Then as usual the numbers were found to be dangerously weak. A quarrel between Spain and the Empire, and the ambitious designs of Cardinal Alberoni brought about a breach between England and Spain, which finally culminated in the attack and defeat of the Spanish fleet by Admiral Byng off Cape Passaro. The action was fought before war had actually been declared, and Byng affected to treat it as an unfortunate accident; but Alberoni was too much incensed at the subversion of his designs to heed such empty blandishment as this. He prepared to avenge himself by making terms with the Jacobites and by fitting out an expedition from Cadiz for the support of the Pretender. The force was to be commanded by Ormonde, the same poor, misguided man who had supplanted Marlborough in Flanders; but the menace was formidable none the less. At the meeting of Parliament the King gave warning that an invasion must be looked for, and received powers to augment the Army to meet it. Nevertheless, it was thought best once more to borrow six thousand foreigners from the Dutch and Austrian Netherlands; and England's contribution to her own defence consisted in no more than the transfer of four weak battalions from the Irish to the British establishment. The King's ministers took credit, when the danger was over, for the moderation with which they had exercised the powers entrusted to them, failing to see that resort to mercenary troops at such a time was a policy wanting as much in true statesmanship as in honour.
April 16.
June 10.
For the rest the peril vanished, as four generations earlier had the peril of a still greater Spanish invasion, before wind and tempest. The Spanish transports were dispersed by a gale in the Bay of Biscay, and the great armament crept back by single ships to Cadiz, crippled, shattered, barely saved by the sacrifice of guns, horses and stores from the fury of the storm. Two frigates only reached the British coast and landed three Scottish peers—Lords Tullibardine, Marischal and Seaforth—with three hundred Spanish soldiers, at Kintail in Ross-shire. Here the little party remained unmolested for several weeks, being joined by some few hundred restless Highland spirits, but supported by no general rising of the clans. At length, however, General Carpenter detached General Wightman with a thousand men from Inverness, who fell upon the insurgents in the valley of Glenshiel and, though their force was double that of his own, dispersed them utterly.[8] The campaign ended, like all mountain-campaigns, in the burning of the houses and villages of the offending clans; and thus ignominiously ended this hopeless and futile insurrection. Its most remarkable result was that it drove Lord Marischal and his brother into the Prussian service, and gave to Frederick the Great one of his best officers and most faithful friends—that James Keith who fell forty years later on the field of Hochkirch.
Sept. 21.
Such aggression, failure though it was, naturally led the English to make reprisals; and in September a British squadron sailed from Spithead with four thousand troops on board for a descent on the Spanish coast. The original object of the expedition had been an attack on Corunna, but Lord Cobham,[9] who was in command, thought the enterprise too hazardous, and turned his arms against Vigo. The town being weakly held was at once surrendered, and the citadel capitulated after a few days of siege. A considerable quantity of arms and stores, which had been prepared for Ormonde's expedition, was captured, and with this small advantage to his credit, Cobham re-embarked his troops for England.[10] Shortly afterwards Alberoni opened negotiations for peace, which he purchased at the cost of his own dismissal. The treaty was signed on the 19th of January 1720, and England entered upon twenty years of unbroken peace.
1722.
But before I touch upon the history of that peace I may be allowed to advance two years to record an event which may fittingly close the first thirty years of conflict with Jacobitism and its allies. On the 16th of June 1722 died John, Duke of Marlborough. Constantly during his later campaigns he had suffered from giddiness and headache, and in May 1716 the shock caused by the death of his daughter, Lady Sunderland, brought on him a paralytic stroke. He rallied, but was struck down a second time in November of the same year; and although, contrary to the received opinion, he again rallied, preserving his speech, his memory, and his understanding little impaired, yet it was evident that his life's work was done. In the few years that remained to him he still attended the House of Lords, spending the session of 1721 as usual in London, and retiring at its close to Windsor Lodge. There at the beginning of June in the following year he was smitten for the third time, and after lingering several days, helpless but conscious, he at dawn of the 16th passed peacefully away.
On the 14th of July the body was brought to Marlborough House. In those days London was empty at that season, and only in Hyde Park, where the whole of the household troops were encamped, was there sign of unusual activity. Day after day the Foot Guards were drilled in a new exercise to be used at the funeral; the weeks wore on, the day of Blenheim came and went, and at length on the 9th of August all was ready. From Marlborough House along the Mall and Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, from thence along Piccadilly and St. James's Street to Charing Cross and the Abbey, the way was lined with the scarlet coats of the Guards. The drums were draped in black, the colours wreathed with cypress; every officer wore a black scarf, and every soldier a bunch of cypress in his bosom. Far away from down the river sounded minute after minute the dull boom of the guns at the Tower.
The procession opened with the advance of military bands, followed by a detachment of artillery. Then came Lord Cadogan, the devoted Quartermaster-General who had prepared for the Duke so many of his fields, and with him eight General Officers, veterans who had fought under their great Chief on the Danube and in Flanders. Among these was Munden, the hero who had led the forlorn hope at Marlborough's first great action of the Schellenberg, and had brought back with him but twenty out of eighty men. Then followed a vast cavalcade of heralds, officers-at-arms and mourners, with all the circumstance and ceremony of an age when pomp was lavished on the least illustrious of the dead; and in the midst, encircled by a forest of banners, rolled an open car, bearing the coffin.[11] Upon the coffin lay a complete suit of gilt armour, above it was a gorgeous canopy, around it military trophies, heraldic devices, symbolic presentations of the victories that the dead man had won and of the towns which he had captured, strange contrast to the still white face, serene beyond even the invincible serenity of life, that slept within.
As the car passed by there rang out to company after company of the silent Guards a new word of command. "Reverse your arms." "Rest on your arms reversed." The officers lowered their pikes, the ensigns struck their colours, and every soldier turned the muzzle of his musket to the ground and bent his head over the butt "in a melancholy posture." The procession moved slowly on, and the troops, still with arms reversed, formed up in its rear and marched with it. Fifty-two years before, John Churchill, the unknown ensign of the First Guards, had marched in procession behind the coffin of George Monk, Duke of Albemarle; now he too was faring on to share Monk's resting-place.