necessary to employ many words,” he writes, “in expressing my surprise and grief at the death of the Duke of Gloucester. It is so great a loss to me as well as to all England, that it pierces my heart with affliction.” It seems impossible that the loss of a child who had shown so touching an allegiance to himself should not have moved him; but perhaps there was in him, too, a touch of satisfaction that the rival pair who had been thorns in his flesh since ever he came to England, were not to have the satisfaction of founding a new line. At St.-Germain the satisfaction was more marked still, and it was supposed that the most dangerous obstacle in the way of the young James Stuart was removed by the death of his sister’s heir. We know now how futile that anticipation was; but at the time this was not so clear, and the anxiety of the English parliament to secure before William’s death a formal abjuration of the so-called Prince of Wales shows that the hope was not without foundation.
This and the new and exciting combination of European affairs produced by what is called the “Spanish Succession,” occupied all minds during the two years that remained of William’s suffering life. It was a moment of great excitement and uncertainty. Louis XIV., into whose hands, as seemed likely, a sort of universal power must fall if his grandson were permitted to succeed to the throne of Spain, had just vowed at the death-bed of James his determination to support the claims of the exile’s son, and, on James’s death, had proclaimed the boy King of England. Thus England had every reason of personal irritation and even alarm for joining in the alliance against the threatening supremacy of France, whose power—had she been allowed to place one of her princes peaceably on the Spanish throne, to which the rich Netherlands still belonged—would have been paramount in Europe. It was on the eve of the great struggle that William died. With a determination equal to that with which he had made head against failing fortune in many a battle-field, he fought for his life, which, at such a crisis, was doubly important to the countries of his birth and of his crown, and to the cause of the Protestant religion and all that we have been taught to consider as freedom throughout Europe. There is something pathetic in the struggle, in the statement of his case, under one name or another as a private individual, that there might be no doubt as to the frankness of the opinions which he caused to be made among the great physicians of Europe. His life in itself could not have been a very happy or desirable one. He had no longer his popular and beloved Mary to leave behind him in England as his representative when he set out for the wars, and there were few in England whom he trusted fully, or who trusted him. To die at the beginning of a great European struggle, leaving the dull people whom he disliked to take his place in England, and the soldier whom he had crushed and subdued and sternly held in the shade as long as he was able, to assume his baton, and win the victories it had never been William’s fortune to gain, must have been bitter indeed. It would appear even that he had entertained some idea of disturbing the natural order of events to prevent this, and that it had been suggested to the Electress Sophia, after poor little Gloucester’s death, that her family should at once be nominated as his immediate successors, to the exclusion of Anne, a proposal which the prudent electress evaded with great skill and ingenuity by representing that the Prince of Wales—who must surely have learned, he and his counselors, wisdom from the failure of his father—was the natural heir, and would, no doubt, do well enough on a trial. Bishop Burnet denies that such a design was ever entertained, but Lord Dartmouth, in his notes upon Burnet, gives the following very distinct evidence on the subject:
I do not know how far the Whig party would trust a secret of that consequence to such a blab as the bishop was known to be: but the Dukes of Bolton and Newcastle both proposed it to me, and used the strongest arguments to induce me to come into it; which was that it would be making Lord Marlborough King at least for the time if the Princess succeeded; and that I had reason to expect nothing but ill-usage during such a reign. Lord Marlborough asked me afterward in the House of Lords if I had ever heard of such a design. I told him Yes, but did not think it very likely. He said it was very true: but by God if ever they attempted it we would walk over their bellies.
