The Whigs had great advantages on their side. They had a clear principle to start with. The constitutional errors and excesses of the Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or three main principles of civil and religious liberty. The Whigs knew what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land. The uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the {20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes. Many a Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his own again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they, had in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion end in a Stuart restoration. But, on the other hand, the Whigs could strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing their projects melt away into visions and chimeras. A great band of landed proprietors formed the leaders of the Whigs. Times have changed since then, and the representatives of some of those great houses which then led the Whig party have passed or glided insensibly into the ranks of the Tories; but the main reason for this is because a Tory of our day represents fairly enough, in certain political aspects, the Whig of the days of Queen Anne. What is called in American politics a new departure has taken place in England since that time; the Radical party has come into existence with political principles and watchwords quite different even from those of the early Whigs. Some of the Whig houses, not many, have gone with the forward movement; some have remained behind, and so lapsed almost insensibly into the Tory quarter. But at the close of Queen Anne's reign all the great leading Whigs stood well together. They understood better than the Tories did the necessity of obtaining superior influence in the House of Commons. They even contrived at that time to secure the majority of the county constituencies, while they had naturally the majority of the commercial class on their side. Then, as in later days, the vast wealth of the Whig families was spent unstintingly, and it may be said unblushingly, in securing the possession of the small constituencies, the constituencies which were only to be had by liberal bribery. Then, as afterwards, there was perceptible in the Whig party a strange combination of dignity and of meanness, of great principles and of somewhat degraded practices. They had high {21} purposes; they recognized noble principles, and they held to them; they were for political liberty as they then understood it, and they were for religious equality—for such approach at least to religious equality as had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England. They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political creed. But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their parliamentary strategy and political conduct. They intrigued, they bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal could have used to secure the attainment of selfish and ignoble ends. Their enemies had put one great advantage into their hands. The conduct of Bolingbroke and of Oxford during recent years had left the Whigs the sole representatives of constitutional liberty.
[Sidenote: 1714—Anarchy or "Perkin">[
The two great political parties hated and denounced each other with a ferocity hardly known before, and hardly possible in our later times. The Whigs vituperated the Tories as rebels and traitors; the Tories cried out against the Whigs as the enemies of religion and the opponents of "the true Church of England." Many a ballad of that time described the Whigs as men whose object it was to destroy both mitre and crown, to introduce anarchy once again, as they had done in the days of Oliver Cromwell. The Whig balladists retorted by describing the Tories as men who were engaged in trying to bring in "Perkin" from France, and prophesied the halter as a reward of their leading statesmen. In truth, the bitterness of that hour was very earnest; most of the men on both sides meant what they said. Either side, if it had been in complete preponderance, would probably have had very little scruple in disposing of its leading enemies by means of the halter or the prison. It was for the time not so much a struggle of political parties as a {22} struggle of hostile armies. The men were serious and savage, because the crisis was serious and portentous. The chances of an hour might make a man a prime-minister or a prisoner. Bolingbroke soon after was in exile, and Walpole at the head of the administration. The slightest chance, the merest accident, might have sent Walpole into exile, and put Bolingbroke at the head of the State.
[Sidenote: 1714—John Churchill]
The eyes of the English public were at this moment turned in especial to watch the movements of two men—the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Bolingbroke. Marlborough was beyond question the greatest soldier of his time. He had gone into exile when Queen Anne consented to degrade him and to persecute him, and now he was on his way home, at the urgent entreaty of the Whig leaders, in order to lend his powerful influence to the Hanoverian cause.
