'•/:■■> 
 
 

 
 QUEEN ANNE
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 BY 
 
 HERBERT PAUL 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 'the life of FROUDE," "a history of modern ENGLAND," ETC. 
 
 NEfV AND REVISED EDITION 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
 
 First published by A/essrs. Gonpil cr= Co. in igo6, 
 with numerous Illustrations. New Edition igi2.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. rAGE 
 
 I POLITICS — I I 
 
 II POLITICS — II 82 
 
 III LITERATURE 158 
 
 IV SOCIETY AND MANNERS ..... 244
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 POLITICS — I 
 
 It was decreed by Providence that the younger 
 daughter of James Stuart and Anne Hyde should 
 sit upon the throne of England, and be its nominal 
 ruler during a period unsurpassed, throughout 
 English history, for splendour in letters and fame 
 in war. Yet few of her subjects were less fitted to 
 estimate the military genius of Marlborough, or the 
 literary genius of Swift. Devoutly attached to the 
 Church of England, simple in her habits, decorous 
 in her life, she never showed any power, and 
 seldom any wish, to comprehend the great issues 
 of European politics, the fierce struggles of political 
 parties, which were decided and fought out by her 
 soldiers and ministers in her name. In religion 
 narrow, constant, and sincere, she gave the rest of 
 her small mind to determining the rival claims of 
 her favourites upon her preference and her affec- 
 tions. If she had been born to a private station, 
 she would have passed almost unnoticed as a good 
 woman and a regular churchgoer, with a singular 
 incapacity for rearing the numerous children to
 
 2 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 whom she gave birth. The tempests that rocked 
 the world in which, from no choice of her own, she 
 played a conspicuous, if not an important, part, 
 scarcely stirred the dull shallows of her soul. 
 Greatness, in the vulgar sense of the word, was 
 thrust upon her, but it only made her wretched. 
 In obscurity she might have been happy. She 
 would never have been remarkable for intellect or 
 character. 
 
 Anne's parentage was illustrious in more than 
 the heraldic sense. Of her two grandfathers, one 
 would have been thought by all men capable of 
 reigning if he had never reigned, and the other 
 wrote books which are still read with delight by all 
 lovers of good literature, or of history at first hand. 
 Charles the First had some kingly qualities, among 
 them the fatal belief that a King of England could 
 be above the law. Of art and letters he was a 
 careful student, and an excellent judge. His Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer, Edward Hyde, afterwards 
 Earl of Clarendon, the father of Queen Anne's 
 mother, was a man of high character and great 
 abilities, an honour to the Royalist cause, and to 
 the profession of letters. His Autobiography, still 
 more than his Rebellion, has a permanent fascina- 
 tion even for those readers who look upon the Long 
 Parliament as the saviour of English freedom. 
 
 Oueen Anne's father has achieved an unenviable
 
 POLITICS 3 
 
 fame as the worst of English sovereigns, and the 
 
 redeeming features in his character are not easy to 
 
 discover. He had a real love of cruelty, and his 
 
 heart was pronounced by Marlborough, who knew 
 
 him well, to be as hard as marble. The private 
 
 character of Charles the First was beyond reproach. 
 
 James the Second was in youth almost as dissolute 
 
 as his elder brother, but his taste in women was 
 
 such that the Merry Monarch described his brother's 
 
 mistresses as given him by his confessors in 
 
 penance for his sins. Although James Stuart and 
 
 George Jeffreys endeavoured, when their crimes had 
 
 landed both of them in ruin and disgrace, to throw 
 
 the blame for their united wickedness upon each 
 
 other, there is quite enough for the two, nor is it 
 
 necessary to settle the proportions of public iniquity 
 
 between them. When James secretly married Anne 
 
 Hyde in 1660, he was still a Protestant, He was 
 
 Duke of York, and heir presumptive to the throne. 
 
 His father-in-law had been Prince Charles's titular 
 
 Chancellor since 1658, and received the Great Seal 
 
 at the Restoration, with the title which his books 
 
 have made for ever famous. The Duke of York 
 
 became Lord High Admiral, and, as we know from 
 
 the diary of Samuel Pepys, was assiduous in the 
 
 discharge of his official duties. As a soldier or 
 
 sailor, he might have won credit, if not distinction. 
 
 As a civil servant he would not perhaps have risen 
 B 2
 
 4 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 to the top of the tree. But he would have earned 
 by laborious and methodical diligence his salary, 
 his pension, and the approval of his superiors. He 
 had also, it must be admitted, that parsimonious 
 economy which, disagreeable as it may be in private 
 life, is a shining virtue in public men. That he did 
 not find out Mr. Pepys's defalcations, which were 
 unknown till the recent discovery of that ingenious 
 gentleman's most secret cipher, only proves that 
 Pepys was a good deal cleverer in manipulating 
 figures than His Royal Highness. James's first 
 wife has left no mark upon history, though her 
 features have been preserved on the canvas of Lely. 
 She had been before her marriage maid of honour 
 to the Princess of Orange, and it was at Buda that 
 she met James, then, like his brother, in exile. Of 
 her children only two survived childhood, but they 
 became successively Queens of England. Anne, 
 the younger, was born at St. James's Palace on the 
 6th of February, 1665, and educated in the religion 
 of her parents, then both members of the National 
 Church. The reaction against Puritanism was at 
 its height. Charles the Second, though his natural 
 abilities were great, far greater than the abilities 
 of James, detested all business, loved only pleasure, 
 and hated only to be bored. His one settled deter- 
 mination was that never again, to use his own 
 words, would he "go on his travels." His desire
 
 POLITICS 5 
 
 was to govern, so far as possible, without a Par- 
 liament, and to put himself under the protection of 
 the French KinjEf. His patriotism, so far as he had 
 any, was hampered by his vices, and his courtiers 
 taught him to believe that Oliver Cromwell, "the 
 greatest Prince who ever ruled England," who 
 made the name of England honoured by every 
 Protestant, and dreaded by every Catholic, Power, 
 was an execrable traitor. "Charles the First," says 
 Junius, with rhetorical exaggeration, "lived and 
 died a hypocrite. Charles the Second was a hypo- 
 crite of another sort, and should have died upon 
 the same scaffold." He died in his bed, with the 
 courtesy and good humour that seldom failed him. 
 But long before his death he had thrown away the 
 fruits of Cromwell's victories, and made England 
 contemptible. By the infamous Treaty of Dover, 
 signed and sealed in 1670, he had "bound himself 
 to make public profession of the Roman Catholic 
 religion, to join his armies to those of Louis for 
 the purpose of destroying the power of the United 
 Provinces, and to employ the whole strength of 
 England, by land and sea, in support of the rights 
 of the House of Bourbon to the vast monarchy of 
 Spain." "^ In return for these degrading promises 
 Charles the ^Second obtained from Louis the Four- 
 teenth a large annual dole, and a guarantee of 
 * {^Mqcaulays Works ^ Vol. I. pp. 164-5).
 
 6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 support against his own subjects if they were driven 
 to rebellion. Well might Charles Fox say that the 
 worst of all revolutions was a restoration. 
 
 Charles the Second, who never had any real 
 religion, was for proclaiming himself a Roman 
 Catholic at once. His more prudent ally, who had 
 taken care to become acquainted with English 
 opinion, and knew that the Protestantism of the 
 English people was incorrigible, induced him to 
 practise for the time a hypocritical concealment, and 
 to attend the services of the Church of England. 
 One service was the same as another to Charles, if 
 only the sermon were short. He went to church as 
 seldom as he decentlv could, and usually provided 
 himself with a plentiful supply of light literature, 
 in case the sermon should be long. He even took 
 the sacrament in both kinds, and on account of his 
 politic acquiescence the Pope refused him till the 
 last moment admittance into the Church of Rome. 
 His brother James was less compliant. It is prob- 
 able that James had already become a Roman 
 Catholic, and at all events he warmly supported 
 the Treaty of Dover. He was in his way a religious 
 man. Morally far worse than his brother, for he 
 was cruel as well as licentious, he did put himself 
 under the priests with a thoroughness that left 
 nothing to be desired. His religion may be called 
 superstition,, for it had no influence upon his
 
 POLITICS 7 
 
 morality, and was as far as possible removed from 
 the teaching of Christ. But, such as it was, it was 
 genuine, and he adhered to it at all costs for the 
 rest of his life. After the Treaty of Dover he ceased 
 to appear in the Royal Chapel. The law as it then 
 stood did not exclude a Catholic from succession 
 to the throne, and by a declaration of doubtful 
 legality the King dispensed Catholics from the 
 penal laws against them. In 1673, however, the 
 Test Act was passed, and the Duke of York found 
 himself under the necessity of abjuring the Catholic 
 faith, or resigning his office as Lord High Admiral. 
 He resigned ; though eleven years afterwards he 
 was permitted, by a flagrant illegality, to take his 
 place again at the Board. His two daughters, by 
 express command of his brother, were brought up 
 to be Protestants. For Charles, who was no fool, 
 perceived clearly enough that if, in a matter for 
 which he was responsible, the Church of Rome were 
 given precedence over the Church of England, the 
 secret article of the Treaty of Dover, that which 
 concerned his own religion, might as well be pub- 
 lished in the Gazette. Anne, Duchess of York, 
 had been received with her husband into com- 
 munion with Rome. But she died in 1671, and her 
 husband married Mary of Modena in 1673, This 
 open union with a Catholic Princess increased an 
 unpopularity which required no augmentation, and
 
 8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 was even censured by the House of Commons. 
 "My dear James," said Charles, on receiving from 
 his brother some hint about the danger of assassina- 
 tion, "they will never kill me to make you King." 
 James, however, bigoted as he was, did not attempt 
 to interfere with the education of Anne. 
 
 Left motherless when she was only eight years 
 old, the little Princess Anne formed after a time an 
 affectionate attachment to Sarah Jennings, a girl 
 five years older than herself, whose strong will 
 and violent temper gradually and completely domi- 
 nated her own. On the 23rd of January, 1676, at 
 the age of thirteen, she was confirmed in the Church 
 of England by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, 
 who had been a cornet in the Horse Guards, and 
 was said by her father to talk more like a colonel 
 than a bishop. He was undoubtedly a pugnacious 
 personage, and a vehement antagonist of the 
 Roman Church. Thus all Anne's surroundings 
 at the most impressionable period of her life were 
 Protestant, and her religious estrangement from her 
 father was complete. Her sister Mary was married 
 at fifteen to William, Prince of Orange, then 
 twenty-seven, the greatest statesman in Europe, a 
 staunch Protestant, and the sworn enemy from boy- 
 hood to the magnificent King of France. Anne's 
 own marriage was much discussed. The Elector 
 of Hanover, afterwards George the First, was a
 
 POLITICS 9 
 
 suitor for her hand. Her own predilection was for 
 John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, whom she called 
 Jack. But her personal leanings were set at nought, 
 the Act of Settlement was not anticipated, and in 
 1683, being then eighteen, she became the wife of 
 a Lutheran Prince, George of Denmark, brother of 
 King Christian the Fifth, What Pope falsely said 
 of most women is perfectly true of Prince George. 
 He had no character at all. So many things sur- 
 prised him, that his favourite ejaculation was Est-il 
 possible? He seemed to care for nothing but his 
 dinner and his bottle. Charles the Second, a pretty 
 shrewd judge of men, said, " I have tried Prince 
 George sober, and I have tried him drunk. Drunk 
 or sober, there is nothing in him." 
 
 Far more important than her marriage in the life 
 of Anne, as in the history of Europe, was the 
 appointment of her old playfellow Sarah Jennings, 
 now Lady Churchill, to be her woman of the bed- 
 chamber. For Lady Churchill's husband was the 
 first soldier of his age, if indeed as a soldier he has 
 ever in any age been surpassed. 
 
 The later career of this extraordinary man, with 
 its shining magnificence and its shameless treason, 
 fills the public stage during the reign of Queen 
 Anne. When the old connection between his wife 
 and the young Princess became official in 1683, he 
 had been for a year Baron Churchill of Aymouth
 
 lo QUEEN ANNE 
 
 in the peerage of Scotland. While he was page to 
 the Duke of York, who seduced his sister, Arabella 
 Churchill, and befriended him in consequence, he 
 had fascinated one of the King's favourites, the 
 Duchess of Cleveland, by his handsome looks. The 
 result was in one particular unusual. For the 
 Duchess gave her lover a large sum of money, and 
 he invested it on the best landed security without 
 scruple or delay. Few are the young men of real 
 life who have profited in a financial sense by their 
 vices, like Tom Jones and Porthos in fiction. But 
 John Churchill was an exception to most rules. A 
 miserly soldier is not common. Churchill's love of 
 money amounted to a passion, and for better for 
 worse, for richer for poorer, he clung to it through- 
 out his life. What Macaulay well describes as his 
 "far-sighted, sure-footed judgment" kept him true 
 to his own interests, and eager for his own promo- 
 tion, alike in youth and in manhood, when he was 
 the unknown son of a penniless courtier, and when 
 the sovereigns of Europe were his obedient suitors. 
 Of fidelity and of friendship he seemed almost 
 incapable. Yet there were two points on which his 
 conduct is absolutely beyond criticism or reproach. 
 He was the staunchest of Protestants. Notwith- 
 standing his lawful and unlawful relations with 
 James, the most devout of Catholics, he never would 
 hear of changing his religion. The other point is
 
 POLITICS II 
 
 ■more closely connected with the subject of this 
 book. When he was twenty-eight, and a colonel 
 of foot, he fell in love with Sarah Jennings, a high- 
 spirited girl of eighteen, with a "fury temper, and 
 a fairy face"; and, though she had not a penny, 
 he married her. From that moment she was the 
 only human being that he either loved or feared. 
 The intimacy between his wife and the Princess was 
 not affected by the marriage of either. They called 
 each other by pet names. Anne was Mrs. Morley, 
 Sarah was Mrs. Freeman. The ascendency of Mrs. 
 Freeman over Mrs. Morley, of a strong character 
 over a weak one, grew absolute by degrees. It 
 must be remembered that at this time, in 1683, the 
 probability of Anne becoming Queen was just one 
 of those nice calculations on which a mind like 
 Churchill's loves to dwell. The King was only 
 fifty-three, but he had severely tried his constitution 
 by his excesses, and he had no legitimate children. 
 His brother was three years younger, and Mary of 
 Modena, the second Duchess of York, might at any 
 time have a son. Anne's sister, the Princess of 
 Orange, stood before her in the succession. But 
 her husband was Stadtholder of Holland, and it was 
 conceivable that on that account the Parliament of 
 England might pass her over. A Bill to exclude 
 the Duke of York from the throne on account of his 
 creed had passed the House of Commons in 1680,
 
 12 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Misled by the genius of George Savile, Marquess 
 of Halifax, a consummate debater, but a man more 
 witty than wise, the Lords rejected it, and thus 
 prepared the way for the most disastrous reign in 
 English history, with the possible exception of 
 Mary Tudor's. But a Bill which had already 
 passed one House might in future pass both Houses, 
 and receive the Royal Assent, so that the succes- 
 sion of James was not secure until, on the 6th of 
 February, 1685, Charles the Second died after a 
 short illness, having first been received into the 
 Church of Rome, and confessed himself to a 
 Roman priest. 
 
 Churchill was at the outset a faithful subject of 
 the new Sovereign. He went on an embassy to 
 Paris for a renewal of the disgraceful subsidy which 
 Charles had received from Louis, and he was 
 created an English peer for his pains. He took a 
 part, though a subordinate part, in putting down 
 the rebellion of Monmouth, Charles's natural son, 
 at Sedgemoor. But this strange man's conscience 
 was as uneasy as his convictions were unsettled. 
 Difficult as it may be to reconcile some incidents of 
 his life with the precepts or practice of any religion, 
 there can be no doubt that he was sincerely attached 
 to the Protestant Church of England. He had, 
 moreover, many sources of information, his judg- 
 ment was almost infallible, and he soon perceived
 
 POLITICS 13 
 
 that James's tenure of the throne was much less 
 stable than his wife's hold upon Princess xVnne, 
 while, if James remained King, the position of no 
 Protestant would be secure. He was not in the 
 habit of allowing other people to profit by his 
 knowledge. When James declared open war upon 
 Protestantism by turning Protestants out of their 
 places, Churchill entered into treasonable corre- 
 spondence with William of Orange. Through 
 Lady Churchill he was sure of the Princess. So 
 far as Anne understood politics, and had a will of 
 her own, she was a Tory, and a believer in divine 
 right. But her mind was almost as limited as her 
 husband's, and on most points her will was the will 
 of Sarah Churchill. Her isolation helped to rivet 
 the chain. She deserted the cause of her father, 
 who had shown her very little affection, and 
 accepted William the Deliverer, her brother-in-law, 
 as her rightful Protestant sovereign. Mary was 
 childless. Anne herself had borne several children, 
 who all died in infancy. W'hile the Revolution was 
 being actively prepared, on the 10th of June, 1688, 
 James the Second's son, known with familiar con- 
 tempt as the " Old Pretender," made his appearance 
 in the world. The "warming-pan " story has been 
 long since exploded, and no one now questions the 
 legitimacy of this child. But his birth appeared too 
 opportune for rational belief, it was surrounded by
 
 14 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the Court with a fooHsh secrecy, and an irrational 
 incredulity prevailed throughout the ranks of Pro- 
 testant Whigs. In any case it was too late to draw 
 back. James persisted in his lawless oppression, 
 and on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot 
 William landed at Torbay. Anne fully believed 
 that the child called James Stuart was supposi- 
 titious. Otherwise, she thought, she would herself 
 have been summoned to her stepmother's bedside; 
 whereas she was in fact made the victim of practical 
 jokes, and sent on a wild-goose chase, which natur- 
 ally mystified her, and made her suspect foul play. 
 She was fond of her sister, and the knowledge that 
 Mary would be, at least in name, a reigning Queen 
 helped to reconcile her to the Revolution. On the 
 nth of April, 1689, she attended the coronation of 
 William and Mary. She soon found that her 
 sister's Queenship was a mere liction. Mary was 
 the most submissive of women, and William was 
 the proudest of men. He had not left his beloved 
 Holland, for which his heart always yearned, to be 
 his wife's gentleman usher. Although Mary was 
 legally Queen, Parliament had given the power, as 
 distinguished from the title, of Sovereign exclu- 
 sively to him, and he was not even in all respects 
 minded to be a constitutional King. The example 
 of James was indeed quite sufficient to prevent him 
 from overriding, or attempting to override, the law.
 
 POLITICS 15 
 
 He treated the House of Commons with punctilious 
 respect. But he had not the modern idea of acting 
 upon the advice of his Ministers, nor of changing 
 them on account of a ParHamentary vote. A master 
 of European statecraft, he determined to be his own 
 Minister for Foreign Affairs, nor was there any one 
 of his subjects who would so well have discharged 
 the duties. Churchill was in 1689 created Earl 
 of Marlborough, and was invested on various 
 occasions with important commands. But William 
 never trusted him, and he is said to have been the 
 one man before whom that intrepid spirit quailed. 
 
 Late in the summer of 1689 was born the only 
 one of Anne's numerous children who survived 
 babyhood. This little boy was created Duke of 
 Gloucester by William, who petted him, and gave 
 him in charge to Marlborough for his military 
 education, saying: "Make him like yourself." 
 At last it appeared as if the succession to the 
 throne were established, and for some years to 
 come nothing was said about the House of 
 Hanover. But though William, in his cold, dry 
 way, was kind to his wife's small nephew, the 
 Princess Anne was not on the best of terms with 
 the King and Queen. The great King, who was 
 never popular with his subjects, had no charm of 
 manner, and no superficial accomplishments. His 
 noble character, his dauntless courage, and his
 
 i6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 profound intelligence, were the objects of his wife's 
 idolatrous admiration, though as a husband he had 
 at first given her good reason to be jealous of the 
 gifted Elizabeth Villiers, afterwards Countess of 
 Orkney, called by Swift the wisest woman he ever 
 knew. Anne was quite incapable of appreciating 
 or understanding him. In her familiar correspond- 
 ence with her "Mrs. Freeman" she called him 
 "Caliban, alias the Dutch Monster." Mary could 
 not endure any disrespect shown to William, and 
 her devotion succeeded at last in winning his heart, 
 so that they became an absolutely united couple. 
 When, in conversation about her allowance, Anne 
 talked of appealing to her friends, Mary said tartly, 
 "Pray, what friends have you but the King and 
 me ? " She disliked the moody silence and the 
 sullen temper of her sister, so different from her 
 own vivacious gaiety, Anne's income was raised, 
 after some demur, from thirty to fifty thousand 
 pounds a year, much of which probably went to the 
 Churchills. But her estrangement from the Court 
 was increased by the King's most wise refusal to 
 employ Prince George in any public situation, and 
 completed on the 21st of January, 1692, by the 
 sudden dismissal of Lord Marlborough from all 
 the offices he held. For this step on the King's 
 part there was ample ground. Marlborough was 
 in secret and treacherous correspondence with the
 
 POLITICS 17 
 
 exile of St. Germains. He was seeking to influence 
 English opinion against the Dutch favourites of 
 the King, especially Bentinck, and he was quite 
 prepared to assist, if it became necessary, for his 
 own purposes in the conditional restoration of 
 James. Legal proof against him may not then have 
 been forthcoming, and the strongest, though cer- 
 tainly not the sole, evidence is supplied by the post- 
 humous Memoirs of James himself. But William 
 knew a great deal, if not everything, and Marl- 
 borough was far too dangerous an enemy to be 
 treated with indulgence, or with contempt. Anne 
 shared the fate of the Marlboroughs, and left the 
 Court with them. To live without her precious 
 Mrs. Freeman was impossible for her. With Mrs. 
 Freeman she was always happy, and her husband 
 was always happy with his bottle. So matters 
 remained until Queen Mary died of smallpox, the 
 great scourge of the age, on the 28th of December, 
 1694. She was only thirty-four, and her death 
 was quite unexpected. Indeed, it had been pretty 
 generally assumed that she would survive her hus- 
 band, marry again, and have children who would 
 destroy all chance of Anne's succession to the 
 throne. Anne was now by the Bill of Rights the 
 heir presumptive. She had a son living. The 
 revival or continuance of the Stuart dynasty might 
 come through her, and at all events, when she
 
 t8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 succeeded to the throne, Marlborough would be the 
 most powerful person in the State. He ceased 
 to engage in Jacobite plots, and actively sought 
 through the Princess Anne a reconciliation with 
 the Court. William was the most placable of men. 
 It was always from policy that he acted, being 
 devoid alike of cruelty and of fear. After her 
 sister's death Anne was again treated with the 
 ceremonious honour appropriate to her rank, which 
 had been, after her quarrel with Mary, withheld 
 from her, and in 1698 Marlborough recovered his 
 position, not because the King had ceased to dis- 
 trust him, but because William's clear intellect per- 
 ceived the change in the situation, which destroyed 
 Marlborough's motive for treason. 
 
 The little Duke of Gloucester, though he had a 
 small cannon and a tiny regiment of his own, 
 was not left exclusively to Marlborough. Bishop 
 Burnet instructed him in history, and was delighted 
 with a progress which may have been forced. At 
 any rate, the child of so many hopes did not enter 
 his twelfth year. When he died at the age of 
 eleven, on the 30th of July, 1700, the ultimate 
 succession to the Crown was again in jeopardy. 
 After so many disappointments, belief in Anne as 
 a mother had ceased, and it became necessary that 
 Parliament should make provision for the future 
 of the State. Such was the origin of the famous
 
 POLITICS 19 
 
 Act of Settlement, which received William's assent 
 
 on the 1 2th of June, 1701. By this statute the 
 
 Crown of England devolved upon Anne after the 
 
 death of the King, and, in the event of her dying 
 
 without further issue, upon the Electress Sophia of 
 
 Hanover, granddaughter of James the First. A 
 
 few months after the House of Hanover had thus 
 
 been introduced into English history James the 
 
 Second died at St. Germains. Before the breath 
 
 was out of James's body, the French monarch, 
 
 whose treatment of the royal exile had always been 
 
 extremely generous, had, with singular imprudence, 
 
 assured the dying man that his son should be 
 
 recognised as James the Third of England. The 
 
 English people were deeply and justly incensed and 
 
 alarmed. The Pretender was at once attainted. 
 
 Men and money were voted for military operations 
 
 against France. The Abjuration Bill, requiring all 
 
 persons who held any public othce to abjure the 
 
 pretensions of James Stuart, was hurried through 
 
 Parliament. 
 
 William the Third lived just long enough to 
 
 give this Act his sanction. On the 8th of March, 
 
 1702, he died of internal injuries caused by the 
 
 stumble of a horse, and Anne became Queen of 
 
 England. Marlborough could not have hoped 
 
 for a more favourable conjunction of circumstances. 
 
 His old master James was no longer alive to 
 c 2
 
 20 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 reproach or incriminate him. The very different 
 King wlio had just passed away was almost the 
 only person he could not beguile or deceive. The 
 new Queen was the obedient slave of his wife. The 
 opening of a great campaign on the Continent of 
 Europe against the first Catholic power of the 
 world called for a Protestant general of military 
 genius, or, in other words, for the Earl of 
 Marlborough. His various treacheries were not 
 known as they are known now. He had had the 
 good fortune to be once falsely accused by an 
 unprincipled adventurer, and the victim of a 
 forgery is always sure of a strong presumption in 
 favour of his general innocence. Marlborough 
 entered under the best auspices upon the most 
 glorious phase of his life. 
 
 On the 23rd of April, St. George's Day, Anne 
 was crowned in accordance with the Act of Settle- 
 ment, and the reign of the Churchills began. The 
 Earl of Marlborough was made a Duke, and 
 Captain General of her Majesty's forces, with an 
 annual pension of five thousand pounds, settled 
 upon him for the Queen's life. The Duchess 
 became Mistress of the Robes. Godolphin, a man 
 of Marlborough's own choice, received the appoint- 
 ment of Lord Treasurer, to whom the First Lord 
 of the Treasury is the nearest modern approxima- 
 tion. "Sidney Godolphin," said Charles the
 
 POLITICS 21 
 
 Second, whom he served in various offices, "Sidney 
 Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of 
 the way." Godolphin was a man of low char- 
 acter, low aims, low tastes and pursuits. He had 
 corresponded with James while he was in the 
 service of William, and he had always been ready 
 to join Marlboroug-h in any proposed intrigue. 
 He cared nothing for literature, or for science, or 
 indeed for anything except politics and sport. But 
 he was an industrious man of business, and an 
 expert administrator, who knew every turn of the 
 machine, and every move of the game. If he had 
 any principles, he was a Tory. His real leader 
 w^as Marlborough, whom he served with as much 
 fidelity as he was capable of showing to any one. 
 It was legally imperative that Parliament should 
 be dissolved within six months of King William's 
 death, and the general election of 1702 produced a 
 large Tory majority. This result well suited Anne. 
 Her Toryism was genuine, so genuine indeed that 
 it made her uncomfortable about her own position. 
 She could not be sure that "James the Third," 
 though he might be a Pretender, was not the 
 legitimate son of her father and her stepmother. 
 Could his religion exclude him from the throne? 
 A Whig would say that that was & question for 
 Parliament, which had decided it against the 
 Pretender* A Tory was in the days of the
 
 22 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Exclusion Bill, and to some extent was still, a man 
 or woman who believed in divine right. Anne 
 could scarcely help asking in her heart of hearts 
 whether this boy of fourteen was not lawful King 
 of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Probably the 
 Churchills quieted her fears. The Duke and 
 Duchess were not troubled with many scruples. 
 But Protestants they were, and they held it a duty 
 to deliver the country from Papists. They could 
 easily represent to Anne that if she were to abdicate. 
 Parliament would at once send for the Electress 
 Sophia, and that her brother James would not 
 have the slightest chance of taking her place. They 
 could appeal, no doubt they did appeal, to her 
 love for the Church of England, which was deep 
 and sincere. But whatever Mrs. Freeman wanted, 
 Mrs. Morley w-ould readily give her, even to the 
 half of her kingdom. As Captain General of the 
 Forces, Marlborough was pre-eminently in his 
 right place. Louis was still bent upon the restora- 
 tion of a Catholic King in England, and the death 
 of William had encouraged his hopes. England 
 was committed to a great war, and stood in need 
 of her great General to cope with the Marshals of 
 France. In her first speech to the Privy Council, 
 where her musical voice was much admired, the 
 Queen announced that the country with its allies 
 would "oppose the great power of France." Some
 
 POLITICS 23 
 
 offence was caused, though it is unlikely that any 
 was meant, by her protest on the same occasion 
 that her heart was entirely English. This was 
 thought to be a reflection upon her predecessor, 
 whose heart was entirely Dutch, and who had 
 placed his head alone at the service of his adopted 
 country. But Anne had a Danish husband, who 
 spoke the French language, and it is unnecessary 
 to look for hidden meanings in a phrase of perfectly 
 natural sentiment. Prince George had been created 
 Duke of Cumberland, and was entitled to sit in 
 the House of Lords, where he duly took his seat. 
 An annuity of a hundred thousand a year was 
 secured to him in case he survived the Queen, who 
 was ten years younger than himself. Otherwise he 
 received no increase of dignity, and continued to be, 
 as he always had been, a cipher in public affairs. 
 " One good trooper would have been a greater loss," 
 said King James on hearing that he had been 
 deserted by Prince George. 
 
 When Marlborough received his Dukedom, he 
 was fifty-two, and in the full enjoyment of all 
 his magnificent powers. In the summer of 1702 he 
 left England to command the allied forces on the 
 Continent, and established his head-quarters at 
 Nimeguen on the Rhine in Holland. War with 
 France had been declared in May, and was at 
 that time popular with both parties in the State,
 
 24 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 except with those logically consistent Tories who 
 were also Jacobites. For, though it carried out 
 the policy of William, and was to that extent a 
 Whig war, it was national because directed against 
 the French King, who had presumed to dictate 
 the devolution of the British Crown. Marlborough 
 had learned the art of soldiering under Turenne. 
 But he was not in the least reluctant to turn against 
 the French the lessons they had unconsciously 
 taught him. The head of the Ministry, Godolphin, 
 was at that time a Tory. Marlborough was osten- 
 sibly sometimes a Tory and sometimes a Whig. 
 In truth and in fact he was neither one nor the 
 other. He disliked "party heats," and party 
 government, then in its infancy, did not appeal to 
 his cool, subtle, calculating mind. 
 
 Unhappily religious discord was rife not merely 
 between Catholics and Protestants, but among 
 Protestants themselves. The toleration of Dis- 
 senters, who were Whigs almost to a man, was 
 thoroughly displeasing to the High Churchmen, 
 who were without exception Tories. The Queen 
 sympathised with these "Highflyers," as they were 
 called, but she was rather embarrassed by the fact 
 that her own husband was a Lutheran Protestant, 
 not in communion with the Church of England. 
 The High Churchmen could not very well get at 
 Prince George. A man of genius was an easier prey.
 
 POLITICS 25 
 
 Daniel Defoe had not yet become immortal as the 
 author of Robinson Crusoe, and he was little known 
 to fame. Dissenters at that time, and for more 
 than a hundred years afterwards, were incapable 
 of holding office without taking the sacrament 
 according to the rites of the Established Church. 
 It was even proposed to go further against them, 
 and by an Occasional Conformity Bill, that is a 
 Bill against occasional conformity, to exclude them 
 from civil employment altogether at the very time 
 when Louis the Fourteenth, having crushed Pro- 
 testantism in France, was seeking to crush it in 
 England. Defoe, assuming the character of a High 
 Churchman, gravely recommended that Noncon- 
 formists should be exterminated. This proposal, 
 called the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, is a 
 masterpiece of savage irony, not unworthy of Swift. 
 It did its work too well for the author's own ease 
 and comfort. Hundreds of readers were taken 
 in, and supposed that they had before them the 
 genuine pamphlet of a Tory zealot. Those High 
 Churchmen who understood the stratagem did not 
 see the joke. They called upon the Government 
 to prosecute the author, and in July 1703, seven 
 months after the publication of the tract, Defoe was 
 sentenced to imprisonment, as well as to exposure 
 on the pillory. He stood on that bad eminence in 
 Cornhill, in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The
 
 26 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 people did not share the folly of their rulers. They 
 gathered round him, not to pelt him, nor abuse him, 
 but to cheer him, and to drink his health. In 
 November he was released from gaol on the inter- 
 cession of Robert Harley, afterwards Earl of 
 Oxford, then Speaker of the House of Commons. 
 Defoe came out of prison to find his business as a 
 manufacturer ruined. But Harley appreciated his 
 literary talents, and the value of his services. The 
 alliance between them was for the mutual benefit of 
 both, and Harley owed more to Defoe than Defoe 
 owed to Harley. For years after Harley's admis- 
 sion to the Cabinet he was a regular spy in the pay 
 of the Government, although, as the Portland 
 Papers show, he often complained to Harley of his 
 inadequate remuneration. 
 
 Defoe regained his liberty just in time to describe, 
 with his inimitably graphic power, the storm which 
 swept over England at the end of November 1703, 
 the most terrible that has visited this island within 
 recorded times. The loss of life was considerable. 
 The loss of property was immense. On the estate 
 of John Evelyn, the Diarist, two thousand trees 
 were destroyed. Ships were sunk by the score. 
 London and Bristol looked as if they had been 
 taken by storm. The Palace at Wells collapsed, 
 and crushed the Bishop, Dr. Kidder, who had 
 succeeded the saintly non-juror Ken. Parliament
 
 POLITICS 27 
 
 voted an Address to the Crown, and a general fast 
 was ordered by the Queen. There were as many- 
 people HI mourning as if a great battle had been 
 fought. The House of Commons intervened, not 
 merely on general grounds of sympathy with the 
 public distress, but also because so many of her 
 Majesty's ships had been ruined that it became 
 necessary to make better provision for maintaining 
 the strength of the fleet. 
 
 The last Parliament of William the Third left 
 to the first Parliament of Anne the legacy of a 
 constitutional struggle between the two Houses, 
 which arose out of the celebrated Aylesbury case, 
 known to lawyers as Ashby v. White. Aylesbury 
 was one of the boroughs which enjoyed the widest 
 possible suffrage for men long before the days of 
 Parliamentary reform. The House of Commons, 
 which at that time, and for more than a hundred 
 and fifty years afterwards, claimed to be the sole 
 authority in determining the legal right to vote, 
 had declared the franchise of Aylesbury to be vested 
 in all adult male inhabitants not maintained by 
 parochial relief. A poor ostler named Ashby, then 
 just above the line, though he soon sank below it, 
 tendered his vote to White, the Constable acting on 
 behalf of the Sheriff, which White refused to accept. 
 That White broke the law was clear. The question 
 was what remedy belonged to the disfranchised
 
 28 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Ashby. Having put himself, it may be presumed, 
 in the hands of some local attorney, Ashby brought 
 an action against White at the Aylesbury Assizes, 
 and recovered five pounds by way of damages. This 
 simple proceeding on his part, or on the part of 
 his backers, shook the fabric of the Constitution. 
 His antagonist White, the defendant in the cause, 
 applied to the Court of Queen's Bench for an order 
 to set aside the verdict as bad in law upon the 
 admitted facts. The Lord Chief Justice of that 
 Court in those days was a very great and famous 
 personage. Sir John Holt. Holt ranks among the 
 sages of the law, and is honoured for having taken 
 a leading part in raising the judicial bench from 
 the discredit into which it had fallen before the 
 Revolution. But on this occasion he was outvoted 
 by his colleagues, and the Court decided against 
 his opinion by three to one that Ashby had suffered 
 no tort, no actionable wrong, for the reason, among 
 others, that the candidates of his choice had both 
 been elected. From this judgment the poor ostler, 
 through his attorney, or the attorney through his 
 poor ostler, appealed to the House of Lords. The 
 Lords, not the Law Lords, but the whole House, 
 reversed it, and then the trouble began. For the 
 peers had presumed to meddle with an election to 
 the House of Commons. By this time William the 
 Third had died, Anne was on the throne, another
 
 POLITICS 29 
 
 House of Commons had been chosen, and Ashby 
 was a pauper in receipt of public ahns. But a 
 great issue was at stake, and everytliing was 
 forgotten except the rival jealousies of Lords and 
 Commons- The indirect control exercised by one 
 House over the other was very grea:t, for many 
 peers owned pocket boroughs, and many pocket 
 boroughs belonged to the same peer. All the more 
 did the Commons think it requisite to protest 
 against the direct influence of the hereditary 
 Chamber. When Ashby took out execution, he 
 was ordered into the custody of the Serjeant-at- 
 arms. The Serjeant was further directed to find 
 and bring to the bar the counsel and attorneys who 
 had brought the case before the Lords. The Lords 
 resolved that they should be set at liberty. Their 
 Lordships then, perceiving that the quarrel had 
 reached a stage which could not be called dignified, 
 desired sL Conference with the Commons in the 
 Painted Chamber. The Conference was held, but 
 it did not bring peace. For the Commons took 
 the opportunity to protest by way of recrimination 
 against the novel practice of bringing appeals from 
 the Court of Chancery to the House of Lords, who 
 had hitherto confined themselves to determinino- 
 as in the present case, writs of error at common 
 law. The Lords therefore broke off the Conference, 
 and the dispute might have become really serious
 
 30 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 if the Queen had not interrupted it by the simple 
 process of proroguing ParUament. This sensible 
 course, for which Godolphin was responsible, put 
 an end to the matter, and it was never revived. 
 Historians, too contemptuous, and perhaps some- 
 times too ignorant, of the law, have represented the 
 Lords as vindicators of electoral right. But to 
 argue thus is to miss the true point, which was 
 not the wrong, but the remedy. If Ashby had 
 petitioned the House of Commons, the decision of 
 the Constable would have been set aside, and the 
 vote would have been allowed. The suffrage was 
 not given him as a material possession on which 
 he could set a pecuniary value, but as a political 
 privilege to be used for public purposes alone. No 
 legal tribunal had any right to a voice in the 
 question, which was exclusively for the House of 
 Commons. It is only by statutes passed long after 
 Anne's reign that the judges have acquired rights 
 which Holt most properly disclaimed. 
 
 In 1705 another great constitutional change was 
 made, and made, as all such changes should be, 
 by Act of Parliament. During William the Third's 
 reign there had been unsuccessful attempts to ex- 
 clude all placemen from the House of Commons. 
 If these efforts had succeeded, the House of Com- 
 mons would have been deprived of active participa- 
 tion in the government of the country, and would 
 have lost control over the Ministers of the Crown.
 
 POLITICS 3t 
 
 Such a disability was long afterwards inserted in 
 the Constitution of the United States by the 
 political philosophers who drew up that famous 
 instrument, and the result has been to make the 
 American Cabinet little more than clerks under 
 the orders of the President. The statute of Anne, 
 which, though modified, has never been repealed, 
 enacts that no one holding an office of profit under 
 the Crown which was not in existence on the 25th 
 of October, 1705, shall sit in the House of Com- 
 mons, and that the acceptance by a Member of that 
 House of an office which did then exist shall vacate 
 his seat, though he may be re-elected. If his office 
 has been created since that day, he is disqualified 
 for election, unless of course he be expressly 
 qualified by the Act which establishes the post, or 
 by some later statute. The broad result of this 
 legislation, and the rules framed in accordance with 
 it for the discipline of the public service, is that 
 political officers may, and practically must, sit in 
 the Legislature, while permanent members of the 
 Civil Service are excluded from Parliament alto- 
 gether. From 1705 to 1867 every member of Par- 
 liament who accepted an office of profit under the 
 Crown vacated his seat, and submitted himself, if 
 eligible, for re-election, even though he passed in 
 due course from the Solicitor- to the Attorney- 
 Generalship. In 1867 it was provided that trans- 
 ference from one oflice to another should not create
 
 34 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 a vacancy. By this rough and ready method, 
 illogical, inartistic, and practically sound, two great 
 and paramount objects are achieved. In the first 
 place the Cabinet, the governing body of the 
 Empire, is entirely composed from the two Houses 
 of Parliament, and constantly associated with them. 
 In the second place, the Civil Service, upon which 
 Ministers of all parties alike depend, is kept free 
 from controversial strife, and is confined to the sole 
 business of efficient administration. 
 
 The Queen, who believed in divine right, took 
 little interest in constitutional questions, except so 
 far as they affected the Church of England. To 
 that Church she gave in commemoration of her 
 thirty-ninth birthday, which fell upon the 6th of 
 February, 1704, a splendid present, ever since 
 called by her name, and known as Queen Anne's 
 Bounty. The First Fruits and Tenths, being a 
 charge upon land, originally levied for ecclesiastical 
 purposes, had been diverted from the Roman to 
 the English Court by Henry the Eighth. Charles 
 the Second could find no better use for them than 
 to make provision for his favourites and their 
 children. Bishop Burnet, a staunch Churchman, 
 though a friend of Dissenters, and a fervent Whig, 
 had tried hard in the previous reign to procure this 
 fund for the small benefices of the Church. Where 
 he had failed with William he succeeded with
 
 POLITICS 33 
 
 Anne. The assent of Parliament was obtained, 
 and the statutes of mortmain were so far repealed, 
 that bequests to the particular corporation which 
 had charge of this fund became by statute legal. 
 Two circumstances, however, postponed and ham- 
 pered the beneficial operation of Queen Anne's 
 Bounty. The charges upon it were not cleared off 
 until the Queen and Burnet were both in their 
 graves. But long after that date, 17 15, long after 
 1815, the other and more serious hindrance con- 
 tinued to operate. The amount of a benefice was 
 no guide to the means of the incumbent. For he 
 might, and often did, hold other preferments besides, 
 putting in curates to do the work for which he 
 received the stipend. To reform the Church of 
 England in 1704, or in 1804, would have been con- 
 sidered sacrilegious. The Establishment was still 
 the rich man's Church, and it was not the poorest 
 parsons who, before the year 1838, derived most 
 benefit from the bounty of Queen Anne. 
 
