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

by John Richard Green

Dismissal of the Whigs.

The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the Examiner, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift, an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St. John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition, with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the maintenance of the war, and encouraged Anne to free herself from the yoke beneath which she had bent so long. At the close of Sacheverell's trial she broke with the Duchess. Marlborough looked for support to the Whigs; but the subtle intrigue of Harley was as busy in undermining the Ministry as St. John was in openly attacking it. The Whigs, who knew that the Duke's league with them had simply been forced on him by the war, and who had already foiled an attempt he had made to secure himself by the demand of a grant for life of his office of Commander-in-Chief, were easily persuaded that the Queen's sole object was his personal humiliation. They looked coolly therefore on at the dismissal of Sunderland, who had now become his son-in-law, and of Godolphin, who was his closest friend. The same means were adopted to bring about the ruin of the Whigs themselves: and Marlborough, lured easily by hopes of reconciliation with his old party, looked on as coolly while Anne dismissed her Whig counsellors and named a Tory Ministry, with Harley and St. John at its head, in their place.

Fall of Marlborough.

The time was now come for a final and decisive blow; but how great a dread Marlborough still inspired in his enemies was shown by the shameful treachery with which they still thought it needful to bring about his fall. The intrigues of Harley paled before the subtler treason of Henry St. John. Young as he was, for he had hardly reached his thirty-second year, St. John had already shown his ability as Secretary of War under Marlborough himself, his brilliant rhetoric gave him a hold over the House of Commons which even the sense of his restlessness and recklessness failed to shake, while the vigour and eloquence of his writings infused a new colour and force into political literature. He was resolute for peace; but he pressed on the work of peace with an utter indifference to all but party ends. As Marlborough was his great obstacle, his aim was to drive him from his command; and earnestly as he admired the Duke's greatness, he hounded on a tribe of libellers who assailed even his personal courage. Meanwhile St. John was feeding Marlborough's hopes of reconciliation with the Tories, till he led him to acquiesce in his wife's dismissal, and to pledge himself to a co-operation with the Tory policy. It was the Duke's belief that a reconciliation with the Tories was effected that led him to sanction the despatch of troops which should have strengthened his army in Flanders on a fruitless expedition against Canada, though this left him too weak to carry out a masterly plan which he had formed for a march into the heart of France in the opening of 1711. He was unable even to risk a battle or to do more than to pick up a few seaboard towns, and St. John at once turned the small results of the campaign into an argument for the conclusion of peace. Peace was indeed all but concluded. In defiance of an article of the Grand Alliance which pledged its members not to carry on separate negotiations with France, St. John, who now became Lord Bolingbroke, pushed forward through the summer of 1711 a secret accommodation between England and France. It was for this negotiation that he had crippled Marlborough's campaign; and it was the discovery of his perfidy which revealed to the Duke how utterly he had been betrayed, and forced him at last to break with the Tory Minister.

Treaty of Utrecht.

He returned to England; and his efforts induced the House of Lords to denounce the contemplated peace; but the support of the Commons and the Queen, and the general hatred of the war among the people, enabled Harley to ride down all resistance. At the opening of 1712 the Whig majority in the House of Lords was swamped by the creation of twelve Tory peers. Marlborough was dismissed from his command, charged with peculation, and condemned as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons. The Duke at once withdrew from England, and with his withdrawal all opposition to the peace was at an end. His flight was in fact followed by the conclusion of a Treaty at Utrecht between France, England, and the Dutch; and the desertion of his allies forced even the Emperor at last to make peace at Rastadt. By these treaties the original aim of the war, that of preventing the possession of France and Spain at once by the House of Bourbon, was silently abandoned. No precaution was in fact taken against the dangers it involved to the balance of power, save by a provision that the two crowns should never be united on a single head, and by Philip's renunciation of all right of succession to the throne of France. The principle on which the Treaties were based was in fact that of the earlier Treaties of Partition. Spain was stripped of even more than William had proposed to take from her. Philip retained Spain and the Indies: but he ceded his possessions in Italy and the Netherlands with the island of Sardinia to Charles of Austria, who had now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his claims; while he handed over Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. To England he gave up not only Minorca but Gibraltar, two positions which secured her the command of the Mediterranean. France purchased peace by less costly concessions. She had to consent to the re-establishment of the Dutch barrier on a greater scale than before; to pacify the English resentment against the French privateers by the dismantling of Dunkirk; and not only to recognize the right of Anne to the crown, and the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover, but to consent to the expulsion of the Pretender from her soil.

Harley and Bolingbroke.

The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into faction and intrigue. The Whigs, who were still formidable in the Commons, and who showed the strength of their party in the Lords by defeating a Treaty of Commerce in which Bolingbroke anticipated the greatest financial triumph of William Pitt and secured freedom of trade between England and France, were zealous for the succession of the House of Hanover in the well-founded belief that the Elector George hated the Tories; nor did the Tories, though the Jacobite sympathies of a portion of their party forced both Harley and Bolingbroke to keep up a delusive correspondence with the Pretender, who had withdrawn to Lorraine, really contemplate any other succession than that of the Elector. But on the means of providing for his succession Harley and Bolingbroke differed widely. Harley, still influenced by the Presbyterian leanings of his early life, and more jealous of Lord Rochester and the high Tories he headed than of the Whigs themselves, inclined to an alliance between the moderate Tories and their opponents, as in the earlier days of Marlborough's power. The policy of Bolingbroke on the other hand was so to strengthen the Tories by the utter overthrow of their opponents that whatever might be the Elector's sympathies they could force their policy on him as king; and in the advances which Harley made to the Whigs he saw the means of ruining his rival in the confidence of his party, and of taking his place at their head. It was with this purpose that he introduced a Schism Bill, which would have hindered any Nonconformist from acting as a schoolmaster or a tutor. The success of this measure broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition to it. But its effects went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned her that "such conduct may imperil the succession itself."

Death of Anne.

To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence in Harley by conferring on him the earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry which would back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of 1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the district in which either claimant of the crown must land, while he gave Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. The appointments were probably only to secure Jacobite support, for Bolingbroke had in fact no immediate apprehensions of the Queen's death, and his aim was to trim between the Court of Hanover and the Court of James while building up a strong Tory party which would enable him to meet the accession of either with a certainty of retaining power both for himself and the principles he represented. With this view he was preparing to attack both the Bank and the East India Company, the two great strongholds of the Whigs, as well as to tax the bondholders at higher rates than the rest of the community by way of conciliating the country gentry, who hated the moneyed interest which was rising into greatness beside them. But events moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July, three days after Harley's dismissal, Anne was suddenly struck with apoplexy. The Privy Council at once assembled, and at the news the Whig Dukes of Argyle and Somerset entered the Council Chamber without summons and took their places at the board. The step had been taken in secret concert with the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was President of the Council in the Tory Ministry, but a rival of Bolingbroke and an adherent of the Hanoverian succession. The act was a decisive one. The right of the House of Hanover was at once acknowledged, Shrewsbury was nominated as Lord Treasurer by the Council, and the nomination was accepted by the dying Queen. Bolingbroke, though he remained Secretary of State, suddenly found himself powerless and neglected while the Council took steps to provide for the emergency. Four regiments were summoned to the capital in the expectation of a civil war. But the Jacobites were hopeless and unprepared; and on the death of Anne on the evening of the 10th of August, the Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne by his mother's death, was proclaimed as king of England without a show of opposition.