The character of the Duke of Marlborough is one which ought to be especially attractive to the authors of romance and the lovers of strong, bold portrait-painting. One peculiar difficulty, however, a romancist would have in dealing with Marlborough—he could hardly venture to paint Marlborough as nature and fortune made him. The romancist would find himself compelled to soften and to modify many of the distinctive traits of Marlborough's character, in order that he might not seem the mere inventor of a human paradox, in order that he might not appear to be indulging in the fantastic and the impossible. Pope has called Bacon "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," but Bacon was not greater in his own path than Marlborough in his, and Bacon's worst meannesses were nobility itself compared with some of Marlborough's political offences. Marlborough started in life with almost every advantage that man could have—with genius, with boundless courage, with personal beauty, with favoring friends. From his early youth he had been attached to James the Second and James the Second's court. One of Marlborough's {23} biographers even suggests that the Duchess of York, James's first wife, was needlessly fond of young Churchill. The beautiful Duchess of Cleveland—she of whom Pepys said "that everything she did became her"—was passionately in love with Marlborough, and, according to some writers, gave him his first start in life when she presented him with five thousand pounds, which Marlborough, prudent then as ever, invested in an annuity of five hundred a year. Burnet said of him that "he knew the arts of living in a court beyond any man in it; he caressed all people with a soft and obliging deportment, and was always ready to do good offices." His only personal defect was in his voice, which was shrill and disagreeable. He was, through all his life, avaricious to the last degree; he grasped at money wherever he could get it; he took money from women as well as from men. A familiar story of the time represents another nobleman as having been mistaken for the Duke of Marlborough by a mob, at a time when Marlborough was unpopular, and extricating himself from the difficulty by telling the crowd he could not possibly be the Duke of Marlborough, first, because he had only two guineas in his pocket, and next, because he was perfectly ready to give them away. Marlborough had received the highest favors from James the Second, but he quitted James in the hour of his misfortunes, only, however, it should be said, to return secretly to his service at a time when he was professing devotion to William the Third. He betrayed each side to the other. In the same year, and almost in the same month, he writes to the Elector at Hanover and to the Pretender in France, pouring forth to each alike his protestations of devotion. "I shall be always ready to hazard my fortune and my life for your service," he tells the Elector. "I had rather have my hands cut off than do anything prejudicial to King James's cause," he tells an agent of the Stuarts. James appears to have believed in Marlborough, and William, while he made use of him, to have had no faith in him. "The Duke of Marlborough," William {24} said, "has the best talents for a general of any man in England; but he is a vile man and I hate him, for though I can profit by treasons I cannot bear the traitor." William's saying was strikingly like that one ascribed to Philip of Macedon. Schomberg spoke of Marlborough as "the first lieutenant-general whom I ever remember to have deserted his colors." Lord Granard, who was in the camp of King James the Second on Salisbury Plain, told Dr. King, who has recorded the story, that Churchill and some other colonels invited Lord Granard to supper, and opened to him their design of deserting to the Prince of Orange. Granard not merely refused to enter into the conspiracy, but went to the King and told him the whole story, advising him to seize Marlborough and the other conspirators. Perhaps if this advice had been followed, King William would never have come to the throne of England. James, however, gave no credit to the story, and took no trouble about it. Next morning he found his mistake; but it was then too late. The truth of this story is corroborated by other authorities, one of them being King James himself, who afterwards stated that he had received information of Lord Churchill's designs, and was recommended to seize his person, but that he unfortunately neglected to avail himself of the advice. "Speak of that no more," says Egmont, in Goethe's play; "I was warned."
[Sidenote: 1714—Marlborough]
Swift said of Marlborough that "he is as covetous as hell, and ambitious as the prince of it." Marlborough was as ignorant as he was avaricious. Literary taste or instinct he must have had, because he read with so much eagerness the historical plays of Shakespeare, and indeed frankly owned that his only knowledge of English history was taken from their scenes. Even in that time of loose spelling his spelling is remarkably loose. He seems to spell without any particular principle in the matter, seldom rendering the same word a second time by the same combination of letters. He was at one period of his life a libertine of the loosest order, so far as morals were {25} concerned, but of the shrewdest kind as regarded personal gain and advancement. He would have loved any Lady Bellaston who presented herself, and who could have rewarded him for his kindness. He was not of the type of Byron's "Don Juan," who declares that
The prisoned eagle will not pair, nor I
Serve a Sultana's sensual phantasy.
Marlborough would have served any phantasy for gain. It has been said of him that the reason for his being so successful with women as a young man was that he took money of them. Yet, as another striking instance of the paradoxical nature of his character, he was intensely devoted to his wife. He was the true lover of Sarah Jennings, who afterwards became Duchess of Marlborough. A man of the most undaunted courage in the presence of the enemy, he was his wife's obedient, patient, timid slave. He lived more absolutely under her control than Belisarius under the government of his unscrupulous helpmate. Sarah Jennings was, in her way, almost as remarkable as her husband. She was a woman of great beauty. Colley Gibber, in his "Apology," pays devoted testimony to her charms. He had by chance to attend on her in the capacity of a sort of amateur lackey at an entertainment in Nottingham, and he seems to have been completely dazzled by her loveliness. "If so clear an emanation of beauty, such a commanding grace of aspect, struck me into a regard that had something softer than the most profound respect in it, I cannot see why I may not without offence remember it, since beauty, like the sun, must sometimes lose its power to choose, and shine into equal warmth the peasant and the courtier." He quaintly adds, "However presumptuous or impertinent these thoughts may have appeared at my first entertaining them, why may I not hope that my having kept them decently a secret for full fifty years may be now a good round plea for their pardon?" The imperious spirit which could rule Churchill long dominated the feeble nature of Queen Anne. But {26} when once this domination was overthrown, Sarah Jennings had no art to curb her temper into such show of respect and compliance as might have won back her lost honors. She met her humiliation with the most childish bursts of passion; she did everything in her power to annoy and insult the Queen who had passed from her haughty control. She was always a keen hater; to the last day of her life she never forgot her resentment towards all who had, or who she thought had, injured her. In long later years she got into unseemly lawsuits with her own near relations. But if one side of her character was harsh and unlovely enough, it may be admitted that there was something not unheroic about her unyielding spirit—something noble in the respect to her husband's memory, which showed itself in the declaration that she would not marry "the emperor of the world," after having been the wife of John, Duke of Marlborough.