 Lord Godolphin, though not a free trader in 
 the modern and scientific sense of the term, was 
 too good a man of business to neglect the vast 
 importance of international trade. By the Methuen 
 Treaty with Portugal, signed at Lisbon in Decem- 
 ber 1703, and called after the British Minister 
 accredited to the Portuguese Court, the woollen 
 manufactures of England were admitted into King
 
 34 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Pedro's dominions, and the British Government 
 on the other hand agreed that the duty on Portu- 
 guese wine should always be less by one-third than 
 the duty on the wine of France. Accustomed as 
 we are to see such taxes regulated not by place of 
 origin, but by degree of alcoholic strength, we may 
 feel surprised at a measure so little likely to pro- 
 mote the cause of temperance as the encouragement 
 of port at the expense of claret. It appears, how- 
 ever, that burgundy, rather than bordeaux, was 
 the favourite drink with the wealthier classes at 
 the beginning of the eighteenth century and there 
 is more gout in burgundy than there is in port. If 
 we turn to the opposite side of the treaty, the 
 extension of the woollen trade, it may be said 
 with fairness of this commercial instrument, which 
 diminished taxation and opened markets, that Eng- 
 land gave nothing which was not for her advan- 
 tage, and yet received a premium for what she gave. 
 The effect upon the habits of Englishmen was not 
 immediate; and William Murray, Lord Mansfield, 
 born in 1705, "drank champagne," sweet cham- 
 pagne, "with the wits," including Pope. But the 
 supremacy of port, w-hich may be said to have 
 culminated with the younger Pitt, to whom it was 
 first medicine and then poison, had its origin in 
 the Methuen Treaty of 1703. 
 
 At the time, however, the political rather than
 
 POLITICS 35 
 
 the commercial aspect of the treaty engrossed 
 public attention. The War of the Spanish Suc- 
 cession had already begun. Louis the Fourteenth 
 had put forward as his candidate for the throne of 
 Spain his own grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou, 
 second son of the Dauphin. Portugal favoured the 
 claims of the Austrian Archduke Charles, which 
 were adopted by this country to preserve the 
 balance of power from the overweening ambition 
 of the French King. England, freedom, and Pro- 
 testantism, which are almost convertible terms, 
 never had, not even in Napoleon, a more danger- 
 ous enemy than the vain and cruel bigot who then 
 governed France. By revoking the Edict of 
 Nantes Louis and Madame de Maintenon had 
 made war upon the Protestant faith. By acknow- 
 ledgmg the Pretender as King of England the 
 King of France made war upon the English people. 
 By assuming to treat the throne of Spain as an 
 appanage of the Llouse of Bourbon, he claimed 
 universal dominion in Europe. The death of 
 William the Third had removed from his path the 
 statesman best qualified to baffle French diplomacy. 
 Now the appeal was to arms, and there stepped 
 forward as the English champion, in the hour of 
 need, a figure of surpassing splendour. Enough 
 has been said to show that the character of John 
 Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was neither pure 
 
 D 2
 
 36 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 nor high. He was not truthful. He was not 
 straightforward. He was not honest. In his love 
 of money, and his capacity for hoarding it, he 
 rivalled those wretched misers who have done no 
 more than contemplate their gains. And yet, such 
 are the strange freaks in which nature indulges, 
 this mean and selfish intriguer was endowed with 
 perfect courage, with an irresistible charm of 
 manner, with a temper which even his wife failed 
 to disturb, with a brain that no sophistry could 
 obscure, and with a military genius before which 
 criticism is humbly silent. Lord Chesterfield, 
 whose taste has become proverbial, and w-hose intel- 
 lect was far stronger than those who know him 
 only through his letters would suppose, pronounced 
 that the graces were absorbed by the Duke of Marl- 
 borough. As fearless as William of Orange, and 
 not less able, he succeeded where the King failed, 
 and failed where the King succeeded. No one ever 
 doubted William's word. The keenest Jacobites 
 acknowledged in their candid moments that he was 
 a just and merciful man. Moral confidence w^as a 
 feeling which Marlborough never, except in battle, 
 inspired. He was treacherous even for a treacher- 
 ous age. Wholly devoid of cruelty, and by nature 
 humane, he is said never to have sacrificed an un- 
 necessary life. But he used his fellow-creatures for 
 his own purposes, and when he had no further use
 
 POLITICS 37 
 
 for them, he forgot their existence. He made his 
 plans and carried them out with the absolute 
 efficiency of sheer intelligence and the serene im- 
 placability of impersonal fate. There are incidents 
 of his career which make it impossible to credit him 
 with a disinterested patriotism. Happily for Eng- 
 land, it was his interest to be patriotic after the 
 deaths of James and William. The Pretender, 
 though Marlborough characteristically kept on 
 good terms with him through his natural brother, 
 his own nephew, Berwick, was not after 1702 a 
 serious object to the first soldier in Europe, the 
 husband of the favourite of the Queen. What was 
 Marlborough's personal religion we are not to 
 inquire. These things are secrets between man and 
 his Maker. But here again fortune favoured Eng- 
 land. For Protestantism, the right of private 
 judgment, the freedom of the layman from the 
 priest, Marlborough was at all periods of his life 
 ready to contend. Even his devotion to the Church 
 of England, though very different in kind from 
 the Queen's, was apparently not less sincere, and 
 had resisted all the seductions of her father. He 
 was now the hope of England, and of the Protestant 
 alliance, as the King of France was their sworn foe. 
 The object of Louis and his Marshals in the 
 spring of 1704 was to carry the war into the heart 
 of the enemy's country by attacking Vienna. The
 
 38 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Elector of Bavaria, faithless to the cause of the 
 Empire, was ready to help them. With the Elector 
 was Marshal Marsin. Marshal Tallard entered the 
 Black Forest in May to reinforce them both. Marl- 
 borough made up his mind that the French should 
 never reach Vienna. After much tiresome negotia- 
 tion with the States General of Holland, in which 
 his tact and dexterity prevailed over Dutch jealousy 
 and weakness, he left the Hague for Coblentz on 
 the 5th of May. From Coblentz he marched to 
 Mayence, and then, after crossing the Neckar, he 
 met at Mindelheim Prince Eugene, a Savoyard 
 born in Paris, and now in command of the Austrian 
 armies. Although his name has been eclipsed by 
 Marlborough's, Eugene was a great general, and 
 took his share in the mighty victories by which the 
 pride of Louis was humbled to the dust. Entire 
 friendship and concord were always maintained 
 between these illustrious commanders. With them 
 was joined on this occasion, a man much inferior 
 to either, Prince Louis of Baden, who would not 
 acquiesce in Marlborough's supremacy, and could 
 not be restrained from taking part in the Bavarian 
 campaign. While Prince Eugene moved to defend 
 Baden against Tallard, Marlborough, accompanied 
 against his will by Louis, crossed the Alps at 
 Gieslingen, and proceeded by Ulm to Donauwerth, 
 where there was a bridge across the Danube. To
 
 POLITICS 39 
 
 occupy Donauwerth, however, it was necessary that 
 he should first take possession of the Schellenberg, 
 a hill which rose gradually, and overhung the 
 town. By an absurd arrangement, which the great 
 general accepted because it was inevitable, Marl- 
 borough and Prince Louis commanded on alternate 
 days. The second of July was Marlborough's day, 
 and he directed that the Schellenberg should be 
 stormed. His orders were carried out by the Eng- 
 lish foot after two unsuccessful efforts, with the 
 assistance of their German allies, and the Bavarians 
 fled in confusion, leaving sixteen pieces of artillery 
 behind them. The English losses were heavy. 
 But Marlborough's object had been accomplished. 
 Instead of marching triumphantly on Vienna, as 
 he otherwise would have done, the Elector of 
 Bavaria was compelled to fall back upon Augs- 
 burg. Marlborough established himself at Donau- 
 werth, and Bavaria lay at his disposal. He offered 
 terms to the Elector, and it was not until they were 
 refused that he ordered the country round Munich 
 to be laid waste. He was by nature mild and 
 placable. He did nothing contrary to the laws of 
 war as then understood. He was simply bent upon 
 bringing the campaign to a successful issue in the 
 shortest possible time. 
 
 On the 3rd of August, a month after the seizure 
 of Donauwerth, and the invasion of Bavaria, the
 
 40 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 French Marshal Tallard, having made his way 
 through the Black Forest with twenty-five thou- 
 sand men, was able to reinforce the Elector at 
 Augsburg. At the same time, Prince Eugene with 
 eighteen thousand men reached Hochstadt on the 
 Danube, a few miles above Donauwerth, and a 
 week later he was joined by Marlborough. After 
 an anxious consultation, and a careful reconnais- 
 sance, Marlborough and Eugene decided that on 
 the 13th of August they would attack the French 
 and Bavarians under Tallard and the Elector. 
 The respective numbers of the opposing forces 
 showed no very marked disparity, though the 
 advantage was on the side of the French. But 
 Eugene, to say nothing of Marlborough, was far 
 superior in strategic capacity to any commander 
 on the other side. The French, however, had more 
 cannon than their opponents. They were encamped 
 on the left bank of the Danube, at that point three 
 hundred feet broad, and too deep for an army to 
 cross. Tallard with his best infantry occupied the 
 village of Blindheim on the same bank, henceforth 
 known to Englishmen always as Blenheim, close to 
 the spot where a little stream called the Nebel flows 
 into the Danube. On the morning of the 13th of 
 August, 1704, Marlborough with the greater part 
 of the Allied Force confronted Tallard, while 
 Eugene with a much smaller force was opposed to
 
 POLITICS 41 
 
 the Elector, and to Marsin. The Battle of Blen- 
 heim began at noon by a dashing charge upon 
 the French which was led by Lord Cutts, "Sala- 
 mander " Cutts, so named from his disregard of 
 fire. But it was Marlborough himself who con- 
 ducted the battle. He seemed to be everywhere. 
 He commanded the cavalry in person, and it was 
 a charge of cavalry which finally determined the 
 fortune of the day. The fascination of his eager 
 alacrity, and his intrepid calm, as he "taught the 
 doubtful battle where to rage," breathed his own 
 spirit into his men, and did far more than make up 
 for the slight numerical inferiority of the Allies. 
 At five in the afternoon a general charge, led by 
 Marlborough himself, and at first repulsed, broke 
 up the French troops, led by Tallard, and drove 
 them into the Danube, where thousands of them 
 were drowned. Tallard himself was taken prisoner. 
 "M. Tallard and two other Generals are in my 
 coach," wrote Marlborough to the Duchess, "and I 
 am following the rest." At Blenheim itself, eleven 
 thousand of the best troops in France were forced 
 to an unconditional surrender, and this fact made 
 an ineffaceable impression upon the Continent. On 
 the 14th of August, Marlborough and Eugene 
 entered Hochstadt together, joint champions of the 
 liberties of Europe. They had fourteen thousand 
 prisoners, of whom three thousand took service with
 
 42 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the Allies. Of sixty thousand Frenchmen who went 
 into the battle, not more than forty thousand came 
 out from it free and unscathed. The losses of the 
 Allies were comparatively small, and Eugene's 
 force suffered far more severely than Marl- 
 borough's. Among those who distinguished them- 
 selves on the losing side a conspicuous place was 
 won by the Irish Brigade, who fought against the 
 country they detested, for the religion they loved. 
 
 In the same year, and the same month, which 
 Blenheim has immortalized, Sir George Rooke, 
 assisted by the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, cap- 
 tured Gibraltar from Philip of Spain. Human 
 beings are not prophets, and little was thought of 
 this conquest at the time. Its peculiar importance 
 is due to Rooke. The German Prince, who accom- 
 panied him, was for hoisting the imperial flag. 
 But Rooke, as an English Admiral, objected to so 
 misleading a performance. England was the mis- 
 tress of the seas; England had taken the Spanish 
 fortress which commands entrance to the Mediter- 
 ranean, and he promptly raised the English flag 
 over the Rock, where it has ever since remained. 
 
 The seizure of Gibraltar was probably within the 
 vast designs of Marlborough, whose plans were as 
 wide as they were deep. But, for the moment, the 
 stupendous victory of Blenheim diverted attention 
 from Spain and the Mediterranean. The Queen
 
 POLITICS 43 
 
 was seated with the Duchess in the turret-chamber 
 of Elizabeth's library at Windsor, when the famous 
 note was brought to them, which Marlborough had 
 scribbled from the field of battle in pencil to his 
 wife. Below her lay the Thames, and the village 
 of Eton, and the chapel of Henry the Sixth, and the 
 tableland of Buckinghamshire, rolling up to the 
 hills of Dropmore. Although modern trees, and 
 still more modern buildings, have changed the face 
 of the landscape, to imagine it as it was is not diffi- 
 cult, and on the wall there hangs a facsimile of the 
 letter, surmounted by a portrait of the officer who 
 conveyed the news. Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Free- 
 man had already been drawn together by the ties of 
 a common affliction, for the Duchess's only son. 
 Lord Blandford, had died at Cambridge in 1703, 
 three years after the Duke of Gloucester. They 
 were now united in a common triumph, which was 
 also a triumph for the nation, and for the liberties 
 of Europe. Had it not been for Blenheim, and for 
 Marlborough, the beautiful English country upon 
 which the Queen looked that day might have been 
 restored to Catholic domination, might even have 
 become a province of France. 
 
 Louis the Fourteenth never quite recovered from 
 the effects of Blenheim. Marlborough did what 
 William of Orange tried to do against superior 
 generals to Tallard and Marsin. He humbled to
 
 44 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the dust the pride of France. He raised to a higher 
 pitch than had ever been known before the martial 
 glory of England. Strange character that he was, 
 and full of mystery, he spent the night before 
 Blenheim in prayer, and in receiving the sacrament 
 with the rites of the English Church. Yet no one 
 trusted him, and he did not deserve to be trusted. 
 Men are the creatures of their age, and breathe [ 
 
 fashionable views with the air in which they live. 
 Marlborough's faults were, in kind, if not in degree, 
 too common to be shocking. But they account for 
 what has been too hastily stigmatized as the ingra- 
 titude of the English people towards him. Even 
 on the morrow of Blenheim, when popular rejoicing 
 at home was apparentlv universal and enthusiastic, 
 the voice of the grumbler was heard. At that 
 period Marlborough, whose political principles were 
 vague and indefinite, was classed with the Whigs. 
 It was a Whig war, and the Tories attacked it. 
 What, they asked, was the use of killing French- 
 men ? The French King could well spare as many 
 more. What was the Holy Roman Empire to us 
 that we should fight for it ? An echo of such ques- 
 tions may be heard in Southey's poem about old 
 Kaspar, sitting at his cottage door. The Empire, 
 which Marlborough saved from premature ex- 
 tinction, was useful as a counterpoise to France, 
 and French supremacy in Europe would have
 
 POLITICS 45 
 
 reduced England to the level she had reached in 
 John Churchill's youth, when Charles the Second 
 was King. It is for that very reason that the 
 Jacobites attacked jNIarlborough, and depreciated 
 Blenheim. On the other hand, it was Godolphin's 
 fortune to procure through Charles Montagu, Earl 
 of Halifax, a young Whig of singular promise, 
 Joseph Addison of Magdalen College, Oxford, to 
 celebrate the battle, and glorify the hero, in a poem, 
 not a very good poem, called The Ca^npaign. 
 When Marlborough returned to London in Decem- 
 ber, he received the thanks of Parliament for his 
 splendid achievements, and a more substantial 
 reward in the Royal Manor of Woodstock, cleared 
 of encumbrances by a vote of the Commons. In 
 Woodstock Park the Queen built for him a palace 
 to which she gave the name of Blenheim, a worthy 
 monument of the taste that admired the architecture 
 of Vanbrugh. Marlborough's victories improved 
 the prospects of the party with which he was 
 nominally connected, and at the General Election 
 of 1705, required by the Triennial Act, the Whigs 
 obtained a considerable majority. Marlborough 
 and Godolphin were the real Government of the 
 Queen. Their colleagues were ciphers. 
 
 In 1705 the party system was in process of crystal- 
 lization, and had not assumed a definite shape. 
 Whigs and Tories sat on opposite sides in both
 
 46 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Houses of Parliament, but often sat together in the 
 same Cabinet. Godolphin passed for a Tory. In 
 1704 he had taken into his government Robert 
 Harley, a Tory of the moderate type, who actually 
 became Secretary of State without at once ceasing 
 to be Speaker, and Henry St. John as Secretary 
 at War. Yet before the dissolution he made over- 
 tures to the Whig Junto, of whom Somers was the 
 most eminent, and afterwards he gave the Great 
 Seal to William Cowper, a Whig of the purest 
 water. In this year, 1705, Harley surrendered the 
 Speakership, remaining Secretary of State for the 
 Northern Department, which included foreign 
 affairs. Harley had the singular fortune to be in- 
 timately connected with men of genius, who made 
 his name immortal. He had no shining talents, 
 and his character, though for the age respectable, 
 was of the ordinary kind. Yet Pope has devoted 
 to him some of the noblest lines in the language, 
 and the Journal to Stella proves that Swift was as 
 fond of him as he could be of any man. He was 
 indeed the M^cenas of his age, a genuine lover of 
 literature, an assiduous collector of manuscripts, 
 and a munificent patron of letters. He was also a 
 sound administrator, without the financial capacity 
 of Godolphin, but well versed in the practice of 
 Parliament and of the public offices, an unrivalled 
 authority on the business and procedure of the
 
 POLITICS 47 
 
 House of Commons. He had been brought up in 
 a Whig family, and in the principles of the Revolu- 
 tion, so that he was never able to share, though he 
 sometimes found it convenient to simulate, the zeal 
 against Nonconformists which animated the Tories 
 of his time. What really united him with them, 
 and made him their ocasional leader, was his 
 dislike of European intervention, his distrust of 
 W^illiam's anti-Gallican policy, his denial that it 
 was England's duty to maintain the balance of 
 power, and his belief in peace at almost any price. 
 It was the war, and the war alone, which separated 
 him from the Whigs ; and, though he held office 
 when Marlborough won the battle of Blenheim, few 
 Englishmen can have rejoiced in the victory less 
 than he did. Ilarley loved wine, and shared the 
 convivial habits of Queen Anne's reign. But, like 
 Swift, he valued his bill of company more than his 
 bill of fare, and he addicted himself to the society 
 of his intellectual superiors without a particle of 
 jealousy or of ostentation. Harley's colleague St. 
 John was an almost complete antithesis to him. 
 A born scholar, orator, and man of letters, the 
 master of a brilliant and powerful, if somewhat 
 too artificial style, St. John dazzled and charmed 
 his readers and his hearers into thinking him a 
 statesman of importance and weight. Although 
 his oratory has wholly perished, the enthusiastic
 
 48 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 admiration of his contemporaries must be accepted 
 as conclusive testimony to its merits. His writings, 
 though Burke declared that no man then read them, 
 and that no man had ever read them through, have 
 been extolled by many later critics, for instance 
 Matthew Arnold and Lord Stanhope, as models of 
 lucid and idiomatic English. But he added nothing 
 in his long life to the strength, the welfare, or the 
 prosperity of his country, because his character had 
 no foundation. A free thinker and a loose liver, he 
 was a Jacobite in the service of a Parliamentary 
 Sovereign, and he would if he could, have sub- 
 stituted the personal rule of a popular monarch for 
 the ordered freedom of the revolutionary settlement. 
 The best of boon companions, he was the most 
 unprincipled of politicians, and, in the opinion of 
 his own father, the chief question raised at the 
 outset of his career was, whether he would be 
 hanged or beheaded. 
 
 Few contrasts in history are more striking than 
 the association of Queen Anne with the scholars and 
 statesmen of her court and cabinet. A narrow- 
 minded and illiterate woman, devoted to her 
 favourite Duchess, who had no more learning than 
 herself, and in a feminine way to the pleasures of 
 the table, she never seemed to realize the fact that 
 her reign was made illustrious by the verse of Pope, 
 and the prose of Swift, as well as by the finance of 
 Godolphin, and the arms of Marlborough. She
 
 POLI'IICS 49 
 
 visited in due course the ancient Universities, and 
 in April 1705, she had the honour of knighting 
 Isaac Newton at Cambridge. But the last of the 
 Stuarts differed from the last of the Tudors, and 
 from the rest of her own race, in no respect more 
 strongly than in her blank indifference to the things 
 of the mind. Anne was not without taste for 
 pleasure, or enjoyment of life. Although she did 
 not care for literature, she loved music, and was so 
 fond of driving, and of sport, that Swift, when he 
 came to Windsor, called her a Jehu and a Nimrod. 
 It was her vanity to think that she ruled as well as 
 reigned. But no public act made her so popular as 
 her revival of the superstitious practice, discon- 
 tinued by William, and known as "touching for the 
 King's evil." The King's evil was scrofula, and 
 one of the children whom she fruitlessly touched 
 was Samuel Johnson. 
 
 On the last day of March 1705 Marlborough left 
 England, sailing from Harwich for the Hague. 
 His main object was a renewal of military opera- 
 tions, then ahvays suspended from the autumn to 
 the spring. But so much hampered was he by the 
 reluctance of the States General, and so much 
 irritated by the Tory attacks upon him at home, 
 that he wrote to Godolphin in June expressing 
 weariness of his life. The Empire was no better 
 than the Republic. The death of the Emperor 
 Leopold in May, and the succession of the Emperor
 
 50 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Joseph, King of the Romans, produced no improve- 
 ment. Prince Eugene, upon whom alone Marl- 
 borough could rely, was sent to Italy, and with 
 Prince Louis of Baden he could do nothing at all. 
 While he was chafing and fuming with an impati- 
 ence he rarely displayed, a glittering adventurer, 
 who does not deserve to be named in connection 
 with him, achieved in Spain the one real success 
 of his life. Charles Mordaunt, third Earl of Peter- 
 borough, had been despatched by Marlborough 
 himself to the Peninsula with an auxiliary force, 
 Dutch and English, of seven thousand men. Sir 
 Cloudesley Shovel joined him at Gibraltar as 
 Admiral of the Fleet. Before reaching Gibraltar, 
 however, Peterborough took up the Archduke 
 Charles, the candidate of the Allies for the throne 
 of Spain, who had not yet been able to set foot 
 in the dominions he claimed. They landed in 
 Valencia, where Charles was received with enthu- 
 siasm, and Peterborough proposed an immediate 
 advance upon Madrid. In this, however, he was 
 overruled by a council of war, and the expedition 
 next sailed to Barcelona. A long and wearisome 
 siege followed. By the middle of September 1705, 
 the failure of the enterprise seemed so certain, that 
 the inhabitants of the town celebrated by public 
 rejoicings the inevitable departure of the heretics. 
 At this moment the desultory mind of Peterborough
 
 POLITICS 51 
 
 hit for once upon a practical expedient. On the 
 side of Barcelona which is away from the sea rises 
 the hill of Montjuich, with a castle and a garrison 
 at the top. The garrison, believing their position 
 to be impregnable, expected no attack. For that 
 very reason Peterborough led a small force up the 
 hill at midnight, surprised the Spanish troops, 
 scaled the heights, and took the citadel. General 
 Stanhope, following with a reserve, supported his 
 chief, and the vantage-ground was secured. With- 
 in a month Barcelona had fallen, and Charles had 
 at least secured a footing in the kingdom of Spain. 
 Peterborough became a popular hero. Swift wrote 
 
 " Mordanto fills the trump of fame, 
 The Christian worlds his deeds proclaim, 
 And prints are crowded with his name." 
 
 His daredevil recklessness, and the profusion with 
 which he squandered any money he had, compared 
 favourably with the rapacious meanness of Marl- 
 borough. It is related of him that he was once 
 mistaken for the Duke, and mobbed as he came from 
 the House of Lords. " Gentlemen," said he, " I will 
 give you two proofs that I am not the Duke of Marl- 
 borough. In the first place I have only five guineas 
 in my pocket. In the second place they are very 
 much at your service." Yet Peterborough scarcely 
 belongs to history. He had no principles, no char- 
 acter, no fixed resolutions of any kind. He was in 
 E 2
 
 52 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 truth more than half mad, and he flashes but for an 
 instant across the world's horizon. It will not be 
 necessary to mention him any more. 
 
 The sleepless genius of Marlborough, unhasting, 
 unresting, had devised for the year 1706 a new plan 
 of campaign. He would march with an allied force 
 on Italy, and join Prince Eugene. So earnest, 
 however, were the remonstrances of the Dutch, who 
 feared a French invasion if he left them, that he 
 changed his plans, and entered Flanders in May. 
 On the 23rd of the month, he and General Cadogan, 
 almost his only real friend, with about sixty thou- 
 sand men, English and Dutch, met Marshal Vil- 
 leroy, with rather superior numbers, at the village 
 of Ramillies on the Little Gheet. There was fought 
 the second of Marlborough's great victories, equally 
 decisive with Blenheim, though much less sanguin- 
 ary and protracted. Marlborough was associated 
 with the Dutch Marshal Overkirk, and Villeroy 
 with the luckless Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria. 
 The French and Bavarians lost fifteen thousand 
 men, the Allies not above a fourth part of that 
 number. Brussels was evacuated by the French 
 troops, and Marlborough entered it in triumph. 
 Ghent, Bruges, and Oudenarde likewise surren- 
 dered. The French garrison of Antwerp marched 
 out with the honours of war. 
 
 At Ramillies Marlborough had the narrowest
 
 POLITICS 53 
 
 escape of his life. He was surrounded by a party 
 of French dragoons, who recognized him, and tried 
 to take him prisoner. He rode at a ditch, but his 
 horse refused the leap, and threw him. While he 
 was mounting another horse, as his equerry held 
 his stirrup, a cannon-ball carried off the equerry's 
 head. He himself escaped with severe bruises, and 
 led in person the final charge on Ramillies. 
 
 A public thanksgiving for this victory was 
 appointed to be held in England on the 27th of 
 June, and, at least in public, all was elation there. 
 In France things were naturally different. Nobody 
 made any attempt on this occasion to conceal the 
 extent and magnitude of the disaster. Although 
 Marlborough, with reluctant prudence, declined the 
 lucrative and splendid offer that he should be 
 Lieutenant-Governor of the Netherlands for the 
 Archduke Charles, now styled Charles the Third of 
 Spain, he was in reality Dictator of Europe. His 
 very name set up a panic, and there was scarcely a 
 Marshal of France who would have cared to meet 
 him in the field after the experience of Tallard and 
 Villeroy. Louis the pseudo-great had no true 
 courage. He was abjectly superstitious, and a 
 craven at heart. Although he treated his unsuccess- 
 ful generals with French and kingly courtesy, he 
 recognized that the game was up. He was willing, 
 and let it be known that he was willing, to acknow-
 
 54 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 ledge Charles as lawful King of Spain, and Anne 
 as lawful Queen of England, if Naples, Sicily, and 
 Milan were ceded to his grandson, Philip of Anjou. 
 With this offer Marlborough and the English 
 Government might well have closed. If it did not 
 give England all that slie wanted, it was an outward 
 and visible sign that France no longer dominated 
 Europe. It amounted to a formal confession of 
 defeat from the haughtiest despot that had ever 
 threatened the independence of this country. But 
 Marlborough's ambition was insatiable, and his 
 trade was war. He used his unrivalled influence, 
 the influence of a man who has conquered appar- 
 ently invincible foes, to such purpose, both with 
 Godolphin in London, and with Pensionary 
 Heinsius at the Hague, that he was authorized to 
 continue the campaign. The Dutch were bound to 
 him by the strongest ties of gratitude. He had the 
 ear of his own Sovereign, not because he was the 
 greatest commander since Julius Ceesar, but because 
 he was the husband of Sarah Jennings. When he 
 returned home at the end of 1706, equally triumph- 
 ant in counsel and in war, his Dukedom was en- 
 tailed upon his daughters and their sons, his own 
 son, thd Marquess of Blandford, having died in 
 early manhood ; and his son-in-law, the Earl of 
 Sunderland, founder of the splendid library at 
 Althorp, was made a Secretary of State.
 
 POLITICS 55 
 
 In 1706 was prepared, and in 1707 was consum- 
 mated, the Union between England and Scotland. 
 Since the accession of James the First, which intro- 
 duced the Stuarts to England, the two countries 
 had been united, except during the Commonwealth, 
 by the golden link of the Crown alone. Want of a 
 closer tie, which Cromwell had temporarily formed, 
 led to much inconvenience, especially in matters of 
 trade, which required custom-houses on the frontier 
 for its regulation, and provoked smuggling, as the 
 protective duties then universal always do. The 
 Scottish people, moreover, were demanding the 
 same commercial privileges as England enjoyed, 
 abroad as well as at home, and one risk in refusing 
 ttie demand was that Scotland might form an 
 alliance with France. The policy of a Parliamentary 
 union was not new. Although Cromwell's Union 
 was dissolved at the Restoration, William made 
 several attempts to restore it, and Anne herself, as 
 we know, and other authorities, from Clerk of 
 Penicuik, had it much at heart. Defoe, who spent 
 a great deal of time at Edinburgh, kept Harley con- 
 stantly informed of Scottish opinion, and impressed 
 upon him that the alternative was union or war. It 
 must be remembered that England was at war 
 already. If peace had been made after Ramillies, 
 the Treaty of Union would have been less urgent, 
 though equally essential. But the Government had
 
 56 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 yielded to Marlborough's opinion that the struggle 
 for Continental supremacy should go on. If Scot- 
 land had taken the side of France, the difficulties 
 would have been multiplied, and the result uncer- 
 tain. Ireland was already hostile, being predomin- 
 antly Catholic, and mainly disaffected. To make 
 the interests of England the interests of Scotland 
 too was the part of wise and prudent statesmanship, 
 of just and considerate foresight. Anne's genuine 
 zeal for the union was, from a personal point of 
 view, the most creditable incident of her reign, as 
 it was politically the most lasting and successful. 
 Before William died the commercial situation had 
 become almost intolerable. The woollen manu- 
 factures of England had been excluded from the 
 northern kingdom, in revenge for the King's re- 
 fusal to help the Scottish colonists of Darien, dupes 
 of William Paterson's madcap scheme, and of their 
 own insane credulity, against the Spanish troops 
 who expelled them. On the i6th of April, 1706, 
 English and Scottish Commissioners met in the 
 Cockpit at Whitehall. There were sixty-two of 
 them, thirty-one upon each side, whose signatures 
 may be read in the Scottish copy of the Treaty kept 
 at Windsor, where Anne is described as Queen of 
 Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. But a 
 single man took the lead, and kept it. Lord Somers 
 w'as head and shoulders above his colleagues. He 
 saw that if equal privileges of commerce between
 
 POLITICS 57 
 
 London and Edinburgh were the chief inducement 
 which Scotland had for engaging in the Treaty of 
 Union, EngHsh interests were principally concerned 
 in preventing the use of the northern kingdom, 
 especially the Highlands, as a nucleus of Jacobite 
 plots. Very few days sufficed for setting the pre- 
 liminary propositions to be laid before Parliament 
 in due course. Lord Chancellor Cowper formally 
 moved, and Lord Seafield, Chancellor of Scotland, 
 seconded, that the two countries should be united in 
 one kingdom, called Great Britain ; that there 
 should be one British Parliament, and one only; 
 and that the succession to the British, not merely 
 the English, Crown should be regulated by the Act 
 of Settlement. A single system of taxation, the 
 natural consequence of political union, increased 
 the amount hitherto paid by the Scottish people ; 
 but by way of set off, a grant of four hundred thou- 
 sand pounds, known as the Equivalent, was made to 
 Scotland from the English exchequer for the en- 
 couragement of manufactures, and in partial com- 
 pensation for the loss of Darien. When this 
 financial detail had been arranged, the rest of the 
 business went smoothlv enough. The separate 
 Chancellorship of Scotland was abolished, and one 
 Great Seal for both countries was ordered to be 
 struck. But the Lord Chancellor acquired no legal 
 jurisdiction in Scotland, except as a Peer of 
 Parliament when appeals came to the House of
 
 58 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Lords. The Court of Session remained intact, and 
 continued to administer the Scottish system of law, 
 founded on the Roman, totally different from the 
 English. That the Episcopal Church of England, 
 and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, should 
 be alone recognized by the State was taken as a 
 fundamental article, which the Commissioners were 
 precluded by the terms of their appointment from 
 even discussing. The Stuarts had had enough of 
 trying to force episcopacy upon the Covenanters 
 north of the Tweed. The number of Scottish 
 members in the British House of Commons was 
 fixed at forty-five, and the number of Scottish 
 Representative Peers to sit in the House of Lords 
 at sixteen. It was inferred from this provision that 
 no Peers of Scotland were henceforth to be, nor 
 have they since been, created. No Scottish Peer 
 could sit, or has ever sat, in the British House of 
 Commons. The House of Lords passed a Resolu- 
 tion which was observed, and not rescinded, till 
 1784, that no Peer of Scotland could be made a 
 Peer of Great Britain. This Treaty was submitted 
 first to the Scottish, and afterwards to the English, 
 Parliament. In Scotland the union was opposed by 
 the Jacobites, who judged quite correctly that it had 
 been aimed as a blow at their cause, and by the 
 High-flying Preachers, especially the Cameronians, 
 who considered that to have anything in common
 
 POLITICS 59 
 
 with Prelatists was an abominable sin. In the city 
 of Edinburgh the merchants apprehended some loss 
 of custom from the removal of Parliament men to 
 London, and throughout the country there were 
 those whose national pride represented to them that 
 union would mean absorption in England. Their 
 feelings were fantastically, but vigorously, ex- 
 pressed by Lord Belhaven. The Ratification of the 
 Union was not finally carried in Edinburgh till the 
 i6th of January, 1707, after it had been determined 
 that the representative Peers of Scotland should be 
 chosen by the whole of the Scottish Peerage for the 
 term of a single Parliament, then three years. 
 "There," said Lord Seafield, in a picturesque and 
 memorable phrase, "there is the end of an old 
 song." At Westminster, the Act of Union passed 
 with great rapidity, "post haste," as some indig- 
 nant Tories exclaimed. But Harley and St. John 
 controlled the moderate men, while the extreme 
 Jacobites were not numerous enough to cause 
 much delay. High Churchmen, inclined to protest 
 against the formal recognition of Presbyterianism, 
 were quieted with the assurance, such as it was, 
 that an Episcopal Church of England was equally 
 part of the Constitution. The injustice of forcing 
 an alien Church upon the people of Ireland does 
 not seem to have struck any one at that time, nor 
 indeed would it have been possible to recognize the
 
 6o QUEEN ANNE 
 
 religion of the Pretender. Catholic emancipation, 
 either in Great Britain or in Ireland, would have 
 been difficult, if not impossible, while the Jacobites 
 were strong and dangerous. On the 6th of March, 
 1707, Queen Anne gave her assent to the Act of 
 Union, which came into operation upon the ist of 
 May, and thus the last of the Stuarts united the 
 Legislatures, as the first of the Stuarts had united 
 the Crowns. 
 
 Early in the year 1707 the hopes of the French 
 King were revived by the bait of a profitable 
 alliance. The young King of Sweden, Charles the 
 Twelfth, had achieved by his successes in Poland, 
 where he put down one sovereign and set up 
 another, a military reputation second to Marl- 
 borough's alone. It all came to nothing, and 
 Charles the Twelfth would have been justly for- 
 gotten long ago if two men of genius, as wide 
 asunder as the poles, had not combined to give him 
 a double immortality. Voltaire's History is a 
 standard book, Carlyle thought his best piece of 
 writing, and Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes 
 embalms the man who "left a name at which the 
 world grew pale, to point a moral and adorn a tale." 
 It is a poor tale, and a cheap moral. Charles 
 wasted his life, and exhausted his country, in futile 
 campaigns against enemies of his own making, 
 until a stray bullet put an end to his career. But
 
 POLITICS 6i 
 
 at the beginning of 1707 he had forty thousand 
 men in Saxony, and if he joined them to the army 
 of France, who could still count upon Bavaria, the 
 result to the empire might be disastrous. So grave 
 did the situation seem that the services of Marl- 
 borough were invoked to deal with it, and to 
 counteract the designs of Louis. Marlborough was 
 a consummate diplomatist, and his serene, victor- 
 ious intellect shone with equally unclouded radiance 
 upon a battle or an intrigue. He could not entirely 
 conceal his scorn of the vainglorious Swede, and 
 his effusive compliments on the prowess of that 
 barrack-room hero are insults imperfectly dis- 
 guised. When he visited the Swedish camp at 
 Alt Ranstadt, he said, perhaps without a visible 
 sneer, " I wish I could serve some campaign under 
 so great a general as your Majesty, that I might 
 learn what I yet want to know in the art of war." 
 Marlborough was an almost unerring judge of men, 
 and he knew that his victim would swallow the 
 flattery. Then he talked, and waited, and watched. 
 On his way to Saxony from the Hague, he had 
 called at Hanover, and consulted the Elector, whose 
 mother was heir presumptive to the British throne. 
 George characteristically recommended bribes, 
 which Marlborough was not above giving at the 
 public expense, and the Swedish Ministers were not 
 above taking for themselves. But Marlborough
 
 62 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 would have succeeded without such aid. To a mind 
 like his the task must have been child's play. He 
 soon found, as Voltaire informs us, that Charles 
 was jealous of Louis, and that a map of Russia lay 
 open on his table. He suggested that an invasion 
 of the Czar's dominions would receive aid from the 
 Cossack Mazeppa, and would put Charles the 
 Twelfth on a higher pinnacle of fame than Louis 
 the Fourteenth. The trick was won. When 
 Marlborough returned to the Hague on the 8th 
 of May, having been absent from the Dutch 
 capital less than three weeks, Charles had struck 
 his camp, and disappeared from the purview of 
 the Allies. 
 
 Nevertheless, when Marlborough returned to 
 England in November 1707, having concluded the 
 year's campaign with the approach of winter, he 
 found the country dissatisfied and despondent. 
 Since Ramillies there had been no military success 
 worthy of the name, and the prospect of an honour- 
 able peace seemed remote. A great naval cata- 
 strophe saddened the autumn. On the 22nd of 
 October Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who had risen 
 from the position of a cabin-boy to be Admiral of 
 the Fleet, went down among the Scilly Isles in his 
 flagship Association with nine hundred men. There 
 was no poet to rank the Association with the Royal 
 George. But there was another Royal George,
 
 POLITICS 63 
 
 Prince George of Denmark, whose hopeless incom- 
 petence as Lord High Admiral had become more 
 conspicuous tlian it otherwise would have been 
 through the rapacity and inefficiency of Admiral 
 Churchill, the great Duke's brother, his creature 
 and tool. The Admiral's retention in office was a 
 scandal, not the less odious because Churchill did, 
 so far as it was done at all, the work which the 
 Queen's husband received money for not doing. 
 Meanwhile the influence of the Churchills at Court 
 had begun to wane. It had been wielded by the 
 Duchess only, and her Grace had abused her power. 
 The Queen was a pious Churchwoman, and a Tory. 
 The Duchess, so far as she had any politics, was 
 a Whig, caring nothing for the Church, and very 
 little for religion of any kind. Her sordid avarice, 
 her scornful temper, and her ungovernable rage 
 were driving Anne into sullen rebellion. A 
 favourite the Queen must have. She wanted some 
 one to lean upon, and her husband was nought. 
 The proud Duchess looked with a contemptuous 
 eye upon Abigail Hill, a poor relation of her own, 
 for whom she had herself procured a place at Court 
 as a woman of the bedchamber. Abigail was a 
 very quiet, and a very artful girl. She had con- 
 trived to give herself a good education, which the 
 Duchess was almost wholly without ; her powers of 
 mind were considerable, and she formed unobtru-
 
 64 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 sively a close alliance with her kinsman, Secretary 
 Harley. Her political opinions were his and the 
 Queen's. She was an orthodox Churchwoman, 
 and poor Anne found her placid temper a sure 
 relief from the tempestuous reproaches of "Mrs. 
 Freeman." Abigail Hill enters the sphere of his- 
 tory in 1707, the date of her secret marriage with 
 Samuel Masham, a gentleman-in-waiting to Prince 
 George. Discovery of this clandestine union, per- 
 fectly regular as it was, made the Duchess furious. 
 But her violence against Mrs. Masham only 
 widened her breach with the Queen, and established 
 the new favourite's position. 
 
 The first Parliament of Great Britain, which met 
 on the 23rd of October, 1707, passed through both 
 Houses joint resolutions in favour of continuing the 
 war so long as Spain, or any part of the Spanish 
 monarchy, remained under the House of Bourbon. 
 This was the Whig policy, the policy put forward 
 by Lord Somers, ablest survivor of the statesmen 
 who had made the Revolution, and had placed 
 William of Orange on the British throne. Its 
 avowal at this juncture made Marlborough a Whig, 
 not perhaps with the less willingness on his part 
 because his unpopular bother at the Admiralty was 
 a violent and irrepressible Tory. Before Parlia- 
 ment met in 1708 Godolphin, acting in concert with 
 Whigs outside the Cabinet, and especially with
 
 POLITICS 65 
 
 Marlborough, determined that Harley must go. 
 The struggle was long and obstinate. The Queen, 
 supported by Mrs. Masham, clung to her favourite 
 Minister, not so much because he was a Tory, as 
 because he was, or professed to be, a High Church- 
 man. Somers, more powerful at that moment than 
 any Minister, carried a measure for cementing the 
 union with Scotland by the abolition of the separate 
 Privy Council which North Britain had hitherto 
 possessed. On this point, and on others, the 
 Cabinet was at sixes and sevens. The Queen 
 habitually attended the confidential meetings of her 
 servants, which it was then the fashion to hold on 
 Sundays. On Sunday, the 8th of February, 1708, 
 the Cabinet met at Kensington in the absence of 
 Godolphin,Lord Treasurer, and Marlborough, Cap- 
 tain General. The two Prime Ministers, whose 
 authority was really equal, refused to attend so long 
 as Harley remained a servant of the Crown. The 
 Queen would gladly have accepted Godolphin's 
 resignation, and might possibly have been induced 
 to accept Marlborough's. But Harley saw that he 
 was beaten, or perhaps that the sooner he went, the 
 sooner he would come back on his own terms. 
 Three days afterwards he resigned, along with St. 
 John, and the Cabinet became, in the rapidly shift- 
 ing nomenclature of that time, exclusively Whig. 
 As usual, the most significant part of the trans-
 
 66 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 action was that which attracted least notice at the 
 time. Henry St. John's successor at the War 
 Office was a young Norfolk squire named Robert 
 Walpole. 
 
