Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope

by Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke

As to the Allies, I saw no difference of opinion among all those who came to the head of affairs at this time. Such of the Tories as were in the system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon after from us, and such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion deserted to us, seemed equally convinced of the unreasonableness, and even of the impossibility, of continuing the war on the same disproportionate footing. Their universal sense was, that we had taken, except the part of the States General, the whole burden of the war upon us, and even a proportion of this; while the entire advantage was to accrue to others: that this had appeared very grossly in 1709, and 1710, when preliminaries were insisted upon, which contained all that the Allies, giving the greatest loose to their wishes, could desire, and little or nothing on the behalf of Great Britain: that the war, which had been begun for the security of the Allies, was continued for their grandeur: that the ends proposed, when we engaged in it, might have been answered long before, and therefore that the first favourable occasion ought to be seized of making peace; which we thought to be the interest of our country, and which appeared to all mankind, as well as to us, to be that of our party.

These were in general the views of the Tories: and for the part I acted in the prosecution of them, as well as of all the measures accessory to them, I may appeal to mankind. To those who had the opportunity of looking behind the curtain I may likewise appeal, for the difficulties which lay in my way, and for the particular discouragements which I met with. A principal load of parliamentary and foreign affairs in their ordinary course lay upon me: the whole negotiation of the peace, and of the troublesome invidious steps preliminary to it, as far as they could be transacted at home, were thrown upon me. I continued in the House of Commons during that important session which preceded the peace; and which, by the spirit shown through the whole course of it, and by the resolutions taken in it, rendered the conclusion of the treaties practicable. After this I was dragged into the House of Lords in such a manner as to make my promotion a punishment, not a reward; and was there left to defend the treaties almost alone.

It would not have been hard to have forced the Earl of Oxford to use me better. His good intentions began to be very much doubted of; the truth is, no opinion of his sincerity had ever taken root in the party, and, which was worse perhaps for a man in his station, the opinion of his capacity began to fall apace. He was so hard pushed in the House of Lords in the beginning of 1712 that he had been forced, in the middle of the session, to persuade the Queen to make a promotion of twelve peers at once, which was an unprecedented and invidious measure, to be excused by nothing but the necessity, and hardly by that. In the House of Commons his credit was low and my reputation very high. You know the nature of that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged. The thread of the negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made himself master of the business much time would have been lost, and great inconveniences would have followed. Some, who opposed the Court soon after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I should have wanted no help to do mischief. I knew the way of quitting my employments and of retiring from Court when the service of my party required it; but I could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the consequence of it must have been the breaking my party and the distress of the public affairs. I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the sense of that duty which I owed her came in aid of other considerations, and prevailed over my resentment. These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under the utmost satisfaction. I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford. I was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin me in the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else. I saw, however, that he had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me, instead of having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire, an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of his jealousy and a reason for undermining me. In this temper of mind I went on till the great work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as well as for me, opened itself.

I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to them, exempt from faults. Many were made no doubt in both by those who were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many were owing purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their progress. I never look back on this great event, passed as it is, without a secret emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the undertaking and the importance of its success, with the means employed to bring it about, and with those which were employed to traverse it. To adjust the pretensions and to settle the interests of so many princes and states as were engaged in the late war would appear, when considered simply and without any adventitious difficulty, a work of prodigious extent. But this was not all. Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands to the most extravagant height. They had been encouraged to this, first, by the engagements which we had entered into with several of them, with some to draw them into the war, with others to prevail on them to continue it; and, secondly, by the manner in which we had treated with France in 1709 and 1710. Those who intended to tie the knot of the war as hard, and to render the coming at a peace as impracticable as they could, had found no method so effectual as that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on all he could think of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these concessions should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands. That this was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one of the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who communicated to me and to two others of the Queen’s Ministers an instance of the Duke of Marlborough’s management at a critical moment, when the French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed inclinable to come into an expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh article of the preliminaries, which could not have been refused. Certain it is that the King of France was at that time in earnest to execute the article of Philip’s abdication, and therefore the expedients for adjusting what related to this article would easily enough have been found, if on our part there had been a real intention of concluding. But there was no such intention, and the plan of those who meant to prolong the war was established among the Allies as the plan which ought to be followed whenever a peace came to be treated. The Allies imagined that they had a right to obtain at least everything which had been demanded for them respectively, and it was visible that nothing less would content them. These considerations set the vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient light.