Thus until the last moment Anne’s position would seem to have been menaced; but a more impossible scheme was never suggested, for even the idea of Marlborough’s triumph was unable to raise the smallest party against the princess, and to the country in general she was the object of a kind of enthusiasm. The people loved everything in her, even the fact that she was not clever, which of itself is often highly ingratiating with the masses. William, it is said, with a magnanimity which was infinitely to his credit, named Marlborough as his most fit successor in the command of the allied armies before he died. The formal abjuration of the Prince of Wales was made by Parliament only just in time to have his assent, and then all obstacles were removed out of the princess’s way. It was thought by the populace that everything brightened for the new reign. There had been an unexampled continuance of gloomy weather, bad harvests, and clouds and storms. But to great Queen Anne the sun burst forth, the gloom dispelled, the country broke out into gaiety and rejoicing. A new reign full of new possibilities has always something exhilarating in it. William’s greatness was marred by externals and never heartily acknowledged by the mass of the people, but Anne had many claims upon the popular favor. She was a woman, and a kind and simple one. That desertion of her father which some historical writers have condemned so bitterly, had no great effect upon the contemporary imagination, nor, so far as can be judged, upon her own; and it was the only offense that could be alleged against her. She had been unkindly treated and threatened with wrong, which naturally made the multitude strenuous in her cause; and everything conspired to make her accession happy. She was only thirty-seven, and though somewhat unwieldy in person, still preserved her English comeliness, her abundant, beautiful hair, and, above all, the melodious voice by which even statesmen and politicians were impressed. “She pronounced this,” says Bishop Burnet, describing her address to the Privy Council when they first presented themselves before her, “as she did all her other speeches, with great weight and authority, and with a softness of voice and sweetness in the pronunciation that added much life to all she spoke.” The commentators who criticize so sorely the bishop’s chronicles are in entire agreement with him on this subject. “It was a real pleasure to hear her,” says Lord Dartmouth, “though she had a bashfulness that made it very uneasy to herself to say much in public.” Speaker Onslow unites in the same testimony: “I have heard the queen speak from the throne, and she had all the author says here. I never saw an audience more affected; it was a sort of charm. She received all that came to her in so gracious a manner that they went from her highly satisfied with her goodness and her obliging deportment; for she hearkened with attention to everything that was said to her.” Thus all smiled upon Anne in the morning of her reign. Her coronation was marked with unusual splendor and enthusiasm, and though the queen herself had to be carried in a chair to the Abbey, her state of health being such that she could not walk, this did not affect the splendid ceremonial in which even to the Jacobites themselves there was little to complain of, since their hopes that Anne’s influence might advance her father’s young son to the succession after her were still high, notwithstanding that the settlement of the crown upon Sophia of Brunswick and her heirs had already been made.
QUEEN ANNE.
FROM COPPERPLATE ENGRAVING BY PIETER VAN GUNST, AFTER THE PAINTING BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.
It is needless for us to attempt a history of the great war which was one of the most important features in Anne’s reign. No student of history can be ignorant of its general course, nor of the completeness with which Marlborough’s victories crushed the exorbitant power of France and raised the prestige of England. There is no lack of histories of the great general and his career of victory: how he out-fought, out-marched, and out-generaled all his rivals, and scarcely in his ten years of active warfare encountered one check; how, though he did not accomplish the direct object for which all the bloodshed and toil were undertaken, he yet secured such respect for the English name and valor as renewed our old reputation and made all interference with our natural settlement or intrusion into our private economy impossible forever. “What good came of it at last?” says the poet. But the inquiry, though so plausible, appealing at once to humanity and common sense, is not perhaps so hard to answer as it seems. Up to this time it has been impossible to procure in the intercourse of nations any other effectual arbiter but the sword: a terrible one, indeed, but apparently as yet the only means of keeping a check upon the rapacity of some, and protecting the weakness of others. At all events, whatever individual opinion may be on the point now, there was a unanimous conviction then, and no one doubted at the opening of the war that it was most necessary and just. And of its conduct there has been but one opinion. Contemporaries accused Marlborough of every conceivable wickedness,—of peculation, treachery, even personal cowardice; but no one ventured to say that he was not a great general. And as we have got further and further from the infuriated politics of his time, his gifts and graces, his wisdom and moderation, as well as his wonderful military genius, have been done more and more justice to. Coxe, his special biographer, may be supposed to look with partiality upon his hero; but this cannot be said of more recent writers,—of Lord Stanhope in his tolerant and sensible history, or of Dr. Hill Burton in his sagacious volumes on the reign of Queen Anne.