 The victory of the Whigs, to give them the name 
 which they gave themselves, was for the moment 
 complete. Godolphin and Marlborough used and 
 abused their triumph. They insisted that the 
 Queen, w-ho had been making ecclesiastical 
 appointments on her own account from the ranks 
 of Tories and High Churchmen, should for the 
 future be guided by the advice of her Whig Minis- 
 ters in the Church as well as in the State. They 
 could not deny that Anne had chosen pious and 
 excellent men. Where religion or morality was 
 concerned, she was always strictly conscientious. 
 But, with motives which were certainly not of the 
 highest, the Lord Treasurer and the Captain 
 General were asserting a principle which has ever 
 since prevailed, and is essential to the maintenance 
 of the Constitution. The Crown cannot be respon- 
 sible to Parliament, except in case of revolution or 
 civil war. For every act of the Sovereign some 
 Minister must be prepared to answer in the House 
 of Commons, and he cannot be expected to defend 
 a course or a policy of which he disapproves. The 
 Church of England being established by law, being 
 in fact part of the Constitution, Parliament has a
 
 POLITICS 67 
 
 right to know the reason why a particular clergy- 
 man is made a Bishop, or a Dean, or a Regius 
 Professor of Divinity. Anne sullenly acquiesced in 
 what she regarded as the tyranny of her Ministers, 
 and privately sought occasion to overthrow them. 
 She had, however, some time to wait, relying upon 
 Harley's friend, the faithful Abigail. Harley him- 
 self was accused of high treason in the common 
 form of those days, correspondence with St. Ger- 
 mains. The charge, which may have been pre- 
 mature, broke down for want of positive evidence, 
 and Harley was not formally impeached. He was 
 left in an atmosphere of suspicion which rendered 
 him an object of hatred and distrust among Pro- 
 testants, Low Churchmen, and Whigs. 
 
 The General Election of 1708 gave the Whig 
 Ministry a preponderance in the House of Com- 
 mons, and there was a steady Whig majority in 
 the House of Lords. It was no mere question of 
 party nicknames. The friends of "James the 
 Third," a dull youth, but an ardent Catholic, were 
 active and venturesome. They planned an invasion 
 of Scotland, where the large party who had opposed 
 the Union were favourable to their cause, and 
 Madame de Maintenon, who was Queen, if not 
 King, of France, in everything but name, lent all 
 her influence to support the Pretender. This 
 expedition failed ingloriously. But the Queen's
 
 68 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 throne was not secure from what she called, or was 
 made to call, "the designs of a Popish Pretender, 
 bred up in the principles of the most arbitrary 
 government." The Whig Ministry, which was 
 really the Ministry of Marlborough, determined to 
 prosecute the war, and early in April 1708 the ever- 
 victorious Captain left England for Holland, that 
 he might consult Prince Eugene and Pensionary 
 Heinsius at the Hague. At this consultation it 
 was decided to fight the French in the Netherlands, 
 and Marlborough made Brussels his headquarters, 
 while Eugene, after an interview with the Emperor 
 at Vienna, took up a position on the Moselle. The 
 situation in the Netherlands was unfavourable to 
 the Allies. The States had made themselves so 
 unpopular in Brabant that the chief cities, Ghent 
 and Bruges, surrendered almost without resistance 
 to the French. This was on the 5th of July, and 
 then Marlborough, with his unerring vision, per- 
 ceived that he must strike the enemy at once. On 
 the 9th the French army began the siege of Oude- 
 narde on the river Schelde. Sending General 
 Cadogan, a renowned soldier, to occupy Lessines, 
 which the French had designed for cover, Marl- 
 borough moved quickly upon the Schelde opposite 
 Oudenarde on the morning of the nth. His force 
 was in numbers inferior to the French. But it was 
 directed by the genius of a single commander, while
 
 POLITICS 69 
 
 the army of Louis suffered from the nominal 
 supremacy of the Duke of Burgundy, a Prince of 
 the blood, over the Duke of Vendome, a scandalous 
 ruffian and debauchee, but a gallant and skilful 
 commander. Marlborough was loyally assisted by 
 Eugene, who never failed to acknowledge the sur- 
 passing talents of a man he was great enough 
 loyally to serve. The battle began at three in the 
 afternoon, and lasted until the long summer day 
 had faded into darkness. The French right was 
 cut off, under Marlborough's directions, by Mar- 
 shal Overkirk, with twenty battalions of Dutch and 
 Danes. The shades of evening fell upon the entire 
 defeat of Vendome, who retreated unwillingly 
 towards Ghent, leaving thousands of prisoners in 
 the hands of the Allies. "We have taken," wrote 
 Marlborough to Godolphin, "ninety-five colours and 
 standards, besides three the Prussians keep to send 
 to their King," the Elector of Brandenburg, who had 
 just been crowned King of Prussia. After the battle 
 of Oudenarde Marlborough would have marched 
 into the heart of France, and so put an end to the 
 war. But this splendid design was too audacious 
 even for Prince Eugene, and much more so for the 
 Dutch deputies of the States. The capture of Lille, 
 in itself daring enough, was the utmost length to 
 which Marlborough could carry the Allies. It was 
 a formidable task. Lille had been fortified by
 
 JO QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Vauban, the first military engineer of that age. 
 Marshal Boufflers, the Governor, had a garrison of 
 fifteen thousand men. The French were in posses- 
 sion of Ghent, which commanded the course of the 
 Schelde. Nevertheless, Eugene, covered by Marl- 
 borough, began the siege on the 22nd of August, 
 1708, and just two months later Boufflers surren- 
 dered. This brilliant achievement was made pos- 
 sible by the battle of Wynendale, where, on the 
 28th of September, General Webb repulsed the 
 French attack from Bruges under La Mothe, 
 designed to cut off a convoy of supplies from 
 Ostend for the relief of the besiegers. Before the 
 end of the year Marlborough had recovered" from 
 the French both Ghent and Bruges. To the 
 haughty monarch who had revoked the Edict of 
 Nantes he must have seemed like the scourge of 
 God. 
 
 When the Parliament of 1708 met on the i6th 
 of November, the power of the Whigs seemed to 
 be established, and their ascendency was for the 
 time complete. On the 28th of October Prince 
 George of Denmark, natus consumere fruges, had 
 drunk his last bottle, and departed this life, having 
 perhaps done as little good, and as little harm, 
 as it is possible for a human being in a high posi- 
 tion to do. His creature Admiral Churchill was 
 at once dismissed from the Admiralty, the
 
 POLITICS 71 
 
 Admiral's illustrious brother being entirely in- 
 different to his fate, and Lord Pembroke became 
 head of the Board. Pembroke's place as President 
 of the Council was taken by John, Lord Somers, 
 the most justly famous of those great lawyers 
 who have maintained the liberties of England in 
 troubled and dangerous times. To Somers is 
 mainly due the Declaration of Rights, and he had 
 taken a leading part in the Treaty of Union with 
 Scotland. His influence in the House of Lords 
 was almost unbounded, and an attempt to impeach 
 him in the last days of King William had igno- 
 miniously failed. His public character was stain- 
 less, and his enemies were so destitute of material 
 for calumny that they were driven to accuse him of 
 undue susceptibility to the charms of the other sex. 
 But he was identified with the Revolution, and 
 therefore obnoxious to Queen Anne, a Jacobite 
 Sovereign with a Parliamentary title. Godolphin, 
 aided by Marlborough, extorted from her with 
 great difficulty her consent to declare Somers Lord 
 President of the Council, and Wharton Lord 
 Lieutenant of Ireland. Her Majesty's objections 
 to Lord Wharton were neither unnatural nor dis- 
 creditable. He was a coarse profligate and blas- 
 phemer, utterly without principle both in public 
 and private life, pronounced by Swift, not often 
 random in his abuse, to be the most universal
 
 72 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 villain he had ever known. But Wharton was 
 always a staunch Whig, and in the triumph of 
 the Whig party he could not be neglected. The 
 Queen was made to feel in the hour of her bereave- 
 ment that she was the puppet of a faction, and the 
 iron entered into her soul. Her miseries were not 
 alleviated by the joint Address from both Houses 
 in January 1709, praying her to contract for the 
 public interest a second marriage. If we consider 
 whai Anne's maternal experience had been, and 
 that she was now forty-five years old, this request 
 must appear not only discourteous, but repugnant 
 to decency and humanity. The Queen declined 
 to give a "particular answer," and consoled herself 
 with the company of Mrs. Masham. She refused 
 to see any member of the House of Hanover, and 
 would not listen to the suggestion that the Electress 
 Sophia, heir presumptive to the throne, or her 
 son the Elector, or her grandson the Electoral 
 Prince, Duke of Cambridge in the English peer- 
 age, who had fought gallantly for the allies at 
 Oudenarde, should be invited to England. The 
 prospects of the succession might well make British 
 statesmen uneasy. It was now practically certain 
 that Anne would not have issue, and no man could 
 say for certain who would succeed her. The Act of 
 Settlement was clear enough, for it fixed the Crown 
 in the Protestant branch of JameS the First's 
 
 I
 
 POLITICS 73 
 
 descendants. But an Act of Parliament can always 
 be repealed, and if a Tory House of Commons were 
 elected in three years, or in six, the Chevalier de 
 St. George, as the French called him, might be 
 adopted, in case he gave up his Popish religion, 
 as James the Third. The Queen's predecessor had 
 been a Dutchman. Her successor would be a 
 German. The Catholic Highlands of Scotland 
 were ready to rise for the Pretender. How many 
 Tories were also Jacobites no human being could 
 precisely tell. Although some men of education 
 and intelligence still firmly believed in the story 
 of the warming-pan, which made James Stuart 
 a supposititious child, there was not a particle 
 of evidence to prove it, it had indeed been dis- 
 proved, and it was gradually falling into disrepute. 
 The Queen's deep and sincere affection for the 
 Protestant Church of England, the only strong 
 element in her character, and the guiding principle 
 of her life, prevented her from acknowledging her 
 brother to have a higher title than her own. James 
 himself, a man of sense and courage, though not 
 attractive or interesting, had fought with the French 
 at Oudenarde, and it was notorious that there were 
 English Jacobites who, like Fielding's Squire 
 Western, fervently desired the success of the 
 French arms. Among public men there was general 
 and mutual distrust, for no one knew who might
 
 74 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 be corresponding with the Pretender, or on what 
 terms. It is practically certain that if James would 
 have abandoned the Roman Catholic faith, he 
 might have been King of England on his sister's 
 death, and there was no guarantee that his Catholi- 
 cism would bear a strain which had broken down 
 the nominal Protestantism of Henry the Fourth. If 
 Paris was worth a mass, London might be worth 
 a Bible. The Whigs were considered at Court lo 
 be not only hard taskmasters, but much tainted with 
 irreligion, and Marlborough's attachment to the 
 principles of the Reformation, though the one 
 genuine feeling in his nature, except his love for 
 Sarah, had certainly not much influence upon his 
 public conduct. But, treacherous as he was, he was 
 true to Protestantism, and the War of the Succes- 
 sion in Spain was also a; war for the Protestant 
 Succession in England. 
 
 Of that war Louis the Fourteenth had had more 
 than enough. His long reign, the longest in 
 European history, was closing in ruin and disgrace. 
 The massacre and expulsion of the LIuguenots in 
 1685 had deprived France of her ablest and most 
 industrious manufacturers and artisans. William 
 of Orange, though his campaign in the Netherlands 
 was indecisive, and partook largely of defence, had 
 baffled the plans and drained the resources of the 
 French King. Marlborough had completed what
 
 POLITICS 75 
 
 William began, and France was perishing for lack 
 of manhood. The miserable superstition of the 
 doting monarch and his pious spouse sought 
 rather to expiate by penance the sins of his youth 
 than to repair by prudence the errors of his man- 
 hood. An atmosphere of devotion was prescribed 
 at Versailles, and, as Macaulay dryly puts it, the 
 INIarshals of France were much in prayer. But their 
 prayers, as might in the circumstances have been 
 expected, availed them nothing, and after Oude- 
 narde, as after Ramillies, the King sued humbly 
 for peace. De Torcy, his Minister for Foreign 
 Affairs, made overtures to Heinsius, the head of 
 the Government at the Hague. His object was to 
 detach Holland from Great Britain, and conclude a 
 separate treaty with the Dutch States. But Heinsius 
 was a friend of Marlborough, and thoroughly loyal 
 to the Alliance. He declined to treat alone, and 
 he indicated, moreover, in quite uncompromising 
 language, the preliminary concessions which France 
 would have to make. The Empire must be secured 
 in possession of Spain and the Spanish Indies, of 
 Naples and Sicily, and of the Netherlands. As for 
 the Dutch themselves, they must have a barrier of 
 strong towns to protect them against the possibility 
 of invasion. This, however, was not enough for the 
 British Government. Marlborough, who returned 
 from the Hague to London in March 1709, urged
 
 76 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 upon his colleagues demands still more irksome, 
 to which he obtained their consent. Louis must 
 acknowledge the Protestant Succession in Great 
 Britain, expel the Pretender from France, and 
 demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, from which 
 the invading squadron had sailed for Scotland. 
 Both the Houses of Parliament agreed to the pro- 
 posals of the Cabinet, and with these instructions, 
 really drawn by himself, Marlborough, accom- 
 panied by Lord Townshend as second Pleni- 
 potentiary, met Prince Eugene from Vienna at the 
 Dutch capital in April. The first French Pleni- 
 potentiary was President Rouille. But in his 
 extreme desire for peace de Torcy came himself^ 
 and on the 27th of May received from Heinsius the 
 requisitions of the Allies. Newfoundland was 
 claimed for England. Ten fortresses in Flanders 
 must be assigned to the Dutch as a barrier. When 
 these points, and those previously put forward, had 
 been accepted by France, the consideration given 
 her would not be a lasting peace, but simply and 
 solely a truce for two months from the ist of June 
 to the ist of August. During that time the Duke 
 of Anjou, pretending to be King of Spain, and 
 being actually in possession of Castille, which he 
 held without French aid, was to leave the Peninsula, 
 and take up his abode in France. If he failed to 
 do so of his own accord, the King of France, his
 
 POLITICS 77 
 
 own grandfather, was to join the Allies in com- 
 pelling him. De Torcy at once declared that he 
 had no authority to make any such engagement, 
 and the negotiations were broken off. It is impos- 
 sible to justify the policy of the Whig Government 
 in refusing the honourable peace which they might 
 have obtained, and insisting upon terms so humili- 
 ating that a high-spirited people like the French 
 were driven to reject them. Even Marlborough 
 thought them too hard, and withheld his name from 
 the Barrier Treaty, signed by Townshend, which 
 gave the Dutch a guarantee for their ten fortresses 
 at the close of the war. On the 2nd of June Louis 
 held a council, attended by de Torcy, at Versailles. 
 The demands of the Allies were formally rejected, 
 and the war was renewed. 
 
 Marlborough and Eugene took joint command of 
 the allied army in Flanders, estimated to consist of 
 a hundred and ten thousand men. Marshal Villars, 
 who opposed them, had an inferior force, ill armed, 
 ill clothed, and ill fed. When Godolphin was at 
 the Treasury, and Marlborough in the field, British 
 soldiers never suffered from want of raiment, 
 ammunition, or supplies. Instead of attacking 
 Villars on the plains of Sens, the allied commanders 
 invested Tournay on the 7th of July, and took it in 
 three weeks. Mons, the capital of Hainault, was 
 next besieged, and Villars, who had been joined
 
 78 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 by Boufflers, the defender of Lille, marched to its 
 relief. On the nth of September, about seven in 
 the morning, Marlborough and Eugene fell upon 
 him at the village of Malplaquet, and a most 
 sanguinary encounter followed. The numbers were 
 nearly equal, about a hundred thousand on each 
 side, and the French fought with desperate courage. 
 Marlborough exposed his life as freely as if he had 
 been a young subaltern in his first engagement, 
 and the slaughter was terrible. The battle lasted 
 seven hours, and at the end of it the French were 
 driven from their position. But they retreated in 
 good order, and the losses of the Allies were far 
 greater than their own. "We have had this day," 
 wrote Marlborough to his wife, "a very bloody 
 battle; the first part of the day we beat their foot 
 and afterwards their horse." Even Marlborough 
 was moved to real concern by the sight of 
 Malplaquet after the engagement, and he must have 
 felt that the lives lost were thrown away. For there 
 were no reasonable conditions which Louis would 
 not, through de Torcy, have accepted in the spring 
 of 1709. The immediate and the sole result of 
 Malplaquet was the surrender of Mons, which 
 capitulated on the 20th of October. 
 
 At this moment Marlborough, flushed with 
 victory, and stimulated by his Duchess, made the 
 one fatal mistake of his glorious, infamous career.
 
 POLITICS 79 
 
 He held the ofiice of Captain General, or Com- 
 mander-in-Chief, during the pleasure of the Crown. 
 He requested the Queen to confer it upon him by 
 Letters Patent for the term of his natural life. From 
 the military point of view the proposal was not 
 altogether unreasonable. Marlborough's genius for 
 war is without a parallel in the history of the 
 modern world. Compared with him Napoleon was 
 reckless of life, and Wellington devoid of origin- 
 ality. Ccesar's thrasonical boast might have been 
 made in sober earnest by John Churchill. When 
 he had come, and seen, he had already conquered. 
 The Marshals of France were his washpot. Over 
 Louis the Fourteenth he had cast his shoe. He 
 never besieged a town without taking it, or fought 
 a battle without winning it. A still greater fame is 
 his. Given the object which he desired to achieve, 
 he never wasted lives in achieving it. Even at 
 Malplaquet, bloody as it was, there had been no 
 useless or avoidable slaughter on the side of the 
 Allies. Nor was he less triumphant in negotiation 
 than in war. His infallible tact and his irresistible 
 charm made statesmen and potentates the instru- 
 ments of his sovereign will, so long as the power 
 of France was dangerous to the peace of Europe, 
 and the Protestant succession to the throne of 
 Great Britain was insecure. But his success had 
 been so complete that he had ceased to be indispens-
 
 8o QUEEN ANNE 
 
 able, and the peril of his own inordinate cupidity 
 seemed far more imminent to the British Constitu- 
 tion than the designs of the Pretender at St. 
 Germains, or of the decrepit, exploded impostor at 
 Versailles. Even the Whig Chancellor, Cowper, 
 rejected as unconstitutional the claims of the Whig 
 General to be recompensed by a novel Dictatorship 
 for a Whig war. The Queen herself was not much 
 concerned with the arguments which prevailed upon 
 lawyers like Cowper; but she had been for some 
 time surely, though gradually, transferring her 
 afTections from the Duchess of Marlborough, who 
 worried her with reproaches, to Mrs. Masham, who 
 soothed her with compliments. There was only 
 one person who could endure the Duchess's temper, 
 and that was the Duke. His patience in bearing 
 her stormy outbursts was not the least wonderful 
 part of his unruffled affability and calm. He had 
 been gifted by nature, and had cultivated by 
 assiduous art an easy, happy, placable disposition, 
 which gave enjoyment to every one who came near 
 him, and not least to himself. He charmed every 
 one without caring for any one, and was agreeable 
 because he liked it. The Duchess, except in her 
 love of money, was nothing that he was, and every- 
 thing that he was not. She had made herself 
 intolerable at Court, as she would have made herself 
 intolerable anywhere. Mrs. Masham, whose intelli-
 
 POLITICS 8i 
 
 gence was far above the common, did not fail to 
 take advantage of Sarah's blunders, and the Duke's 
 petition was rejected. The Whigs did not know 
 how to manage the Queen, who had inherited her 
 father's sullen and obstinate temper. For the 
 moment, however, they were successful. They 
 required that she should dismiss Lord Pembroke 
 from the Admiralty, and appoint in his room 
 Edward Russell, Earl of Orford, who had been 
 ennobled by William the Third for his naval vic- 
 tory over the French at Barfleur in 1692, but was 
 generally believed to have been connected with 
 the intrigues of Marlborough's nephew, Berwick. 
 With Orford's appointment the power of the Whigs 
 reached its zenith, Marlborough returned from the 
 wars on the 8th of November, 1709. Parliament 
 met on the 15th, and the House of Commons voted 
 a sum of six millions sterling, without hesitation, 
 for the continuance of the campaign.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 POLITICS — II 
 
 When the Whigs were at the height of their 
 power, an unforeseen, and, to a superficial observer, 
 a trifling incident, produced a convulsion, and led 
 to a catastrophe. The numerous and powerful 
 body of political High Churchmen, among whom 
 Francis Atterbury, then Dean of Carlisle, was the 
 most eminent and intrepid, raised a cry that the 
 Church was in danger. By the union with Presby- 
 terian Scotland Presbyterians had been necessarily 
 admitted to both Houses of Parliament, from which 
 Catholics were excluded by the Test Act. The 
 occasional conformity of those Dissenters who 
 took the sacrament in the Church of England as a 
 qualification for municipal office gave great oiTence 
 to jealous ecclesiastics, and several attempts had 
 been made without success to prevent this mode 
 of escape from the statute. The Form of Prayer 
 for the thirtieth of January stamped with official 
 approval a strange and blasphemous comparison 
 between the execution of Charles the First and the 
 
 Passion of Christ. Atterbury, who was a Jacobite, 
 
 82
 
 POLITICS 83 
 
 and many other clergymen, though they would not 
 acknowledge the Pope, were much nearer to the 
 Church of Rome than to Protestant Dissent, and 
 pushed the doctrine of divine right, with its 
 corollary of passive obedience, far beyond the point 
 where it would have been logically consistent with 
 allegiance to Queen Anne. They abhorred the 
 principles of 1688, and regarded the Revolution 
 much as their modern successors regard the 
 Reformation. A turbulent specimen of this class, 
 Henry Sacheverell, Doctor of Divinity and Fellow 
 of Magdalen College, Oxford, had been elected by 
 popular votes, a rare anomaly in the Church of 
 England, to the benefice of St. Saviour's, South- 
 wark. There he preached his favourite doctrines 
 with much animation, and engaged in vehement 
 controversy with Benjamin Hoadly, a Low Church- 
 man and a Whig, who was at that time Rector of 
 St. Peter le Poer in the City of London. In 
 August 1709, Sacheverell preached the Assize 
 sermon at Derby upon the Communication of Sin. 
 On the 5th of November, the anniversary of the 
 Gunpowder Plot and of William's landing at Tor 
 Bay, he discoursed the Lord Mayor at St. Paul's 
 on the perils of false brethren. Both sermons were 
 covert attacks on the Revolution, and the second 
 was the less covert of the two. In it he went so 
 
 far as to designate Lord Treasurer Godolphin, not 
 G 2
 
 84 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 obscurely, by the nickname of Volpone, the 
 scoundrel in Ben Jonson's familiar comedy. The 
 Lord Mayor was a Tory, a High Churchman, and 
 a member of Parliament. He was so much de- 
 lighted with the preacher that he took him home 
 to dinner, and begged him to print the sermon. He 
 even moved the Court of Aldermen to make a 
 formal request in that sense. The aldermen 
 refused. But Sacheverell took his patron's advice, 
 and sold forty thousand copies. 
 
 Few less interesting persons than Henry Sache- 
 verell have ever intruded themselves into the pages 
 of history. But when Macaulay talks of a foolish 
 parson, and Lord Stanhope refers to "the buzz of 
 a single insignificant priest," they overshoot the 
 mark. Sacheverell was not a fool. Nor was he in 
 his own time and place altogether insignificant. 
 He was a popular preacher, verbose and rhetorical, 
 but quite capable of expressing himself in a forcible 
 manner, and of appealing to sentiments which thou- 
 sands shared. The Act of Settlement, and the 
 Protestant Succession, were by no means secure. 
 The Queen's life was a bad one. Her misfortunes 
 as a mother had weakened her health, and she was 
 prone to indulgence in the pleasures of the table. 
 She was a childless widow, not likely to marry 
 again, nor to have children if she did. The heir 
 to the throne by statute was a German woman
 
 POLITICS 85 
 
 unknown in England, though she happened to be 
 the grand-daughter of James the First. Her son 
 George was as un-EngHsh as herself, a brave 
 soldier, it is true, but a man of detestable character 
 who kept his wife in perpetual imprisonment, while 
 he consorted with ugly and rapacious harlots. The 
 Queen's throne was probably safe so long as she 
 herself lived. But who could say what would 
 happen if she died, or when the Act of Settlement 
 might be repealed ? If the Pretender was not less 
 French than the Elector was German, his habits 
 were not repulsive, and he had the manners of a 
 gentleman. James had many friends in England, 
 who would be strengthened and encouraged by such 
 exhortations as Sacheverell's. Early in December 
 1709 the Cabinet met to consider what should be 
 done about the sermon. The Queen thought that 
 it was a very bad one, and that the doctor well 
 deserved to be punished. No one proposed that it 
 should be treated with the contemptuous indiffer- 
 ence recommended by Macaulay and Stanhope, 
 writing at their ease in quiet times. The question 
 before the Cabinet was whether Sacheverell should 
 be prosecuted by the Attorney General in a Court 
 of Law, or impeached by the House of Commons 
 and tried by the House of Lords. Somers was for 
 prosecution, Sunderland was for impeachment. 
 Godolphin sided with Sunderland, and Sacheverell
 
 86 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 was impeached. The opinion of Somers is not 
 lightly to be dismissed. But on the other hand 
 we have the deliberate, considered judgment of the 
 greatest constitutional theorist who wrote in Eng- 
 lish, Edmund Burke. Although Burke was not 
 born till twenty years after Sacheverell's impeach- 
 ment, he was nursed in the creed of the English 
 Revolution, and the Whigs of i688 were the fathers 
 of his Church. In his Appeal from the Neiv to the 
 Old Whigs, he says, " It rarely happens to a Party 
 to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, re- 
 corded declaration of their political tenets upon 
 the subject of a great constitutional event like that 
 of the Revolution. The Whigs had that oppor- 
 tunity, or, to speak more properly, they made it. 
 The impeachment of Dr. Sacheverell was under- 
 taken by a Whig Ministry and a Whig House of 
 Commons, and carried on before a prevalent and 
 steady majority of Whig Peers. It was carried on 
 for the purpose of condemning the principles on 
 which the Revolution was first opposed, and after- 
 wards calumniated, in order, by a juridicial sent- 
 ence of the highest authority, to confirm and fix 
 Whig principles as they operated both in the 
 resistance to King James and in the subsequent 
 settlement; and to fix them in the extent and 
 with the limitations with which it was meant 
 they should be understood by posterity." These
 
 POLITICS 87 
 
 are weighty words, and so are those in which 
 Burke describes the managers of the impeachment. 
 "They were not," says he, '' umhr allies doctor es^ 
 men who had studied a free constitution only in 
 its anatomy and upon dead systems." UnHke most 
 writers on constitutional law, "they knew it alive 
 and in action." It was not the punishment of Dr. 
 Sacheverell that the Cabinet desired, but the 
 authoritative repudiation of his doctrines by Parlia- 
 ment, and the implied guarantee of a Parliamentary 
 title already vested in the House of Hanover. 
 
 Before the end of the year Sacheverell had been 
 impeached by the Commons, and ordered into the 
 custody of the Serjeant-at-arms. When he was 
 transferred in due course to Black Rod, the Lords 
 admitted him to bail, and fixed his trial for the 
 27th of February, 17 10, in Westminster Hall. The 
 trial lasted for three weeks, and absorbed public 
 attention in a manner highly flattering to Sache- 
 verell. It was the happiest time of the doctor's 
 life. Nothing pleased him more than to be the 
 cynosure of every eye ; and as he drove each day 
 from the chambers he occupied in the Temple to 
 Westminster Hall, crowds of admirers surrounded 
 his coach, shouting for the Church and Sacheverell, 
 or, in still more agreeable phraseology, for Sache- 
 verell and the Church. Colley Cibber mentions in 
 his Autobiography that the trial withdrew numbers
 
 88 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 from the Opera at the Haymarket. When the 
 Queen went privately without state in her sedan 
 chair to hear the proceedings, the populace ex- 
 pressed without ceremony a hope that she was on 
 the doctor's side. Two eminent divines, Atterbury 
 and Smalridge, with some of Her Majesty's own 
 chaplains, stood by Sacheverell in the Hall. She 
 began to perceive that clerical Toryism was unani- 
 mously in favour of the accused, and she therefore 
 leaned in that direction herself. The managers for 
 the Commons were judiciously moderate and dis- 
 creet. One of them, Sir Robert Eyre, Solicitor 
 General, denied that "the resistance at the Revolu- 
 tion could bear any parallel with the execrable 
 murder of the royal martyr, so justly detested by 
 the whole nation." Sacheverell 's counsel, of whom 
 Sir Simon Harcourt was chief, were equally pru- 
 dent, and the question between the two sides became 
 extremely narrow. Both agreed that obedience was 
 the rule, and refusal to obey the law an exception, 
 which only extreme necessity would justify. It 
 was argued for Sacheverell that exceptions need 
 not be named in sermons ; and against him that, 
 if they were ignored, the rule was fundamentally 
 changed. But what the Whigs chiefly valued was 
 the opportunity of laying down in the most public 
 place, and the most authoritative form, the cardinal 
 doctrines of their political faith. These were not
 
 POLITICS 89 
 
 at the time popular with the lower orders. While 
 Eyre and Jekyll and Stanhope and Parker were 
 expounding the limits of royalty, and the safe- 
 guards of freedom, a London mob were pulling 
 down conventicles and burning the pews. The 
 Lords treated Sacheverell with singular indulgence. 
 Though defended by the ablest counsel, he was 
 allowed to read, on his own behalf and in his own 
 name, a speech which Atterbury had composed for 
 him. It abounded in zeal for the Protestant Suc- 
 cession, which Atterbury would have maintained 
 by restoring the Catholic Pretender. On the 25th 
 of March the Lords gave their verdict upon their 
 honour in response to Lord Chancellor Cowper, 
 who called upon them by their rank, beginning with 
 the junior Baron. By a majority of sixty-nine voices 
 against fifty-two Sacheverell was found guilty of 
 the offence charged against him. Four Bishops, 
 including Burnet of Salisbury, the historian, 
 voted against the doctor. Archbishop Sharp of 
 York, and Bishop Compton of London, were in his 
 favour. Nottingham and the other Tory leaders 
 voted Not Guilty, as a matter of course. Three 
 Whig Dukes, Shrewsbury, Somerset, and Argyll 
 refused to vote with their party, and were regarded 
 with approval by the Court. Shrewsbury pro- 
 nounced the doctor to be innocent. Somerset stood 
 neutral on the steps of the throne. Argyll, after
 
 go QUEEN ANNE 
 
 voting Guilty, voted against the proposed suspen- 
 sion from preaching, which was the only punish- 
 ment inflicted on Sacheverell. The period was 
 reduced on a division from seven years to three, 
 but it was ordered that the two incriminated 
 sermons should be burnt by the common hangman. 
 Although Godolphin expressed to Marlborough, in 
 rather undignified language, his disappointment at 
 the inadequacy of this result, the Whigs had, as 
 Burke points out, achieved their main and chief 
 object. Their principles had been adopted, and the 
 principles of the Tories had been condemned, by 
 both Houses of Parliament, after a solemn and ex- 
 haustive discussion in the great Hall of William 
 Rufus. They could afford to let Sacheverell enjoy 
 his bonfires and illuminations, his progresses and 
 plaudits, even the benefice to which a Tory patron 
 prefer! ed him in Wales. They had vindicated the 
 Revolution and the Constitution by showing that 
 the two words were practically synonymous. 
 
 When Parliament was prorogued on the 5th 
 April, 1 7 10, with a speech from the throne advis- 
 ing men "to be quiet and to do their own business 
 rather than busy themselves in reviving questions 
 and disputes of a very high nature," the Whig 
 government seemed unassailable at home and 
 abroad. Marlborough, who was never really a 
 Whig, though he was always a Protestant, reposed
 
 POLITICS 91 
 
 upon his military laurels, and took more interest 
 in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain for himself the 
 lucrative Vice-Royalty of the Netherlands, which 
 he had formerly refused, than in the prosecution 
 of Sacheverell. The love of money is not apt to 
 diminish with years, and John Churchill felt it 
 strongly from his callow youth. His wife, who 
 shared it with him, did not share his prudence or 
 his self-control. The day after the prorogation, 
 while her lord was in Holland, she forced herself 
 upon the Queen at Kensington, and poured out a 
 flood of reproachful self-defence. The Duchess was 
 not really a clever woman, and, notwithstanding 
 their long intimacy, she had failed to understand 
 the Queen. Her profoundly sagacious husband, 
 who read men much more easily than he read books, 
 had observed and noted a characteristic trait in 
 James the Second, which was that, at the close of 
 a long argument, his Majesty would repeat his 
 original opinion in precisely the same words. Anne 
 was like her father. Writing before the interview, 
 the Duchess, in order to procure it, promised that 
 it would not require the Queen to give an answer. 
 Her Majesty laid hold of this concession and would 
 by no means let it go. Neither the expostulations 
 of the Duchess nor her tears could elicit from her 
 royal mistress any change in the sullen formula, 
 "You desired no answer, and you shall have none."
 
 92 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 At last, finding that her angry playmate would not 
 go, Anne herself left the room, and the Duchess 
 saw her no more for ever. 
 
 The reign of the first favourite was over, and 
 the ascendency of Mrs. Masham was complete. A 
 few days afterwards. Lord Kent, the Whig Lord 
 Chamberlain, was dismissed, and the Duke of 
 Shrewsbury, who had voted for Sacheverell, re- 
 ceived the appointment, without the consent or 
 knowledge of Godolphin. The Lord Treasurer 
 submitted meekly to the affront, and went on bet- 
 ting at Newmarket as if nothing had happened. 
 All this time Marlborough was at the Hague, 
 employed in considering fresh negotiations for 
 peace. He was no longer desirous of continuing 
 a war in which he could gain no glory that he had 
 not already won. His position, and the position 
 of Great Britain, which was due to him, were truly 
 splendid. No English statesman, not even Crom- 
 well, would have thought it possible in the seven- 
 teenth century for any European power or concert 
 of powers, to prevail over the combination of 
 France and Spain. The eighteenth century was 
 but ten years old, and the proudest of French 
 sovereigns was humbly suing England for peace on 
 any terms, short of compelling his grandson by 
 arms to surrender the Spanish throne. England, 
 however, was in the hands of her allies, with whom
 
 POLITICS 93 
 
 she could not decently break, and the Dutch in- 
 sisted that Louis should drink the cup of humilia- 
 tion to the dregs. When he declined, the Peace 
 Conference, held at Gertruydenberg, broke up, 
 and the campaign was once more renewed. Marl- 
 borough was now master of the situation. The 
 Marshals of France retired at his approach, and 
 would not give him battle. He passed their lines 
 without losing a man, and invested Douay, which 
 had a garrison of eight thousand troops. Assisted 
 by Eugene, he prevented Villars, whose head- 
 quarters were at Cambray, from marching to its 
 relief, and on the 25th of June Douay capitulated. 
 It began to look as if Calais would once more fall 
 into English hands, when a political convulsion in 
 England itself changed the whole aspect of affairs. 
 Emboldened by the pusillanimity of Godolphin, 
 the Queen went a step further, and removed from 
 her counsels a much more important person than 
 the Marquis of Kent. This was the Earl of Sun- 
 derland, Marlborough's son-in-law, and Secretary 
 of State. Sunderland was in theory a violent 
 Whig, his enemies said a Republican, obnoxious 
 to the Queen for his temper no less than for his 
 principles. In fact he was used by the Jacobites, 
 and not unwilling to serve them. His successor, 
 appointed through Godolphin, but without con- 
 sulting him, was Lord Dartmouth, a Tory, a High
 
 94 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Churchman, and something very like a Jacobite 
 himself. That Marlborough should retain his com- 
 mand, despite the insult to his family, was natural 
 and proper. His country was still at war, and he 
 was worth a hundred thousand men. But Godol- 
 phin, and even Somers, showed on this occasion a 
 spirit unworthy of themselves. For, though the 
 doctrine of collective responsibility was not then 
 established, and it was not yet regarded as essential 
 that a Cabinet should be wholly Whig, or wholly 
 Tory, two such nominations as Shrewsbury's and 
 Dartmouth's amounted to a withdrawal of the 
 Queen's confidence from her Whig advisers. They 
 were designed to express her disapproval of 
 Sacheverell's impeachment. They were directed 
 against Godolphin and Marlborough. They were 
 known to have been prompted by Mrs. Masham, 
 and through Mrs. Masham by Harley. The 
 Tories, the country party, were delighted, and 
 assured poor distracted Anne that she was now 
 Queen indeed. The Wliigs, the moneyed party, 
 were alarmed, and the Governor of the Bank 
 headed a deputation of protest to the Queen. They 
 got a short dry answer to the effect that they had 
 nothing to fear from "any further changes" which 
 might be made. 
 
 Sunderland had been dismissed on the 13th of 
 June. But it was not till the 8th of August that the
 
 POLITICS 95 
 
 Queen struck her great blow. On that day, taking 
 advantage of some uncourtly words employed by 
 the Lord Treasurer at a Council in her Majesty's 
 presence, she ordered Godolphin to break his staff, 
 the symbol of office, promising him at the same 
 time a pension of four thousand a year. Godolphin 
 was sixty-five, and old for his age. Although he 
 had clung to his post as long as he decently could, 
 and perhaps longer, he retired with dignity, and 
 without unmanly complaints. Had it not been for 
 his pension, he would have been a poor man. In 
 a corrupt age he was incorruptible, and the finances 
 of this country never had a more vigilant steward. 
 He would spend money freely where it was re- 
 quired, and his name must always be coupled with 
 Marlborough's in joint responsibility for cam- 
 paigns which were not less providently organized 
 than they were brilliantly designed and splendidly 
 achieved. His financial administration, assailed by 
 unscrupulous opponents, was so conclusively de- 
 fended by Walpole, that the malice of his critics 
 was put to silence and to shame. Walpole himself 
 soon followed his chief into retirement. It had 
 not, however, come to be acknowledged that there 
 was any head of the Government except the Queen, 
 and the removal of Godolphin did not of itself 
 destroy his Cabinet. The Treasury was put into 
 Commission with a titled nonentity as First Lord,
 
 96 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and Robert Harley as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 But Harley became in effect Prime Minister, and 
 proceeded to reconstruct the Ministry. Harley's 
 principles were fluid. Brought up a Whig and a 
 Nonconformist, he had become a Tory and a 
 Churchman. He was, how^ever, a moderate 
 Churchman, and a lukewarm Tory. His Toryism 
 indeed chiefly consisted in a desire to stand well 
 with Mrs. Masham and the Queen. Having got 
 what he wanted for himself, he tried his hand at a 
 coalition. He induced John Holies, Duke of New- 
 castle, uncle of the notorious placeman, to remain 
 Lord Privy Seal. He made fruitless overtures to 
 Halifax. He did his best to keep Somers, Cowper, 
 and especially Walpole. But, finding that they 
 were not prepared to act with him, and did not 
 believe in his strange professions of being a Whig 
 at bottom, he turned them out, and presented Anne 
 with the Tory Cabinet which was her heart's desire. 
 Harcourt became Lord Chancellor in the room of 
 Cowper, Rochester, the Queen's uncle, succeeded 
 Somers as Lord President, and Ormond was 
 declared Lord Lieutenant of Ireland instead of 
 Wharton. With Wharton fell his Chief Secre- 
 tary, Joseph Addison, the best and most popular 
 representative of Whiggery in the world of letters. 
 The new Secretary of State was Henry St. John, 
 Harley's principal confederate, a man of boundless
 
 POLITICS 97 
 
 and unscrupulous ambition, whose real aim was to 
 exclude the House of Hanover from the throne of 
 England. 
 
 Even before her Tory Cabinet was complete, and 
 while Cowper still held the Great Seal, the Queen, 
 on the 2ist of September, 1710, dissolved the Par- 
 liament of 1708. This assertion of her prerogative, 
 though it would not now be regarded as constitu- 
 tional, was justified by the result. The Tories and 
 High Churchmen, on whose behalf she was acting, 
 carried everything before them, insomuch that their 
 majority in the new House of Commons was 
 estimated at four to one. It is strange, as Macaulay 
 says, that an Administration judicious in its policy 
 at home, and glorious for its exploits abroad, 
 should have been assailed with a roar of obloquy, 
 and defeated with an emphasis of ignominy, which 
 would have seemed appropriate if Louis were the 
 arbiter of Europe, and Marlborough had suffered 
 defeat. The explanation of the paradox is not easy, 
 even if there be added to the popularity of 
 Sacheverell the unpopularity of the war. There 
 was no enthusiasm for the Queen, for Harley, or 
 for St. John. Impatience of taxation, and disgust 
 with the Allies, especially with the Dutch, may have 
 done something for the Tories. But the Church 
 undoubtedly did far more. The cry of "Low 
 Church is no Church " was more effective than it 
 
 H
 
 98 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 had been at any time since the Revolution. The 
 country party, who resorted to general and un- 
 scrupulous intimidation of electors, were zealous 
 against Whigs, Dissenters, and the moneyed in- 
 terest of the towns. They had no confidence in 
 Marlborough, and though they called themselves 
 Protestants, many of them were Jacobites at heart. 
 The Whigs in those days were better patriots than 
 the Tories, for Tory hatred of the Allies had in 
 1 710 reached a pitch at least as high as Whig 
 hatred of Napoleon's enemies rose during the first 
 ministry of Pitt. 
 
