The conditions of these preliminaries, which were afterwards embodied in the Treaty of Utrecht, were the acknowledgement of the Queen's title to the throne, and the Protestant succession, by Louis; an engagement to take all just and reasonable measures that the crowns of France and Spain should never be united on the same head,—the providing a sufficient barrier to the Dutch, the empire, and the house of Austria; and the demolition of Dunkirk, or a proper equivalent. But the crown of Spain was left to the Duke of Anjou, and no provision whatever made to exclude a Bourbon prince from succeeding to it. Thus the main object of the contest—the excluding the Bourbon family from the throne of Spain, was abandoned: and at the close of the most important, successful, and glorious war ever waged by England, terms were agreed to, which left to France advantages which could scarcely have been hoped by the Cabinet of Versailles as the fruit of a long series of victories.
Marlborough felt deeply this clandestine negotiation, which not only deprived him of the main object for which, during his great career, he had been contending, but evinced a duplicity and want of confidence on the part of his own government at its close, which was a melancholy return for such inappreciable public services.[7] But it was of no avail; the secession of England proved, as he had foreseen from the outset, a deathblow to the confederacy. Finding that nothing more was to be done, either at the head of the army, or in direction of the negotiations, he returned home by the Brille, after putting his army into winter-quarters, and landed at Greenwich on the 17th November. Though well aware of the private envy, as well as political hostility of which he was the object, he did nothing that could lower or compromise his high character and lofty position; but in an interview with the Queen, fully expressed his opinion on the impolicy of the course which ministers were now adopting.[8] He adopted the same manly course in the noble speech which he made in his place in Parliament, in the debate on the address. Ministers had put into the royal speech the unworthy expression—"I am glad to tell you, that notwithstanding the arts of those who delight in war, both place and time are appointed for opening the treaty of a general peace." Lord Anglesea followed this up, by declaring, in the course of the debate, that the country might have enjoyed the blessing of peace soon after the battle of Ramilies, if it had not been deferred by some person whose interest it was to prolong the war.
Rising upon this, with inexpressible dignity, and turning to where the Queen sat, Marlborough said, "I appeal to the Queen, whether I did not constantly, while I was plenipotentiary, give her Majesty and her Council an account of all the propositions which were made; and whether I did not desire instruction for my conduct on this subject. I can declare with a good conscience, in the presence of her Majesty, of this illustrious assembly, and of God himself, who is infinitely superior to all the powers of the earth, and before whom, by the ordinary course of nature, I shall soon appear to render account of my actions, that I was very desirous of a safe, honourable, and lasting peace, and was very far from wishing to prolong the war for my own private advantage, as several libels and discourses have most falsely insinuated. My great age, and my numerous fatigues in war, make me ardently wish for the power to enjoy a quiet repose, in order to think of eternity. As to other matters, I have not the least inducement, on any account, to desire the continuance of the war for my own interest, since my services have been so generously rewarded by her Majesty and her parliament; but I think myself obliged to make such an acknowledgment to her Majesty and my country, that I am always ready to serve them, whenever my duty may require, to obtain an honourable and lasting peace. Yet I can by no means acquiesce in the measures that have been taken to enter into a negotiation of peace with France, upon the foot of some pretended preliminaries, which are now circulated; since my opinion is the same as that of most of the Allies, that to leave Spain and the West Indies to the House of Bourbon, will be the entire ruin of Europe, which I have with all fidelity and humility declared to her Majesty, when I had the honour to wait upon her after my arrival from Holland."[9]
This manly declaration, delivered in the most emphatic manner, produced a great impression; and a resolution against ministers was carried in the House of Peers by a majority of twelve. In the Commons, however, they had large majority, and an address containing expressions similar to those used by Lord Anglesea, reflecting on Marlborough, was introduced and carried there. The Whig majority, however, continued firm in the Upper House; and the leaders of that party began to entertain sanguine hopes of success. The Queen had let fall some peevish expressions in regard to her ministers. She had given her hand, in retiring from the House of Peers on the 15th December, to the Duke of Somerset, instead of her own Lord Treasurer; it was apprehended her old partiality for Marlborough was about to return; Mrs Masham was in the greatest alarm; and St John declared to Swift that the Queen was false.[10] The ministers of the whole alliance seconded the efforts of the Whigs, and strongly represented the injurious effects which would ensue to the cause of European independence in general, and the interests of England in particular, if the preliminaries which had been agreed to should be made the basis of a general peace. The Dutch made strong and repeated representations on the subject; and the Elector of Hanover delivered a memorial strongly urging the danger which would ensue if Spain and the Indies were allowed to remain in the hands of a Bourbon prince.
