[27] Howe’s Despatch, Hanover, 11th March, 1707.
[28] Howe’s Despatch, Hanover, 11th March, 1707.
[29] Anne; born in 1709. She was afterwards Princess Royal of England, and married in 1733 the Prince of Orange.
[30] Vide Swift’s character of Mrs. Howard, Suffolk Correspondence.
[31] Princess Amelia was born in 1710, Princess Caroline in 1713. They both died unmarried.
CHAPTER VI.
THE LAST YEAR AT HANOVER. 1714.
The history of the last year of Queen Anne’s reign, with its plots and counter plots, strife of statesmen and bitter party feuds, has often been written, so far as England is concerned. But comparatively little is known of how this eventful year, so important in fortunes of the dynasty, passed at Hanover. Every one, both in England and Hanover, felt that a crisis was imminent, yet no one, on either side of the water, prepared for it. The Queen’s death was likely to be accelerated by her own mental struggles with regard to the succession to her crown, and by the fierce quarrels and jealousies that raged among her advisers. The rival ministers could scarce forbear coming to blows in her presence, the rival claimants to her throne were eager to snatch the sceptre from her failing hand almost before she was dead. James, flitting between Lorraine and St. Germains, was in active correspondence with his friends in England waiting for the psychological moment to take action. Over at Herrenhausen, the aged Electress watched with trembling eagerness every move at the English Court, straining her ears for the summons which never came. Though she knew it not, in these last months she and Anne were running a race for life.
The news that came to Sophia from England was bad, as bad as it could be. The Tories were in power, and what was worse, the Jacobite section of the Tories, headed by Bolingbroke and Ormonde, were gaining swift ascendency over Oxford, who still, outwardly at any rate, professed himself in favour of the Hanoverian succession, and so, for that matter, did Bolingbroke too. The Queen, it is true, continued to profess her friendship to the House of Hanover, but her professions were as nothing worth. As her health failed, her conscience reproached her with the part she had played towards her exiled brother. There was another consideration which weighed with her more than all the rest, one that does not seem to have been given due weight in the criticisms which have been passed on her vacillating conduct, either from the Hanoverian or the Jacobite point of view. Like her grandfather, Charles the First, Anne was fervently attached to the Church of England; her love for it was the one fixed point in her otherwise tortuous policy. Like Charles the First, she saw the English Church through the medium of a highly coloured light, as a reformed branch of the Church Catholic, and as the via media between Protestantism and Popery. Her love for the Church was a passionate conviction, and her zeal for its welfare was shown by many acts throughout her reign. The excuse urged by her friends for her conduct to her father was that she had been actuated by zeal for the Church, which was in danger at his hands.
The question now presented itself again. How would the Church fare with a Roman Catholic as her successor? James, it was true, spoke fair, and declared his determination to maintain the Church of England in all its rights and privileges as by law established, but the Queen remembered that King James the Second had promised the same, and had persecuted the Church beyond measure. The people had not forgotten the expulsion of the Fellows of Magdalen, or the committal of the seven bishops to the Tower. Would not her brother also, in the same spirit of blind bigotry, seek to destroy one of the strongest bulwarks of the throne? “How can I serve him, my lord?” she once asked Buckingham. “You know well that a Papist cannot enjoy this crown in peace. All would be easy,” she continued, “if he would enter the pale of the Church of England.”[32] But that was what James would not do. On the other hand, the Church would gain little, and probably suffer much, if its temporal Head were the Electress Sophia, a German Calvinist, with a strong bias towards rationalism, as was shown by her patronage of the sceptic Toland and others of the same way of thinking. In truth, some sympathy must be extended to Queen Anne, and those of her many subjects who thought with her. It is no wonder they were undecided how to act, for they were between the Scylla of Popery and the Charybdis of Calvinism.
Yet the impassioned appeal which James had addressed to his sister that she would prefer “your own brother, the last male of our name, to the Electress of Hanover, the remotest relation we have, whose friendship you have no reason to rely on, or to be fond of, and who will leave the government to foreigners of another language, and of another interest,”[33] could not fail to awaken a responsive echo in the Queen’s heart. Other considerations weighed too. She was by temperament superstitious, and as her health failed and she saw herself like to die, childless, friendless and alone, she came to think that the restoration of the crown to her brother was the only atonement she could make for the wrong she, his best-loved child, had done her father. This sentiment of Queen Anne’s was well understood, and for the most part approved, by the Courts of Europe, with whom, almost without exception, the Hanoverian claims were unpopular, and considered to have little chance of success. The ambitions of the Electress Sophia met with no sympathy, and the idea of her becoming Queen of England was scouted as preposterous. Even her beloved niece and confidante, the Duchess of Orleans, gave her cold comfort. “Queen Anne,” she wrote to her, “must be well aware in her heart of hearts that our young king is her brother; I feel certain that her conscience will wake up before her death, and she will do justice to her brother”.[34]