 No sooner had the new Parliament met on the 
 25th of November, than the Queen declared herself 
 for the Protestant Succession and the House of 
 Hanover. Yet in the early months of 171 1 Harley 
 and St. John employed a French Catholic priest, 
 Gaultier by name, to negotiate secretly with the 
 King of France and the Pretender for the con- 
 clusion of peace, if not for something more. While 
 the House of Commons was voting six millions 
 for a continuance of the war, and Marlborough was 
 again at the Hague, planning fresh manoeuvres, 
 this dark and sinister plot was conducted by the 
 Queen's confidential servants in the Queen's own 
 name. De Torcy, the French Minister for Foreign 
 Affairs, was assured that Anne had the most tender 
 feelings for her brother James, and that Harley 
 
 i
 
 POLITICS 99 
 
 wished the Pretender to come by his own upon the 
 next demise of the Crown. Few more disgraceful 
 episodes besmirch the pages of Enghsh history, 
 and the final touch of infamy is added by a recom- 
 mendation that the Archduke Charles, the ally of 
 Great Britain, should be kept by French Generals 
 within the walls of Barcelona. Different indeed 
 was the management of British diplomacy and war 
 under Harley and St. John from what it had been 
 under Marlborough and Godolphin. While the 
 principal Ministers of the Queen, her "prime 
 ministers," as they were called in the plural, 
 coquetted with the Pretender, and caballed against 
 the allies of Great Britain, a British General, 
 James Stanhope, who had served under the illus- 
 trious Duke, was compelled by no fault of his own 
 to capitulate to Marshal Vendome at Brihuega in 
 Spain, and become a prisoner of France. But 
 Stanhope, founder of the Earldom, was a Whig, 
 and in the rage of party spirit which then prevailed 
 the Tories regarded his discomfiture as a triumph 
 for themselves. The temper in which they had 
 accepted office is described with entire candour by 
 St, John. "I am afraid," he wrote, "that we came 
 to court by the same dispositions as all parties 
 have done; that the principal spring of our actions 
 was to have the government of the State in our 
 hands ; that our principal views were the conserva- 
 
 H 2
 
 loo QUEEN ANNE 
 
 tion of this power, great employments to ourselves, 
 and great opportunities of rewarding those who had 
 helped to raise us, and of hurting those who stood 
 in opposition to us." 
 
 The German historian von Ranke has expressed 
 an opinion that, in the last four years of Queen 
 Anne's reign, during the Cabinet of Harley and 
 St. John, lies its real historic importance. That 
 is to confound the transitory with the permanent 
 part of human affairs. Tory predominance from 
 1 7 ID to 17 14, described in the feeble apologetics of 
 an author who usurped the famous name of Swift, 
 was no more than the prelude to the Whig ascend- 
 ency of the first two Georges. This period has 
 attained a fascinating, but a delusive, celebrity, 
 from the number of great writers who dignified by 
 their genius its pitiful intrigues. As statesmen, 
 Harley and St. John were worse than useless, 
 almost entirely contemptible. As generous and 
 sympathetic friends to men of letters whom they 
 appreciated, and not merely rewarded, they have 
 received from posterity a gratitude too indiscrimin- 
 ate to be just. St. John's own writings, of which 
 Burke fully understood the real value, are still 
 admired by some, and if style were an end in itself, 
 if the art of expression were valuable without refer- 
 ence to the thing expressed, they would be admir- 
 able indeed. But though he failed equally to
 
 POLITICS loi 
 
 destroy the Christian religion, and to construct a 
 patriot King, St. John was as good a judge of 
 literature as of burgundy, and Harley loved books 
 without adding to their number. In 1710 they both 
 saw the value of enlisting literary support, and they 
 made a notable acquisition. It was the classical 
 age of the political pamphlet, standing between the 
 glorious sunrise of Milton and the splendid sunset 
 of Burke. They found a pamphleteer without 
 eloquence, without romance, without elevation of 
 soul, but with a clearness of intellect, a soundness 
 of judgment, a lucidity of style, a richness of 
 humour, a crushing, penetrating, remorseless irony, 
 which have never been combined in any other writer 
 before or since. 
 
 The Reverend Jonathan Swift was then in the 
 forty-fourth year of his age. Though born in 
 Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Swift 
 always indignantly denied that he was an Irish- 
 man. A man, he said, might as well be called a 
 horse because he was born in a stable. He was, 
 however, ordained in Ireland, all his preferments 
 were Irish, and he was in 17 10 the incumbent of 
 Laracor, with a prebendal stall in the cathedral 
 church of St. Patrick. It is difficult for any one 
 acquainted with Swift's published works to believe 
 that his Churchmanship, or even his Christianity, 
 was more than nominal. But his personal pride,
 
 I02 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 which early hardships, and the patronage of his 
 kinsman Sir William Temple, had developed to 
 insolent arrogance, made him jealous for the estab- 
 lishment of which he was a minister, the Church 
 of Ireland. It was not the Church of the Irish 
 people, most of whom were Catholics, while many 
 in the north were Presbyterians. It was the Church 
 of the English Pale, and it was only for the Pale 
 in Ireland that Swift really cared. The Irish 
 Catholics were in his eyes scarcely human, though 
 he relieved, with a generosity in honourable con- 
 trast to his personal penuriousness, the necessities 
 of the Dublin poor. The Irish Presbyterians were 
 dangerous enemies, to be fought by tests in lieu 
 of faggots. The Protestant Episcopal Church was 
 his own ; and he stood up for its rights, real or 
 imaginary, as a soldier maintains the honour of 
 his regiment. The Tale of a Tub, which appeared 
 in 1704, had already made him famous. For 
 though, like almost all his writings, it was anony- 
 mous, the secret had not been kept, and connois- 
 seurs were aware that the poor parson was a power. 
 Swift had no political principles, and he had 
 become intimate with the Whigs in 1707, when he 
 tried his best to arrange for the participation of the 
 Irish Protestant Church in Queen Anne's Bounty. 
 They had not, however, rewarded him in any sub- 
 stantial manner, and he was a perilous ally for
 
 POLITICS 103 
 
 them, because he could not be civil to Dissenters. 
 There were indeed few people to whom he could 
 be civil. Incapable of the passions which soften 
 human nature, though they may corrupt it, he was 
 a prey to envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitable- 
 ness. Although he liked clever women, and they 
 liked him, he was in truth a real misanthrope, and 
 his mind was full of loathsome images, which he 
 loved to delineate for the benefit of his less for- 
 tunate fellow-creatures. A more manly side of his 
 character was his vaulting ambition, which by 17 10 
 had estranged him from the ungrateful Whigs, and 
 prepared him for the reception of St. John's flattery. 
 In November of that year he became a contributor 
 to the Tory Examiner, and wrote for it regularly 
 till June 171 1. His principal colleagues were Prior 
 and Defoe. His chief opponents were Addison and 
 Steele. Not one of them could in controversy hold 
 a candle to him. Time, which displays the true 
 proportions of things, exhibits the reign of Anne 
 as dominated by Marlborough and by Swift. 
 Neither of them had any nobility of soul. Both 
 were time-servers and self-seekers. But these are 
 moral deficiencies. Intellectual faults they had 
 none. At the very time when Swift had made him- 
 self the slave of a party, when he was writing for 
 his employers two of his masterpieces. The Con- 
 duct of the Allies, and A Letter to the October
 
 704 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Club, he appeared, so consummate is his art, to 
 be simply putting plain good sense into good plain 
 English. His triumph, and the triumph of his 
 employers, was short. But, while it lasted, it was 
 complete, and to no man were they more indebted 
 than they were to him. They did not really trust 
 him. He was not, as he fondly imagined, in their 
 secrets. With all his faults he was a truthful man, 
 and they wisely kept him in ignorance of their 
 clandestine communications with the Pretender, so 
 that he might deny what he did not know. He 
 proved a wonderfully dexterous, and an infinitely 
 useful, agent. Macaulay has written on the margin 
 of his Swift that a man must have been behind 
 the scenes in politics to appreciate the excellence of 
 the Letter to the October Club. It is indeed 
 a storehouse of practical sagacity, and it had the 
 desired result of quieting those Tory highfliers who 
 expected all things in an hour, whose minds were 
 clouded by their October beer, who believed that 
 Harley was one of themselves, and that St. John 
 was a High Churchman, meaning what he said. 
 
 When Harley and St. John, who were at this 
 time on familiar and intimate terms, had secured 
 the services of Swift, they made up their minds to 
 get rid of Marlborough. He was their most dan- 
 gerous enemy, as Swift was their most valuable 
 friend. But it was necessary to proceed against
 
 POLITICS J05 
 
 him with extreme caution, for his treasons were 
 imperfectly known, and his achievements had 
 dazzled the eyes of mankind. When he arrived 
 in London, between the Christmas of 17 10 and the 
 New Year of 171 1, the popular cheers which 
 greeted him were mingled with more ominous 
 shouts of "No Popery," and "No wooden shoes," 
 such as the French were supposed to wear while 
 attending their confessionals, and eating their 
 frogs. At Court he was not in favour. The Queen 
 received him coldly, although he showed the in- 
 herent baseness which even the splendour of his 
 genius cannot hide by the servility of his adula- 
 tion, and by, an offer that his wife should not so 
 much as come into the Royal presence, if only she 
 might be allowed to keep her official emoluments. 
 The Queen, having fallen completely under the 
 influence of Mrs. Masham, and through her of 
 Harley, refused to be conciliated, and peremptorily 
 demanded from the Duchess her golden key. It 
 is painful to add that on the 17th of January, 171 1, 
 the first soldier of the age, perhaps of any age, fell 
 on his knees before a peevish woman, and passion- 
 ately begged that his wife might not be dismissed. 
 The one excuse to be suggested for him, strange 
 and paradoxical as it may seem, is that he was 
 really and truly afraid of the Duchess. He had to 
 go home, and tell her that he had failed, whereupon
 
 to6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 she characteristically threw the key at his head. 
 She received, without a murmur from the Queen, 
 the lavish pecuniary compensation which she was 
 not ashamed to demand. But her kingdom was 
 taken from her, and divided among the Medes and 
 Persians. The Duchess of Somerset, whose hus- 
 band, though a Whig, was an early friend of the 
 Queen's, and had not voted against Sacheverell, 
 became Mistress of the Robes, while Mrs. Masham, 
 who had done it all, was made Keeper of the Privy 
 Purse. Elizabeth, Duchess of Somerset, w-ife of 
 "the proud Duke," the last of the original Percys, 
 was satirized by Swift in the Windsor Prophecy 
 as "carrots from Northumberland." The Tories 
 were afraid of her influence over the Queen, and 
 of her intrigues with the Whigs. Marlborough, 
 whom the Somersets hated, continued to be Cap- 
 tain General, though not for life, and on the 
 1 8th of February, 171 1, he sailed for the Hague 
 to consult with Heinsius about the renewal of the 
 war. 
 
 The Government were seeking an opportunity 
 to abandon the European alliance, and to make 
 peace with France. If they had openly and avow- 
 edly, with the knowledge of the Empire and of 
 the States General, made overtures of peace, their 
 conduct would have deserved rather praise than 
 blame. Louis the Fourteenth had ceased to be a
 
 POLITICS 107 
 
 danger, or even a bugbear. Great Britain was in 
 a position to dictate her own terms, for Marl- 
 borough had placed her on a pinnacle of greatness 
 which even Cromwell scarcely reached. But honest 
 statesmen, Somers for instance, or Walpole, would 
 have made a point of acting with Austria and 
 Holland until it became clear that those Powers 
 would not accept a reasonable arrangement. Harley 
 and St. John, on the contrary, behaved as if Eng- 
 land's allies were her enemies, as if her enemies 
 were her friends, and as if the Pretender were her 
 lawful king. They relied upon the undoubted and 
 by no means surprising fact that the war had 
 become extremely unpopular. If Southey had 
 written his poem about Malplaquet, instead of 
 Blenheim, the reason would have been at least as 
 good as the rhyme. After Ramillies there was no 
 sufficient cause for prolonging the struggle, and 
 by 171 1 it had become palpably futile. When 
 Lutheran emigrants from the Palatinate, "poor 
 Palatines " as they were called, received public 
 money to establish them in Ireland and in the 
 North American Colonies, while many Englishmen 
 were suffering severely from distress, popular dis- 
 content became vociferous, and Marlborough's 
 name no longer served to allay the tumult. The 
 House of Commons, which in 171 1 was more like 
 Convocation than it has ever been before or since,
 
 io8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 protested against the importation of these destitute 
 aliens on the ground, amongst others, that by multi- 
 plying Dissenters it endangered the Church. Even 
 the impeachment of Sunderland, who as Secretary 
 of State had brought them in, was proposed. But 
 Sunderland was no longer in office, and the matter 
 was allowed to drop. 
 
 Harley might have found some difficulty in re- 
 taining a position which the more impetuous Tories 
 would gladly have transferred to St. John, if an 
 unforeseen accident had not suddenly made him a 
 popular hero. A French exile residing in London, 
 the Marquis de Guiscard, who had given valuable 
 information to Marlborough and Godolphin at 
 earlier stages of the war, demanded money from 
 Harley, which that prudent financier refused to pay. 
 Guiscard thereupon wrote to the French court dis- 
 closing what he knew, and was arrested by order 
 of St. John, who discovered his treachery, on the 
 8th of March, 171 1. Brought before the Privy 
 Council at the Cockpit in Whitehall, Guiscard sud- 
 denly rushed at Harley, and stabbed him in the 
 breast with a penknife. The wound was slight, 
 and it was Guiscard who died, by the swords of 
 St. John and other Privy Councillors. But Harley 
 was laid up for some weeks with fever, and the calm 
 courage which he displayed under the murderous 
 attack, as by intention it had undoubtedly been,
 
 POLITICS 109 
 
 was in the mouths of all men. The rival claims 
 of St. John were forgotten, and Harley became 
 without dispute the first Minister of the Crown. 
 
 Never was there a more loyal House of Commons, 
 nor one more devoted to the landed interest. 
 Soldiers, courtiers, merchants, and, above all, Dis- 
 senters were the objects of its jealousy and distrust. 
 Parliament enacted in this year that every knight 
 of the shire, or county member, must possess an 
 income of six hundred pounds a year, and every 
 burgess, or borough member, an income of three 
 hundred pounds a year, from land. It was also 
 ordered by the Queen's special and earnest desire, 
 that fifty new churches should be built in London, 
 from the produce of the civic duty on coal, as 
 recommended by the Lower House of Convocation 
 through their Jacobite Prolocutor, Francis Atter- 
 bury. As if still further to exhibit the political 
 influence of the Church, a Bishop, Robinson of 
 Bristol, was at the same time admitted to the 
 Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. Robinson, in the 
 course of his unusual career, had been for a quarter 
 of a century chaplain to the Swedish Embassy at 
 Stockholm, had discharged the duties of Minister 
 during the Minister's absence, and had actually 
 accompanied Charles the Twelfth to Norway, while 
 he held a benefice in England. 
 
 Harley had now reached the height of his power.
 
 no QUEEN ANNE 
 
 On the 26th of April, 171 1, he reappeared in the 
 House of Commons after his illness, and received 
 the congratulations of the Speaker. A few days 
 afterwards he made his financial statement as 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, and proposed, w ithout 
 a glimmer of light on the real nature of what he 
 was doing, the incorporation of the South Sea Com- 
 pany. A month later he was gazetted Earl of 
 Oxford, reviving the ancient title of the De Veres, 
 which had become extinct less than ten years before, 
 and on the blessed anniversary of the glorious 
 Restoration he took the oaths as Lord Treasurer 
 before Simon Harcourt, Lord Keeper. Meanwhile 
 there had occurred on the Continent a great change. 
 How much the history of the eighteenth century 
 was affected by the smallpox would be an interest- 
 ing subject of investigation. In April 171 1 it 
 carried off the French Dauphin, who was soon fol- 
 lowed by his son and the Emperor Joseph, a young 
 man of thirty-two. Joseph was succeeded, with the 
 consent of the Electors, by his brother Charles, the 
 candidate of the Allies for the throne of Spain. 
 The ironic texture of human affairs, on which great 
 satirists have exhausted their vocabularies, was 
 seldom illustrated in a more grimly practical way. 
 Even those who objected most strongly to the 
 aggrandisement of the Bourbons did not desire to 
 see Spain a fief of the Empire, as she had been in
 
 POLITICS itl 
 
 the days of Charles the Fifth, and no further 
 attempt was made to disturb Philip of Anjou. The 
 old King of France, who had reduced his country 
 from the heights of glory to the depths of degrada- 
 tion, was left to enjoy such comfort as he could 
 derive from the fact that his grandson now reigned 
 without dispute over a country not less humbled 
 than his own. 
 
 The campaign of 171 1, though for political 
 reasons it led to no tangible result, was not less 
 illustrative of Marlborough's military genius than 
 the battle of Blenheim itself. He planned with 
 Prince Eugene a great project for invading French 
 territory from Tournay. Eugene, however, was 
 recalled, by orders issued from Vienna, to guard 
 the Imperial Electors at Frankfort, and Marl- 
 borough had to act alone against Marshal Villars, 
 who was so proud of his defensive lines that he 
 called them, in the spirit of King Canute, his ne 
 flus ultra. Marlborough watched the Marshal's 
 designs with calm disdain, and was no more im- 
 peded by them than the ocean was impeded by 
 Canute. When the time had come, in the month 
 of August, he crossed the Schelde, and besieged 
 the garrison of Bouchain, which he took, with three 
 thousand prisoners, on the 12th of September. The 
 French were in numbers far stronger than the Eng- 
 lish army, and there was not another soldier in
 
 112 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Europe who would have regarded Marlborough's 
 enterprise as feasible with the men at his disposal. 
 This achievement relaxed the Queen's purse-strings, 
 which had been closed since her quarrel with the 
 Duchess, and she gave another sum of twenty 
 thousand pounds towards the completion of Blen- 
 heim Palace. 
 
 Marlborough never asked advice, and seldom 
 took it, being indeed accustomed to receive it with 
 the one word of comment, "Silly." But he did 
 announce his intentions at this juncture to his old 
 colleague Godolphin, who had never failed him. 
 At the same time, with the serene, high-bred cour- 
 tesy so much admired by Chesterfield, he furnished 
 special protection at Cateau-Cambresis to the 
 diocesan estates of the illustrious Archbishop 
 Fenelon. Whatever he may have been below, 
 Marlborough was always on the surface a great 
 gentleman. But the position of this singular and 
 incomparable personage was being steadily under- 
 mined by intriguers, who resembled him only in the 
 want of scruple and of shame. The Duchess had 
 been banished from the Court, and the "all-accom- 
 plished St. John " was pulling every wire within his 
 reach to compass the ruin of the Protestant Succes- 
 sion in the person of its champion. He and Lord 
 Oxford, who for this purpose, though his nominal 
 superior, was his actual tool, sent Matthew Prior the
 
 POLITICS 113 
 
 poet on a secret mission to King Louis and de Torcy 
 at Fontainebleau. The Queen objected to the social 
 grade of the envoy as too low for such an office. 
 But Prior, now known as a graceful and rather 
 licentious author of familiar verse, was by profession 
 a diplomatist, had been Secretary to the English 
 Embassy at Paris, and had taken a leading part 
 in negotiating the Treaty of Ryswick for King 
 William. The motives of his journey to France in 
 the summer of 171 1 were carefully concealed from 
 the public, and even Swift, who thought he knew 
 everything, had no knowledge of them at all. If 
 secrecy had been confined to England, it would need 
 no excuse. Even in our own day, when the light 
 of publicity beats upon many things not thought 
 proper in the eighteenth century to be divulged, the 
 preliminary stages of an international agreement 
 cannot always be communicated to the Press. 
 What makes the authors of these particular negotia- 
 tions infamous is the deceit they practised upon 
 Britain's allies. Swift's argument in his famous 
 pamphlet, that we undertook more than our share 
 of the burden involved in the war, while Holland 
 and the Empire derived more than their share of the 
 profit, is a perfectly fair one. But he was allowed 
 to write in ignorance of the facts. He had no idea 
 that while he was defending Ministers, they were 
 doing what he could not have defended. So far as
 
 114 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the requirements of this country alone were con- 
 cerned, their proposals were reasonable enough. 
 The greatest of British interests at that time was 
 peace. St. John was entitled to say that, if the 
 Spanish crown were always separated from the 
 French, a Bourbon might be suffered, as Philip the 
 Fifth, to reign at Madrid. Prior was instructed to 
 demand, in return for this concession, Gibraltar, 
 Port Mahon, and Newfoundland for Great Britain ; 
 the sinister privilege of the Asiento, or right of sup- 
 plying the Spanish Colonies with negro slaves; a 
 guaranteed frontier on the Rhine for Austria, and a 
 Barrier Treaty for the Dutch. When Prior returned 
 to London, he was followed by a French envoy, 
 Manager by name, who further undertook on behalf 
 of his master that France should acknowledge the 
 title of Queen Anne, and the validity of the Protest- 
 ant Succession. At the same time, with a refine- 
 ment of treachery which may safely be attributed 
 to St. John, a different set of proposals, omitting 
 all the advantages secured by England, was drawn 
 up for communication to the Hague. Holland, 
 however, was most reluctant to accept terms, and 
 the Emperor was furious at the very suggestion of 
 them. The English Whigs took up the cry, and in 
 the month of October 171 1 the peacemongers were 
 bitterly lampooned. That the Tory Government 
 were substantially right in their policy would not
 
 POLITICS 115 
 
 now be in any quarter denied. There was nothing 
 left in dispute for which a civilized nation could 
 with justice, or even with decency, wage war. Not 
 the thing done, but the manner of doing it, has left 
 an indelible stain upon the characters of Oxford and 
 St. John. Oxford's nature was crooked, and St. 
 John preferred, whenever he had a choice, to accom- 
 plish his objects by dishonest means. 
 
 When Marlborough, returning, as usual, from 
 the Hague, landed at Greenwich on the anniversary 
 of Queen Elizabeth's accession, the 17th of Novem- 
 ber, there were popular demonstrations in London 
 against the Pope and the Pretender. Although 
 Marlborough wisely avoided them, and the Govern- 
 m2nt treated the demonstrators W'ith foolish severity, 
 the Whigs were not discouraged, but resolved to 
 find an opportunity for turning the Ministry out. 
 In the House of Commons the Tory majority was 
 too strong for them, and they therefore directed 
 their attention to the House of Lords, which had not 
 then lost its control over executive affairs. The 
 balance of power among the Peers was held at that 
 time by Nottingham, who resented his exclusion 
 from office, and was willing to coalesce with the 
 Whigs, if they would help him in enforcing upon 
 Dissenters a regular, and not merely an occasional, 
 conformity to the Established Church. The igno- 
 minious bargain was struck, and the aid of Marl- 
 I 2
 
 n6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 borough was secured to protest against Spain, with 
 her West Indian possessions, being left to the House 
 of Bourbon. The Elector of Hanover, who had an 
 envoy in London, Baron Bothmar, allowed it to be 
 known that he, who after his mother was heir to the 
 British crown, shared the Duke of Marlborough's 
 views. On the other hand the Queen, as became a 
 woman, was sincerely anxious to stop the further 
 effusion of blood. When Parliament met on the 
 7th of December, the Speech from the Throne was 
 earnestly pacific. Nottingham met it with an 
 amendment which, immediately and directly, raised 
 the question of Spain and the Bourbons. He was 
 supported by all the Whigs, including Bishop 
 Burnet, except the Duke of Shrewsbury, who went 
 over to the Tories. Marlborough spoke with dig- 
 nity and power, "in the presence of Her Majesty, 
 of this illustrious assembly, and of that Supreme 
 Being, who is infinitely above all the powers upon 
 earth." His direct reference to the Queen is 
 historically interesting, because Anne was the last 
 Sovereign who attended debates in the House of 
 Lords, as she was the last to exercise the legislative 
 veto, and to preside over meetings of the Cabinet. 
 When Marlborough denounced the peace as danger- 
 ous to the political balance of Europe, the effect must 
 have been profound, and Nottingham's amendment 
 was carried by 62 Contents against 54 Not Contents.
 
 POLITICS T17 
 
 In the House of Commons the same evening the 
 Ministerial majority exceeded a hundred. Now- 
 a-days, such a conflict between the Houses would 
 injure no one except the Lords themselves; but 
 at the beginning- of the eighteenth century the con- 
 stitutional position was very different. The House 
 of Commons did not really represent the people ; and 
 although the Commons could stop a war by refus- 
 ing supplies, they could hardly treat the Lords with 
 indifference. Too many of them owed their seats 
 to "noble " patrons. 
 
 Where the two Houses did agree, their unanimity 
 was disastrous. Nottingham at once exacted the 
 price for his vote against the peace, reintroducing 
 his Occasional Conformity Bill, which he had never 
 yet been able to pass. It was carried through the 
 House of Lords with the help of unworthy Whigs, 
 such as Wharton the blasphemer, and welcomed 
 with enthusiasm by the Tory majority in the House 
 of Commons. This odious statute provided that 
 any officer of the army or navy, any Minister of 
 State, any Mayor, Alderman, or Councillor, and 
 any Magistrate, who attended a chapel or religious 
 meeting of Dissenters, should be deprived of his 
 post, and fined forty pounds. The only possible 
 excuse or apology for so grotesque a form of per- 
 secution is, that the law which it superseded, was 
 incapable of serious defence. Ever since the
 
 ii8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Restoration, it had been necessary for all the per- 
 sons described by the Act to quaUfy themselves by 
 taking the sacrament in the Church of England, and 
 the "Occasional Conformity" thus prescribed by 
 law was, not without reason, regarded as scandal- 
 ous. But to substitute an injustice for a scandal 
 is not an improvement, and the political folly of 
 this legislation was enhanced by the fact that, while 
 many Churchmen were Jacobites, the Nonconform- 
 ists were, every one of them, loyal to the Act of 
 Settlement. The moral principle of the Occasional 
 Conformity Act, in which the dismal Nottingham 
 sincerely believed, must be judged in the light of 
 St. John's enmity to the Christian religion, though 
 his true sentiments had not then been fully avowed. 
 Although St. John was destitute of political 
 honesty, and of moral courage, there is a daredevil 
 recklessness in his brief official career, which com- 
 pels a sort of admiration. That such a man as he 
 was should have conceived, and executed, in con- 
 junction with Oxford, the idea of dismissing 
 Marlborough from the public service, reminds one 
 of the two private soldiers who, in the terse lan- 
 guage of Tacitus, undertook the task of transferring 
 the Roman Empire, and transferred it. They 
 struck at Marlborough, these little men, in his most 
 vulnerable part, his rapacious avarice.. But even 
 so their case was not a good one. A Tory Com-
 
 POLITICS IT9 
 
 mission, appointed by themselves, reported that 
 Marlborough during his campaigns had received 
 large sums of money from a wealthy Jew, Sir 
 Solomon Medina, and from other contractors for 
 supplies. Marlborough admitted the fact, alleging 
 that he had followed the example of previous com- 
 manders, and that he had employed the money in 
 obtaining information of the enemy's designs. 
 There can be no doubt that, if the standard of 
 public morality which then prevailed be taken as 
 a standard, this particular charge against Marl- 
 borough breaks down. That a general in the field 
 should make money by his position, and should 
 even, like Marlborough, realize a considerable for- 
 tune by his military command, is now impossible, 
 almost unthinkable. But the historian has no right, 
 if he passes ethical judgments at all, to incorporate 
 the ideas of his own age with that of which he is 
 writing, and the best proof that Marlborough's 
 acceptance of these perquisites from Sir Solomon 
 Medina implied no special depravity may be found 
 in the fact that similar presents were received 
 without a qualm by his successor the Duke of 
 Ormond, who was as far above him in purity of 
 character, as he was unequal to him in renown. 
 This ostentatious crusade against the illustrious 
 soldier was a fruit of the narrowest partisanship. 
 It was peculiarly mean and low, because it had
 
 I20 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 been carefully kept for the time when the services 
 of the Captain General would be no longer required. 
 Just as a famous and eloquent Professor of Medicine 
 was said to be a very good doctor, if you had 
 nothing the matter with you, because he amused 
 you with anecdotes, and did you no harm, so the 
 Duke of Ormond commanded the Queen's forces 
 with great success and dignity in time of profound 
 peace, when the power of France had been shattered 
 for more than a generation at Blenheim, at Ramil- 
 lies, at Oudenarde, and at the terrible battle of 
 Malplaquet. Even in the character of Swift, then 
 the unscrupulous tool of Oxford and Bolingbroke, 
 there are few such sinister traits as the tone in which 
 he writes of Marlborough. In his Journal to Stella, 
 the most intimate and the tenderest record of his 
 thoughts, for the 30th of December, 171 1, he tells 
 his "dears," Esther Johnson and her companion, 
 Mrs. Dingley, that "the Duke of Marlborough was 
 at court to-day, and nobody hardly (sic) took notice 
 of him." Who cares now what the courtiers of 
 Queen Anne, or even Swift himself, thought of Marl- 
 borough ? Morally, they were, most of them, quite 
 as bad as he was. His genius has long outsoared 
 the shadow of their night, and remains the most 
 splendid luminary in the martial firmament of Eng- 
 land. The day after Swift's entry in his journal 
 Queen Anne herself, inspired by the evil genius of
 
 POLITICS 121 
 
 St. John, directed that Marlborough should be 
 "dismissed from all his employment," not as a 
 result of his conviction, but as a preliminary to his 
 trial. This was Jedburgh justice with a vengeance. 
 But Marlborough, whose public career was thus 
 suddenly brought to a premature close, is too great 
 and too bad a man for pity. To condole with him 
 is to insult him. He fell by ignoble hands, the 
 victim of a stupid woman and a knavish intriguer, 
 after he had placed the enemies of England under 
 his feet, and established the Protestant Succession 
 upon an impregnable rock. He retired to enjoy 
 wealth beyond the dreams of a miser, with the con- 
 sciousness that he had preserved his country and his 
 faith from ruin, in the company of a wife whom he 
 passionately adored. Although the Duchess had 
 the sort of temper which would provoke a saint, and 
 did destroy the doting fondness of the Queen, she 
 never ruffled the imperturbable serenity, or dimin- 
 ished the constant love, of her celebrated, her almost 
 too celebrated, husband. 
 
 Simultaneously with Marlborough's disgrace, as 
 the courtiers called it, there appeared in the Gazette 
 the names of twelve new Peers. This bold stroke, 
 also the work of St. John, has been often discussed 
 by constitutional writers as if it were in some mys- 
 terious way unconstitutional. No one thought it so 
 at the time. No one who understands the Consti-
 
 122 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 tution would call it so now. That Queen Anne was 
 badly advised in making so sudden and decisive a 
 use of her prerogative, is an arguable proposition, 
 or at worst, a defensible paradox. The existence of 
 the prerogative itself, which has never fallen into 
 disuse, was at the root of the kingly commonwealth 
 of England. The fountain of honour has always 
 contained a pipe which may be turned upon the 
 House of Lords. Lord Oxford's Ministry, in which 
 St. John was the leading spirit, desired to conclude 
 peace with France. Their policy, which in prin- 
 ciple, if not in method, was sound, had the approval 
 of a large majority in the House of Commons. To 
 bring the two branches of the Legislature into 
 harmony, by lawful means, for a judicious purpose, 
 is a transaction which may be censured by the 
 pedant in his closet, but will receive a ready con- 
 donation from all who understand public affairs. 
 With a prudence characteristic of Oxford, though 
 not of St. John, Ministers began their efforts with 
 the Peerage itself. They called up in their fathers' 
 baronies, as the saying is, the sons of two earls. 
 Two other eldest sons of Peers received baronies of 
 their own, and an Irish Peer became a Peer of Great 
 Britain. The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 
 Sir Thomas Trevor, and a couple of baronets, left 
 room for only three untitled commoners, who be- 
 came respectively, without changing their names,
 
 POLITICS 123 
 
 Lord Foley, Lord Bathurst, and Lord Masham. 
 Masham was the husband of the Queen's favourite, 
 and he was nothing more. Perhaps he reminded 
 her Majesty of the late Prince George. Some 
 apprehension seems to have been felt lest Lady 
 Masham, once Abigail Hill, should be thought to 
 lower the dignity of a Peeress, by continuing to dress 
 the Queen, for which exalted purpose she sometimes 
 lay on the floor. But Lady Masham was always 
 willing to make herself useful, and the dignity of a 
 Peeress has survived more serious, if not more 
 ludicrous, shocks. Lord Stanhope has recorded the 
 wholesome answer of a country gentleman, to whom 
 one of these things was offered. "No," said he, 
 "this looks like serving a turn. Peers used to be 
 made for services which they have done, but I 
 should be made for services that I am to do." One 
 of these services was very soon required. On the 
 2nd of January, 17 12, the Twelve took the oaths 
 required by law, and were sarcastically asked by 
 Lord Wharton, in one of the few really good Par- 
 liamentary jokes, whether they would vote by their 
 foreman. They had to vote that very day. The 
 Queen desired the Lords by message to adjourn till 
 the 14th of January, when the Commons were to 
 meet. This message might plausibly be called 
 unconstitutional, the right of adjournment being a 
 privilege of each House itself. The motion of the
 
 124 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Government was, however, carried by a majority of 
 thirteen, with the aid of the Twelve, against the 
 opposition of the Whigs. 
 
 When both Houses met on the 14th of January, 
 Prince Eugene had arrived in London, and the 
 Plenipotentiaries had met at Utrecht to arrange the 
 preliminaries of European peace. Eugene could do 
 nothing for Marlborough, to whom he was always 
 consistently devoted, and the Tories attacked him 
 with calumnious insinuations, as engaged in a plot 
 against the Queen, because he was, like his Royal 
 master, the Emperor Charles the Sixth, unfavour- 
 able to the French terms. Lord Oxford had the bad 
 taste to describe him in his presence, as the first 
 Captain in Europe. "If I am so," said the chival- 
 rous Prince, "it is because you have removed my 
 superior." The triumphant Tories were carrying 
 everything before them, and Eugene retired to the 
 Hague without the smallest measure of success. 
 The Tory desire for revenge took the ephemeral 
 shape of a zeal for purity, and found a victim in 
 Robert Walpole. The Commissioners of Public 
 Accounts had formally charged Walpole, whose 
 sense of public honour was never nice, though his 
 sense of public duty was always high, with making 
 illicit gains from Scottish contracts for forage, 
 while he held the office of Secretary at War in the 
 Administration of Godolphin. Walpole was not
 
 POLITICS 125 
 
 distinguished for personal greed. He was lavish in 
 his expenditure, legitimate or otherwise, and he died, 
 after an unexampled period of office, a compara- 
 tively poor man. On this occasion he had gratified 
 a friend at the cost of the country, which would now- 
 a-days be most justly regarded as an unpardonable 
 offence. But in 17 12 such vicarious generosity was 
 regarded as venial, if not laudable, and the Tory 
 House of Commons was animated by party rancour, 
 not by public virtue, when it censured him, expelled 
 him, and committed him to the Tower. His con- 
 stituency, the borough of King's Lynn, at once re- 
 elected him, and he issued from his easy confinement 
 a spirited defence, which completely established his 
 honour with his contemporaries, if it cannot alto- 
 gether vindicate with posterity the whiteness of his 
 soul. "I hope," wrote Swift to Stella on the 17th 
 of January, 17 12, "I hope Walpole will be sent to 
 the Tower, and expelled the House." Swift's 
 amiable desire was gratified. But in later years, 
 when Swift was eating out his heart with mordant 
 bitterness on Irish soil, and giving to himself even 
 more pain than he gave to others, he must often 
 have cursed not only, as we know he did, the 
 day of his birth, but the day when he made an 
 enemy of the mighty Minister whom his fiery darts 
 were powerless to reach. With Walpole was ex- 
 pelled the Duke of Marlborough's secretary, Adam
 
 126 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Cardonnel, Member for Southampton. Lord Town- 
 shend, who had negotiated the Barrier Treaty, was 
 declared an enemy to the Queen and liingdom. 
 Marlborough himself, in a published reply to his 
 accusers, said with dignity, and what is more, with 
 truth, "The Commissioners may have observed very 
 rightly that, by the strictest inquiry they could 
 make, they cannot find that any English general 
 ever received this perquisite. But I presume to say 
 the reason is that there was never any other English 
 general, besides myself, who was Commander-in- 
 Chief in the Low Countries." Marlborough was 
 always plausible, and relied much upon the secrecy 
 in which his most scandalous transactions were 
 buried. Justly and widely suspected as he was, his 
 worst villainies were not unearthed until he had 
 passed beyond the reach of all human tribunals, 
 except the court of the historian. 
 
 The Parliament of 1710 was chiefly concerned 
 in asserting and establishing the supremacy of 
 Episcopalian Protestantism in general, and of the 
 English Church in particular. The Occasional 
 Conformity Act, an eternal discredit to the Whigs 
 who voted for it in the House of Lords, disqualified 
 all honest Dissenters for political and municipal 
 office. Roman Catholics were of course excluded 
 from Parliament by the Test Act, and Anglo- 
 Catholics had not been heard of. Scottish Presby-
 
 POLITICS 127 
 
 terians could not be prevented from sitting in a 
 Legislature not merely English, but British, and to 
 interfere directly with the Presbyterian Church of 
 Scotland would have been to destroy the Union. 
 St. John had no religion of his own, and was in- 
 capable of understanding what other people meant 
 by the term. He took his idea of a parson from 
 Swift, and supported High Churchmen, such as 
 Atterbury, because they were Jacobites, or political 
 allies. Scottish Episcopalians were under the 
 peculiar protection of the Ministry, and that they 
 needed the secular arm even so patriotic an historian 
 of his own country as John Hill Burton does not 
 deny. A clerk in holy orders, a minister of the 
 Established Church of Ireland, one Greenshields, 
 settled in Edinburgh, and read to his voluntary 
 congregation the English Liturgy, as he had a 
 perfect right to do. That beautiful service had 
 seldom been heard by the Presbyterians of Scotland 
 since Laud foolishly tried to force it upon them, and 
 the Presbytery of Edinburgh, to whom religious 
 toleration meant tampering with the accursed thing, 
 forbade Greenshields, as an unqualified intruder, to 
 read or preach within the bounds. When he dis- 
 regarded their prohibition, they brought him before 
 the magistrates, who sent him, like Paul and Silas, 
 to gaol. This truly monstrous sentence, alike 
 illegal and unchristian, was upheld by the Court of
 
 128 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Session, the supreme embodiment of justice in Scot- 
 land. A Scottish House of Lords, to whom a 
 "remeid of law," in English an appeal, would have 
 lain, no longer existed, having been destroyed by 
 the Act of Union. The British House of Lords, 
 containing bishops, then an abomination to the 
 Scottish mind, having ostensibly inherited the 
 powers of the Scottish Peers, reversed the judgment 
 pronounced at Edinburgh. The devil was thus let 
 loose, and Episcopal clergymen in Scotland were 
 rabbled by the mob. Parliament naturally and 
 properly passed an Act for their protection at the 
 hands of the sheriffs, aided by the secular forces 
 of the Crown. But unfortunately, through sheer 
 ignorance, or perhaps by way of wanton insult, the 
 Presbyterian ministers were directed by this statute 
 to pray in express words for Queen Anne and the 
 Electress Sophia. There could hardly be a better 
 example of the provincial arrogance and stupidity 
 with which Englishmen are sometimes charged. 
 The Presbyterians were as much attached as any 
 Church of England man could be to the Protestant 
 Succession, and they would naturally have prayed 
 for it, if they had been left to themselves. But that 
 Parliament should prescribe their prayers was in 
 their eyes a profane aggression of the secular power 
 upon sacred things, far more important than any 
 title to any throne on earth. The Act became even
 
 POLITICS 129 
 
 more obnoxious than it otherwise would have been, 
 because it was accompanied by another statute, 
 which revived the rights of private patrons, who 
 had not commuted them under the Act of 1690, to 
 appoint parochial ministers without the consent of 
 the local presbytery, known as an "harmonious 
 call." And as if this were not enough to disgust the 
 people of Scotland with that Treaty of Union which 
 it should have been the business of Parliament by 
 every available method to commend, the House of 
 Lords had unconstitutionally, if not illegalkv, 
 refused to admit the Duke of Hamilton after he had 
 been created Duke of Brandon in the Peerage of 
 Great Britain, alleging forsooth, in deiiance of 
 recognized and undoubted Prerogative, that the 
 Crown could not confer British Peerages upon 
 Scottish Peers. If the Government of Oxford and 
 St. John wished to make Scotland disloyal, they 
 certainly went the right way to work. 
 
