Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope

by Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke

Instead of gathering strength, either as a Ministry or as a party, we grew weaker every day. The peace had been judged, with reason, to be the only solid foundation whereupon we could erect a Tory system; and yet when it was made we found ourselves at a full stand. Nay, the very work which ought to have been the basis of our strength was in part demolished before our eyes, and we were stoned with the ruins of it. Whilst this was doing, Oxford looked on as if he had not been a party to all which had passed; broke now and then a jest, which savoured of the Inns of Court and the bad company in which he had been bred. And on those occasions where his station obliged him to speak of business, was absolutely unintelligible.

Whether this man ever had any determined view besides that of raising his family is, I believe, a problematical question in the world. My opinion is that he never had any other. The conduct of a Minister who proposes to himself a great and noble object, and who pursues it steadily, may seem for a while a riddle to the world; especially in a Government like ours, where numbers of men, different in their characters and different in their interests, are at all times to be managed; where public affairs are exposed to more accidents and greater hazards than in other countries; and where, by consequence, he who is at the head of business will find himself often distracted by measures which have no relation to his purpose, and obliged to bend himself to things which are in some degree contrary to his main design. The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government, and the pilot and the Minister are in similar circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once consummated the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think he could have done the same. But, on the other hand, a man who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both, who begins every day something new, and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose awhile on the world; but a little sooner or a little later the mystery will be revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but a thread of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther than living from day to day. Which of these pictures resembles Oxford most you will determine. I am sorry to be obliged to name him so often, but how is it possible to do otherwise while I am speaking of times wherein the whole turn of affairs depended on his motions and character?

I have heard, and I believe truly, that when he returned to Windsor in the autumn of 1713, after the marriage of his son, he pressed extremely to have him created Duke of Newcastle or Earl of Clare, and the Queen presuming to hesitate on so extraordinary a proposal, he resented this hesitation in a manner which little became a man who had been so lately raised by the profusion of her favours upon him. Certain it is, that he began then to show a still greater remissness in all parts of his Ministry, and to affect to say that from such a time, the very time I am speaking of, he took no share in the direction of affairs, or words to that effect.

He pretended to have discovered intrigues which were set on foot against him, and particularly he complained of the advantage which was taken of his absence during the journey he made at his son’s marriage to undermine him with the Queen. He is naturally inclined to believe the worst, which I take to be a certain mark of a mean spirit and a wicked soul. At least, I am sure that the contrary quality, when it is not due to weakness of understanding, is the fruit of a generous temper and an honest heart. Prone to judge ill of all mankind, he will rarely be seduced by his credulity, but I never knew a man so capable of being the bubble of his distrust and jealousy. He was so in this case, although the Queen, who could not be ignorant of the truth, said enough to undeceive him. But to be undeceived, and to own himself so, was not his play. He hoped by cunning to varnish over his want of faith and of ability. He was desirous to make the world impute the extraordinary part, or, to speak more properly, the no part, which he acted with the staff of Treasurer in his hand, to the Queen’s withdrawing her favour from him and to his friends abandoning him—pretences utterly groundless when he first made them, and which he brought to be real at last. Even the winter before the Queen’s death, when his credit began to wane apace, he might have regained it; he might have reconciled himself perfectly with all his ancient friends, and have acquired the confidence of the whole party. I say he might have done all this, because I am persuaded that none of those I have named were so convinced of his perfidy, so jaded with his yoke, or so much piqued personally against him as I was; and yet if he would have exerted himself in concert with us to improve the few advantages which were left us and to ward off the visible danger which threatened our persons and our party, I would have stifled my private animosity and would have acted under him with as much zeal as ever. But he was incapable of taking such a turn. The sum of all his policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them. When it became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the end of his line.

By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.

The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution in the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded, and by the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of a new administration. Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect to them and to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be brought about before he could effectually serve either. You cannot have forgot how things which we pressed were put off upon every occasion till the peace; the peace was to be the date of a new administration, and the period at which the millenary year of Toryism should begin. Thus were the Tories at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as soon as the peace had rendered them practicable. He was to attempt nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.

