[308] Coxe's Marlborough, i. 483. Mr. Smith was chosen speaker by 248 to 205, a slender majority; but some of the ministerial party seem to have thought him too much a whig. Id. 485; Parl. Hist. 450. The whig newspapers were long hostile to Marlborough.
[309] Burnet rather gently slides over these jealousies between Godolphin and the whig junto; and Tindal, his mere copyist, is not worth mentioning. But Cunningham's history, and still more the letters published in Coxe's Life of Marlborough, show better the state of party intrigues; which the Parliamentary History also illustrates, as well as many pamphlets of the time. Somerville has carefully compiled as much as was known when he wrote.
[310] Parl. Hist. vi. 4.
[311] Nov. 27; Parl. Hist. 477.
[312] Coxe's Marlborough, i. 453, ii. 110; Cunningham, ii. 52, 83.
[313] Mémoires de Torcy, vol. ii. passim; Coxe's Marlborough, vol. iii.; Bolingbroke's Letters on History, and Lord Walpole's answer to them; Cunningham; Somerville, 840.
[314] The late biographer of Marlborough asserts that he was against breaking off the conferences in 1709, though clearly for insisting on the cession of Spain (iii. 40). Godolphin, Somers, and the whigs in general, expected Louis XIV. to yield the thirty-seventh article. Cowper, however, was always doubtful of this. Id. 176.
It is very hard to pronounce, as it appears to me, on the great problem of Louis's sincerity in this negotiation. No decisive evidence seems to have been brought on the contrary side. The most remarkable authority that way is a passage in the Mémoires of St. Phelipe, iii. 263, who certainly asserts that the King of France had, without the knowledge of any of his ministers, assured his grandson of a continued support. But the question returns as to St. Phelipe's means of knowing so important a secret. On the other hand, I cannot discover in the long correspondence between Madame de Maintenon and the Princesse des Ursins the least corroboration of these suspicions, but much to the contrary effect. Nor does Torcy drop a word, though writing when all was over, by which we should infer that the court of Versailles had any other hopes left in 1709, than what still lingered in their heart from the determined spirit of the Castilians themselves.
It appears by the Mémoires de Noailles, iii. 10 (edit. 1777), that Louis wrote to Philip, 26th Nov. 1708, hinting that he must reluctantly give him up, in answer to one wherein the latter had declared that he would not quit Spain while he had a drop of blood in his veins. And on the French ambassador at Madrid, Amelot, remonstrating against the abandonment of Spain, with an evident intimation that Philip could not support himself alone, the King of France answered that he must end the war at any price. 15th April 1709. Id. 34. In the next year, after the battle of Saragosa, which seemed to turn the scale wholly against Philip, Noailles was sent to Madrid in order to persuade that prince to abandon the contest. Id. 107. There were some in France who would even have accepted the thirty-seventh article, of whom Madame de Maintenon seems to have been. P. 117. We may perhaps think that an explicit offer of Naples, on the part of the allies, would have changed the scene; nay, it seems as if Louis would have been content at this time with Sardinia and Sicily. P. 108.
[315] A contemporary historian of remarkable gravity observes: "It was strange to see how much the desire of French wine, and the dearness of it, alienated many men from the Duke of Marlborough's friendship." Cunningham, ii. 220. The hard drinkers complained that they were poisoned by port; these formed almost a party: Dr. Aldrich (Dean of Christchurch, surnamed the priest of Bacchus), Dr. Ratcliffe, General Churchill, etc. "And all the bottle companions, many physicians, and great numbers of the lawyers and inferior clergy, and, in fine, the loose women too, were united together in the faction against the Duke of Marlborough."