 Through his Plenipotentiaries at Utrecht the 
 French King made this year proposals, probably not 
 meant to be final, which excited alarm at the Hague, 
 and indignation in England. Lille and Tournay 
 were to be given him in return for the demolition 
 of his fortress at Dunkirk. He wanted his own 
 barrier in the Netherlands, a very different barrier 
 from Lord Townshend's. Even the Queen's title, 
 as good as his ov/n, except in the eyes of unpopular
 
 I30 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and discredited Jacobites, tie would not condescend 
 to acknowledge, until peace, on his own terms, had 
 been finally concluded. The Dutch Ministers, with 
 timely wisdom and judicious foresight, caused these 
 arrogant demands to be published in their Gazette, 
 and they were thus speedily known in England, 
 where the Tory, semi-Jacobite Cabinet would will- 
 ingly have concealed them. The wrath of the 
 Whigs at the news was shared by many patriotic 
 Tories, and notwithstanding the new Peers, Charles 
 Montagu, Earl of Halifax, carried unanimously on 
 the 1 2th of February, a hostile motion in the House 
 of Lords, which Lord Oxford, the most prudent of 
 men, durst not oppose. Misfortune fell at the same 
 time, and fell heavily, upon the House of Bourbon. 
 The very day on which Halifax carried his Resolu- 
 tion the Dauphiness, Marie of Savoy, Duchess of 
 Burgundy, died of measles, and within a fortnight 
 she was followed to the grave by her husband, the 
 heir to the throne of France. Their eldest son 
 expired on the 8th of March, and the succession 
 devolved upon the King's great-grandson, a sickly, 
 unwholesome child, afterwards infamous as Louis 
 the Fifteenth, next to whom by French law came 
 Philip the Fifth, King of Spain. England renewed 
 preparations for war. She had chosen, or her 
 Ministers had chosen for her, to discard the most 
 universally victorious of all her soldiers, and in
 
 POLITICS 131 
 
 April they made themselves the laughing-stock of 
 Europe by appointing the Duke of Ormond to be 
 General in Flanders, and to join Prince Eugene at 
 Tournay. Eugene, a great soldier, and as true to 
 Marlborough as the dial to the sun, wished to 
 resume the great project of his former colleague, to 
 fight Marshal Villars, and to invade the heart of 
 France. But Louis the Fourteenth, though he could 
 afford to despise such a commander as Ormond, 
 knew well the capacity of Eugene, was conscious of 
 the evil plight to which, since 1704, his own army 
 had been reduced, and perceived the necessity of 
 making more acceptable overtures. De Torcy was 
 directed to inform St. John that Philip should never 
 become King of France, unless he expressly re- 
 nounced, both for himself and for his descendants, 
 the crown of Spain. The King of Portugal was 
 suggested as Spanish monarch in Philip's room, 
 for no one anticipated that the baby Louis would 
 survive to make the French Revolution salutary and 
 inevitable. St. John replied that this would not 
 do, and that Philip's renunciation of either the 
 French or the Spanish Crown, instead of being left 
 for the future, as a likely cause of another war, must 
 be put at once into the Treaty of Pease. Louis 
 agreed to this proposal, with some unimportant 
 reservations, and on the loth of May Ormond was 
 
 directed from London to suspend hostilities till the 
 K 2
 
 132 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 receipt of turtlier orders. With characteristic 
 treachery, St. Joiin concealed the issue of these in- 
 structions from tile Uutcli Government, the faitiiful 
 ally of this country, and even the loyal, gallant, 
 honourable Eugene was left to find them out for 
 himself. Eugene, however, was not easily^ foiled, 
 and he insisted so warmly upon the duty of investing 
 Le yuesnoy, that Ormond could not decently refuse 
 his co-operation. In the British Parliament the 
 Whigs, small in number as they were, at least in 
 the House of Commons, warmly protested against 
 these transactions, and Ministers were reduced to the 
 subterfuge of maintaining that a siege might be 
 lawful, though a battle was not. In the House of 
 Lords Marlborough poured just contempt upon 
 St. John's nefarious design, and Oxford only 
 escaped defeat by telling the deliberate falsehood 
 that the Allies were satisfied with their own be- 
 trayal. " We got a great victory last Wednesday," 
 Swift wrote to Stella on the 31st of May, 1712, "we 
 got a great victory last W^ednesday in the House 
 of Lords by a majority, 1 think, of twenty-eight 
 (Contents 40, Not Contents 68), and the Whigs had 
 desired their friends to bespeak places to see Lord 
 Treasurer (the Earl of Oxford) carried to the 
 Tower." The second part of the sentence is not of 
 course seriously meant. But the victory was hardly 
 to be called a moral one ; and if the Tower were the
 
 POLITICS 133 
 
 proper receptacle for traitors, it would have been 
 no unsuitable lodging for Swift's patrons. 
 
 Having the support of both Houses, the Queen's 
 Ministers pursued their isolated policy, in itself a 
 breach of good faith, and on the 6th of June con- 
 cluded for two months a separate armistice with 
 France in the Netherlands. The Duke of Ormond, 
 who loved peace, and ensued it, willingly obeyed 
 his instructions, so far as he could. But Prince 
 Eugene, accustomed to co-operate with a com- 
 mander of very different calibre from Ormond's, 
 induced the auxiliary forces to leave the British 
 standard, and it was only with twelve thousand 
 men, who under Marlborough would have gone 
 anywhere, and done anything, that Ormond fell 
 back ingloriously upon Dunkirk. 
 
 For his share in this despicable business, St. John 
 was raised to the Peerage, and became Viscount 
 Bolingbroke. Lord Morley, in his brilliant sketch 
 of Walpole's character and career, perhaps the best 
 thing of the kind in the English language, con- 
 demns St. John as a trifler for thus leaving the real 
 seat of power for the glittering bribe of a title. 
 The whole course of Henry St. John's long and 
 chequered career shows that he was destitute of true 
 courage, and that he lacked all the elements of real 
 greatness. But, in estimating the comparative im- 
 portance of the two Houses, we must not forget
 
 134 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the tremendous revolution effected by the Reform 
 Act of 1832, which enfranchised the middle classes, 
 and abolished the pocket boroughs. Even in 
 17 1 2, the House of Commons possessed the power 
 of the purse, and the practical control of the Execu- 
 tive Government which that power implies. On 
 the other hand, the collective responsibility of the 
 Cabinet was still in the making, a majority in the 
 Lords was considered essential to a minister, and 
 many members of Parliament were returned by 
 Peers. St. John, however, behaved with his usual 
 servility. In abject letters to the Queen he en- 
 treated that the Earldom of Bolingbroke, which had 
 belonged to his family, might be revived in his 
 favour. If he had been on good terms with the 
 Lord Treasurer, it is possible that this request 
 might have been granted. As he had chosen, 
 against the sagacious advice of Swift, to quarrel 
 with Lord Oxford, who had the ear of Lady 
 Masham, and therefore of the Queen, it was re- 
 fused, and he had to be content, or as content as he 
 ever could be, with a mere Viscounty. Oxford 
 himself received the Order of the Garter, and thus 
 completely asserted his supremacy in the Cabinet, 
 though to call him Prime Minister would be a 
 technical anachronism. 
 
 Bolingbroke at once went to Paris, with the 
 double object of courting IMadame de Parab^re, an
 
 POLITICS 135 
 
 easy prey, and of obtaining a general armistice, not 
 confined to the Netherlands, for four months, in 
 which he also succeeded. He did a third thing, 
 by far the worst of the three. He abandoned to the 
 vengeance of King Philip those inhabitants of 
 Catalonia, who, relying on British honour, had 
 fought on Britain's side. In his Public Spirit of 
 the Whigs, as unscrupulous a piece of sophistry 
 as ever appeared, Swift, replying to Steele, vainly 
 attempts an apology for this crime. Where Swift 
 failed, no one else is likely to succeed, and Boling- 
 broke's treatment of the Catalans lies under the 
 final ban of all impartial historians. The negotia- 
 tions for peace had really been conducted by a much 
 more useful person than Bolingbroke, Matthew 
 Prior. A treaty, however, could not be ratified by 
 a man of Prior's plebeian rank ; and the Duke of 
 Hamilton was appointed Ambassador for that pur- 
 pose, with secret instructions to bring over the 
 Pretender. All readers of Thackeray's Esmond 
 will remember what became of Hamilton. He was 
 first insulted, and then challenged, by Lord Mohun. 
 Both the duellists were killed in the encounter, and 
 the Duke of Shrewsbury, a magnificent, if not very 
 effective personage, upon whom the Jacobites could 
 not rely, was sent to Paris as Hamilton's successor. 
 Throughout July Prince Eugene, as commander of 
 the Imperial forces, endeavoured to carry on the
 
 136 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 war with the aid of the Dutch. But there were no 
 British soldiers, and there was no Duke of Marl- 
 borough. Eugene had to look helplessly on, while 
 Marshal Villars defeated a Dutch force under Lord 
 Albemarle at Denain on the 24th of July ; and from 
 that day the Dutch Republic acceded to the cause 
 of peace. Even Bouchain, which had been taken 
 by Marlborough, was in his absence recovered by 
 Villars. Bolingbroke was at this time in strict 
 secrecy using Gaultier as an instrument, and pro- 
 posing that the Pretender should be restored to the 
 British throne, on the next demise of the Crown. 
 One reason made his success impossible. James 
 was a strictly honourable and a sincerely religious 
 man, devoid of all shining talents, but as honest as 
 the day, and therefore as unlike Bolingbroke as 
 might be. Nothing would induce him even to con- 
 template the possibility of changing his faith, and 
 after the disastrous reign of his father the English 
 people, though thousands of them believed in divine 
 right, would not endure the notion of a Catholic 
 Sovereign. The Electress Sophia, a German old 
 enough to be the Queen's mother, was a philo- 
 sopher, and a disciple of Leibniz, believing in 
 revealed religion no more than Bolingbroke him- 
 self. But she had one supreme merit. She was not 
 a "Papist," and her son, as well as her grandson, 
 had fought under Marlborough. The English
 
 POLITICS 137 
 
 people cared no more for the House of Hanover 
 than the House of Hanover cared for them. They 
 were resolved at all costs to uphold the Protestant 
 Succession. 
 
 In September 17 12 died Sidney, Earl of Godol- 
 phin, the ablest and most successful financier whom 
 England had known. Godolphin, who began his 
 career under Charles the Second, was a man prone 
 to cynicism, despising most people, and believing, 
 not without reason, that they had their price. But 
 his own hands were clean, he died poor, and he 
 watched the expenditure of public funds with a 
 jealous, honourable care. While he never suffered 
 money to be wasted on trifles, and had an eye for 
 detail which a modern Secretary to the Treasury 
 might envy, he grudged no payment required for 
 success in the French war, so that Marlborough was 
 indebted to him for the perfection of his transport 
 and supplies. He was in truth the one English 
 friend, except Cadogan, that Marlborough had, 
 and it was in one of the Duke's houses that he died. 
 His death determined Marlborough to leave Eng- 
 land, which he had raised to the highest pitch of 
 military renown, and where all parties distrusted, as 
 most persons disliked, him. He had always been 
 strangely sensitive to the attacks of anonymous 
 writers, which were becoming more frequent every 
 day. The world was all before him, where to
 
 138 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 choose, for his wealth was enormous, and his 
 Duchess would have accompanied him anywhere. 
 With her he sailed to Ostend in November 1712, 
 and after a visit to the Principality of Mindelheim, 
 once his own, fixed his residence at Antwerp early 
 in 1713. 
 
 The prospects of peace, improved, or at all events 
 not diminished, by Marlborough's retirement from 
 public affairs, were much assisted by the pen of 
 Arbuthnot, who introduced John Bull, in his lively 
 satires, as the typical name of an Englishman. 
 Although the power and influence of Grub Street, 
 or, in other words, of the political pamphlet and 
 news-sheet, were higher in the reign of Queen Anne 
 than they have ever been, before or since, the Parlia- 
 ment of 1 7 10 was hostile to the Press as an organ 
 of opinion. The Stamp Act of 1712, opposed by 
 authors so celebrated for their genius, and so diverse 
 in their views, as Swift, Addison, and Defoe, re- 
 tained its bad eminence on the Statute Book for 
 nearly a century and a half. It imposed upon all 
 newspapers and pamphlets the duty of a half-penny 
 for each half-sheet. This tax upon knowledge, or 
 upon ideas, almost ruined a number of journalists, 
 and their fate was wittily described in the Spectator 
 as "the fall of the leaf." It weighed of course most 
 heavily upon the humblest scribblers, and could not 
 seriously affect such a journal as the Spectator, or 
 
 I
 
 POLITICS 139 
 
 such a pamphleteer as Dr. Arbuthnot. John 
 Arbuthnot, physician in ordinary to the Queen, was 
 an ardent Tory, a polished, elegant writer, the most 
 delightful of companions, and the most amiable of 
 men. He was not, like Swift, a statesman, and he 
 was content to interpret the opinions which found 
 most favour with the Court. Anne being in 17 12 
 enthusiastically pacific, her doctor was easily in- 
 duced to publish a satire on the war, which he called 
 Law is a Bottomless Pitt. The secondary title, ex- 
 plaining the scope and purpose of the tract, is, 
 "Exemplified in the case of the Lord Strutt, John 
 Bull, Nicholas Frog, and Lewis Baboon, who spent 
 all they had in a Law Suit." Arbuthnot was incap- 
 able of distinguishing between the Europe of 1712 
 and the Europe of 1704, nor was it any part of his 
 design to appreciate the splendid services of Marl- 
 borough. On the main question, whether peace on 
 honourable terms should be made when he wrote, 
 few would now dispute either his arguments or his 
 inference. Marlborough had done, and more than 
 done, his work. All possible danger from France 
 had long passed away, and a continuance of the 
 armed struggle was useless slaughter. Boling- 
 broke, upon whom, as Secretary of State, the main 
 responsibility for the negotiations fell, was a traitor 
 to the Act of Settlement, if not to his Royal mis- 
 tress, and had been in treasonable correspondence,
 
 I40 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 through Gauhier, with the Pretender. But, as 
 James remained obstinately Catholic, and as 
 Catholicism was unpopular in Great Britain, Boling- 
 broke, to whom all religions were alike, gave him 
 up in public, and even pressed, with a vehemence 
 which deceived many of his countrymen, for the 
 immediate departure of the "Chevalier de St. 
 George " from France. James hesitated to comply 
 with a demand ill suited to the dignity of his claims, 
 and Louis, who only persecuted Protestants, shrank 
 from expelling him. At last, on the 17th of 
 February, 17 13, Bolingbroke directed Shrewsbury 
 to call for an immediate reply from the French 
 Government, and three days afterwards the 
 Chevalier left Chalons for Bar in Lorraine. When 
 this step had been taken, the business proceeded 
 more rapidly, and on the 31st of March, 1713, the 
 Treaty of LUrecht was signed. 
 
 This famous instrument, which gave Great 
 Britain peace for a generation, was in no way due 
 to the statesmen who actually signed it. Oxford 
 and Bolingbroke were responsible for deceiving 
 the Dutch, and betraying the Catalans. Gibraltar, 
 Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Hudson's Bay, 
 the substantial fruits of the great war, were due to 
 the financial capacity of Godolphin, who was dead, 
 and to the military genius of Marlborough, who was 
 in exile. The Tories had opposed the war, and were
 
 POLITICS 141 
 
 not entitled to claim any credit for the peace. The 
 banishment of the Pretender, and the security of the 
 Protestant Succession, were no objects of desire 
 with Bolingbroke, who, if he could, would have 
 repealed the Act of Settlement, and enthroned 
 James the Third. He may be allowed to claim, or 
 to share with Oxford, the glory of the Asiento, by 
 which Britain received the exclusive privilege of 
 supplying the Spanish possessions in America 
 with negro slaves. Philip's renunciation of the 
 French Crown, declared by French lawyers, and by 
 the Duke of Saint-Simon, to be invalid in law, 
 would almost certainly have been found worthless 
 in fact, if Louis the Fifteenth had not falsified 
 general expectation by living to inherit his great- 
 grandfather's dominions. Little statesmanship was 
 required to gather the fruits of other men's victories, 
 and to extract from France what she had no power 
 to withhold. The diplomatic instrument itself was 
 complicated and confusing to ordinary minds. 
 "My Lord Oxford's peace," said Wharton pro- 
 fanely, "is like the peace of God ; it passes all under- 
 standing." Nevertheless the Treaty of Utrecht was 
 popular, and in making it the Ministers gave effect 
 to the will of the people. At the General Election 
 of 1 7 13 they received the approval of the nation, and 
 the Whigs seemed to have no chance of regaining 
 power. Two causes, however, were working silently
 
 142 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 in their favour. One was the staunch Catholicism 
 of James ; the other was the restless ambition of 
 Bolingbroke. A Catholic sovereign of Great 
 Britain was impossible, and the only alternative to 
 James the Third, unless the Electress survived the 
 Queen, was George the First. The House of Han- 
 over was essentially and inevitably Whig. Its title 
 to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland was 
 Parliamentary. Its enemies, believers in divine 
 right, were all Tories. Hanover had taken an active 
 part with the Empire against France in the War of 
 the Spanish Succession. It was Protestant to the 
 core, and commanded the support of all Whigs. 
 While the Whigs were united by adversity, the 
 Tories were divided by prosperity. Some were 
 Hanoverians, others were Jacobites. Tories who 
 would not willingly in set terms acknowledge any 
 one except James Stuart as their lawful sovereign, 
 were willing to recognize a King by Act of Parlia- 
 ment, as their legal ruler, to whom obedience might 
 without prejudice be rendered. Bolingbroke, even 
 after he despaired of inducing the Pretender to 
 abandon the Catholic faith, had his own game to 
 play. His nominal subordination to Oxford galled 
 him, and it was not a solitary grievance. With all 
 his accomplishments, he had a trivial mind, and he 
 was bitterly disappointed to be put off with a 
 viscounty when he expected an earldom. The Port-
 
 POLITICS 143 
 
 land manuscripts preserve the proofs of his chagrin, 
 which was inflamed by Anne's bestowal of the 
 Garter upon the Earl of Oxford. He who thinks 
 his place unlit for him, said the Marquess of Halifax, 
 will be unfit for his place. So it was with Boling- 
 broke in 17 13. His mind was not really given to 
 foreign affairs, not even to the Treaty of Utrecht. 
 His main purpose was to supersede Lord Oxford, 
 and to become Lord Treasurer himself. For the 
 White Staff, the symbol of power, or at least of 
 patronage, he would have bartered such prejudices 
 as remained to him, and such principles as he pos- 
 sessed. He would gladly have accepted it under 
 James. He would willingly have accepted it under 
 George. He was bent upon receiving it under 
 Anne. He cultivated an alliance with the Tory 
 Highfliers, and even affected to be a High Church- 
 man, believing that persecution of Dissenters would 
 be as popular with the nation as it would be con- 
 genial to the Queen. He was a disturbing element 
 in Oxford's cabinet, and in the Tory ranks. So far 
 as he had any settled convictions in politics, he was 
 against Constitutional monarchy, and favourable to 
 personal rule. Few Tories who were not also 
 Jacobites, and perhaps not all who were, would have 
 followed him in abandoning the restrictions placed 
 by the Revolution upon the Crown. Even the Treaty 
 of Utrecht contained unpalatable matter. Little was
 
 144 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 said or thought at the time about the fishing rights 
 reserved to France in Newfoundland, which have 
 since given rise to so much trouble. But there were 
 also questions of trade. 
 
 Besides the general peace, Bolingbroke had con- 
 cluded a commercial treaty with France, which 
 gave her the rights of the most favoured nation, 
 providing that no foreign imports should pay a 
 lower duty than the French. In 1713 this was 
 regarded, and with reason, as a long step towards 
 complete freedom of trade. But it was a direct 
 infringement of the Methuen Treaty with Portugal, 
 under which the duty on Portuguese wine must 
 be one-third less than was paid by the wine of 
 France. The Whigs took this point in the House 
 of Commons, and the manufacturers of woollens 
 were so much alarmed for the possible loss of their 
 business with Portugal, if the Methuen Treaty 
 were infringed, that the Bill adopting the conven- 
 tion was finally defeated on the i8th of June. Nor 
 was this the only Whig triumph. Both Houses 
 agreed to address the Queen in favour of removing 
 the Pretender from Lorraine, although she had in 
 fact no control over the Duke of Lorraine, or over 
 her own brother, and nothing happened in con- 
 sequence of these votes. 
 
 Bolingbroke's avowed policy of using his power 
 for the benefit of his friends was adopted in ecclesi-
 
 POLITICS 145 
 
 astical, as well as in secular, affairs. On the 23rd of 
 March, 17 13, the period for which the House of 
 Lords had suspended Sacheverell from preaching, 
 came to an end, and a Tory House of Commons 
 invited this noisy Jacobite to preach before them on 
 the anniversary of the Restoration. The Queen 
 was not unwilling to make him a bishop. But this 
 was felt to be too strong an approval of passive 
 obedience, and Sacheverell had to be content with 
 the Crown living of St. Andrew's, Holborn, which 
 gave him a large share of the notoriety he loved. 
 No one had a more open contempt for Sacheverell 
 than Jonathan Swift, who aspired to a! bishopric at 
 this time. Here, however, Anne put down her foot. 
 The man who had written the Tale of a Tub, 
 though he had prudently abstained from putting his 
 name to it, should not, while she lived, be a bishop 
 either in the Church of England or in the Church of 
 Ireland. It is impossible not to respect the scruples 
 of the Queen. The Tale of a Tub could not have 
 been written by a man who had any spiritual rever- 
 ence, and that Swift should himself have desired a 
 bishopric is not the least startling feature of his 
 enigmatic disposition. A middle course was found 
 by promoting Dr. Sterne to the Bishopric of 
 Dromore, and appointing Swift to be Dean of St. 
 Patrick's, on the 23rd of April, in Sterne's room. 
 Swift's powerful, irrepressible genius soon made
 
 146 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 him the greatest man in Ireland, though he derived 
 no happiness from the influence he wielded. He 
 had sold himself to Oxford and Bolingbroke. By 
 dint of always preaching Toryism he had un- 
 consciously become a Tory. But Swift was no 
 Jacobite. He was attached to his Protestant 
 Church as a political institution. Of ministerial 
 intrigues with St. Germains he knew nothing, and 
 it is to his honour that he was never entrusted with 
 the knowledge. Far different was the case of 
 Francis Atterbury, promoted at this time from the 
 Deanery of Christchurch to the Deanery of West- 
 minster and Bishopric of Rochester, then usually 
 combined. Atterbury's High Churchmanship 
 stopped short of Rome, from which it was divided 
 theologically by a thin, impalpable line, and prac- 
 tically by the Pope. But he would certainly have 
 had no objection to a Catholic Sovereign, and there 
 was not a more thorough-going Jacobite in the 
 Church of England than he. His removal from 
 Christchurch was a blessing to the College, which 
 was never at peace during the short period of his 
 headship, and which he would have reduced, if 
 more time had been given him, to the condition of 
 Trinity under Bentley. In the House of Lords, if 
 circumstances had not soon placed him on his own 
 defence, he would have agitated for repealing the 
 Act of Settlement with as much pugnacity, and as
 
 POLITICS 147 
 
 little information, as he displayed in arguing for 
 the absurd Letters of Phalaris. 
 
 Atterbury's appointment was a declaration of 
 open war against Whigs, Low Churchmen, Dis- 
 senters, and Hanoverians. Yet it produced 
 strangely little effect upon the country, when the 
 Parliament of 17 10 came under the Triennial Act 
 to be dissolved in the summer of 17 13. The peace 
 was so popular that a Government which contained 
 at least one ardent Jacobite received votes from 
 electors who burnt together in effigy the Devil, the 
 Pope, and the Pretender. The Whigs gained a 
 few seats, but not enough to disturb their opponents, 
 or to encourage themselves. The Tories were 
 resolved to make hay while the sun shone. On 
 the i8th of March, 17 14, they expelled Richard 
 Steele, Member for Stockbridge, a Whig essayist 
 inferior only to Addison, from the House of 
 Commons for publishing a pamphlet called the 
 Crisis in favour of the Hanoverian succession, 
 which happened to be the law of the land. That 
 succession was altered by death on the 28th of May. 
 The Electress Sophia once said that she would die 
 happy, if she could be described on her coffin as 
 Queen of England. Considering that her son was 
 older than Queen Anne, the Electress may be 
 thought immoderate in her ambition, near as she 
 came to fulfilling it. She died suddenly in her 
 
 L 2
 
 148 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 eighty-fourth year, partly, it is thought, from vexa- 
 tion, because Anne, who had no wish for the society 
 of her own heirs, declined to receive in England 
 Sophia's son the Elector, or her grandson the 
 Electoral Prince, who as Duke of Cambridge was 
 entitled to a writ of summons for the House of 
 Lords. Although the Elector had quarrelled with 
 Marlborough, who would not trust him with military 
 secrets in 1708, his Whig leanings were well known, 
 and the English Tories were pulling fast towards 
 the rapids. The nearer they came, the harder they 
 pulled. In the session of 17 14 they carried the 
 Schism Act, for which the much abused word 
 incredible seems the most appropriate epithet. By 
 this statute, which was never, as things turned out, 
 enforced. Englishmen were forbidden to act as 
 tutors or school-masters, except in noblemen's 
 families, without conforming to the Church of 
 England. A touch of burlesque is imparted to the 
 infamy of such a law by the ludicrous exception 
 already named, and by the fact that its most 
 strenuous champion was Henry St. John, Viscount 
 Bolingbroke, a nominal Deist, an actual sceptic, 
 scoffer, and rake. After this Act had been passed, 
 and before Parliament had been prorogued, the 
 Government offered a reward, hypocritical so far as 
 Bolingbroke was concerned, and not very sincere 
 on the part of Oxford, for the apprehension of
 
 POLITICS 149 
 
 James Stuart upon British soil. It was originally 
 five thousand pounds, but the House of Commons 
 increased it to a hundred thousand. There was no 
 real danger of a Stuart restoration, or the House of 
 Hanover would have been impossible. But at a 
 time when nobody trusted anybody else, when 
 public morality was on much the same level as 
 Thucydides has described in his account of the 
 troubles at Corcyra, effusive outbursts of loyalty to 
 the Act of Settlement were as common as they were 
 false. What really kept the mass of honest 
 Englishmen, not involved in political intrigues, 
 true to the Protestant Succession, was no statute, 
 and no Parliament; it was the memory of James the 
 Second's reign and the history of Mary Tudor's. 
 
 On the gth of July, 17 14, the Session drew to a 
 close. Within a few days the quarrel between 
 Oxford and Bolingbroke came to a head. The life 
 of one frail woman, prematurely old, and exhausted 
 by a long series of illnesses, stood between the 
 chiefs of the Tory Ministry and a cataclysm of 
 political ruin. Yet they could find no better occupa- 
 tion than to intrigue against each other. Boling- 
 broke was the more active plotter of the two, because 
 he had failed to get what he wanted, and was not 
 the head of the Government. He had good reason 
 to know that his plan of restoring James, after the 
 death of Anne, in which his friend Atterbury
 
 150 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 believed, would be frustrated by James's loyalty to 
 the Catholic faith. He cherished a hope, which 
 must have been faint, of making his peace with the 
 Elector, and meanwhile he was resolved to be the 
 First Minister of Anne. Oxford's incapacity helped 
 him, and so did the growing sottishness which made 
 the Lord Treasurer odious to the Queen. Even 
 Lady Ma'sham, to whom Bolingbroke paid assidu- 
 ous court in a political sense, had turned against 
 her kinsman, partlv because Oxford was out of 
 favour with her mistress, and partly, it is probable, 
 because he had failed to co-operate with her in some 
 scheme of making money at the public expense. 
 The best account of this miserable squabble is to 
 be found in a sombre and mournful letter, written 
 thirteen years after the event by Swift to Oxford's 
 son. Swift had scarcely been installed in his 
 Deanery of St. Patrick's when numerous letters 
 from England implored him to return, and to effect 
 a reconciliation. No one could appeal to the reason 
 better than Swift, so long as he retained his own. 
 But Oxford and Bolingbroke were beyond the reach 
 of argument. Oxford was in an almost chronic 
 state of alcoholic torpor, and Bolingbroke was 
 madly bent upon ousting his rival without delay. 
 "When I returned to England," wrote Swift on the 
 14th of June, 1737, "I found their quarrels and 
 coldness increased. I laboured to reconcile them
 
 POLITICS 151 
 
 as much as I was able. I contrived to bring them 
 to my Lord Masham's, at St. James's. My Lord 
 and Lady Masham left us together. I expostulated 
 with them both but could not find any good con- 
 sequences. I was to go to Windsor next day with 
 my Lord Treasurer : I pretended business that 
 prevented me, expecting they would come to some 
 agreement. But I followed them to Windsor, where 
 my Lord Bolingbroke told me that my scheme had 
 come to nothing. Things went on at the same rate : 
 they grew more estranged every day. My Lord 
 Treasurer found his credit daily declining. In May 
 1 7 14 I had my last meeting with them at my Lord 
 Masham's. He left us together, and therefore I 
 spoke very fully to them both ; and told them * I 
 would retire, for I found all was gone.' Lord 
 Bolingbroke whispered me, ' I was in the right.' 
 Your father said, ' All would do well.' " 
 
 Swift, who knew better, was powerless, and 
 retired to Berkshire, where he stayed, a strange 
 guest, with a clerical friend. It was on the 27th of 
 July, 17 14, that Bolingbroke achieved his momen- 
 tary triumph in the dismissal of Oxford, after a 
 stormy altercation in the Royal Closet, and a torrent 
 of undignified reproaches from the Queen. Who 
 was to be the new Lord Treasurer ? A more utterly 
 insignificant question never presented itself to the 
 mind of man. But to Bolingbroke it was the one
 
 152 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 thing in all the world that mattered. He did not 
 get the White Staff himself. The disputes which 
 led to Oxford's compulsory retirement had pro- 
 strated the Queen, and on the 30th of July she was 
 at death's door. Bolingbroke was no favourite of 
 hers. His irreligion and immorality were not to her 
 mind. With her dying hands she gave the staff to 
 the Duke of Shrewsbury, who was recommended by 
 the Cabinet, with the sulky acquiescence of Boling- 
 broke, and bade him use it for the good of her 
 people. Shrewsbury, though he played a double 
 part, like so many statesmen of his time, was an 
 active supporter of the Revolution, and of the 
 Exclusion Bill. Whatever he may have been in 
 1700, or in 1 7 15, when the Whigs had ousted him, 
 he was in 17 14 a staunch adherent to the Protestant 
 Succession, and to the House of Hanover. If the 
 Queen had lived, Bolingbroke might have sup- 
 planted Shrewsbury, as he supplanted Oxford, and 
 a Jacobite conspiracy might for a time, though not 
 for long, have succeeded. But the Queen's strength 
 was dwindling every hour. She had no wish to live. 
 "Sleep," said Dr. Arbuthnot, "was never more 
 welcome to a weary traveller than death was to her." 
 There is no truth in the legend that she showed 
 remorse for her treatment of her father, or of her 
 brother. "Death is the triumph of the physical," 
 and the appointment of Shrewsbury was Anne's last
 
 POLITICS 153 
 
 conscious act, though she survived till the morning 
 of the I St of August. 
 
 Meanwhile there had assembled at Kensington 
 Palace what would now be called a Cabinet. Anne 
 would naturally have been there. But her absence 
 on this occasion, though it portended a' change of 
 dynasty, was less notable than the presence of two 
 Whig Peers, the Dukes of Somerset and Argyll. 
 As they were not in office, they had not been sum- 
 moned. They were, however, Privy Councillors, 
 and they asserted their right to be present at a 
 Committee of the Privy Council. Shrewsbury made 
 them welcome. Bolingbroke did not venture to 
 keep them out. He was a victim of the moral 
 paralysis which habitually assailed him when action 
 was required. The Whigs were at least men, and 
 Argyll in particular was a strong man. They knew 
 their own minds, and made adequate preparations 
 against the danger of a Jacobite rising. When the 
 Queen died, five days after Oxford's removal, the 
 Government was really, though not formally, in 
 Whig hands. Whigs held command of the army 
 and of the navy. The ports were watched. A ship 
 was sent to Holland, where George the First could 
 embark for his new kingdom. Marlborough waited 
 at Ostend for a favourable wind, a Hanoverian by 
 inclination, but prepared for either event. When 
 he did come to England in support of King
 
 154 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 George, he was too late, and his services were not 
 required. The Whigs of those days were essentially 
 placemen, and their standard of public morality 
 would now be considered deplorably low. Boling- 
 broke himself was not more greedy of power and 
 patronage than they. But they were also men of 
 action, bold, resolute, determined; unlike the 
 Tories, except Atterbury, who was a bishop, and 
 alone. They understood business, diplomacy, and 
 war. Formal praise would be wasted upon states- 
 men whose interests coincided with their duty. 
 For the Whigs the Hanoverian dynasty signified a 
 long, an indefinite prospect of honour and emolu- 
 ment. They took the tide at the flood, and it led 
 them on to fortune. There was probably no one 
 whom Bolingbroke, the literary dreamer, hated or 
 despised as he despised and hated the illiterate 
 Walpole. But while Bolingbroke quoted Horace, 
 and wrapped himself in his own virtue, a threadbare 
 suit, Walpole, consolidating his position by all 
 means, good and bad alike, became the first states- 
 man in England, if not in Europe. England passed 
 under the domination of the Whigs with the final 
 breath that left the body of Queen Anne. 
 
 As George the First was still in Hanover, a list 
 of Regents had been drawn up before the actual 
 demise of the Crown. Besides seven officers of 
 State who were entitled to places in it, the Arch- 
 
 \
 
 POLITICS 155 
 
 bishop of Canterbury standing first, and tlie Lord 
 Chancellor second, it included eighteen noblemen, 
 five of whom were Tories. Marlborough and 
 Somers were conspicuous by their absence, prce- 
 fulgehant quia non visehantur. The Proclama- 
 tion which actually notified the death of Anne, 
 and the accession of George, was signed by 
 Bolingbroke, and several other Jacobites. When 
 it was read at Westminster, and in the City of 
 London, the loyal cheers were unbroken by a single 
 hiss. That sign of public feeling was reserved for 
 Oxford and Bolingbroke, who in their quarrel with 
 each other had ruined themselves. The Whigs 
 carried everything before them, though Ormond's 
 personal popularity ensured him a' good reception. 
 The sentiments of the people admitted of no doubt. 
 A Protestant sovereign and a tranquil reign were 
 the objects of their desire. The Act of Settlement 
 had the support of public opinion because it saved 
 England from the Pope and the Pretender. 
 
 The life of Anne resolves itself at the beginning 
 of her reign into the history of England, of Scot- 
 land, and of Europe. The history of Ireland, a 
 mere history of oppression, was illuminated in 
 subsequent years by the savage satire of the great 
 Dean, who withdrew at the death of the Queen to 
 Dublin, and there wreaked his vengeance upon 
 Whigs in particular, and the human race in general,
 
 156 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Throughout the mighty drama of the disputed 
 succession and the Spanish war Anne was a dumb 
 character, a lay figure on the stage. Of the four 
 English Queens she is by far the least significant. 
 Even Mary Tudor is redeemed from nonentity by 
 her policy of "thorough" in religious persecution. 
 Anne did her best, in circumstances of peculiar 
 embarrassment, to fulfil her obligations amidst the 
 selfish intriguers who surrounded her. But her 
 task was almost impossible. She laboured for the 
 peace which only came in the last year of her reign, 
 not because she was a prudent sovereign, but 
 because she was si. conscientious woman. She gave 
 lavishly to the Church of England. Otherwise she 
 was little more than a bone of contention between 
 ambitious statesmen and plotting favourites. Her 
 one political conviction was that the Whigs were 
 enemies of the Church. In that and some other 
 respects she was curiously like George the Third. 
 If she had been gifted with his cunning and his 
 strength of will, she would have made a push for 
 personal rule. She presided, as we have seen, at 
 her own Cabinets. She assisted, almost as regularly 
 as Charles the Second, at the debates in the House 
 of Lords. She resented the coercion of Godolphin's 
 Whig ministry, and it was by playing upon this 
 resentment that Mrs. Masham acquired the influence 
 which put Harley in the place of Godolphin. When
 
 [POLITICS 157 
 
 the favourite used, or abused, her ascendency for 
 the second time, and did with Oxford as she had 
 done with his predecessor, the Queen's strength had 
 been exhausted, and the whole fabric of bedchamber 
 intrigue fell to pieces like a house of cards. The 
 Duchess of Burgundy told Catherine de Medicis 
 that a country with a King was governed by women, 
 and a country with a Queen was governed by men. 
 Anne and her female favourites did not, could not 
 govern. The ruling forces of her reign were Marl- 
 borough and Godolphin. Her sad life was as 
 inconspicuous as the life of royalty can be. Married 
 to a husband whom she could not respect, seeing all 
 her children die in childhood, watching the gradual 
 dissolution of her ardent friendship for the play- 
 mate of her youth, she did find a real friend, if not 
 a disinterested one, in Abigail Masham. Suspicion, 
 the besetting sin of the narrow-minded, haunted 
 Anne's life and increased its gloom. The secret 
 tragedy of her maimed existence and her wasted 
 years may be read in the little coffins at West- 
 minster Abbey, where the bodies of her children 
 are laid.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 Before Walpole and the Hanoverians banished 
 literature from pubhc Hfe, men of letters were, 
 almost an estate of the nation. Addison, Pope, 
 Swift, and Bolingbroke were not only united in 
 good fellowship ; they were also glad to welcome any 
 man of genius, like Prior, and ready to assist every 
 young author who deserved it. London was then 
 so small a place that nothing good could be pub- 
 lished there without the writer becoming, in a short 
 time, familiar to the literary circle of the metropolis. 
 It was not unlike the Augustan age so admirably 
 described by Ben Jonson in Sejanus, although 
 there was no cultivated Csesar. Halifax, Oxford, 
 and Shrewsbury, if the two former were not 
 competent critics, were all three generous patrons, 
 so that, though the spirit of party was at 
 its height, literature united men whom politics 
 divided. There could be no better example of this 
 pleasant freemasonry than the case of William 
 Harrison. Harrison was the son of a country 
 doctor, and became through Addison "governor" 
 or tutor to the Duke of Oueensberry's son. Addison
 
 LITERATURE 159 
 
 also recommended him to Swift as an ingenious 
 composer of Latin verscj and author of some 
 EngHsh poems in the Tatler. "A little pretty 
 fellow," Swift called him in writing to Stella, "with 
 a great deal of wit, good sense, and good nature." 
 When Steele gave up the Tatler at the end of 17 10, 
 Swift, with great kindness, helped Harrison to carry 
 it on, freely correcting what he frankly described as 
 Harrison's "trash." The enterprise was not suc- 
 cessful, and Harrison was quick to spend whatever 
 he earned. But Swift's unaccustomed benevolence 
 was not exhausted. A man, he thought, might fail 
 in literature, and yet succeed in diplomacy. St. 
 John was Secretary of State, and the Peace Con- 
 ference was about to meet at the Hague. "I was 
 this morning at the Secretary, St. John's," wrote 
 Swift to Stella, on the 15th of March, 171 1, "and 
 he has given me for young Harrison the Tatler, the 
 prettiest employment in Europe, Secretary to my 
 Lord Raby, who is to be Ambassador Extraordinary 
 at the Hague, where all the great affairs will be 
 concerted, so we shall lose the Tatler in a fortnight." 
 Harrison came home with the Barrier Treaty at the 
 beginning of 1712, but died of a fever in his twenty- 
 eighth year. Swift's attention to him during his 
 last illness was extraordinary, and he told Stella 
 that no loss had ever grieved him so much. Harri- 
 son is not himself an important person, though his
 
 i6o QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Woodstock Park, in Dodsley's collection of poetry, 
 is still read. The interest of his brief career lies in 
 his relation to the older writers who befriended him 
 and provided for him. It was a real confraternity 
 of letters to which Swift introduced Harrison, and 
 even Congreve, in his blindness, was at pains to 
 write for the young man's Tatler. Such things are 
 only possible in a small society, where every denizen 
 of Grub Street knows all the rest. Addison's course, 
 though chequered and disturbed by politics, is a 
 very remarkable instance of literary merit rewarded 
 by public office and honour. But still more striking 
 and more agreeable than the patronage of Halifax 
 or Godolphin was the cordial sympathy with which 
 the masters of the pen regarded each other. There 
 has been nothing quite like it since. There are too 
 many people in the world, especially in London, 
 and competition is too fierce. After the censorship 
 of the Press had ceased, and before Parliamentary 
 reporting had begun, the little group of pamphlet- 
 eers who could write were more powerful than the 
 Cabinet, and at least as well known. 
 
 Ere Queen Anne became sovereign of England, 
 Scotland, and Ireland, the founder of the literary 
 school which illustrates her reign had passed away. 
 John Dry den died in 1700, after predicting that his 
 "cousin Swift," a distant cousin, would never be a 
 poet. Dryden had seen only the crazy Pindarics
 
 LITERATURE i6i 
 
 with which Swift celebrated, in a metre he did not 
 understand, the virtues of Sir WiUiam Temple, 
 whom he feared and therefore hated. He did not 
 live to read the masterpieces of satire and observa- 
 tion which make Swift one of the best writers of 
 familiar verse in the English language. Of Alexan- 
 der Pope, who was twelve years old at his death, 
 Dryden knew nothing at all. Yet it is as certain 
 as any unverified hypothesis can be, that without 
 Dryden there would have been no Pope ; and Pope, 
 though most of his best things were written after 
 1 7 14, was the one really great poet in the reign of 
 Anne. That in his own way he was a great poet 
 few critics would now deny. The extravagant 
 adulation of Byron, whose praise of the dead was 
 usually meant to give pain to the living, and the 
 rise of the Lake School, whom Byron absurdly 
 decried, combined to bring about a temporary 
 eclipse of Pope's fame. But genius is immortal, 
 and the star of Pope has reappeared. One star 
 differeth from another star in glory. It is idle and 
 unprofitable to compare Pope with Wordsworth or 
 with Keats. He had different ideals, and different 
 methods of pursuing them. But in his own line he 
 has never been surpassed, and he represents the 
 spirit which ruled the eighteenth century, until the 
 French Revolution changed the face of the world. 
 Pope has been called classical, partly because he
 
 1 62 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 paraphrased Homer and Horace, partly from the 
 perfection of his Hterary form. Yet he was no great 
 classical scholar, no match for Swift, or for Lady 
 Mary Wortley. The question how much Greek he 
 knew, or whether he knew Greek at all, lies outside 
 the period of Anne. It is enough to say here that 
 a man of Pope's unrivalled cleverness might have 
 written his pretty poem, as Bentley called his Itiad, 
 from Chapman and Dacier, or from a Latin crib. 
 A good Latinist Pope undoubtedly was, slender and 
 fragmentary as his education had been. He was 
 born in the year of the English Revolution, and his 
 parents were Catholics. Taught by four priests in 
 succession, with two private schools interposed 
 between the third and the fourth, he began from a 
 child to read voraciously, and was scarcely out of 
 his childhood when he commenced author. " I 
 lisped in numbers, for the numbers came," he says, 
 imitating a verse of Ovid, whom in many respects 
 he resembled.^ Pope's religion, or the religion of 
 his father and mother, shut him out from the public 
 schools, the universities, the legislature, the bar, 
 and every kind of political, military, or municipal 
 office. But for such things he had no aptitude and 
 no inclination. His weapon was the pen, and the 
 success with which he wielded it is embalmed in 
 his own famous couplet — 
 
 * (Et quod tentabam dicere versus erat.) 
 
 i
 
 LITERATURE 163 
 
 " Yes, I am proud, and justly proud, to see 
 Men not afraid of God afraid of me." 
 