After many delays, fatal to the general interest of Europe, this peace was signed: and the only considerable thing which he brought about afterwards was the marriage I have mentioned above; and by it an accession of riches and honour to a family whose estate was very mean, and whose illustration before this time I never met with anywhere, but in the vain discourses which he used to hold over claret. If he kept his word with any of the parties above-mentioned, it must be supposed that he did so with the Whigs; for as to us, we saw nothing after the peace but increase of mortification and nearer approaches to ruin. Not a step was made towards completing the settlement of Europe, which the treaties of Utrecht and Radstadt left imperfect; towards fortifying and establishing the Tory party; towards securing those who had been the principal actors in this administration against future events. We had proceeded in a confidence that these things should immediately follow the conclusion of the peace: he had never, I dare swear, entertained a thought concerning them. As soon as the last hand was given to the fortune of his family, he abandoned his mistress, his friends, and his party, who had borne him so many years on their shoulders: and I was present when this want of faith was reproached him in the plainest and strongest terms by one of the honestest men in Britain, and before some of the most considerable Tories. Even his impudence failed him on this occasion: he did not so much as attempt an excuse.

He could not keep his word which he had given the Pretender and his adherents, because he had formed no party to support him in such a design. He was sure of having the Whigs against him if he made the attempt, and he was not sure of having the Tories for him.

In this state of confusion and distress, to which he had reduced himself and us, you remember the part he acted. He was the spy of the Whigs, and voted with us in the morning against those very questions which he had penned the night before with Walpole and others. He kept his post on terms which no man but he would have held it on, neither submitting to the Queen, nor complying with his friends. He would not, or he could not, act with us; and he resolved that we should not act without him as long as he could hinder it. The Queen’s health was very precarious, and at her death he hoped by these means to deliver us up, bound as it were hand and foot, to our adversaries. On the foundation of this merit he flattered himself that he had gained some of the Whigs, and softened at least the rest of the party to him. By his secret negotiations at Hanover, he took it for granted that he was not only reconciled to that Court, but that he should, under his present Majesty’s reign, have as much credit as he had enjoyed under that of the Queen. He was weak enough to boast of this, and to promise his good offices voluntarily to several: for no man was weak enough to think them worth being solicited. In a word, you must have heard that he answered to Lord Dartmouth and to Mr. Bromley, that one should keep the Privy Seal, and the other the seals of Secretary; and that Lord Cowper makes no scruple of telling how he came to offer him the seals of Chancellor. When the King arrived, he went to Greenwich with an affectation of pomp and of favour. Against his suspicious character, he was once in his life the bubble of his credulity; and this delusion betrayed him into a punishment more severe in my sense than all which has happened to him since, or than perpetual exile; he was affronted in the manner in which he was presented to the King. The meanest subject would have been received with goodness, the most obnoxious with an air of indifference; but he was received with the most distinguishing contempt. This treatment he had in the face of the nation. The King began his reign, in this instance, with punishing the ingratitude, the perfidy, the insolence, which had been shown to his predecessor. Oxford fled from Court covered with shame, the object of the derision of the Whigs and of the indignation of the Tories.

The Queen might, if she had pleased, have saved herself from all those mortifications she met with during the last months of her reign, and her servants and the Tory party from those misfortunes which they endured during the same time; perhaps from those which they have fallen into since her death. When she found that the peace, from the conclusion of which she expected ease and quiet, brought still greater trouble upon her; when she saw the weakness of her Government, and the confusion of her affairs increase every day; when she saw her First Minister bewildered and unable to extricate himself or her; in fine, when the negligence of his public conduct, and the sauciness of his private behaviour had rendered him insupportable to her, and she took the resolution of laying him aside, there was a strength still remaining sufficient to have supported her Government, to have fulfilled in great part the expectations of the Tories, and to have constituted both them and the Ministers in such a situation as would have left them little to apprehend. Some designs were, indeed, on foot which might have produced very great disorders: Oxford’s conduct had given much occasion to them, and with the terror of them he endeavoured to intimidate the Queen. But expedients were not hard to be found by which those designs might have been nipped in the bud, or else by which the persons who promoted them might have been induced to lay them aside. But that fatal irresolution inherent to the Stuart race hung upon her. She felt too much inward resentment to be able to conceal his disgrace from him; yet, after he had made this discovery, she continued to trust all her power in his hands.