Deeming themselves pushed to extremities, and having failed in all attempts to detach Marlborough from the Whigs, Bolingbroke and the ministers resolved on the desperate measure of bringing forward the accusation against him, of fraud and peculation in the management of the public monies entrusted to his management in the Flemish campaign. The charges were founded on the report of certain commissioners to whom the matter had been remitted; and which charged the Duke with having appropriated L.63,319 of the public monies destined for the use of the English troops, and L.282,366, as a per-centage of two per cent on the sum paid to foreign ambassadors during the ten years of the war. In reply to these abominable insinuations, the letter of the Duke to the commissioners was published on the 27th December, in which he entirely refuted the charges, and showed that he had never received any sums or perquisites, not sanctioned by previous and uniform usage, and far less than had been received by the general in the reign of William III. And in regard to the L.282,000 of per-centage on foreign subsidies, this was proved to have been a voluntary gift from those powers to the English general, authorised by their signatures and sanctioned by warrants from the Queen. This answer made a great impression; but ministers had gone too far to retreat, and they ventured on a step which, for the honour of the country, has never, even in the worst times, been since repeated. Trusting to their majority in the Commons, they dismissed the Duke from all his situations on the 31st December; and in order to stifle the voice of justice in the Upper House, on the following day patents were issued calling twelve new peers to the Upper House. On the following day they were introduced amidst the groans of the House: the Whig noblemen, says a contemporary annalist, "cast their eyes on the ground as if they had been invited to the funeral of the peerage."[11]
Unbounded was the joy diffused among the enemies of England by these unparalleled measures. On hearing of Marlborough's fall, Louis XIV. said with triumph, "The dismission of Marlborough will do all we can desire." The Court of St Germains was in exultation; and the general joy of the Jacobites, both at home and abroad, was sufficient to demonstrate how formidable an enemy to their cause they regarded the Duke; and how destitute of truth were the attempts to show that he had been engaged in a secret design to restore the exiled family. Marlborough disdained to make any defence of himself in Parliament; but an able answer on his part was prepared and circulated, which entirely refuted the whole charges against the illustrious general. So convinced were ministers of this, that, contenting themselves with resolutions against him in the House of Commons, where their influence was predominant, they declined to prefer any impeachment or accusation, even in the Upper House swamped by their recent creations. In the midst of this disgraceful scene of passion, envy, and ingratitude, Prince Eugene arrived in London to endeavour to stem the torrent and, if possible, prevent the secession of England from the confederacy. He was lodged with the Lord Treasurer; and the generous prince omitted no opportunity of testifying his undiminished respect for his illustrious rival in the day of his tribulation. The Treasurer having said to him at a great dinner, "I consider this day as the happiest of my life, since I have the honour to see in my house the greatest captain of the age." "If it be so," replied Eugene, "I owe it to your lordship;" alluding to his dismissal of Marlborough. On another occasion, some one having pointed out a passage in one of the libels against Marlborough, in which he was said to have been "perhaps once fortunate." "It is true," said Eugene; "he was once fortunate; and it is the greatest praise which can be bestowed on him; for, as he was always successful—that implies that all his other successes were owing to his own conduct."[12]
Alarmed at the weight which Marlborough might derive from the presence and support of so great a commander, and the natural sympathy of all generous minds with the cordial admiration which these two great men entertained for each other, the ministers had recourse to a pretended conspiracy, which it was alleged had been discovered on the part of Marlborough and Eugene to seize the government and dethrone the Queen, on the 17th November. St John and Oxford had too much sense to publish such a ridiculous statement; but it was made the subject of several secret examinations before the Privy Council, in order to augment the apprehensions and secure the concurrence of the Queen in their measures. Such as it was, the tale was treated as a mere malicious invention, even by the contemporary foreign annalists,[13] though it has since been repeated as true by more than one party native historian.[14] This ridiculous calumny, and the atrocious libels as to the embezzlement of the public money, however, produced the desired effect. They inflamed the mind of the Queen, and removed that vacillation in regard to the measures of government, from which so much danger was apprehended by the Tory administration. Having answered the desired end, they were allowed quietly to go to sleep. No proceedings in the House of Peers, or elsewhere, followed the resolutions of the Commons condemnatory of Marlborough's financial administration in the Low Countries. His defence, published in the newspapers, though abundantly vigorous, was neither answered nor prosecuted as a libel on the Commissioners or House of Commons; and the alleged Stuart conspiracy was never more heard of, till it was long after drawn from its slumber by the malice of English party spirit.
