History of the English People, Volume VII / The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767

by John Richard Green

Marlborough's difficulties.

With the defeat of Ramillies and the conclusion of the Union the greatness of Marlborough reached its height. In five years he had rescued Holland, saved Germany, and thrown France back on a purely defensive position. He exercised an undisputed supremacy over an alliance which embraced the greatest European powers. At home he was practically first minister, commander-in-chief, and absolute master through his wife of the Queen herself. He was looked upon as the most powerful as he was the wealthiest subject in the world. And while Marlborough's fortunes mounted to their height those of France sank to their lowest ebb. Eugene in his greatest victory broke the siege of Turin, and Lewis saw the loss of Flanders followed by the loss of Italy. Not only did Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the Third, with an army of English and Portuguese, entered Madrid. But it was in fact only these triumphs abroad that enabled Marlborough to face the difficulties which were opening on him at home. His command of the Parliament rested now on a coalition of the Whigs with the moderate Tories who still adhered to him after his break with the more violent members of his old party. Ramillies gave him strength enough to force Anne in spite of her hatred of the Whigs to fulfil the compact with them from which this coalition had sprung, by admitting Lord Sunderland, the bitterest leader of their party, to office as Secretary of State at the close of 1706. But with the entry of Sunderland into office the system of political balance which the Duke had maintained till now began at once to break down. Constitutionally, Marlborough's was the last attempt to govern England on other terms than those of party government, and the union of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the support of the Whigs.

Triumph of the Whigs.

The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to office, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes. Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by wresting from Anne her consent in 1708 to the dismissal from office of Harley and St. John with the whole of the moderate Tories whom they headed. Their removal was followed by the complete triumph of the Whigs in the admission of Lords Somers and Wharton into the ministry. Somers became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, while lower posts were occupied by younger men of the same party, who were destined to play a great part in our later history, such as the young Duke of Newcastle and Robert Walpole.

Oudenarde.

Meanwhile, the great struggle abroad went steadily against France, though its progress was varied with striking alternations of success. France rose indeed with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip in 1707 by a victory of Marshal Berwick at Almanza. Marshal Villars won fresh triumphs on the Rhine; while Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back into Italy. In Flanders Marlborough's designs for taking advantage of his great victory were foiled by the strategy of the Duke of Vendôme and by the reluctance of the Dutch, who were now wavering towards peace. In the campaign of 1708 however Vendôme, in spite of his superiority in force, was attacked and defeated at Oudenarde; and though Marlborough was hindered from striking at the heart of France by the timidity of the English and Dutch statesmen, he reduced Lille, the strongest of its frontier fortresses, in the face of an army of relief which numbered a hundred thousand men. The blow proved an effective one. The pride of Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible sufferings of France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that the allies had fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from Philip of Spain, to give up ten Flemish fortresses as a barrier for the Dutch, and to surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the Treaty of Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender from his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, a port hateful to England as the home of the French privateers.

Peace rejected.

To Marlborough these terms seemed sufficient, and for the moment he regarded peace as secure. Peace was indeed now the general wish of the nation, and the longing for it was nowhere stronger than with the Queen. Dull and sluggish as was Anne's temper, she had the pride and stubbornness of her race, and both revolted against the submission to which she was forced. If she bowed to the spirit of the Revolution by yielding implicitly to the decision of her Parliament, she held firmly to the ceremonial traditions of the monarchy of her ancestors. She dined in royal state, she touched for the evil in her progresses, she presided at every meeting of council or cabinet, she insisted on every measure proposed by her ministers being previously laid before her. She shrank from party government as an enslavement of the Crown; and claimed the right to call on men from either side to aid in the administration of the State. But if England was to be governed by a party, she was resolved that it should be her own party. She had been bred a Tory. Her youth had fallen among the storms of the Exclusion Bill, and she looked on Whigs as disguised republicans. Above all her pride was outraged by the concessions which were forced from her. She had prayed Godolphin to help her in excluding Sunderland as a thing on which the peace of her life depended. She trembled every day before the violent temper of the Duchess of Marlborough, and before the threat of resignation by which the Duke himself crushed her first faint efforts at revolt. She longed for a peace which would free her from both Marlborough and the Whigs, as the Whigs on the other hand were resolute for a war which kept them in power. It was on this ground that they set aside the Duke's counsels and answered the French proposals of peace by terms which made peace impossible. They insisted on the transfer of the whole Spanish monarchy to the Austrian prince. When even this seemed likely to be conceded they demanded that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to give up the crown of Spain.

Sacheverell.

"If I must wage war," replied the French king, "I had rather wage it with my enemies than with my children." In a bitter despair he appealed to France; and, exhausted as the country was by the struggle, the campaign of 1709 proved how nobly France answered his appeal. The terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of Malplaquet showed a new temper in the French soldiers. Starving as they were, they flung away their rations in their eagerness for the fight, and fell back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of Marlborough could break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but the forcing their lines of entrenchment had cost the allies a loss of double that number. Horror at such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.