The importance of succeeding in the work of the peace was equally great to Europe, to our country, to our party, to our persons, to the present age, and to future generations. But I need not take pains to prove what no man will deny. The means employed to bring it about were in no degree proportionable. A few men, some of whom had never been concerned in business of this kind before, and most of whom put their hands for a long time to it faintly and timorously, were the instruments of it. The Minister who was at their head showed himself every day incapable of that attention, that method, that comprehension of different matters, which the first post in such a Government as ours requires in quiet times. He was the first spring of all our motion by his credit with the Queen, and his concurrence was necessary to everything we did by his rank in the State, and yet this man seemed to be sometimes asleep and sometimes at play. He neglected the thread of business, which was carried on for this reason with less dispatch and less advantage in the proper channels, and he kept none in his own hands. He negotiated, indeed, by fits and starts, by little tools and indirect ways, and thus his activity became as hurtful as his indolence, of which I could produce some remarkable instances. No good effect could flow from such a conduct. In a word, when this great affair was once engaged, the zeal of particular men in their several provinces drove it forward, though they were not backed by the concurrent force of the whole Administration, nor had the common helps of advice till it was too late, till the very end of the negotiations; even in matters, such as that of commerce, which they could not be supposed to understand. That this is a true account of the means used to arrive at the peace, and a true character of that Administration in general, I believe the whole Cabinet Council of that time will bear me witness. Sure I am that most of them have joined with me in lamenting this state of things whilst it subsisted, and all those who were employed as Ministers in the several parts of the treaty felt sufficiently the difficulties which this strange management often reduced them to. I am confident they have not forgotten them.

If the means employed to bring the peace about were feeble, and in one respect contemptible, those employed to break the negotiation were strong and formidable. As soon as the first suspicion of a treaty’s being on foot crept abroad in the world the whole alliance united with a powerful party in the nation to obstruct it. From that hour to the moment the Congress of Utrecht finished, no one measure possible to be taken was omitted to traverse every advance that was made in this work, to intimidate, to allure, to embarrass every person concerned in it. This was done without any regard either to decency or good policy, and from hence it soon followed that passion and humour mingled themselves on each side. A great part of what we did for the peace, and of what others did against it, can be accounted for on no other principle. The Allies were broken among themselves before they began to treat with the common enemy. The matter did not mend in the course of the treaty, and France and Spain, but especially the former, profited of this disunion.

Whoever makes the comparison, which I have touched upon, will see the true reasons which rendered the peace less answerable to the success of the war than it might and than it ought to have been. Judgment has been passed in this case as the different passions or interests of men have inspired them. But the real cause lay in the constitution of our Ministry, and much more in the obstinate opposition which we met with from the Whigs and from the Allies. However, sure it is that the defects of the peace did not occasion the desertions from the Tory party which happened about this time, nor those disorders in the Court which immediately followed.

Long before the purport of the treaties could be known, those Whigs who had set out with us in 1710 began to relapse back to their party. They had among us shared the harvest of a new Ministry, and, like prudent persons, they took measures in time to have their share in that of a new Government.

The whimsical or the Hanover Tories continued zealous in appearance with us till the peace was signed. I saw no people so eager for the conclusion of it. Some of them were in such haste that they thought any peace preferable to the least delay, and omitted no instances to quicken their friends who were actors in it. As soon as the treaties were perfected and laid before the Parliament, the scheme of these gentlemen began to disclose itself entirely. Their love of the peace, like other passions, cooled by enjoyment. They grew nice about the construction of the articles, could come up to no direct approbation, and, being let into the secret of what was to happen, would not preclude themselves from the glorious advantage of rising on the ruins of their friends and of their party.

The danger of the succession and the badness of the peace were the two principles on which we were attacked. On the first the whimsical Tories joined the Whigs, and declared directly against their party. Although nothing is more certain than this truth: that there was at that time no formed design in the party, whatever views some particular men might have, against his Majesty’s accession to the throne. On the latter, and most other points, they affected a most glorious neutrality.