 His compliments are among the most exquisite ever 
 paid in verse. His invective was so tremendous 
 that the least susceptible shrank from it in fear. 
 The disabilities imposed on him by his hereditary 
 faith he never attempted to remove. He was no 
 more a real Catholic than Bolingbroke was a real 
 Protestant. He was simply a Deist, whose genuine 
 convictions are expressed in the Universal Prayer. 
 If he adhered to the Church of his parents, the 
 reason may be found in that devotion to his mother 
 which is the most amiable feature in a strange, 
 crooked, sidelong character. Injuries received in 
 babyhood produced a physical weakness and de- 
 formity to which his moral perversity and falsehood 
 may perhaps be traced. Yet, addicted as he was 
 to a gallantry of the most prurient sort, he seems 
 to have been really fond of Martha Blount, and his 
 friendship for Swift was undoubtedly sincere. 
 Although his treatment of Addison and of Lady 
 Mary Wortley is inexcusable, his love of impish 
 mystification is a peccadillo, and Pope was nothing 
 like the monster of incredible iniquity that he 
 appeared to Whitwell Elwin. 
 
 Pope took Addison's early advice to remember that 
 his genius was national, and though he called him- 
 self a Whig, kept out of political controversy alto- 
 M 2
 
 1 64 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 gether. He was a man of letters pure and simple, 
 with an added taste for good company, and an 
 especial appreciation of the fairer sex. His masters 
 in literature were Horace, Spenser, Dryden, and 
 Boileau. The majesty of Dryden 's verse was 
 beyond him, for he had no dignity of mind. But 
 he learnt rhythm from Spenser and Dryden, as he 
 learnt criticism from Horace and Boileau. The 
 original part of him was his style; inimitable for 
 neatness, terseness, and point. The part that 
 belonged to his age, and is therefore most to the 
 purpose here, was his sceptical, mocking spirit ; his 
 exaltation of common sense; his acceptance of 
 Shaftesbury's canon that ridicule is the test of truth. 
 In these things he resembled Voltaire. Easily as 
 rhymes came to Pope, he polished them to the last 
 degree before they saw the light. His Pastorals, 
 imitated from Virgil's Eclogues, and published in 
 1709, were by his own account the poems on which 
 he spent most care, and the Messiah, a modern 
 setting of the Pollio, was always his favourite. 
 Whatever else may be thought of these Pastorals, 
 they are copies taken from copies, for Virgil 
 followed, and almost translated, Theocritus. And 
 although the best Greek literature will bear a good 
 deal of watering down, even Theocritus at two 
 removes bears a perilous resemblance to salt with- 
 out its savour. At twenty-one Pope was a mere
 
 LITERA TURE 165 
 
 bookworm, and his full powers slumbered until he 
 had become thoroughly well acquainted with human 
 nature. The best thing the Pastorals did for him 
 was that they introduced him to Halifax and Con- 
 greve. The Essay on Criticism, which came out 
 two years later, in 171 1, was written, as we learn 
 from Spence's Anecdotes, "very fast." Here Pope 
 was familiar with his subject, having studied 
 Horace's Art of Poetry as an adept, and thoroughly 
 understood the Roman critic's meaning. The Ars 
 Poetica was not written for beginners, and is quite 
 unintelligible to schoolboys. It is the familiar epistle 
 of a highly cultivated gentleman to correspondents 
 who can take hints without explanations, and can 
 fill up gaps in the sense for themselves. It can 
 never be of any use to readers who try to interpret 
 the suggestive, half-inquiring lines as though they 
 were the finished and formal treatise of an academic 
 professor. Pope did not apprehend Horace as the 
 Pisos apprehended him. But he was quite clever 
 enough to see what sort of thing he was copying, 
 to pick out the salient points, and to leave the diffi- 
 culties alone. "Horace's Art of Poetry" he said 
 to Spence, "was probably only fragments of what 
 he designed ; it wants the regularity that flows from 
 the following a plan ; and there are several passages 
 in it that are hints only of a larger design." When 
 Johnson paraphrased Juvenal, he glowed with the
 
 1 66 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 feeling of his author. When Pope paraphrased 
 Horace, he was conscious of the excellent oppor- 
 tunities given him by the Latin for the development 
 of his own peculiar talents. Few poets have 
 achieved earlier fame. William Congreve, who 
 admired his Pastorals, was then at the summit of 
 his own renown. Congreve's brilliant comedies had 
 all been produced in the late reign before he was 
 thirty. His one tragedy, The Mourning Bride, so 
 extravagantly praised by Johnson, had succeeded 
 beyond its deserts. Godolphin had provided for 
 him by a Commissionership of Licenses, which 
 enabled him to live in comfort, to set up for a man 
 of fashion, and to pose as an arbiter of taste. Lord 
 Halifax, whose steadfast Whiggery excluded him 
 from ofifice during the reign of Anne, affected the 
 airs of a literary critic without much right to assume 
 them. He was, however, a generous patron of 
 letters, and though Pope derived no material assist- 
 ance from him, he owed to Halifax his friendship 
 with Addison, and to Addison his friendship with 
 Swift. The relations between Pope and Addison 
 were not altogether satisfactory. But no one ever 
 had a better friend than Pope had in Addison, or 
 than Swift had in Pope. 
 
 The Essay on Criticism received warm and due 
 praise from the Spectator, of which the first number 
 appeared on the ist of March, 171 1 . It was followed
 
 LITERATURE 167 
 
 in 1 7 14 by Windsor Forest and the Rape of the 
 Lock. Windsor Forest, an academic exercise, 
 destitute of reality and nature, had the honour to 
 be praised by Wordsworth. Otherwise it possesses 
 Httle interest now, except to show how Pope assimi- 
 lated the metre of Dryden. The Rape of the Lock, 
 on the other hand, was a new thing in English 
 poetry, and is a perfect thing of its kind. Founded 
 on the simple fact that Lord Petre, in the fervour of 
 his adoration, cut off a tress of Miss Belle Termor's 
 hair, and designed at first merely to mitigate the 
 heinousness of that offence, it afterwards became, 
 by the introduction of the sylphs as part of the 
 machinery, a singular example of poetry improved 
 by the preternatural. The powers of the air, good- 
 natured spirits, are martialled by Pope with such 
 grace and skill that a trumpery incident of a 
 frivolous amour becomes quite romantic, and almost 
 sublime. Addison incurred Pope's undying resent- 
 ment by begging him not to touch the original ver- 
 sion, in which there were no sylphs. But that most 
 amiable of men would have been the first to acknow- 
 ledge that his advice was bad, and that Pope had 
 done what any judicious critic would have told him 
 he could not do. Pope's Catholic training may have 
 suggested to him the idea of "metaphysical aid." 
 No one less prodigiously clever could have invoked 
 it in such a cause without incurring the slightest
 
 1 68 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 touch of ridicule. The result, charming as it is 
 to-day, was even more appropriate to the age of 
 Anne. It was an age of fops and beaux, of wigs 
 and swords, of love-making rather ostentatious than 
 clandestine, of masks and dominos, duels and dice. 
 London society was quite small enough to knDw all 
 about Miss Fermor, and Lord Petre, and Sir George 
 Brown, who figured as Pope's "Sir Plume," and 
 did not fike being made to talk nonsense all the 
 time; "Sir Plume of amber snuff-box justly vain, 
 and the nice conduct of a clouded cane." The read- 
 ing public, however, were of a different opinion 
 from Sir George Brown's. Pope was not really 
 more moral than Congreve, perhaps less. But he 
 had written a poem which was like a proper Love 
 for Love, a prim Way of the World, and he seemed 
 to have taken from the devil some of his best tunes. 
 Congreve was guilty of an anachronism, which laid 
 him open to the unsparing lash of Jeremy Collier. 
 He had transferred to the Revolution the morality 
 of the Restoration, when all the world, especially 
 Dryden, was young. The Court of Anne was 
 strictly decorous ; and if the whole of the town was 
 not quite so correct as the Court, the parade of vice 
 had ceased to be popular. When Pope was writing 
 only to please himself, as in his version of Horace's 
 second satire, which has never been published since 
 1738, he could be far more licentious than Dryden
 
 LITERATURE X69 
 
 or Congreve. But as a rule he exercised restraint, 
 and conformed to a public taste which was neither 
 dissolute nor Puritanical. 
 
 Pope did not begin to write, or at least to publish, 
 until the martial ardour excited by Marlborough's 
 campaigns had subsided. He is emphatically the 
 poet of peace and pleasure, "youth at the prow and 
 pleasure at the helm." His mastery of the ver- 
 nacular gave him a wider popularity than he could 
 have acquired by his grace of style alone, and no 
 English poet except Shakespeare, not even Milton, 
 is so full of passages which have become stock 
 quotations. i\lthough the heroic metre, in which 
 his thoughts, not very profound thoughts, seemed 
 naturally to clothe themselves, has become nearly 
 obsolete, and the secret of his epigrammatic verse 
 has vanished, the attraction of Pope is indestruct- 
 ible with all who have any sense of literary form. 
 If any one will seriously try to improve upon the 
 way in which Pope has expressed his meaning, he 
 will get a more vivid idea of what expression is 
 than by the study of a hundred manuals. The age 
 of Anne was not altogether superficial. It was the 
 age of Newton, of Berkeley, of Bentley, and of 
 Swift. But its religion and its philosophy, though 
 quite genuine, were not deep. The unbridled 
 license of the Restoration had sprung in part from 
 the meddlesome strictness of the Commonwealth.
 
 I70 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 With the Revolution began the reign of reason 
 in poHtics, in morals, and in faith. The ponderous 
 Theism, or Pantheism, of Toland and his school 
 was regarded as a bore. When Swift sneered at 
 "that quality of their voluminous writings which 
 the poverty of the English language compels me 
 to call their style," he made a palpable hit. He 
 would have been the last to depreciate the style of 
 Pope, which, in simplicity and directness, was not 
 unlike his own. Although Pope was not a member 
 of the dominant Church, although he nominally 
 adhered to a small and persecuted communion of 
 disfranchised Englishmen, he hit the lay public 
 between wind and water. Collier had too much 
 religion for them. Shaftesbury had too little. 
 Berkeley was over their heads. Swift frightened 
 them. Pope was every man's poet, the poet of the 
 golden mean, who had true wit because he said 
 what everybody thought, and nobody else could 
 say so well. 
 
 Yet in the literature of Anne there was a mightier 
 than Pope. Pope in his most ambitious specula- 
 tions never went much below the surface. His 
 vein was thin. His mine was shallow. Carlyle 
 loved to tell the story of a Scottish miner, who 
 was asked how far down he had been in the course 
 of his work, and replied that he had heard the devil 
 boasting, or in English coughing. Swift seemed
 
 LITERATURE 171 
 
 often to hear the sound. He was cursed with a 
 lurid insight into evil, with an eye which pierced 
 the trappings of conventionalism and saw the 
 hypocrisy involved in all civilized behaviour. True 
 goodness he did not see ; or, if he saw it, he did 
 not care to dwell upon it. He was that rarest of 
 God's creatures, a misanthrope, to whom the degra- 
 dation of humanity was a real joy. That the rela- 
 tions of the sexes were the same in men and women 
 as in other animals, was a revolting paradox on 
 which he loved to dwell. All pretence of sanctity, 
 or even of religion, apart from a cold, dry, legal 
 orthodoxy, to be enforced by the secular arm, was 
 to him dishonest affectation. He said openly in 
 talk, and implied in his own ghastly epitaph on 
 himself, that his sermons were political pamphlets. 
 He seldom in all his various writings appeals 
 to a lofty motive, or shows any enthusiasm for a 
 great deed. His chief friends, such as Pope, 
 Harley, and St. John, had neither religion nor 
 virtue. His love of filth amounted to a mania. 
 On the other hand, in a drunken age he was strictly 
 sober, and he was quite capable of disinterested 
 kindness to the few people he really liked. His 
 nature was warped. Capable of inspiring, but in- 
 capable of returning, passion, he broke the hearts 
 of two women by his coldness, and the death of 
 Vanessa, Hester Van Homrigh, affected him no
 
 172 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 more than the death of a dog. Of Stella, Esther 
 Johnson, he was truly fond. But his fondness was 
 not the love of a man for a woman ; if it ended in 
 some mysterious, clandestine marriage, of which 
 there is no positive evidence, the marriage was 
 not a real union ; and though he was the absorb- 
 ing interest of her existence, he made her in 
 the end almost as miserable as he made himself. 
 He hated Ireland, where he had to live ; he hated 
 the human race; he hated life itself. On his birth- 
 day, the day on which, in his own elegant phrase, 
 he was "dropped" on the wrong side of the Irish 
 Channel, he always read the fearful chapter in 
 which Job "opened his mouth, and cursed his day." 
 He was marked from his birth with the stamp of 
 misery and genius. His final catastrophe, the 
 failure of his intellect, belongs to a later period 
 than the period of this book. Till his appointment 
 to the Deanery of St. Patrick's in 17 13, and long 
 afterwards, his mind was almost miraculously 
 acute. His humour is not of the deepest kind, 
 because it lacks reverence. Rabelais, his favourite 
 author, hating monks and monkery, revelling in 
 audacious animalism, despising the ceremonies of 
 the Catholic Church, never lost his faith in know- 
 ledge or in God. Although Swift is traditionally 
 said to have spent much time at his Deanery in 
 private devotion, his published works show very
 
 LITERATURE 173 
 
 little religion of any kind. What they do show 
 is an almost inexhaustible storehouse of ludicrous 
 images, a power of murderous satire that no 
 controversialist has ever surpassed, a diamond 
 sense that cut through sophistry like a knife, and 
 a pellucid simplicity of statement that makes the 
 most difficult question easy to the plainest mind. 
 It is possible, of course, to disagree with Swift. 
 It is impossible to misunderstand him. 
 
 Swift's early years were hard, and he took them 
 hardly. His father died before he was born, and 
 he never cared for his mother, nor she for him. 
 After leaving Trinity College, Dublin, where he 
 attained no distinction, he became a private secre- 
 tary to his kinsman, Sir William Temple, at Moor 
 Park, in Surrey, took holy orders, which were not 
 holy in his case, was presented with the small bene- 
 fice of Laracor, near Dublin, and, residence not 
 being required, came back to Moor Park, where he 
 made up for his idleness at Trinity by a course of 
 steady reading, which made him a sound classical 
 scholar. There he became acquainted with Esther 
 Johnson, another of Temple's poor relations, and 
 there he was goaded by Temple's patronage into 
 that attitude of aggressive hostility against man- 
 kind which, as he had a tongue like a razor, pro- 
 cured for him the homage of terror. There can be 
 no doubt that Swift, who was not otherwise clerical,
 
 174 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 took advantage of his cloth to scatter insults which 
 would have cost a layman many duels, and possibly 
 his life. Women no less than men were the victims 
 of his fury, especially if their social rank was high, 
 for he could not see that to insult a Duchess was 
 simply to insult a w^oman. His first publication of 
 any importance was evoked by a foolish dispute 
 about the respective merits of ancient and modern 
 writers. Swift's Battle of the Books, an excellent 
 piece of English, has not many other merits, being 
 chiefly designed to cover the deficiencies of his 
 patron, Sir William Temple, w'ho was well quali- 
 fied to write in defence of the moderns, because he 
 did not know a word of Greek. But Swift's great 
 contribution to literature in the reign of Queen 
 Anne was the Tale of a Tub. It is useless to call 
 in question the merits of a book which critic follows 
 critic in pronouncing to be among the glories of 
 English literature. I will only ask, without an- 
 swering, how many pyeople read it now. Swift's 
 ostensible object in the Tale of a Tub is to prove 
 that the established Church of England and Ire- 
 land, of which he was an ordained minister, is 
 superior to Romanism on the one hand, and to 
 Calvinism on the other. Both Catholics and Pro- 
 testant Dissenters are adroitly contrived to look 
 exceedingly contemptible and ridiculous. The 
 Church of England, on the other hand, is repre-
 
 LITERATURE 175 
 
 sented, much less adroitly, to have made the best 
 of a bad job, and to be the only religious com- 
 munion with which a man of sense may in reason 
 connect himself. If there w^as one person who held 
 the views which the Tale of a Tub professes to 
 inculcate, that person was Queen Anne. Yet the 
 Queen said, and insisted, that the man who wrote 
 that profane ribaldry should never be a bishop. 
 On a point of this kind one can only express one's 
 own opinion, and I agree with the Queen. I do 
 not believe that any one would have written the 
 Tale of a Tub who had any reverence for Chris- 
 tianity, for religion, or for the Church as a divine 
 institution. Swift never committed himself to a 
 direct statement of disbelief in revelation, in the 
 Bible, or in Christ; but a long course of silence, 
 varied by profane jests at the expense of every 
 other religious body except the jester's own, has 
 a cumulative effect, and leaves upon the mind of an 
 impartial reader a conviction that Swift was far less 
 spiritually minded than the sectaries, or even the 
 Deists, he denounced. The literary merits of the 
 Tale of a Tub are a different question. There is 
 a popular legend that when Swift's intellect was 
 decaying, he took up the Tale and exclaimed, 
 "What a genius I had when I wrote that book." 
 If he had written nothing else, would he now be 
 considered a man of genius at all ? The story of the
 
 176 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 will, and of its interpretation by the three brothers, 
 though exquisitely droll in itself, does not corre- 
 spond with any historic facts. The brother who 
 represents the Church of England, Martin by name, 
 is no more logical and consistent, though he may 
 be less extravagant, than Peter or Jack. Catholics 
 are treated as if they were not Christians at all, and 
 everything worthy of respect or admiration in their 
 Church is studiously ignored. Nonconformists are 
 to Swift hypocrites of the most loathsome kind, 
 consciously dishonest, and habitually profane. 
 The religious, and even the respectable, part of the 
 community, said that this parson was a jack pud- 
 ding, to whom all forms of faith were food for 
 flouts and jeers. Even the style is very inferior to 
 what the style of Swift afterw^ards became, and 
 the whole treatise is unworthy to be mentioned 
 in the same breath with his priceless, incompar- 
 able satire on the inconveniences which might 
 result from the immediate abolition of Christianity 
 by law. 
 
 Swift's poetry, or rather verse, belongs for the 
 most part to the Georgian era, when he had done 
 with ambition, and with England. His pre- 
 decessor, Matthew Prior, though inferior to him in 
 humour, far excelled him in beauty of expression, 
 and was endowed with a poetical imagination which 
 Swift wholly lacked. In sheer intellectual power
 
 LITERATURE 177 
 
 Prior was no match for the great Dean. But if he 
 had never written a Hne, the man who really nego- 
 tiated the Treaty of Utrecht would be an important 
 person ; and Prior's poems would have made a 
 mere denizen of Grub Street justly famous. He 
 had not Swift's perfect rhythm, and therefore he 
 has been less directly imitated. Cowper, for in- 
 stance, in the eighteenth century, and Praed in the 
 nineteenth, owed more to Swift than to him. 
 Prior's metre sometimes halts, and his grammar is 
 not always faultless. But the graceful lines begin- 
 ning "Dear Cloe, how blubbered is that pretty 
 face," quite original, though suggested by Horace, 
 are entirely beyond Swift's range of fancy, and 
 Prior, though often indiscreet, is never disgusting. 
 Educated at Westminster and Cambridge, he knew 
 the classics, if not like a scholar, at least like a 
 gentleman, and they furnished him with many 
 themes for his muse. We need not inquire now- 
 a-days who Prior's Cloe was, or whether he was 
 nice in his amours. His age was not ashamed of 
 sexual passion, and he was a child of his age. He 
 could, however, write in a very different strain, as 
 in his lines to Lady Margaret Holles-Harley, " My 
 noble, lovely little Peggy." Swift sometimes rose 
 to heights, and often descended to depths, where 
 his readers could not follow him. Prior gave them 
 what they wanted, and though he wrote perhaps
 
 178 ., QUEEN ANNE 
 
 too often for the boudoir and the alcove, he charmed 
 their senses without shocking their tastes. 
 
 The typical prose of Queen Anne's reign is the 
 prose of Addison and Steele in the Spectator. 
 Although Addison wrote some of the finest hymns 
 in the English language, such as "The spacious 
 firmament on high," and "How are thy servants 
 blest O Lord," together with a drama called Cato, 
 from which quotations are still sometimes made, 
 he is chiefly known to posterity as the painter of 
 Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison's scholarship, as 
 Macaulay points out, was almost confined to the 
 Roman poets, whom at Charterhouse and Oxford 
 he reproduced with wonderful skill. He travelled 
 in Italy, then an unusual feat, and everything he 
 saw there brought to his mind either Latin hexa- 
 meters, or Latin elegiacs, or Latin lyrics. It was 
 in English verse, as we have seen, that he cele- 
 brated Blenheim. But it was in English prose that 
 he made his ineffaceable mark. The shallowest 
 observers of English politics find the party system 
 the easiest thing to abuse. It had not made much 
 progress in the reign of Anne, and the manifesta- 
 tions of it in her last four years are seldom edify- 
 ing. But one of the debts that literature owes it 
 is the production of the Spectator, founded as a 
 successor to Steele's Tatler, and a counterblast to 
 Swift's Examiner. Swift always wrote anony-
 
 LITERATURE 179 
 
 mously, save when he recommended Lord Oxford, 
 in a rather stilted pamphlet, to found an English 
 Academy of Letters, which would soon have died 
 of ridicule. Addison published his Remarks on 
 Italy and his Dialogues on Medals in his own 
 name. For the Tatler and the Spectator, as after- 
 wards for the Guardian, he wrote without a signa- 
 ture. The Spectator, which lasted in its original 
 shape for about a year and a half, contains his 
 three great characters of Sir Roger de Coverley, 
 Sir Andrew Freeport, and Will Honeycomb, repre- 
 senting the Tory Squire, the Whig fund-holder, 
 and the man about town. The tale is of the slight- 
 est. The persons are finished and typical portraits, 
 which hold the mirror up to nature. Addison, 
 assisted in the Spectator by Steele, who had a 
 true and individual genius of his own, was quali- 
 fied by nature and art to be instructive and at the 
 same time amusing, to read moral lessons in perfect 
 taste without ever becoming a bore. He was 
 throughout his short life a consistent Whig, and yet 
 even Queen Anne could not accuse him of being an 
 enemy to the Church. He was sincerely religious, 
 without a trace of fanaticism ; he had a kind heart 
 and a generous temper; his wit was so gentle that 
 when it is keenest it never wounds ; and his style is 
 exactly the mode in which an educated gentleman 
 
 would write to his friends. Very rarely, as in the 
 N 2
 
 i8o QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Vision of Mirza, he rose higher than that, and 
 showed that the deeper mysteries of existence were 
 not beyond his ken. As a rule he gave the culti- 
 vated society of his time useful and delicate hints 
 concerning religion, politics, manners, literature, 
 drama, and art. He became the arbiter elegant- 
 iarum, the fashionable dictator of an age when 
 fashion had nothing to do with wealth or luxury, 
 but was identified with breeding and behaviour. If 
 Addison had not been rather too fond of wine, he 
 would have had no faults at all ; and if he had 
 preached a rigid sobriety, he would have preached 
 to deaf ears. He did succeed in persuading an age 
 which remembered the Plays of Congreve that vice 
 was dull, dyspeptic, and ill bred. He made the 
 Protestant Succession "the thing," and insinuated 
 without obtruding, a case for the unpopular House 
 of Hanover. Above all, he did what Swift's 
 savage satire could not do. He showed how fool- 
 ish and how unmannerly it was to laugh at the 
 Christian religion, upon which civilization de- 
 pended. 
 
 Hardly less celebrated as an essayist than Addi- 
 son, and scarcely less deserving of celebrity, was 
 his friend and coadjutor Richard Steele, also a 
 Charterhouse boy, and also an Oxford man, his 
 college being Merton. Steele's early career was 
 spent in the army, and he had incurred some ridicule
 
 LITERATURE i8i 
 
 by publishing, so far back as 1701, his Christian 
 Hero; for there can be no doubt that, in Johnson's 
 charitable language, he practised the lighter vices. 
 Like Addison, he was a Whig, and his party spirit 
 was much less temperate than his friend's. But he 
 was essentially a good-natured man, easy and 
 tolerant whenever he was not engaged in defending 
 Whigs and attacking Tories. We have seen how 
 Steele excited the wrath of his political opponents 
 by his pamphlet on the crisis in 17 13, and how he 
 paid the penalty in a most unjust expulsion from 
 the House of Commons. But politics played a very 
 small part in the Tatler, or in the Spectator, both 
 of which he founded and carried on with Addison's 
 help. The sharp contrast which Thackeray draws 
 between the two men, professing, and proving, that 
 Steele can be imitated, while asserting that Addison 
 is inimitable, will not hold. Subsequent critics have 
 been too much in the habit of blindly following 
 Johnson, who laid down in his dictatorial way the 
 proposition, that the art of writing prose could only 
 be learnt by studying Addison. Johnson himself 
 followed Quintilian on Cicero. But such dogmat- 
 ism is misleading. Dryden is a better model than 
 Addison, and Swift wrote simpler English than 
 either. Moreover, Steele and Addison are so much 
 alike that it is not always possible to distinguish 
 their work in the Spectator, and Steele was the
 
 1 82 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 actual creator, though not the complete author, of 
 Sir Roger de Coverley. That Addison was always 
 above Steele is an exaggeration. His general level 
 is perhaps higher, and certainly more correct. His 
 humour is far more subtle and delicate. On the 
 other hand, he had no enthusiasm, and could not 
 have depicted the lady whom it was a liberal educa- 
 tion to love. Nor has he, with all his grace and 
 sympathy, written anything like Steele's remini- 
 scences of his brief military course, which it may 
 be well here to set down : 
 
 "Who can have lived in an army, and in a serious 
 hour reflect upon the many gay and agreeable men 
 that might long have flourished in the arts of peace, 
 and not join with the imprecations of the fatherless 
 and widow on the tyrant to whose ambition they fell 
 sacrifices ? But gallant men who are cut off by the 
 sword move rather our veneration than our pity; 
 and we gather relief enough from their own con- 
 tempt of death to make it no evil which was ap- 
 proached with so much cheerfulness, and attended 
 with so much honour." 
 
 To learn an essay of Addison's or of Steele's by 
 heart, would be a far more profitable occupation 
 than to show why one was better or worse than the 
 other. 
 
 During the whole of Queen Anne's reign, Isaac 
 Watts was a Nonconformist minister in London, a
 
 LITERATURE 183 
 
 man of liberal mind, author of many noble hymns, 
 and of some bad Court odes. He is said to have 
 written six hundred hymns in all. Two at least are 
 universally popular and superlatively good. "Jesus 
 shall reign where'er the sun," has the more personal 
 interest because Watts himself inclined to Arianism. 
 But his masterpiece, perhaps the finest hymn in 
 the English language, first published in 1707, is 
 "O God, our help in ages past." It is of course a 
 paraphrase of the ninetieth psalm, that sublime ex- 
 pression of pure theism. Whereas, however, most 
 metrical versions of the psalms are faint and feeble 
 efforts, almost parodies, this stands out as superior 
 in dignity, majesty, and beauty, even to the splendid 
 translation from the Vulgate in the Book of 
 Common Prayer. 
 
 If Isaac Watts, educated, and very well educated, 
 at Stoke Newington, was the glory of the free 
 churches, or the churches which ought to have been 
 free, the glory of the Established Church was not 
 Sv/ift, who should never have been a clergyman at 
 all, but Berkeley. George Berkeley, the greatest 
 philosopher ever produced by Trinity College, 
 Dublin, came to England in 17 13, where he was 
 welcomed by the circle of Pope, Swift, Addison, and 
 Steele. He had already published his New Theory 
 of Vision, his Treatise Concerning Human Know- 
 ledge, and his Dialogues between Hylas and
 
 1 84 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Philonous, that is to say, between a materialist and 
 a spiritualist in the proper sense of those terms. 
 Berkeley was one of the few Greek scholars in any 
 university at that time, and no English writer has 
 come nearer to the perfection of Plato in the art of 
 philosophical dialectic. The assailants of Chris- 
 tianity, Shaftesbury and Mandeville, at whom he 
 more particularly aimed his shafts, were not formid- 
 able in themselves. Berkeley's own philosophy has 
 long survived the controversies of his own day, and 
 become the permanent heritage of speculative man- 
 kind. He was subject to much vulgar ridicule be- 
 cause he denied, or at all events doubted, the reality 
 of the external world, and "coxcombs vanquished 
 Berkeley with a grin," as they have continued to do 
 ever since. He who denied that the world was 
 manifest to our senses would of course be a lunatic. 
 But appearance is not reality, and things are not 
 what they seem. Of those who maintained, like 
 Tyndall in our own day, that matter alone existed, 
 Berkeley inquired how they knew that matter existed 
 at all. He did not foresee that Hume would carry 
 the investigation a step further, and ask what 
 proof there was for the existence of mind, to which 
 perhaps the best answer is, that we can put the 
 question. Berkeley had to deal with materialism, 
 in his time a not unfashionable creed, and he dealt 
 it a blow from which it has never recovered. His 
 
 ( 
 i
 
 LITERATURE 185 
 
 Irish bishopric belongs to the future, when the 
 Irish Church was past saving. In Queen Anne's 
 reign he was only a clergyman. But among all the 
 wits of that reign there were few wittier, and none 
 more wise than he. 
 
 Shaftesbury, on the other hand, the third Earl, 
 and Bernard Mandeville, whom Berkeley honoured 
 with a refutation, are almost entirely forgotten. 
 Shaftesbury was a disciple of Pierre Bayle, but he 
 had neither the depth nor the eloquence of that 
 great writer. His Characteristics, published in 
 171 1, would have attracted little notice if they had 
 not been written by a person of quality. Thomas 
 Hill Green, the Oxford Hegelian, calls them a "thin 
 and stilted rhapsody." They had the temporary 
 effect of making smart young gentlemen think that, 
 if ridicule were indeed the test of truth, they could 
 laugh England's Christianity, as Cervantes had 
 laughed Spain's chivalry, away. They also made 
 "the moral sense" a fashionable phrase in circles 
 where there was little sense and less morality. But 
 they did not contribute much to the advancement 
 of any theory, or the formation of any school. Man- 
 deville, a native of Holland, and a doctor of 
 Leyden, had no such ambition. He believed as 
 fully as Swift in the vileness of human nature, and 
 he inculcated the utility of vice, in his Fable of the 
 Bees, with a frankness never surpassed. Socrates
 
 1 86 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 would have enjoyed an argument with Mandeville, 
 whose thesis that private vices are pubHc benefits is 
 quite in the vein of Polus or Thrasymachus. At the 
 time of the Restoration, when Hudibras was 
 popular, Mandeville might have had the honour 
 of being taken to church by Charles the Second. 
 But he came too late, except for Berkeley, and other- 
 wise he only amused the curious. From 1660 to 
 1685 vice, public and private, had had full swing. 
 it was glorified after the Revolution with exquisite 
 taste, in the Comedies of Congreve, which still kept 
 the stage, Jeremy Collier notwithstanding. The 
 English people, however, did not want to make a 
 theory of it. Most of them would rather be hypo- 
 crites than pay no homage to virtue at all. 
 
 The principal dramatist of Queen Anne's reign 
 was Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim, and of 
 Castle Howard. George Farquhar, who died before 
 he was thirty, brought out in 1707 his best play, 
 The Beau's Stratagem, and Mrs. Centlivre, wife of 
 the Queen's cook, herself an actress, wrote eighteen, 
 which have entirely perished, except one phrase, 
 "the real Simon Pure." Professor Saintsbury has 
 acutely observed that a moral improvement, perhaps 
 due to the strictures of Jeremy Collier, may be traced 
 in the plays of this reign. They turn indeed, like 
 Dryden's and Congreve's, upon intrigue and 
 gallantry. But the intrigue is commonly unsuccess-
 
 LITERATURE 187 
 
 ful, and the gallantry therefore wasted. This is 
 perhaps not very much for the non-juring parson 
 to have accomplished by all the eloquence which 
 he bestowed upon his Short View of the Immorality 
 and Profaneness of the English Stage. But it is 
 better than nothing, and every little helps. Van- 
 brugh was in the habit, a habit which did not die 
 with him, of adapting plays from the French, and 
 his most successful piece. The Confederacy, was 
 derived from Dancourt's Bourgeoises a la Mode. 
 There is little to be said for the morality of such 
 plays as the Confederacy, and the good Queen 
 always declined to patronise the stage in any way. 
 Her standard of decorum was high, not to say 
 prudish, and for literature, which Vanbrugh's 
 dramas certainly are, she did not care at all. Shake- 
 speare was not then in vogue, and no one ventured 
 to bring him on the stage, until Colley Cibber had 
 rewritten him. Anne had herself, at the instigation 
 of Charles the Second, been taught the management 
 of her musical voice by an actress, Mrs. Barry, who 
 did not retire till 17 10, when she and Mrs. Brace- 
 girdle, the friend of Congreve, were both eclipsed 
 by the rising star of Mrs. Oldfield. The chief actor 
 was Colley Cibber, who may be said to have bridged 
 the period between Betterton and Garrick. No one 
 claimed for the stage, in Queen Anne's time, that 
 it w^as a virtuous profession, or expected actors and
 
 1 88 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 actresses to be bound by the principles of average 
 decorum. Their principle was that those who live 
 to please must please to live. That the stage had 
 a mission, or any other object than the amusement 
 of the public, would have been regarded as a prig- 
 gish paradox. It was not meant for puritans, 
 parsons, or young ladies, nor was it recruited from 
 the upper and middle ranks of society. All that 
 can be said for it is that actors like Barton Booth, 
 whom even Queen Anne condescended to notice, or 
 Robert Wilks, or Thomas Doggett, founder of the 
 Waterman's badge, knew their business, and that 
 the profession was appreciably less immoral than it 
 had been in the days of the Merry Monarch. 
 
 Music, for which the Queen was as enthusiastic 
 as she could be for anything, except the Church, 
 included one illustrious name. George Frederick 
 Handel, a native of Saxony, born in 1685, came to 
 England in 17 10, and never left this country after 
 1 7 12, when he broke his contract with the Elector 
 of Hanover to remain here, so that he is not unfairly 
 reckoned among English composers. Most of his 
 operas, and his mighty oratorios, were produced 
 under Hanoverian auspices. But his Rinaldo, his 
 Pastor Fido, and his Utrecht Te Deum, glorified the 
 reign of Anne. Although he studied in Italy, and 
 was the pupil of Scarlatti, his native force and his 
 inexhaustible genius rank him with the great
 
 LITERATURE 189 
 
 original composers of all time. No such music had 
 been heard in England before; and Swift's ignor- 
 ant contempt of it, displayed in his popular couplet 
 about Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Handel and 
 Buononcini, is an example which shows how little 
 the countrymen of Milton knew about the instru- 
 mental orchestra, familiar as they were with singing, 
 and with the peal of the anthem from cathedral 
 choirs. Vanbrugh introduced opera from Italy, 
 bringing over Nicolini and Santini to the playhouse 
 in the Haymarket, which he built himself. But it 
 failed for want of subscribers, and Vanbrugh was 
 out of pocket by the transaction. 
 
 The painting, like the music, of the early eigh- 
 teenth century came from Germany. Sir Godfrey 
 Kneller's real name was Gottfried Kniller, and he 
 was born at Liibeck. He was nearly thirty when 
 he first arrived in England, and more than thirty 
 when he began his courtier's career by executing 
 a portrait of Charles the Second. Among his 
 subsequent victims, who included ten reigning 
 sovereigns, were Louis the Fourteenth, William the 
 Third, Peter the Great, and of course Queen Anne 
 herself. Few persons of importance in England 
 escaped being painted by Kneller when the eigh- 
 teenth century was young. The features of his men 
 are disguised by their full bottomed wigs, and he 
 had too much task-work for the complete develop-
 
 I go QUEEN ANNE 
 
 ment of his powers. His treatment of Marlborough 
 is conventional. But his portrait of the Duchess, 
 now at Windsor, is painted with wonderful verve, 
 and helps one to realize, as nothing else does, the 
 empire she exercised over the greatest man of her 
 time. Kneller's Sarah shows what he might have 
 done if he had been left to himself, and not confined 
 in gilded chains. For Marlborough we must go to 
 the bust in the British Museum, or to the print, 
 also at Windsor, which depicts him as a brilliant 
 young ensign in the French Guard. 
 
 The age of Anne has been called Augustan, and 
 was certainly, except the latter part of Elizabeth's 
 reign, the greatest literary age in the history of 
 England. Of its science there is not much to be 
 said. Although Newton's Optics appeared in 1704, 
 his marvellous series of discoveries had been made 
 before the Revolution ; he retired from the repre- 
 sentation of his University in Parliament at the 
 death of William ; and his later years were spent in 
 furthering the cause of Liberal theology. Richard 
 Bentley, as eminent in scholarship as Sir Isaac 
 Newton was in science, had also established his 
 reputation before the close of the seventeenth 
 century, by his unrivalled treatise on the forged 
 letters of Phalaris, and had settled down as Master 
 of Trinity to that chronic struggle with his Fellows 
 which mainly occupied his last forty years. He
 
 LITERATURE 191 
 
 was too far above his contemporaries in classical 
 scholarship for them to judge him accurately, or at 
 all. But it is unnecessary for arriving at a critical 
 estimate of his powers to follow, or even to approach, 
 the case of Phalaris. Bentley's short letter on a 
 very bad book, Joshua Barnes's edition of Homer, 
 which will be found in Bishop Monk's biography, 
 is a perfect example of philological criticism at its 
 highest and best. It is curious that Richard 
 Bentley and Lewis Theobald, the first two scholars 
 and critics of their age, were both included in the 
 Dunciad by Alexander Pope, who knew, in the true 
 sense of knowledge, nothing at all. No comment- 
 ator on Shakespeare's text can be compared with 
 Theobald, who restored the true reading, "babbled 
 o' green fields," to Mrs. Quickly's account of Fal- 
 staff's death in Henry the Fifth. No edition of 
 Shakespeare, not even Johnson's, is so utterly 
 worthless as Pope's. It may seem paradoxical to 
 call the age of Newton and Bentley shallow. Nor 
 must we forget that Edmund Halley, of St. Paul's 
 and Queen's College, Oxford, Newton's worthy 
 coadjutor, predicted in 1705 that the comet of 1682 
 would return in 1758, as after his own death it 
 punctually did. Few discoveries in scholarship can 
 be set above Bentley's restoration of the lost 
 digamma to the metre of Homer, as explained by 
 him with his habitual lucidity in 17 13.
 
 192 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 The days of newspapers half knowing every- 
 thing, from the cedar to the hyssop, had not begun, 
 though the Daily Courant was founded, by way of 
 experiment, in 1702. And yet the age as a whole 
 was shallow, spite of lonely thinkers, like Newton, 
 and obscure students, like Theobald. Lady Mary 
 Pierrepont, afterwards Wortley, and finally Wort- 
 ley-Montagu, who made herself a sound classical 
 scholar while other girls flirted and danced, is a 
 rare exception which proves that the rule was the 
 other way. The Tatler and the Spectator repre- 
 sented, even in cultivated society, the utmost stretch 
 of learning that could be expected from a lady, or 
 even from a gentleman. The whole controversy 
 about ancient and modern writers, which produced 
 Swift's agreeable trifle, The Battle of the Books, 
 was conducted by men none of whom understood 
 both sides of the question, while few of them under- 
 stood either. Most of them thought that Atterbury 
 had scored a brilliant triumph over Bentley, whose 
 position he could not appreciate, and whose proofs 
 he was incapable of correcting. Swift was justly 
 severe upon the superficial Deism of Collins and 
 Toland. But Swift's own philosophy was of the 
 flimsiest ; he did not even see what Berkeley meant ; 
 nor did Samuel Clarke's Lectures on the Being and 
 Attributes of God advance the science of theology. 
 Indeed the chief point about these Boyle lectures 
 
 I
 
 LITERATURE 193 
 
 delivered by Clarke is that they were criticized in 
 1 7 13 by Joseph Butler, the future bishop, then a 
 young Presbyterian of twenty-one, who had not yet 
 conformed to the Church of England, or gone up to 
 Oxford. The struggle between the Whig bishops 
 in the Upper House of Convocation, and the Tory 
 parsons in the Lower, which led to a joint pro- 
 nouncement that the Church was not in peril, were 
 infinitely trivial. Swift saw wider and deeper than 
 most of his contemporaries. But even he did not 
 see deep or wide, except into the faults and follies 
 of human nature. The spirit of the time was em- 
 bodied in Pope, who packed up neat moral maxims 
 in small handy parcels. That he performed his task 
 with consummate dexterity does not alter the nature 
 of it. The world went very well then for the upper 
 ranks of society, and the others did not count. 
 Democracy was considered equivalent to anarchy, 
 and therefore the proper place for a democrat was 
 held to be a lunatic asylum or a gaol. Religion 
 was not meant to curtail the enjoyments of the rich, 
 but to keep the poor in their places, and to prevent 
 the lower orders from rising above their station in 
 life. 
 
 Men of letters, with a very few exceptions, de- 
 pended upon the patronage of the wealthy, who were 
 called the great. Offices of emolument, if not of 
 honour, w^ere bestowed upon masters of the pen on
 
 194 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 condition that they devoted it to the service of their 
 employers. 
 
 That the pubHc was the best patron could hardly 
 be perceived in the absence of copyright, and there 
 was no copyright in published matter at common 
 law. In 1 7 ID the first Copyright Act was passed, 
 and a very mild statute it proved to be. All copies 
 of printed books were vested in their authors, with 
 a power of sale, for the brief period of fourteen 
 years, provided that the book was registered at 
 Stationers' Hall, and deposited with certain public 
 libraries in Great Britain, of which the British 
 Museum was the chief. The act did not apply to 
 Ireland, where books printed in England or Scot- 
 land could be freely pirated, if any one were found 
 to buy them. So the law remained more than a 
 hundred and thirty years. Inadequate as was the 
 protection it afforded to authors, it recognized a 
 great principle, and, except the Act of Union with 
 Scotland, this was the most important statute passed 
 in the reign of Anne. The idea that property can 
 consist of ideas had been foreign to the law of Eng- 
 land. By way of encouraging literature, it was 
 held that if a man wished to remain owner of his 
 thoughts, he must keep them to himself, and that 
 if he wanted to derive any advantage from his 
 written compositions, he must not publish them. 
 Letters were sacred, and could not be printed with-
 
 LITERATURE 195 
 
 out the consent of the writer. Books were profane, 
 and anybody could make what use he pleased of 
 them. It was a good beginning for the age of 
 reason, as the eighteenth century has been called, 
 to destroy this false antithesis, and to bring the 
 common law for once into harmony with common 
 sense. 
 
