] The defence set up by Lord Oxford would undoubtedly not be tolerated at present, if alleged in direct terms, by either house of parliament; however it may sometimes be deemed a sufficient apology for a minister, by those whose bias is towards a compliance with power, to insinuate that he must either obey against his conscience, or resign against his will.