Meanwhile the negotiations at Utrecht for a general peace continued, and St John and Oxford soon found themselves embarrassed by the extravagant pretensions which their own conduct had revived in the plenipotentiaries of Louis. So great was the general indignation excited by the publication of the preliminaries at Utrecht, that St John felt the necessity of discontinuing any general negotiation, and converting it into a private correspondence between the plenipotentiaries of the English and French crowns.[15] Great difficulty was experienced in coming to an accommodation, in consequence of the rising demands of the French plenipotentiaries, who, deeming themselves secure of support from the English ministry, not only positively refused to abandon Spain and the Indies, but now demanded the Netherlands for the Elector of Bavaria, and the cession of Lille and Tournay in return for the seizure of Dunkirk. The sudden death, however, first of the Dauphiness of France, and then of the Dauphin, the former of whom was carried off by a malignant fever on the 12th, the latter on the 18th February 1712, followed by the death of their eldest son on the 23d, produced feelings of commiseration for the aged monarch, now in his seventy-third year and broken down by misfortunes, which rendered the progress of the separate negotiation more easy. England agreed to abandon its allies, and the main object of the war, on condition that a guarantee should be obtained against the crowns of France and Spain being united on the same head. On this frail security, the English ministry agreed to withdraw their contingent from the Allied army; and to induce the Dutch to follow their example, Ipres was offered to them on the same terms as Dunkirk had been to Great Britain.[16]
The disastrous effects of this secret and dishonourable secession, on the part of England, from the confederacy, were soon apparent. Great had been the preparations of the continental Allies for continuing the contest; and while the English contingent remained with them, their force was irresistible. Prince Eugene was at the head of the army in Flanders, and, including the British forces under the Duke of Ormond, it amounted to the immense force of 122,000 effective men, with 120 guns, sixteen howitzers, and an ample pontoon train. To oppose this, by far the largest army he had yet had to confront in the Low Countries, Villars had scarcely at his command 100,000 men, and they were ill equipped, imperfectly supplied with artillery, and grievously depressed in spirit by their long series of disasters. Eugene commanded the army of the confederates; for although the English ministry had been lavish in their promises of unqualified support, the Dutch had begun to entertain serious suspicions of their sincerity, and bestowed the command on that tried officer instead of the Duke of Ormond, who had succeeded Marlborough in the command of the English contingent. But Marlborough's soul still directed the movements of the army; and Eugene's plan of the campaign was precisely that which that great commander had chalked out at the close of the preceding one. This was to besiege Quesnoy and Landrecies, the last of the iron barrier of France which in this quarter protected the frontier, and immediately after to inundate the open country, and advance as rapidly as possible to Paris. It was calculated they might reach it in ten marches from Landrecies; and it was well known that there was neither a defensible position nor fortress of any sort to arrest the invaders' march. The Court of Versailles were in despair: the general opinion was, that the King should leave Paris, and retire to Blois; and although the proud spirit of Louis recoiled at such a proposal, yet, in taking leave of Marshal Villars, he declared—"Should a disaster occur, I will go to Peronne or St Quentin, collect all my troops, and with you risk a last effort, determined to perish, or save the State."[17]
But the French monarch was spared this last desperate alternative. The defection of the British Cabinet saved his throne, when all his means of defence were exhausted. Eugene, on opening the campaign on the 1st May, anxiously inquired of the Duke of Ormond whether he had authority to act vigorously in the campaign, and received an answer that he had the same authority as the Duke of Marlborough, and was prepared to join in attacking the enemy. Preparations were immediately made for forcing the enemy's lines, which covered Quesnoy, previous to an attack on that fortress. But, at the very time that this was going on, the work of perfidious defection was consummated. On May 10, Mr Secretary St John sent positive orders to Ormond to take no part in any general engagement, as the questions at issue between the contending parties were on the point of adjustment.[18] Intimation of this secret order was sent to the Court of France, but it was directed to be kept a positive secret from the Allied generals. Ormond, upon the receipt of these orders, opened a private correspondence with Villars, informing him that their troops were no longer enemies, and that the future movements of the troops under his command were only to get forage and provisions. This correspondence was unknown to Eugene; but circumstances soon brought the defection of England to light. In the middle of it, the Allied forces had passed the Scheldt, and taken post between Noyeller and the Boiase, close to Villars's position. To bring the sincerity of the English to a test, Eugene proposed a general attack on the enemy's line, which was open and exposed, on the 28th May. But Ormond declined, requesting the operation might be delayed for a few days. The defection was now apparent, and the Dutch deputies loudly condemned such dishonorable conduct; but Eugene, anxious to make the most of the presence of the British troops, though their co-operation could no longer be relied on, proposed to besiege Quesnoy, which was laid open by Villars's retreat. Ormond, who felt acutely the painful and discreditable situation in which, without any fault of his own, he was placed, could not refuse, and the investment took place that very day. The operations were conducted by the Dutch and Imperial troops alone; and the town was taken, after a siege of six weeks, on the 10th July.[19]