 Common sense is indeed the chief characteristic 
 of literature in Queen Anne's reign. The poetry 
 of Pope, and the prose of Swift, are almost perfect 
 in form. Even Swift's farriiliar verse, which can 
 scarcely be called poetry, is punctiliously and invari- 
 ably correct. But until he wrote Gulliver's Travels, 
 which belongs to a later period. Swift showed very 
 little imagination, and it is satire, not fancy, which 
 inspired that savage immortal book. Cadenus and 
 Vanessa, which purports to be a love-poem, is as 
 destitute of poetry as of love. Prior's amatory 
 verses are simple, direct, and human enough for the 
 most exacting of literary naturalists. But they 
 have no air and fire, such as redeem the songs of 
 the seventeenth century from the charge of mere 
 licentiousness. There are few ideas in Pope, con- 
 summate artist as he was, which could not be equally 
 well expressed in prose; and when he came to Eng- 
 lish Horace, though no other writer has Englished 
 Horace so well, it is the sermo pedestris, the style 
 
 which never leaves the ground, that he chooses for 
 o 2
 
 196 QUEEN AN ME 
 
 his model. Pope's peculiar excellence as a letter- 
 writer, in which difficult art he has been surpassed 
 only by Gray, who had more learning, and Byron, 
 who had more wit, is closely connected with his 
 mundane wisdom, his inveterate habit of delivering 
 himself like a man of this world. No wonder that 
 the England of Pope was Voltaire's ideal, without 
 superstition, without enthusiasm, without spiritual- 
 ity, with complete freedom for every writer who did 
 not attack the Government of the day. llie one 
 really religious man in the circle of Pope and Swift 
 was Addison, whose piety is essentially rational. 
 He loved to show how reasonable Christianity was, 
 how moderate, how gentle, how well bred. So with 
 Pope's Deism, which hardly complied with the 
 standards of the Roman Catholic Church. It was 
 because his creed naturally commended itself to the 
 minds of educated people, that Pope offered that 
 creed for their acceptance. Swift applied the test 
 of ridicule to the religion of others, and said as little 
 as possible about his own. Berkeley was an excep- 
 tion. He had an imaginative, as well as a philo- 
 sophical, intellect. He is our English Plato. But 
 upon the men of Queen Anne he made no impres- 
 sion, and his philosophy conveyed no more to the 
 mind of Swift than the music of Handel conveyed 
 to his senses. He, the most powerful writer of the 
 age, could no more distinguish Berkeley from Male-
 
 LITERATURE 197 
 
 branche, than he could distinguish Handel from 
 Buononcini. Swift in his prime was common sense 
 personified. Except when in the blind rage of the 
 party hack he imputed cowardice to Marlborough, 
 his humour saved him from absurdity. He and his 
 pupil Arbuthnot, who could write almost exactly like 
 him, were never tired of making fun out of bombast, 
 as Prior did out of Boileau's foolish ode on the cap- 
 ture of Namur. Arbuthnot was essentially a good- 
 natured man, and a Tory by conviction, whereas 
 no one could attribute either conviction or good 
 nature to Swift. It is the more remarkable that 
 they should have agreed in their pitiless satire of 
 everything extravagant or high-flown. Pope com- 
 pressed Newton into a neat couplet, and tossed off 
 Bacon in a single line. He has expended far more 
 eloquence upon his patron Robert Harley, Earl of 
 Oxford, and even upon the Earl of Rochester's 
 grandson, Lord Cornbury. The adroitest and most 
 graceful of flatterers, the most poisonous and malig- 
 nant of traducers. Pope was never led bv any 
 generous emotion to depart from the golden medio- 
 crity, the rule of "not to admire," which suited his 
 age and himself. The great and lasting service 
 which he and Swift, and Addison and Steele, per- 
 formed for literature, was to redeem it from slovenli- 
 ness, to give it a form as correct as Racine's or 
 Voltaire's. Dry den, though himself usual Iv re-
 
 1 98 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Strained by his own sanity and judgment, had en- 
 couraged by his exuberance the vagaries of others, 
 and Swift's youthful efforts to emulate Pindar are 
 but a caricature of the general looseness that was 
 setting in. Swift himself became afterwards a 
 model of correct versification. But it was Pope who 
 established once for all the reign of law in metre and 
 rhyme. If some of his successors chose to fancy 
 that nothing more was needed in poetry than accu- 
 rate metre and regular rhyme, that was not the fault 
 of Pope. 
 
 Pope, it must be remembered, was under the per- 
 vading influence of Horace. With Homer, who is 
 all nature and sublimity, he had nothing in com- 
 mon. He sympathized instinctively with Horatian 
 methods, at least in the Horatian Satires and 
 Epistles. The Odes he left to Prior, who also was 
 steeped in Horace, and had to persuade Cloe that 
 she need not be jealous of Lydia. Est modus in 
 rebus, sunt certi denique fines, might be taken as 
 the motto of Queen Anne literature, except where 
 love-making is concerned. Pope and his school 
 worshipped moderation, looking upon enthusiasm 
 with a supercilious sneer. In spite of Prior's 
 irreverence, they set great store by Boileau, and 
 paid almost as much respect to French models as 
 Horace paid to Greek. Yet they wrote the ver- 
 nacular. Pope is a well of English undefiled. At
 
 LITERATURE 199 
 
 a time when Shakespeare was either neglected, or 
 mauled by the gross taste of Colley Cibber, and 
 Milton was abhorred, except by Addison, as a Re- 
 publican Dissenter, Pope's epigrams and phrases 
 passed into common speech and language. The 
 Spectator, for which every one who professed any 
 literary taste subscribed, had taught even before 
 Pope, through Steele and Addison, that nothing 
 could be good in any way which was not in good 
 taste. Profanity was in bad taste. So was ostenta- 
 tion. So was vice. The furious diatribe of Collier 
 was not half so effective in promoting virtue, which 
 certainly needed promotion in 171 1 and 1712, as 
 Addison's quiet scorn of everything base, vulgar, 
 and profane. He never reached, nor attempted to 
 reach, the lower orders. He scarcely realized their 
 existence, and probably thought that the clergy must 
 deal with them. His aim was to make goodness 
 and piety modish, to turn the laugh against the 
 other side. He was the best of good company, 
 Lady Mary Wortley thought the best in the world. 
 Lord Carteret contrasted him in that lespect with 
 Steele. They were both, he said, the most agree- 
 able of companions at dinner. But Steele shone 
 more brightly at the beginning, and Addison at the 
 end. For by the time that Steele had drunk himself 
 down, Addison had drunk himself up. Addison's 
 convivial intemperance, the only kind of which he
 
 200 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 could be accused, was the vice of a shy man, whose 
 tongue wine unlocked. To none of his contem- 
 poraries would it have been imputed as a fault at 
 all. It is only because Addison resembled "a 
 parson in a tie-wig," that any account was taken of 
 the number of bottles he consumed. They cannot 
 have affected him much in the morning. His head 
 must have been very clear and cool when he 
 described Sir Roger and Will Honeycomb. 
 
 Jonathan Swift is an apparent exception to the 
 rule of mediocrity which marks the reign of Anne. 
 Swift's genius was in some respects peculiar. His 
 misanthropy was of later growth, or at least of later 
 development. His sardonic humour was con- 
 genital ; and the fierce indignation of which he 
 boasted on his tombstone was excited by what ap- 
 peared to him the hypocrisy of mankind. To Swift 
 it was hypocrisy if a weak woman showed a little 
 more sorrow for the death of a friend than she really 
 felt. As a writer of prose or verse he fell in with 
 the temper of his time by the closeness of his reason- 
 ing, and the sobriety of his style. Any kind of 
 religious excitement moved his bitter scorn. Of 
 hero-worship he was incapable, and he could not 
 understand why the man who won the battle of 
 Blenheim should be spared by the scribes of the 
 party to which he was opposed. That Swift as an 
 Englishman owed his liberty and independence to
 
 LITERATURE 201 
 
 Marlborough, did not occur to him, or did not strike 
 him as relevant. It would have been sham, cant, 
 heroics, to take account of such sentimentality. 
 The supreme art of Swift was in strict accordance 
 with the rational, sceptical, positive spirit of the age. 
 He had the gift, perhaps in fuller measure than any 
 other controversialist, ancient or modern, of putting 
 one side of a case so simply, forcibly, and clearly 
 that there seemed to be no other. The Conduct of 
 the Allies is one striking instance of this peculiar 
 talent. The Letter to the October Club is another. 
 Both pamphlets were written to order. On neither 
 subject is it likely that Swift had any strong opinion 
 of his own. In both cases, however, the argument 
 is put from his employers' point of view with such 
 masterly clearness, precision, and emphasis that it 
 does not even seem to be one-sided. In the Conduct 
 of the Allies, he had to prove that Holland and the 
 Empire profited by a war for which England paid. 
 In his Letter to the October Club, his theme was the 
 impossibility of Harley and St. John having done 
 more than they actually did to gratify the wishes 
 of their followers. It would be difficult to imagine 
 two more utterly different topics within the political 
 sphere. Swift treats them both with the same ease, 
 and with the same indefinable air of expert insight 
 into every move of the game. Burke's magnificent 
 treatise on the causes of discontent is far beyond
 
 202 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the range of Swift in eloquence, in imagination, and 
 in statesmanship. But Burke always rouses an- 
 tagonism, never fails to suggest that there must be 
 considerations which he ignores. What made 
 Swift so consummately dexterous a controversialist 
 was the dry light of cold reason which he shed upon 
 the dispute. The slave of party as he was, no Pro- 
 fessor of Mathematics could in appearance be more 
 completely abstracted from all passion or prejudice 
 than he. If anybody wants to see what Swift could 
 be like when his self-love was wounded, and he 
 really cared, let him read those awful verses on 
 the Irish Parliament called The Legion Club. In 
 Queen Anne's days, before his final retirement to 
 Dublin, he wrote up Harley, and wrote down Marl- 
 borough, with as much semblance of impartiality 
 as if he were proving a proposition of Euclid, with 
 all the bias of an advocate, and all the dignity of a 
 judge. The dignity was not genuine. Swift 
 boasted of the rudeness which his cloth protected. 
 He never knew his own place, and he was always 
 trying to take somebody else's. It was only when 
 he handled his pen, and became the man of letters, 
 that his false pride fell away, and his intellect 
 worked with unerring singleness of aim. He 
 believed in neither Whigs nor Tories. He did 
 not even believe in their honesty. The Tories 
 had taken him up when the Whigs dropped him.
 
 LITERATURE 203 
 
 and in serving the Tories he wreaked his vengeance 
 on the Whigs. He exhausted his powers of sar- 
 casm on the Irish bishops. The grapes were sour. 
 He wanted to be a bishop himself. Yet, if Swift 
 did not feel the restraint of his profession, he felt 
 the influence of his time. He is never bombastic, 
 never turgid, never obscure. His humour is never 
 forced, always spontaneous, irrepressible, unex- 
 pected. His art is higher than Pope's because it 
 conceals itself. Whether or no he actually said that 
 "a man should write his own English," he acted 
 upon the saying. Rabelais and La Rochefoucald 
 were this strange parson's favourite reading. To 
 them, to Cervantes, and to the classics of Greece and 
 Rome, rather than to any English author, he was 
 indebted for whatever was not original in his style. 
 There is scarcely in all Swift's voluminous writings a 
 single reference to Shakespeare, who was too great 
 for the eighteenth century, and simply bewildered 
 its critics. According to Spence, Pope enumerated 
 the best English comedians as Etherege, Vanbrugh, 
 Wycherley, Congreve, Fletcher, Jonson, and 
 Shakespeare. Thomas Parnell, author of The 
 Hermit, an Irish clergyman, who helped Pope in 
 translating Homer, and drank himself to death 
 after the loss of his wife, a martyr, as Spence 
 quaintly says, to conjugal fidelity, was more in the 
 correct line of poetry than the author of plays which
 
 204 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Gibber then edited, and sonnets which nobody then 
 read. Voltaire's opinion that Shakespeare is a bar- 
 barian was really the opinion of Pope, and Pope was 
 the arbiter of taste. There is more wit in Love's 
 Labour Lost than in all Pope, and yet if Love's 
 Labour Lost were lost itself, the fame of Shakes- 
 peare would not appreciably suffer. The patient 
 industry, the ingenious felicity, and the sound taste 
 of Lewis Theobald, have done more than the 
 editions of Pope, of Malone, or even of Johnson, 
 to redeem the eighteenth century from the charge of 
 ignoring what it could not understand. 
 
 Men of letters in Queen Anne's time were so 
 closely connected with public life that their careers 
 are part of history, and necessary to explain it. 
 Swift was a far more practical statesman than 
 Bolingbroke, and Harley lives not in the legislation 
 of the period, but in the verse of Pope. Literature 
 lasts when politics are forgotten, and hundreds 
 know Prior as a poet, who would not recognize the 
 Treaty of Utrecht under the name of "Matt's 
 peace." And yet a biography of Prior, who was 
 neither a professional politician nor a member of 
 the governing class, would involve reference to the 
 principal events both in William's reign and in 
 Anne's. His patron was the magnificent Dorset, 
 Charles Sackville, author of that lovely song "To 
 all you ladies now on land," and the patron also of
 
 LITERATURE 205 
 
 Dryden. Educated at Westminster and Cam- 
 bridge, a Fellow of St. John's the great Tory- 
 college, Prior went early into the diplomatic 
 service, and acted as secretary at the Hague in the 
 negotiations which concluded William's campaigns 
 with the Treaty of Ryswick. Four years later he 
 became member for East Grinstead in the last Par- 
 liament summoned by William of Orange, and on 
 the accession of Anne he joined the Tory party. 
 His political convictions were skin-deep, but he 
 knew on which side his bread was buttered, and 
 Toryism under Anne was in the long run the creed 
 that paid. "Prior," said Pope in his candid- 
 friendly way, "was less fit for business than even 
 Addison, though he piqued himself much upon his 
 talents for it." That was not the opinion of Prior's 
 employers. Whig or Tory, Halifax or Bolingbroke. 
 It was not the opinion of Swift. Nor would Prior 
 have been sent, as he was, on delicate and difficult 
 errands if he had merited Pope's malignant sneer. 
 At the outset of his career Prior made the mistake 
 of premature anticipation. The triumph of the 
 Tories was not yet, and the Whigs took from him 
 his Commissionership of Trade. Not till 171 1, 
 when Oxford had succeeded Godolphin, was he 
 again taken into public employment, and made a 
 Commissioner of Customs. The Whigs treated 
 him more hardly than the Tories treated Congreve,
 
 2o6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 for whose Commissionership of Licenses Halifax 
 
 interceded with Harley in 1708, and received 
 
 the Virgilian answer 
 
 " Non obiusa adeo gesiamtis pectora Poem, 
 Nee tarn aversits eqiios Tyria sol jungit ab tirbe." 
 
 In 171 1 Prior suddenly found himself at the very 
 centre of affairs, plunged into business of the high- 
 est national and European importance. While 
 Marlborough was in the Netherlands, preparing 
 to renew the campaign and outmanoeuvre Villars, 
 Louis made overtures of peace to Great Britain 
 through de Torcy and Gaultier. These proposals 
 were communicated to Heinsius at the Hague by 
 Lord Raby, created Earl of Strafford with the title 
 of his great-uncle Wentworth. Heinsius, not un- 
 naturally annoyed, attempted to deal on his own 
 account with the French King. This unsuccessful 
 effort was made in April, and in July Lord Oxford, 
 never precipitate, thought that the time had come 
 for a special mission to France. The utmost 
 secrecy was observed, not merely in fraud of the 
 public, but with the more particular object of de- 
 ceiving the Duke of Marlborough. Oxford and 
 St. John looked about them for a trusty and skilful 
 envoy who could accompany Gaultier. Their 
 choice fell upon Matthew Prior. It must be borne 
 in mind that Prior was a professional diplomatist, 
 not merely a man of letters. But his friendship
 
 LITERATURE 207 
 
 with St. John arose from common tastes, and 
 to patronize genius without condescension was 
 Oxford's worthiest aim. Prior amply justified the 
 confidence reposed in him. His enterprise was full 
 of difficulty, and not unattended with danger. At 
 first his course was smooth. He crossed with Gaul- 
 tier from Dover to Calais in a fishing-boat, and was 
 well received at Fontainebleau. De Torcy had 
 known him at the Embassy in Paris, and Prior was 
 just the sort of Englishman that Frenchmen liked. 
 The British demands, however, were not such as 
 de Torcy could have pleasure in submitting to his 
 royal master. So far as Spain and Philip of 
 Anjou were concerned, St. John, or Prior, was not 
 exacting. He would be satisfied with a stipulation, 
 as easy to grant as it would be easy to break, that 
 the same person should never inherit the French and 
 Spanish Crowns. A much more practical, and a 
 much less flexible, demand was that Spain should 
 give Great Britain in all commercial matters the 
 terms of the most favoured nation. For, while 
 Louis had at one time supposed France to be in- 
 vincible in war, he had never cherished the delusion, 
 at least since he revoked the Edict of Nantes, that 
 his subjects could compete on equal terms with 
 Englishmen in affairs of trade. Another formidable 
 demand Prior had also been instructed (perhaps at 
 his own suggestion) to put forward at the same
 
 2o8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 time. The right of supplying the Spanish planta- 
 tions with negro slaves must be transferred from the 
 French company, which then held it, to the hands 
 of British merchants. Besides these economic 
 advantages, real or imaginary, some territorial con- 
 cessions were prescribed. Spain was to yield Gib- 
 raltar and Port Mahon. Newfoundland and Hud- 
 son's Bay were to be surrendered by France. Prior 
 supported these proposals with a vigour and ability 
 which entirely refute the malice of Pope. Eiigland, 
 he said, had not the least desire to injure the pros- 
 perity of other nations. Monopolies were bad for 
 every one. Free trade was good for all. The 
 Spaniards had misemployed their exclusive powers, 
 and it was time that these should be shared by more 
 enlightened communities. If the Archduke Charles 
 were King of Spain, he would readily grant the 
 commercial facilities required. If the right of 
 Philip were acknowledged, the least he could do in 
 return would be to prove himself as liberal as 
 Charles. Mr. Frederick Wyon, in his valuable 
 History of Great Britain during the Reign of 
 Queen Anne, sarcastically observes that Charles 
 might well promise what he could not perform, and 
 that the Allies, having failed to drive Philip from 
 Spain, could scarcely expect to be put in the same 
 position as if they had succeeded. This is a fallacy. 
 There was one war, not two wars, and the Spaniards
 
 LITERATURE 209 
 
 were in the same boat with the French. Even in 
 Spain GibraUar had been taken by Rooke. But the 
 victories of Blenheim, RamilHes, Oudenarde, and 
 Malplaquet were quite as material to the issue as if 
 they had been won upon Spanish soil. Marl- 
 borough, not Peterborough, had made this country 
 the master of the situation. 
 
 Prior was not a Plenipotentiary. If the terms 
 offered through him were rejected, he could only 
 go home, and report tho failure of his mission. 
 Louis, however, was unwilling to break off negotia- 
 tions. Believing that he could induce the British 
 Government to moderate their demands, he ap- 
 pointed a representative of his own to accompany 
 Prior. Accustomed during a long life to lean upon 
 the exertions of others, and to appropriate the fruits 
 of their successes, Louis had acquired an insight 
 into character which would have been more remark- 
 able in a private man. On this occasion he selected 
 a merchant of Rouen, Manager by name, who not 
 only understood the West Indian trade, but was 
 also an adroit and prudent diplomatist. And now 
 Prior approached the most perilous part of his 
 adventures. Hitherto inviolable secrecy had been 
 preserved. But England was not France. For 
 fifteen years there had been no censorship of the 
 Press, and the editor of the Daily Courant was on 
 the look-out for news. Ever since the dismissal of
 
 2IO QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Godolphin the Whigs had been seeking without 
 finding an opportunity for revenge. They could 
 not hope for a better chance than the discovery of 
 the business which brought Mt^nager to London 
 with Prior. Accident favoured them. Early in 
 August, Prior, Manager, and Gaultier landed at 
 Deal. Their too obvious anxiety to elude notice 
 excited the suspicion of the local magistrates, who 
 had them followed, and arrested them at Canter- 
 bury. They were, of course, released by an order 
 from the Secretary of State, so soon as St. John 
 heard of their mishap. But it was too late. Prior, 
 though he gave another name, had been recognized 
 by an officer of the customs at Deal, and the story 
 was at once published not merely in London, but 
 also in Amsterdam. The public, however, had not 
 discovered much. Nothing was known of Manager, 
 and even Swift, who prided himself on the especial 
 accuracy of his information, was completely in the 
 dark. Manager was privately presented to the 
 Queen, who received him graciously, but he was 
 directed to remain in his lodgings during the day, 
 and to take the air at night. He held nocturnal 
 meetings, most of them at Prior's house, with 
 Oxford, St. John, Shrewsbury, Dartmouth, and 
 Jersey. Edward Villiers, first Earl of Jersey, who 
 then held the office of Lord Chamberlain, was a 
 Jacobite, and in the pay of France. He died, how-
 
 LITERATURE 211 
 
 ever, on the 26th of August, and his colleagues were 
 in no hurry to alter the proposals already made. 
 Menager tried in vain to elicit from the English 
 statesmen how far they would support the demands 
 of the Empire and of the Dutch States. Oxford and 
 St. John were not the kind of men to risk their own 
 necks, or to trust the mercy of their political oppo- 
 nents. While they were havering about the fortifi- 
 cations of Dunkirk, the secrecy of their interview 
 was maintained, and even when Menager took leave 
 of the Queen at the end of September, he was 
 brought to her room in Windsor Castle by the back 
 stairs. It was not till the 13th of October that the 
 Daily Courant obtained from the Minister of the 
 Empire, Count Gallas, to whom they had been 
 confidentially imparted, the preliminary articles of 
 peace. They appeared at an unlucky moment, four 
 days after the arrival at Spithead of the squadron 
 despatched under Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker 
 and General Hill to take Quebec. General Hill was 
 Mrs. Masham's brother, a totally incompetent per- 
 son, whom Marlborough had refused to promote. 
 His expedition had ignominiously failed, the French 
 were confirmed in their hold upon Canada, and now 
 it transpired that the Government were prepared to 
 throw away the fruits of the war by recognizing the 
 grandson of Louis as King of Spain. To get rid 
 
 of Count Gallas by handing him his passports was 
 p 2
 
 212 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 simple enough. He iiad abused his position by a 
 breach of confidence, and had acted as an open ally 
 of one political party in the State to which he was 
 accredited. But no enforcement of diplomatic regu- 
 larity, however justifiable, could make it popular to 
 surrender what Marlborough had won while Marl- 
 borough himself was actually in the field. 
 
 Prior had served the Government faithfully, and 
 was not responsible for carrying out his instruc- 
 tions. When the Peace Congress was appointed 
 to meet at Utrecht on the ist of January, 1712, Lord 
 Oxford desired that Prior should be named a third 
 Plenipotentiary with Bishop Robinson of Bristol, 
 Lord Privy Seal, and the Earl of Strafford. Straf- 
 ford, however, was what we now call a snob, and 
 objected to being associated with a man of Prior's 
 plebeian origin. A modern Minister would have 
 dispensed with the services of the nobleman who 
 had troubled him on such frivolous grounds. 
 Oxford, perhaps under pressure from the Queen, 
 withdrew the name of the only Plenipotentiary who 
 is remembered, or worth remembering, now. St. 
 John at least had no sympathy with the vulgarity 
 of the foolish Earl. When at the close of the 
 Session of 1712 he had been created Viscount 
 Bolingbroke, as a reward for services which it would 
 have been difficult to specify, he started for Paris 
 to settle with de Torcy the questions not solved at
 
 LITERATURE 213 
 
 Utrecht. His companions were Prior, and the in- 
 evitable Gaultier, a Catholic and a thoroughgoing 
 Jacobite. Bolingbroke,who loved mystery, resorted 
 to pseudonyms. But by this time Prior's face was 
 familiar both at Dover and at Calais. Even if he 
 had really wished to escape recognition, which may 
 be doubted, Bolingbroke would certainly have 
 failed. He was received with acclamations, which 
 were intended quite as much for Prior as for him. 
 This time it was arranged without any difficulty 
 that Philip should renounce the throne of France, 
 that the French Bourbons should renounce the 
 throne of Spain, and that in default of heirs to 
 Philip the Spanish Crown should devolve upon the 
 Duke of Savoy, who would have Sicily for his 
 pains, with the title of King. That the inhabitants 
 of Sicily, or Spain, or France had anything to do 
 with these prospective arrangements would have 
 been regarded as preposterous both by Bolingbroke 
 and by Prior. A very different objection occurred 
 to them. How would these renunciations be en- 
 forced ? Louis himself had broken most of the 
 engagements he made. Why should his kinsfolk 
 and descendants be more scrupulous than himself ? 
 Bolingbroke suggested that the States General 
 should be convoked, and should ratify the pledges 
 of the Royal family. Louis would, of course, listen 
 to no such proposal. A great many things had to
 
 214 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 happen before a King of France admitted that there 
 was any French institution not subordinate to him- 
 self. Louis had been much elated by the successes 
 of Villars in the absence of Marlborough. He 
 received Bolingbroke with the most flattering atten- 
 tion, feeling instinctively that if this man had been 
 at the head of affairs in England, France would still 
 be the first military power in Europe, and the 
 Treaty of Utrecht would have been another Treaty 
 of Dover. The States General were not to be men- 
 tioned. Englishmen did not understand France. 
 But Louis could rely upon Bolingbroke to help him 
 against Marlborough, and the English charlatan, 
 who was worth far more to France than the costly 
 diamond given him by Louis, went home to pro- 
 claim a truce of four months, which was celebrated 
 by several bonfires. Prior, who had received the 
 King's portrait set in diamonds, remained in charge 
 of the Embassy at Paris. The correspondence 
 between him and Bolingbroke when not strictly 
 official was affectionate and familiar. It was "my 
 dear Harry" and "my dear Matt." Madame de 
 Parab^re, who must have been strangely uncom- 
 fortable at the Court of Madame de Maintenon, was 
 taught in the more congenial company of Prior to 
 drink the healths of "Harre et Robin," Henry Lord 
 Bolingbroke and Robert Lord Oxford. Shrews- 
 bury was despatched to sign the treaty. Prior
 
 LITERATURE 215 
 
 Stayed at Paris so long as Queen Anne lived. At 
 her death he was recalled in disgrace, being too 
 much implicated in Bolingbroke's designs for 
 bringing over the Pretender to be employed by a 
 Whig Minister or a Hanoverian Sovereign. But 
 while his own party were in power, he was trusted 
 by Bolingbroke, and perhaps by Oxford, with 
 secrets which might have brought them to the block. 
 Jonathan Swift was a man of very different calibre 
 from Prior's. Although he sometimes descended 
 to write for his party what he must have known was 
 nonsense, he had the mind of a statesman, and 
 would have been a far better Minister than either 
 St. John or Harley. Swift lived in politics, and 
 was a clergyman merely by accident. He was 
 only twenty-six when Sir William Temple sent 
 him to urge upon the King his arguments in 
 favour of the Triennial Bill. Swift's dependent 
 position in the household of Temple had inspired 
 him with a ferocious hatred of all persons in 
 authority who did not show him personal respect. 
 He came to London in 1705 at the age of thirty- 
 eight, already a disappointed man. Temple had 
 died without doing anything for him, and Temple 
 was a Whig. What would the other Whigs do ? 
 They did not care for parsons, and they did nothing. 
 Swift had been at school with Congreve, then at the 
 height of his literary fame. Congreve made him
 
 2i6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 acquainted with Charles Montague HaHfax, the 
 Whig M^cenas of the age. But HaHfax was out 
 of office, and his successor Godolphin knew more 
 about race horses than hterature. Swift went back 
 to his benefice in Ireland a sad and sour man. But 
 it was not until he returned to London in 1707 on 
 the business of Queen Anne's Bounty, which he 
 wished to extend to Ireland, that he discovered the 
 full iniquity of which Whigs were capable. They 
 took little interest in Queen Anne's Bounty, or in the 
 Irish Church, or in the Reverend Jonathan Swift. 
 He left England in deep disgust, and attacked the 
 Irish Presbyterians in his Letter on the Sacramental 
 Test. Next time he came to London, in 17 10, when 
 the Journal to Stella begins, he was more success- 
 ful. The Tories, especially St. John, took him up, 
 settled his business, and secured him as their scribe 
 for the remainder of Anne's reign. It may be 
 doubted whether any Englishman has ever wielded 
 more practical and immediate influence with his pen 
 than Swift exercised during this period. He could 
 appeal to any class of readers, from the highest to 
 the lowest. He never missed his point, or failed in 
 controversy to get home. He never shrank from 
 attacking greatness, as in Marlborough, or valour, 
 as in Cutts, or virtue, as in Somers. He feared no 
 man's intellect, and he was too much engrossed in 
 his subject to think of the ultimate consequences to 
 which his proposals might lead. The Journal to
 
 LITERATURE 217 
 
 Stella begins with his arrival at Chester on his way 
 from DubHn in September 1710. Godolphin had 
 just been removed from office, and ParUament was 
 about to be dissolved. When the General Election 
 had confirmed Harley and St. John in power, they 
 turned to Swift as their best penman, and he fought 
 their battles in the Examiner. Swift was an ideal 
 journalist. He was always clear, forcible, and per- 
 suasive ; never hazy, ambiguous, or obscure. He 
 wrote the best English, scholar's English, free from 
 foreign idioms, cant phrases, mannerisms, and 
 tricks of style. His humour preserved him from 
 the temptation to fine writing, and enabled him to 
 put the case of his opponents in a ludicrous shape. 
 His audacity has never been surpassed. In Novem- 
 ber 1 710 he gravely argued that the best means of 
 paying for the war would be the repudiation of the 
 national debt. Swift was strictly honest in private 
 life, and punctilious in the discharge of pecuniary 
 obligations. Yet he could make a flagrantly dis- 
 honest proposal in a public journal, because it 
 would be popular with the party he served. The 
 national debt, like the standing army, was Whig. 
 Country gentlemen had no money in the funds, and 
 the landed interest regarded commercialism as the 
 enemy. Therefore the clerical moralist, who knew 
 perfectly well the meaning of what he said, calmly 
 suggested a clean slate as the policy, not of a 
 Turkish, but of a British, Administration. Harley,
 
 2i8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 a Downing Street man if ever there was one, cannot 
 have regarded as serious Swift's proposal for the 
 repeal of the eighth commandment. His own way 
 of raising funds was a lottery, which the public 
 opinion of the time did not condemn. He was, no 
 doubt, willing enough that his predecessors should 
 be attacked as rogues and traitors for upholding 
 the honour of their country, and paying her debts 
 by fair means. Swift did not stop there. He 
 counted the price of Marlborough's glories, elabo- 
 rately comparing his salaries, pensions, and Parlia- 
 mentary grants with the laurel crown and the copper 
 medals of a Roman conqueror. No man was a hero 
 to Swift, and no hero has been more open to 
 criticism than Marlborough. But by this satire, 
 clever as it is, the writer did himself more harm 
 than he did the Duke, and the ribald parson who 
 wrote the Tale of a Tub seemed a strange champion 
 for defenders of the Church. 
 
 Swift's social success, however, was quite as great 
 as his political services were valuable. Although 
 he seldom smiled, and never laughed, his drollery 
 was irresistible, and his eccentric behaviour added 
 to the joke. Harley and St. John flattered him by 
 calling him Jonathan. He lived, dined, and in his 
 sober way drank, with the wits. Prior became his 
 constant companion. Addison, who seldom let 
 politics interfere with friendship, delighted in
 
 LITERATURE 219 
 
 Swift's sardonic humour, so unlike his own. Pope 
 looked up to him with an awe and reverence which 
 he felt for no other human being. Arbuthnot trum- 
 peted his fame, and copied his style. They even 
 endured his puns, in which Swift, unlike most 
 genuine humourists, took great pleasure. Many of 
 these were execrable, as he frankly admitted him- 
 self, protesting that he learned the trick from Stella. 
 The best that survives is a Latin one. A lady had 
 knocked a violin off a table with th6 sleeve of her 
 mantle. Swift quoted, with exquisite neatness — 
 
 ^^ Mantua vcb miser cb iiimium vicina Cretnona:.''^ 
 
 Swift had a curious fascination for women. He 
 puzzled, amused, and frightened them. He differed 
 from other men, for he never made love. He had 
 no home life. If the fine ladies of his acquaintance 
 heard of the mysterious friend in Ireland, they 
 would have been attracted all the more. Swift 
 showed them no mercy. It was not in his nature to 
 be chivalrous. He felt no respect for women, unless 
 they had minds, and used them. But he would talk 
 in a boudoir by the hour, and write comic verses 
 by the hundred for the mistress of it, if the fancy 
 took him. His Verses, Wrote on a Lady's Ivory 
 Table-Book are worth quoting, not merely for their 
 excellence, but also because they show what Swift 
 really thought of the other sex.
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 " Peruse my leaves through every part, 
 And think thou sees my Owner's Heart, 
 Scrawled o'er with Trifles thus, and quite 
 As hard, as senseless, and as light ; 
 Exposed to every coxcomb's eyes, 
 But hid with caution from the wise. 
 Here you may read {Dear charming Smtt/), 
 Beneath (A new Receipt for Paint) : 
 Here in Beau-spelling {Jru iel deth). 
 There in her own {for an el breth). 
 Here {Lovely Nymph pronounce 7ny Doom)^ 
 There {a safe Way to use Perfume) ; 
 Here a page filled with Billet-Doux ; 
 On t'other side {laid out for shoes) : 
 {Madam, I die without your grace), 
 Item, {for half a yard of lace) 
 Who that had wit would place it here, 
 For every peeping Fop to jeer ? 
 
 Whoe'er expects to hold his part 
 In such a Book, and such a Heart, 
 If he be wealthy, and a Fool, 
 Is in all points the fittest Tool ; 
 Of whom it may be justly said. 
 He's a Gold Pencil tipped with Lead. 
 
 Of Swift's ways with men there are endless stories. 
 Perhaps the best and most characteristic is Pope's 
 experience as recorded by Spence : 
 
 "One evening Gay and I went to see him : you 
 know how intimately we were all acquainted. On 
 our coming in: 'Heyday, gentlemen,' says the 
 doctor, * what's the meaning of this visit ? How 
 come you to leave all the great lords, that you are 
 so fond of, to come hither to see a poor dean ? ' 
 ' Because we would rather see you than any of
 
 LITERATURE 221 
 
 them.' ' Ay, any one that did not know you so 
 well as I do might believe you. But, since you are 
 come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose ? ' 
 ' No, doctor, we have supped already.' ' Supped 
 already ! that's impossible ; why, 'tis not eight 
 o'clock yet.' ' Indeed we have.' ' That's very 
 strange : but if you had not supped, I must have 
 got something for you. Let me see, what should I 
 have had ? a couple of lobsters ? ay, that would have 
 done very well; — two shillings; tarts: a shilling. 
 But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though 
 you supped so much before your usual time, only 
 to spare my pocket ? ' ' No, we had rather talk with 
 you than drink with you.' ' But if you had supped 
 with me, as in all reason you ought to have done, 
 you must have drunk with me. A bottle of wine : 
 two shillings. Two and two is four ; and one is five ; 
 just two and sixpence a piece. There, Pope, there's 
 half a crown for you ; and there's another for you, 
 sir: for I won't save anything by you, I am deter- 
 mined.' This was all said and done with his usual 
 seriousness on such occasions ; and in spite of every- 
 thing we could say to the contrary, he actually 
 obliged us to take the money." 
 
 It is impossible always to believe Pope, he told 
 so many lies, usually from pure love of mystification. 
 But this story is too odd not to be true. No one, 
 not even Pope, would have thought of inventing
 
 222 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 it. We may perhaps feel doubtful whether Pope 
 quite understood Swift's meaning. Swift, of 
 course, knew his own reputation for narrowness, and 
 suspected his visitors of conspiring to save him 
 the expense of their entertainment. His pride was 
 touched, and he would not take advantage of their 
 early meal. Yet still the ruling passion was strong. 
 The quantity of wine suggested was remarkably 
 small for the age of Anne. Swift's oddities must 
 have been heightened by the gown and bands which 
 he habitually wore. He was below the middle 
 height, his garb was not at that time held in high 
 esteem, but Swift himself was universally dreaded 
 for his temper and his tongue. Although he dis- 
 liked and despised most of his brother clergymen, 
 he insisted that the clerical profession should be 
 treated in his presence with respect. When he 
 closed his series of articles for the Examiner with 
 the prorogation of Parliament in 171 1, he might 
 boast that he had turned the tables against the 
 Whigs. He had made many people believe that 
 Marlborough fought for his own hand, that Godol- 
 phin plundered the nation, and that Harley was a 
 stern, unbending patriot, a "soul supreme." One 
 instance will prove the lengths to which Swift would 
 go in exalting Tories over Whigs. It is the almost 
 inconceivably loathsome copy of verses called 
 Description of a Salamander, and published in 17 1 1 .
 
 LITERATURE 223 
 
 Salamander Cutts, John Lord Cutts of Gowran in 
 the Irish Peerage, distinguished himself at the battle 
 of Blenheim, and was famous for his coolness under 
 fire, whence his nickname. But he was also a Whig 
 Member of Parliament, and therefore Swift, four 
 years after his death, assailed him with a venomous 
 scurrility which he would certainly not have used 
 while Cutts was alive. When the dead man's sister 
 complained to the Lord Treasurer, Swift loftily ad- 
 vised his patron to take no heed of such trifles. He 
 was not even ashamed of mentioning the Salamander 
 to Stella. Swift's greatest service to the Tory party, 
 greater even than his Letter to the October Club, 
 was his Conduct of the Allies. So far as it pro- 
 tested against a continuance of the war, it was 
 unanswerable, and served the interests of the nation 
 no less than the prospects of the Tories. His 
 satirical ballad on Daniel Finch, Earl of Notting- 
 ham, which begins with the words "An Orator 
 dismal of Nottinghamshire, who had forty years let 
 out his conscience for hire," though it enraged 
 Nottingham himself, made both Whigs and Tories 
 laugh at the pomposity of that tiresome pedant, who 
 was, however, a perfectly honest man, as Swift must 
 have known. The Duchess of Somerset, from her 
 singular hold upon the Queen, was a more formidable 
 enemy. Swift called her an insinuating woman, and 
 was never tired of demanding that the Lord Treasurer
 
 224 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 should remove her from the Court. Oxford, how- 
 ever, was pretty w^ell convinced that if he made any 
 such attempt he was far more likely to be removed 
 than she. The Duke, who was always intriguing-, 
 he did succeed in dismissing from the Cabinet before 
 the end of 171 1. The Duchess, so long as Anne 
 lived, was immoveable. If Abigail INIasham's rank 
 had been higheri, she might have succeeded the 
 Duchess of Marlborough as Mistress of the Robes. 
 But Anne was a stickler for precedent and custom. 
 Her Mistress of the Robes must be a Duchess, and 
 even a Percy was not too proud to take the post. 
 Once there, the Duchess of Somerset knew how to 
 make herself indispensable, often as Swift might 
 vent his spleen upon "Carrots from Northumber- 
 land." When he thought of "Carrots," even in 
 writing to Stella, he cursed and swore. His entry 
 for the gth of December, 171 1, gives a vivid picture 
 of the terror w hich her Grace inspired in him, and 
 the many victims of his pen would have been con- 
 soled if they could have seen how their persecutor 
 shivered, the man who accused Marlborough of 
 cowardice. 
 
 "I was this morning with the Secretary (St. 
 John) ; we are both of opinion that the Queen is 
 false. I told him what I heard, and he confirmed 
 it by other circumstances. I then went to my friend 
 Lewis (Erasmus Lewis, the diplomatist), who had
 
 LITERATURE 225 
 
 sent to see me. He talks of nothing but retiring 
 to his estate in Wales. He gave me reasons to 
 believe the whole matter is settled between the 
 Queen and the Whigs ; he hears that Lord Somers 
 is to be Treasurer, and believes that, sooner than 
 turn out the Duchess of Somerset, she will dissolve 
 the Parliament, and get a Whiggish one, which 
 may be done by managing elections. Things are 
 now in the crisis, and a day or two will determine. 
 I have desired him to engage Lord Treasurer, that 
 as soon as he finds the change is resolved on, he 
 will send me abroad as Queen's Secretary some- 
 where or other, where I may remain till the new 
 Ministers recall me ; and then I will be sick for five 
 or six months, till the storm has spent itself. I 
 hope he will grant me this ; for I should hardly trust 
 myself to the mercy of my enemies while their anger 
 is fresh. I dined to-day with the Secretary, who 
 affects mirth, and seems to hope all will yet be 
 well. I took him aside after dinner, told him how 
 I had served them and had asked no reward, but 
 thought I might ask security ; and then desired the 
 same thing of him, to send me abroad before a 
 change. He embraced me, and swore he would take 
 the same care of me as himself, etc., but bid me 
 have courage, for that in two days my Lord 
 Treasurer's wisdom would appear greater than ever ; 
 that he suffered all that had happened on purpose, 
 Q
 
 226 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and had taken measures to turn it to advantage. I 
 said ' God send it ; ' but do not believe a syllable ; 
 and, as far as I can judge, the game is lost. I shall 
 know more soon and my letters will at least be 
 a good history to show you the steps of this 
 change." 
 
 St. John never took quite such good care of any 
 one else as he took of himself. But he was habit- 
 ually kind to Swift, and on this occasion Oxford 
 joined in reassuring that faint heart. Swift's idea 
 of a diplomatic appointment, which may have been 
 suggested by the despatch of Bishop Robinson to 
 Utrecht, came to nothing, and was not seriously 
 regarded by his friends. His immediate fears were 
 quieted on the 29th of December, 171 1, when the 
 Queen agreed to the creation of twelve new Peers, 
 and the Duchess of Somerset was forgotten. The 
 charge of double dealing, often made by Swift 
 against Anne, who hated him, during these trans- 
 actions, seems to be unfounded. The Queen stood 
 by her Tory Ministers to the point of turning out 
 the Duke of Marlborough, and even the Duke of 
 Somerset. The Duchess of Somerset she retained 
 on private and personal grounds, such as Queen 
 Victoria pleaded when she refused to part with her 
 Ladies of the Bedchamber in 1839. Somerset him- 
 self had the honour of following, though not of 
 accompanying, Marlborough. It is amusing to find
 
 LITERATURE 227 
 
 that Swift wrote, when Marlborough was dismissed, 
 "I do not love to see personal resentment mix with 
 public affairs." Swift's vivid insight into other 
 people's characters did not extend to his own. 
 
 His reward was not the diplomatic one he ex- 
 pected. His Journal to Stella closes with his depar- 
 ture for Ireland in May 17 13, to be installed in the 
 Deanery of St. Patrick's, which had been conferred 
 upon him in April. He then considered his friends 
 to be safe in office, and regarded himself, not with- 
 out reason, as the cause of their being still there. 
 The time had come to think of his own prospects. 
 Swift's ambition had no sordid taint. His habits 
 were simple and frugal. He was generous to Stella 
 and Mrs. Dingley. He was quite content to be 
 poor. But he was conscious of immeasurable 
 superiority to all the bishops and other clergymen 
 of his acquaintance. He expected and demanded 
 ecclesiastical promotion from the Government which 
 he had served as faithfully and unscrupulously as 
 Cardinal Wolsey served Henry the Eighth. If the 
 Government had been able to do exactly as they 
 pleased, Swift would probably have been first 
 Bishop of Hereford, and then Archbishop of York. 
 The Archbishop of York, John Sharp, who died in 
 1 7 14, was a favourite with Queen Anne, and did not 
 conceal his opinion that Swift was quite unfit to 
 be a bishop. Swift always believed that Sharp 
 Q 2
 
 228 
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 prevented his appointment to Hereford, but it is 
 doubtful whether the Queen would have allowed it 
 in any case. Her Majesty looked upon Swift as an 
 obscene atheist who disgraced his gown, and to 
 argue with her was like arguing with a mantelpiece 
 or a stone wall. Happily for Swift an Irish see 
 became vacant at the beginning of 1713. The 
 Queen would indeed by no means consent that he 
 should have it, or a Canonry of Windsor, which 
 also fell in at the same time. But the Dean of 
 St. Patrick's was ready to become Bishop of Dro- 
 more, and the patronage of the Deanery belonged 
 by custom to the Duke of Ormond as Lord Lieu- 
 tenant. So the bargain was struck without preju- 
 dice to the virtue of good Queen Anne. One last 
 service Dean Swift rendered to his patrons, and his 
 gratitude on this occasion was certainly no sense of 
 favours to come. His Public Spirit of the Whigs, 
 published in 17 14, was an answer to Steele's Crisis', 
 for which a Tory House of Commons expelled the 
 author. Swift might have suffered a more severe 
 punishment than expulsion if he had not concealed 
 his authorship of this pamphlet with unusual care. 
 For it consisted chiefly of an attack upon the Union 
 with Scotland, written in language studiously in- 
 sulting to the Scottish nation. "Imagine," he said, 
 "a person of quality prevailed upon to marry a 
 woman much his inferior and without a groat to her
 
 LITERATURE 229 
 
 fortune, and her friends arguing that she was as 
 good as her husband because she brought him as 
 numerous a family of poor relations and servants 
 as she found in his house." The reckless malignity 
 of this and similar gibes was denounced by the 
 House of Lords as a scandalous and seditious libel. 
 The Queen offered a reward of three hundred 
 pounds for the name of the author, which was never 
 publicly divulged, and Oxford, after falsely telling 
 the Lords that he did not know who wrote the 
 pamphlet, sent Swift a bank bill for a hundred 
 pounds. 
 
 The Public Spirit of the Whigs is discreditable 
 to Swift's patriotism. He knew better than to sup- 
 pose that England was injured by the Union with 
 Scotland. On one point, however, it does help to 
 clear his fame. He has been accused of being a 
 party to Jacobite intrigues while he professed, like 
 Atterbury, allegiance to Queen Anne. No Jacobite 
 would, in 1 7 14, have gone out of his way to express 
 scorn and contempt for the only part of Great 
 Britain from which the Pretender could look for 
 any support. That Swift was incapable of subter- 
 fuge under stress of personal danger cannot be 
 affirmed by any one acquainted with the whole of 
 his career. But he was habitually veracious, and 
 his word was his bond. It is weak men, not strong 
 men, who tell lies. Two years after everything was
 
 230 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 over, when Swift had retired finally to Dublin, and 
 left the strife of British politics, so far as they did 
 not concern Ireland, for ever, on the 22nd of Novem- 
 ber, 1 7 16, Archbishop King of Dublin wrote to him 
 from London on ecclesiastical business, and con- 
 cluded his letter with these significant words : "We 
 have a strong Report that my Lord Bolingbroke 
 will return here, and be pardoned ; certainly it must 
 not be for Nothing. I hope he can tell no ill story 
 of you." To this letter Swift at once replied. King 
 was one of the few people he respected, and he is 
 supposed to have trusted the archbishop with the 
 secret of his life. The first part of this familiar 
 epistle is taken up with protestations of Boling- 
 broke's innocence, which were quite sincere, because 
 the writer did not know the truth, then only known 
 at St. Germains. There follows this solemn and 
 emphatic passage : "But, whether I am mistaken or 
 no in other men, I beg your Grace to believe that I 
 am not mistaken in myself. I always professed to 
 he against the Pretender; and am so still. And 
 this is not to make my Court (which I know is 
 vain) for I own myself full of Doubts, Fears, and 
 Dissatisfactions; which I think on as seldom as I 
 can : yet, if I were of any Value, the Public may 
 safely rely on my Loyalty ; because I look upon the 
 coming of the Pretender as a greater evil than we 
 are like to suffer under the worst Whig Ministry
 
 LITERATURE 231 
 
 that can be found." Swift ends this letter with the 
 words "I beg your Grace's blessing." It seems to 
 me beyond all question sincere; and, if so, it proves 
 that Swift was never a Jacobite. Throughout his 
 public career he always maintained that the Tories 
 were not Jacobites, but true Church of England 
 m.en, and that the Queen detested the Pretender, 
 whom, though he was her father's son, she never 
 knew. To suppose Swift a Jacobite is to suppose 
 him as dishonest as Bolingbroke and as stupid as 
 Oxford. He was not a scrupulous politician. But 
 at treason and Popery he drew the line. Boling- 
 broke concealed from him the essential circumstance 
 of his own intrigues with the Pretender, knowing 
 his friend's regard for "the Security of the Pro- 
 testant Succession in the House of Hanover: not 
 from any partiality to that illustrious House, further 
 than as it hath had the honour to mingle with the 
 Blood Royal of England." In a melancholy retro- 
 spect, called Some Idle Thoughts upon the Present 
 State of Affairs, and referring to the year 17 14, Swift 
 took leave of the busy scene where he had played 
 so powerful and conspicuous a part. " It may 
 serve," he wrote, "for a great lesson of Humiliation 
 to mankind to behold the Habits and Passions of 
 Men otherwise highly accomplished triumphing 
 over Interest, Friendship, Honour, and their own 
 personal Safety, as well as that of their Country;
 
 232 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and probably of a most gracious Princess who hath 
 entrusted it to them. A Ship's Crew quarrelHng in 
 a Storm, or while their Enemies are within Gunshot, 
 is but a faint idea of this fatal infatuation." The 
 reign of Anne could have no more fitting epilogue 
 than this masterly little essay, which Swift wrote 
 from his retirement in Berkshire after the failure of 
 his efforts to reconcile Oxford and Bolingbroke. 
 The real Swift cannot be better expressed than in 
 the words which he wrote to his fondest admirer 
 Pope on the 27t?h of September, 1725 : "I have ever 
 hated all nations, professions, and communities, and 
 all my love is towards individuals : for instance, I 
 hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love counsellor such 
 a one, and judge such a one. It is so with physi- 
 cians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, 
 English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But princi- 
 pally I hate and detest that animal called man ; 
 although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and 
 so forth. This is the system upon which I have 
 governed myself many years (but do not tell) and 
 so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have 
 got materials toward a treatise proving the falsity 
 of that definition animal rationale, and to show it 
 should be only rationis capax. Upon this great 
 foundation of misanthropy (though not in Timon's 
 manner) the whole building of my travels is erected ; 
 and I never will have peace of mind, till all honest
 
 LITERATURE 233 
 
 men are of my opinion : by consequence you are to 
 embrace it immediately, and procure that all who 
 deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so 
 clear, that it will admit of no dispute ; nay, I will 
 hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree on the 
 point." That is the true key to the meaning of 
 Gulliver's Travels, and to the nature of Jonathan 
 Swift. 
 
 A more striking contrast to the character of Swift 
 could hardly be imagined than the character of 
 Addison, whom every one that knew him loved, 
 including Swift himself. Addison's influence upon 
 politics, though far less than Swift's, is not to be 
 despised. Always a staunch and consistent, though 
 a rational and moderate, Whig, he received, soon 
 after his election as a probationer fellow of Mag- 
 dalen, a pension of three hundred a year from 
 Halifax, then first Lord of the Treasury, that he 
 might qualify himself for the diplomatic service 
 by foreign travel. This was in 1699. When he 
 returned from France and Italy, Germany and 
 Holland, in 1703, Halifax had long been out of 
 office, William the Third was dead, and Addison's 
 pension had been stopped by the frugal Ministry of 
 Godolphin. His very poor poem on Blenheim, 
 however, was rewarded with a Commissionership ; 
 he was successively Under-Secretary of State to 
 Sir Charles Hedges and to the Earl of Sunderland;
 
 234 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and after the Whig victories at the polls in 1708, 
 he became Chief Secretary to Wharton, Lord 
 Lieutenant of Ireland. He was then Member for 
 Malmesbury in the British House of Commons. At 
 Westminster he never spoke, being unable to 
 conquer his natural shyness, even when he became 
 a Secretary of State under George the First. In the 
 Irish House of Commons he did venture to address 
 a smaller and quieter audience. But it is never- 
 theless true that no man of letters, before or since, 
 has risen so high in politics as Addison by means 
 of literary talent alone. It was while he lived in 
 Ireland, with the uncongenial company of Wharton, 
 that Addison began to write for Steele's Taller, 
 published on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, 
 when the country post went out of London. 
 Addison's articles in the Taller are not as a rule 
 political. It was after he and his friends had been 
 turned out of ofhce, in 1710, that he wrote for the 
 Whig Exayniner against Swift. Although the 
 General Election crushed the W^higs, Addison was 
 returned without opposition for Malmesbury, and 
 Swift admitted, perhaps with excessive modesty, 
 that in Addison as a political journalist he had for 
 once found his match. During the months of 171 1 
 and 17 1 2, when the Speclator appeared, the Tories 
 were in office and in power. The Speclator, though 
 its two principal contributors were Addison and
 
 LITERATURE 235 
 
 Steele, was not avowedly political. Sir Roger de 
 Coverley, the Tory squire, took more hold upon 
 the public than Sir Andrew Freeport, the Whig 
 merchant. But Addison, whose exquisite tact pre- 
 vented him from ever preaching out of season, lost 
 no good opportunity of putting in a word for the 
 Protestant Church and the House of Hanover. 
 He was always true to his principles, and never 
 deserted his colours. His tragedy of Cato, acted 
 at Drury Lane in 17 13, was treated by the Whigs 
 as a Whig play, though the resemblance of Whar- 
 ton, or even of Halifax, to Cato was far from 
 obvious. Bolingbroke made a palpable hit by 
 sending for Barton Booth, who played the title- 
 part, and giving him fifty guineas, public money no 
 doubt, for defending the cause of liberty against 
 a perpetual dictatorship. The point was double- 
 edged, because Caesar refused the proffered crown, 
 whereas Marlborough had asked to be made Captain 
 General for life. At the death of Anne, Addison 
 was engaged upon the eighth volume of the Spec- 
 tator^ which he conducted during six months of 
 its prosperous existence without the help of Steele. 
 Steele himself, who became Member for Stock- 
 bridge, in Hampshire, at the General Election of 
 17 13, did not shine as a politician. He was greeted 
 on rising in the House of Commons with cries of 
 "Tatlerj" which, though really compliments, were
 
 236 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 not SO intended, and his expulsion from the House, 
 scandalous as it was, would have been impossible 
 if he had understood the temper of the assembly. 
 This ignominious transaction is redeemed by a 
 picturesque incident of a personal kind. The Earl 
 of Nottingham's eldest son, Lord Finch, tried to 
 speak for the first time on Steele's behalf. But 
 nervousness sealed his lips, and as he sat down, 
 he was heard to say, in artless language more 
 cheered than any eloquence would have been, "It is 
 strange that I cannot speak for this man, though 1 
 could readily fight for him." Steele had as many 
 friends as faults, though he had a faculty for getting 
 into scrapes which often tried his best friends hard. 
 It is painful, on the other hand, to record, on the 
 unimpeachable evidence of his own letters in the 
 Portland Correspondence, that Daniel Defoe urged 
 the Government to insist upon the expulsion of 
 Steele. Defoe's character will not bear much 
 scrutiny, or indeed any scrutiny at all. He was in 
 Harley's pay, and he did what Harley told him to 
 do, rather overacting the part than otherwise. His 
 books, by which he lives, were none of them 
 published in Queen Anne's reign. But his political 
 influence was not the less strong or marked because 
 it was exercised behind the scenes. In 1705 Harley 
 sent him to Scotland, and his correspondence shows 
 that he kept the Secretary of State exceedingly well
 
 LITERATURE 237 
 
 informed about the temper of parties and the minds 
 of men. Defoe was by inclination or conviction a 
 Whig, and his zeal on behalf of Nonconformists 
 had brought him to the pillory. The Presby- 
 terianism of Scotland was not uncongenial to his 
 taste. But in Edinburgh he was simply Harley's 
 agent, giving him the information, so valuable to a 
 Minister, about leading politicians and the way to 
 win them. It was, for instance, from Defoe that 
 Harley learnt how strong the feeling was in Edin- 
 burgh against English desertion of the Scottish 
 colonists at Darien. Although Defoe was one of 
 the greatest writers who ever used the English 
 language, he did not belong to the literary circle of 
 Swift and Addison and Pope. Pope said con- 
 descendingly, "that there was something good in 
 all he had written." He was not more scrupulous, 
 or more high-handed, than Pope himself. His 
 political influence, which was all through Queen 
 Anne's reign considerable, he wielded entirely and 
 exclusively with his pen. His own principles were 
 sound and enlightened, religious toleration and free 
 trade being their corner-stones. If he was not 
 always consistent, the explanation is that he varied 
 with his patron Harley, who procured his release 
 from prison in 1704, and always afterwards 
 employed him as an agent or spy. For a long 
 time he supported Marlborough and Godolphin
 
 238 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 in their policy of continuing the French war after 
 Ramillies. He defended, from the Whig point of 
 view, the impeachment of Sacheverell. But when 
 Harley returned to office in 17 10, he engaged Defoe 
 to plead his cause in the Review, and that versatile 
 disputant then went over to the cause of peace. 
 Defoe never troubled himself about consistency, and 
 he had no character to lose. The public devoured 
 what he wrote without regard for his personality, 
 because he had the gift of making the wildest 
 fiction or the merest imagination look like sober 
 truth, so that it was read by thousands and believed 
 of course. His arguments, on the other hand, were 
 convincing, and his grasp of economic science was 
 unusual in his age. He had done much to allay 
 the financial panic which followed the dismissal of 
 Godolphin, by proving that the security for the 
 public funds and the national debt was parlia- 
 mentary, not ministerial, thus counteracting, so far 
 as he could, the mischievous advocacy of repudia- 
 tion to which Swift stooped. Defoe's Review was, 
 as we have seen, killed by the statute against know- 
 ledge, the Stamp Act of 17 12. But his pen could 
 not be idle, and in 17 13 his irony, surpassed only 
 by Swift's, brought him again into misfortune, as 
 it had led him to the pillory ten years before. Then, 
 he had held the mirror up to High Churchmen by 
 pretending to be one himself. Now, he wrote as
 
 LITERATURE 239 
 
 a Jacobite, and the Jacobites did not like it at all. 
 But it was the Whigs who, very foolishly, took 
 action. Perhaps they had not forgiven Defoe for 
 his able, though unsuccessful, support of that com- 
 mercial treaty with France which was appended 
 to the Treaty of Utrecht. They might certainly 
 have known better than to suppose that his two 
 pamphlets, called respectively Reasons against the 
 Succession of the House of Hanover, and Con- 
 siderations of the Advantages of the Pretender's 
 possessing the Crown of Great Britain, meant 
 what their titles implied. Defoe's object was purely 
 satirical. He had no more wish to help the 
 Pretender than Swift had to make the Irish people 
 eat babies, or to abolish Christianity by law. But 
 the M^igs were so much afraid of Jacobite plots 
 that they felt like men living on a volcano, and 
 Anne could not bear to be reminded of any suc- 
 cessor, Jacobite or Hanoverian. Defoe was taught 
 once more by practical experience how dangerous a 
 gift the sense of humour may be. In this case its 
 consequences could only be averted by a pardon 
 under the Great Seal. 
 
 Defoe, however, did not stand alone among his 
 contemporaries as a victim of transcendent gifts. 
 The Deanery of St. Patrick's, that symbol of dis- 
 appointed ambition, was far worse than a pillory to 
 Swift. There was scarcely a bishop in the Church
 
 240 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 of Ireland or the Church of England for whom Swift 
 did not feel intellectual contempt. In his essay on 
 the Fates of Clergymen, contrasting the neglected 
 genius with the promoted dullard, he has displayed 
 the bitterness of his soul. The least unhappy period 
 of his unhappy life is covered by the Journal to 
 Stella. He was then a leading and dominating 
 figure in a society which has never been surpassed 
 for wit, ease, and charm. How dull the Court was 
 at this time we know from Swift himself. "There 
 was a Drawing-room to-day," he writes to Stella 
 on the 8th of August, 171 1, "but so few company 
 that the Queen sent for us into her bedchamber, 
 where we made our bows, and stood about twenty 
 of us round the room while she looked at us round 
 with her fan in her mouth, and once a minute said 
 about three words to some that were nearest her, 
 and then she was told dinner was ready, and went 
 out." Very different was the company which Swift 
 habitually kept. It had its seamy side. There was, 
 for instance, Mrs. Manley, author of a scandalous 
 book called the New Atlantis, and a woman of 
 notorious character, whom he was not ashamed 
 to employ in the work of libelling Whigs. But 
 on the other hand there were Addison, Prior, St. 
 John, Congreve, Arbulhnot, and Pope. "I think 
 Mr. St. John," he wrote to Stella, "the greatest 
 young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty,
 
 LITERATURE 241 
 
 quickness of apprehension, good learning, and an 
 excellent taste ; the best orator in the House of 
 Commons, admirable conversation, good nature, 
 and good manners; generous, and a despiser of 
 money." Beauty is an odd constituent in masculine 
 greatness, and Swift goes on to say that he will 
 not answer for this paragon's sincerity. But other- 
 wise it is a fascinating portrait, and St. John did 
 not, like Alexander, reign alone. Lady Mary 
 Wortley, who knew all the wits, and was an 
 excellent judge, declared that there was no company 
 in the world like Addison's. There was nothing 
 that Swift regretted more in politics than the cool- 
 ness they made for a time between Addison and 
 him. Arbuthnot, whose racy, humorous style did 
 much to help the negotiations for peace at a pinch, 
 was one of Swift's most intimate friends, and a 
 hundred years after the Tory doctor's death 
 Macaulay wrote : "I love Arbuthnot." Congreve's 
 oral epigrams are said to have been as witty as 
 his comedies, which are wittier than Sheridan's. 
 When Bentley was asked why Pope put him in 
 the Dunciad, he said, "I talked against his Homer, 
 and the portentous cub never forgives." But the 
 portentous cub was never dull, as any one can see 
 who reads his letters. The literary people of those 
 days were sociable in a degree and to an extent 
 which we can hardly understand. In Spence's
 
 2 42 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Anecdotes we read that "Addison's chief com- 
 panions, before he married Lady Warwick (in 1716), 
 wer Steele, Budgell [Eustace Budgell, afterwards a 
 victim of the South Sea Bubble], Philips [Ambrose 
 Philips, author of Pastorals], Carey [Henry Carey, 
 author of Sally in our Alley], Davenant [Charles 
 Davenant, the economist], and Colonel Brett 
 [Henry Brett, M.P.]. He used to breakfast with 
 one or other of them at his lodgings in St. James's 
 Place, dine at taverns with them, then to Button's, 
 and then to some tavern again for supper in the 
 evening : and this was then the usual round of his 
 life." In another anecdote, Pope says that Addison 
 studied all the morning, and then dined at Button's, 
 where in his own little senate he made laws, and 
 sat attentive to his own applause. Button was his 
 own servant, whom he established at a coffee house 
 in Russell Street, opposite the defunct Will's, 
 which is sacred to the memory of Dryden. Steele's 
 idolatrous veneration for Addison, who sometimes 
 played a little on him, excited kindly mirth. But 
 most of us wish we had had the chance of showing 
 it. Addison was the most characteristic genius of 
 that age, for Swift belongs to no age in particular, 
 and Marlborough was simple efficiency idealized. 
 There are no mysterious depths in Addison's 
 thought, and no unapproachable heights in his 
 style. His refined scholarship, his delicate humour,
 
 LITERATURE 243 
 
 his dignified courtesy, his exquisite breeding, his 
 simple piety, and his unwilHngness to give pain, 
 make up the characteristics of a Christian gentle- 
 man. The absence of enthusiasm and the pre- 
 dominance of reason fix a type which was not 
 superseded as an object of imitation for seventy 
 years after his death. 
 
 R 2
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 
 
 During Queen Anne's childhood at St. James's 
 Palace, the society of the Court, and of fashionable 
 London, was in the full swing of reaction against 
 the Puritan strictness of the Commonwealth. Never 
 before, and never since, not even under the 
 Regency or in the reign of George the Fourth, has 
 either the stage or the world of fashion been so 
 openly licentious and profane. With a few excep- 
 tions, such as Bishop Ken, who did not, however, 
 become a bishop until Anne was nineteen, the 
 Church of England made no protest against vice 
 in high places. The Church had regained its posi- 
 tion of ascendency, the King had his own again, 
 besides a good deal that was not his own, and all 
 was well. Anne's secluded life and careful educa- 
 tion kept her out of harm's way. Mrs. Barry, who 
 first appeared on the stage under Rochester's 
 patronage when the Princess was a child of eight, 
 taught Her Royal Highness the use of her voice 
 in public, and taught that exceedingly well. Anne's 
 
 other links with the world were Sarah Jennings, 
 
 244
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 245 
 
 and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards 
 Duke of Buckingham, who made premature love 
 to her, and was banished from the Court for so 
 doing by Charles the Second, when she was a girl 
 of seventeen. Her marriage with Prince George of 
 Hanover, the future George the First, had been 
 proposed and rejected a year before. A year later 
 she was actually married to a still duller George, 
 and her long series of misfortunes began. Through- 
 out the years of her maidenhood the rule of the 
 sinners, which superseded the rule of the saints, 
 continued, and she had been a wife for two years 
 when her gloomy father, who atoned for the ex- 
 cesses of his youth by an equally selfish austerity 
 of devotion, removed his brother's friends from 
 Whitehall. Five years before her own wedding 
 she had been introduced to Sarah's husband, John 
 Churchill, whose sister had been the mistress of 
 her own father, and who had himself been dis- 
 tinguished by another royal favourite, Barbara 
 Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, and Duchess of 
 Cleveland. The only charge ever made against 
 Anne herself was a love of brandy, and that rests 
 upon Jacobite malice. But the moral tone of the 
 society in which she lived was about as low as it 
 could be. The standard of public and private virtue 
 was on a par. The policy of the Cabal, and the 
 Comedies of Dryden, are a p/etty good counterpart
 
 246 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the one to the other. Charles the Second acted a 
 lie whenever he went to Church, and it was only 
 fear of the priests that checked the dull licentious- 
 ness of James. That the Princess Mary and the 
 Princess Anne should have grown up modest and 
 innocent in such surroundings is wonderful. They 
 both made excellent wives, though one was married 
 to a great man, and the other to a mere fool. But, 
 whereas Mary was true to the husband she idolized 
 even when he was not faithful to her, and had a 
 singularly amiable temper, the effect upon her 
 sister of the examples she saw was to plant in her 
 mind the seeds of suspicion and distrust. She lost 
 her mother, Anne Hyde, a woman of blameless char- 
 acter, when she was only six years old, and differ- 
 ence of religion was an insuperable barrier to all in- 
 timacy with her young stepmother, Mary of Modena. 
 Her only real friend of her own sex in youth, 
 Sarah Jennings, was a type of the woman fostered 
 by the Restoration, save in the one matter of con- 
 jugal fidelity, for which she indemnified herself by 
 scolding and storming at her illustrious husband. 
 Although she chose to call herself a Whig, Sarah's 
 real politics were avarice, pride, and the advance- 
 ment of her own family at the public expense. To 
 suppose her imbued with the principles of Locke and 
 Somers would be ridiculous. If she had any reason 
 for being a Whig, it was that she hated the Church,
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 247 
 
 and it was probably she who imbued Anne with 
 the notion that the Whigs were enemies of that 
 institution. What exactly it was that Anne meant 
 by the Church cannot easily be ascertained. She 
 was, and Sarah was not, a religious woman. But 
 to call the Church of the Restoration a religious 
 body is to strain a point. The Whigs of the 
 Revolution were Erastians. They were in favour 
 of the ecclesiastical Establishment. They were 
 willing to let its proctors sit in Convocation, and 
 its bishops attend the House of Lords. They 
 merely insisted on Dogberry's principle, "if two 
 men ride on a horse, one must ride behind," that 
 the Church should be servant, and the State should 
 be master. It is not to be supposed that Anne 
 ever formulated to herself the reverse of this pro- 
 position. It is more likely that she regarded the 
 Church as the one safeguard against moral evils 
 with which she had been brought into such early 
 contact. During the short reign of her father, 
 however, the Church of England appeared as the 
 champion of popular liberties, which happened for 
 the nonce to coincide with its own. The seven 
 bishops whom James prosecuted for not reading 
 the illegal declaration of independence were the 
 idols of the people, and their acquittal was the 
 signal of his downfall. William's accession pro- 
 duced a change, and indeed a reversal of parts.
 
 248 
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Five of the seven bishops, including Sancroft and 
 Ken, refused allegiance to a sovereign who did not 
 reign by divine right, and these non-jurors were 
 deprived of their sees. The abusive language in 
 which Anne wrote of William may have been partly 
 due to his conflict with the High Churchmen, and 
 it certainly brought her into serious disfavour with 
 Queen Mary. Whoever offended Mary offended 
 William ten times more. For the remainder of 
 Mary's life, the Princess Anne was made to feel 
 herself in disgrace by the withdrawal of official 
 homage to her rank, and by the dismissal of her 
 friends the Churchills from all the offices they 
 held. She accompanied them into their retirement, 
 and remained with them in seclusion until Miary 
 died. 
 
 The death of Mary, which completely shattered 
 for a time the adamantine fortitude of William, was 
 due to the most terrible scourge which had afflicted 
 Europe since the black death. Even in these days 
 of vaccination, cleanliness, and sanitary science 
 smallpox is a serious disease. In 1694, ^^^ long 
 afterwards, there was no remedy for it known to 
 the medical profession except careful nursing and 
 the strength of the patient. William himself 
 suffered from it, and had been saved by the extra- 
 ordinary devotion of his friend Bentinck, the first 
 Earl of Portland. Dr. Radclifife, whose name is
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 249 
 
 immortalized by the magnificent dome of the 
 library at Oxford, was reported to have most skill 
 in curing it. But it often baffled the physician, it 
 was especially fatal to the young, and it per- 
 manently disfigured many who survived the attack. 
 Sanitary science hardly existed in Queen Anne's 
 time, and the art of drainage was in a rudimentary 
 stage. Even fine ladies powdered and painted 
 more than they washed. Fresh air in a house was 
 regarded as neither necessary nor wholesome, and 
 baths were considered effeminate. The condition 
 of towns was such as to foster disease even in 
 palaces, and smallpox was so highly contagious 
 that it might be brought to a palace from a cottage. 
 Readers of Esmond will recollect the terror of Lord 
 Castlewood when he discovers that Harry may be 
 a source of infection, and yet Lord Castlewood was 
 a courageous man. Nothing could save Mary, and 
 her death was a turning point in the life of Anne. 
 She was now heir presumptive to the throne. Wil- 
 liam received her back into favour, and after four 
 years became reconciled to Marlborough. It was 
 her son's death in the year 1700 that made Anne 
 entirely dependent upon Sarah. After that she 
 took to signing herself "your infortunate Morley," 
 and it was indeed the crowning tragedy of the poor 
 lady's sad life. Only six of her seventeen children 
 lived long enough to be called by their names.
 
 250 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 The little boy whom William made Duke of 
 Gloucester was the single one that attained any 
 development of mind or character. After his loss 
 she became more sullen and moody. She had dis- 
 missed the first physician of the age, John Rad- 
 cliffe, because she disliked his uncourtly manners, 
 and her acquaintance with Dr. Arbuthnot was of 
 more recent date. The death of her father, in 1701, 
 made a considerable, though not a legal, change 
 in the position of Anne. Her succession to the 
 throne depended constitutionally upon the Bill of 
 Rights, and the Act of Settlement. But a large 
 number of Englishmen ceased to be Jacobites on 
 the death of James, because they did not think that 
 the person calling himself Prince of Wales was his 
 son. Anne herself believed for some time in the 
 story of the warming-pan, and some think that she 
 died believing it. In any case it was believed by 
 thousands, and no formal steps were taken, perhaps 
 could be taken, to refute it until it had become an 
 accepted legend. So long as James the Second 
 lived, the credibility of the tale, or the credulity of 
 the public, was immaterial. He, and he alone, 
 could be the lawful sovereign of those who held 
 the divine right of Kings. Many Jacobites were 
 willing to obey William the Third as the Chief 
 Magistrate whom Parliament had chosen to set 
 over them custos regni, as Sancroft called him, 
 King de facto in the language of the text writers.
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 251 
 
 but not de jure. But though they obeyed him, and 
 would have obeyed Anne in her father's lifetime, 
 their consciences would not have allowed them to 
 take the oath of abjuration. The old James gone, 
 and the young James assumed to be spurious, 
 there was no obstacle whatever to Anne's peaceful 
 and legitimate succession. Resentment against the 
 French King for acknowledging the Pretender 
 became doubly strong where it was thought that 
 the child he acknowledged was not the son of King 
 James and his Italian wife. 
 
 Thus, when Anne came to the throne, her sub- 
 jects might conveniently be divided into four 
 classes. There were those who held that she was 
 simply a usurper, and that their lawful ruler was 
 James the Third. They were energetic, but not 
 numerous, and mostly Catholics. Then came a 
 considerable proportion who waited for better 
 times, holding that, for the sake of peace, they 
 might recognize a Parliamentary arrangement of 
 which they did not approve. A third party, who 
 had been Jacobites while the dethroned monarch 
 lived, held the Pretender to be a mere impostor. 
 Lastly, there were the Whigs, who thought that 
 Parliament could do as it pleased, and that Anne's 
 title rested on the sure foundation of two statutes. 
 People who were not politicians were apt to reflect 
 that, after all, their Sovereign was a Stuart and a 
 woman. Her Stuart blood gave her a respectable
 
 252 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 degree of legitimacy, and the last woman who 
 reigned alone in England had been the greatest of 
 all her Sovereigns. Elizabeth, however, with her 
 many splendid attributes, had one sordid vice. She 
 grudged the payment of money actually due even 
 to the gallant sailors who had destroyed the power 
 of Spain, and made her mistress of the seas. Anne 
 was remarkably liberal. Besides her munificent 
 benefaction to the Church she gave a sixth part of 
 her Civil List, an annual sum of a hundred thou- 
 sand pounds, to the expenses of the war. Blenheim 
 Palace is estimated to have cost her not less than 
 two hundred thousand sterling ; and when she 
 finally dismissed the Duchess of Marlborough, 
 after innumerable provocations, from employment 
 at Court, she paid her old friend without demur the 
 exorbitant demands for pecuniary solace which that 
 unprincipled woman put forward. She spent com- 
 paratively little upon herself, and never bought a 
 jewel during her reign. She would not even pur- 
 chase the famous diamond brought home from 
 Madras by Governor Pitt, Lord Chatham's grand- 
 father, and sold after her death to the Regent 
 Orleans for about one fourth of its market value. 
 Until they quarrelled about matters unconnected 
 with money, she was a monarch after Godolphin's 
 own heart. The popular phrase "good Queen 
 Anne" had a very different meaning from the once
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 253 
 
 equally popular "good Queen Bess." The public 
 knew little or nothing of Anne's sullen disposition, 
 of the resentment which grew from continual brood- 
 ing over injuries and slights. They saw that, when 
 the Duchess of Marlborough lost her only son from 
 the prevalent scourge, the Queen showed her the 
 affectionate sympathy of a mother still more cruelly 
 bereaved. They felt the subsequent ingratitude of 
 the Duchess to be without excuse. They perceived 
 that Marlborough, though he had destroyed the 
 tyranny of F'rance, might have become a dangerous 
 dictator himself, if the Queen had granted his 
 request, and made him Captain General for life. 
 They respected Anne for her blameless conduct as 
 a wife, and for her steady devotion to the Church 
 which had attained the highest measure of its popu- 
 larity by resisting the unconstitutional despotism 
 of her father. To the dry philosophic Calvinism of 
 William the Church of England was only a shade 
 less repugnant than the Church of Rome. Queen 
 Anne loved the Church of her baptism, and 
 showed, so far as she could, most favour to those 
 clergymen who held its claims the highest. She 
 hated Dissenters ; and Dissenters were not popular 
 in her reign, when even to profess religious toler- 
 ance was to incur the reproach of schism, and the 
 suspicion of infidelity. 
 
 Anne had none of the personal dignity which
 
 254 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 belonged, at least in public, to Elizabeth. Her 
 wretched health was not favourable to the pre- 
 servation of queenly pomp, and her courtiers often 
 saw her in circumstances of ignominious helpless- 
 ness. Even strangers were sometimes admitted to 
 curious scenes. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik has left 
 in his Memoirs a quaint description of royalty at 
 Kensington in 1704. Sir John was a supporter of 
 the Union with Scotland, which the Queen had 
 much at heart, and while that measure was prepar- 
 ing, he was admitted to the private apartments, 
 through his patron the Duke of Oueensberry. "One 
 day," he says, not in the spirit of a courtier, or 
 perhaps of a gentleman, "one day I had occasion 
 to observe the calamities which attend human 
 nature, even in the greatest dignities of life. Her 
 Majesty was labouring under a fit of gout, and 
 in extreme pain and agony, and on this occasion 
 everything about her was much in the same dis- 
 order as about the meanest of her subjects. Her 
 face, which was red and spotted, was rendered 
 something frightful by her negligent dress, and 
 the foot afifected was tied up with a pultis and some 
 nasty bandages. I was much afifected at this sight, 
 and the more when she had occasion to mention her 
 people of Scotland, which she did frequently to 
 the Duke. What are you, poor mean-like mortal, 
 thought I, who talks in the style of a Sovereign? "
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 255 
 
 More interesting, because less trite, is the account 
 given by the same writer, of a second interview 
 with the Queen two years later, when the Union 
 had been successfully accomplished, with the 
 earnest encouragement and assistance of Anne her- 
 self. On this occasion Clerk kissed hands on his 
 appointment to be a Baron of the Exchequer in 
 Scotland. "I cannot remember this incident," he 
 adds, "without making this reflexion, as I have 
 done before that, tho' this great Queen had in her 
 short reign, I mean to the year I saw her, made a 
 very glorious figure in Europe by her armies and 
 fleets abroad, and even in bringing about the 
 Union of the two Kingdoms, which could never be 
 accomplished by any of her predecessors, tho' she 
 was in all respects arbitrix of peace and war in 
 Europe, and by her sovereign authority held the 
 Balance of Power in her hands, yet at the time I 
 was introduced to her to receive her commands for 
 Scotland, she appeared to me the most despicable 
 mortal I had ever seen in any station. The poor 
 lady, as I saw her twice before, was again under a 
 severe fit of the gout, ill-dressed, blotted in her 
 countenance, and surrounded with plasters, cata- 
 plasims (sic), and dirty little rags. The extremity 
 of her pain was not then upon her, and it diverted 
 her a little to see company with whom she was not 
 to use ceremonies, otherWays I had not been
 
 256 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 allowed access to her. However, I believe she was 
 not displeased to see anybody, for no Court 
 Attenders ever came near her. All the Incense and 
 adoration offered at Courts were to her Ministers, 
 particularly the Earl of Godolphin, her chief 
 Minister, and the two Secretaries of State; her 
 palace of Kensington, where she commonly re- 
 sided, was a perfect solitude, as I had occasion to 
 observe several times. I never saw anybody attend- 
 ing there but some of her Guards in 'the outer 
 Rooms, with one at most (sic) of the Gentlemen of 
 her Bedchamber. Her frequent fits of sickness and 
 the distance of the place from London, did not 
 admit of what are commonly called Drawing-Room 
 nights, so that I had many occasions to think, that 
 few Houses in England belonging to persons of 
 quality were kept in a more private way than the 
 Queen's Royal Palace of Kensington." It must 
 be remembered that Kensington w-as then a village 
 of gravel pits, with one handsome square before 
 the palace, far beyond the limits of London, 
 though a not unfashionable resort for Londoners 
 in search of fresh air. Swift, however, when he 
 was at Windsor in 171 1, drew a different and much 
 more agreeable picture. Among many references 
 to the Queen's love of hunting and sport, he 
 writes: "Mr. Vice Chamberlain lent me his horse 
 to ride about arid see the country this morning.
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNEIiS 257 
 
 Dr. Arbutlinot, the Queen's physician and favourite, 
 went out with me to the places : we went a httle 
 after the Queen and overtook Miss Forester, a maid 
 of honour on her palfrey talking the air ; we made 
 her go along with us. We saw a place they have 
 made for a famous horse-race to-morrow, where the 
 Queen will come. We met the Queen coming back 
 and Miss Forester stood like us with her hat off 
 while the Queen went by. ... I was tired with 
 riding a trotting mettlesome horse a dozen miles, 
 having not been on horseback this twelvemonth. 
 And Miss Forester did not make it easier; she is 
 a silly true maid of honour and 1 did not like her 
 although she be a toast and was dressed like a 
 man." 
 
 Anne's influence upon the society of her time, 
 wholesome so far as it went, was small. She dis- 
 couraged open licentiousness, though she could not 
 exclude Bolingbroke entirely from her counsels, and 
 she loathed the ribaldry even of so great a humor- 
 ist as Swift, though she could not prevent the Duke 
 of Ormond as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 
 making him a dean. It would have been impos- 
 sible for any woman, and even for any man, between 
 1 7 12 and 1 7 14, to check duelling, drunkenness, or 
 gambling. A gentleman insulted by a bully in his 
 own rank of society had then no choice but to fight. 
 Even Parliament was not a protection, and the Duke
 
 258 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 of Marlborough, after all his victories had been 
 won, invited a blackguard peer who had affronted 
 him in debate to "take the air in the country." This 
 particular encounter did not ensue, because the bully- 
 was also a coward. But duels were almost of daily 
 occurrence, and were not uncommonly fatal. They 
 were fought at Hampstead, at Paddington, in 
 Bloomsbury, even in Hyde Park, and it was never 
 thought necessary to leave England for the purpose. 
 Yet by the English law, then and always, duelling 
 was criminal, and to kill a man in a duel was murder, 
 even though the party who lost his life were the 
 party who sent the challenge. That no jury would 
 in the eighteenth century have convicted of a 
 capital crime a man who had fought according to 
 the rules is doubtless true. The utmost the Crown 
 could hope was a verdict of manslaughter, and the 
 sentence would have been a light one. Neverthe- 
 less duelling is a singular instance of public opinion 
 brought round by degrees to the law, not, as usually 
 happens, of the law moulded in accordance with 
 public opinion. 
 
 Duelling was fostered by drunkenness, and the 
 age of Anne was emphatically drunken. It would 
 be difficult to mention a single man in public life 
 who was habitually sober, except Marlborough, who 
 depended upon the clearness of his head. Swift, 
 who was a dean, and Atterbury, who was a bishop.
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 259 
 
 The fashionable dinner-hour was five, which 
 allowed plenty of lime for steady soaking, and for 
 suppers, when bottles could again be opened. Bur- 
 gundy was being gradually superseded by port in 
 the later years of the reign. Claret and sweet cham- 
 pagne were also coming into vogue. Immense 
 quantities of ale, home-brewed October, were con- 
 sumed in the country. In towns the most popular 
 drink was gin, but there was a considerable demand 
 for the more salutary cider. Many men, like 
 Harley, were scarcely sober before they began to 
 drink again. Their habits made them prematurely 
 old, and apoplexy or paralysis carried them off in 
 middle life. Gout was almost universal, and stone, 
 which required a surgical operation without anaes- 
 thetics, was very common. A drinking bout some- 
 times ended in a murderous quarrel, and sometimes 
 in what was called death from natural causes. 
 Societies for the promotion of temperance would 
 have been regarded as insane, and the law rather 
 encouraged than checked the consumption of excis- 
 able liquor. When gentlemen began seriously to 
 drink, ladies retired. But a man under the influence 
 of wine must have been one of the first sights to 
 which a girl entering society became accustomed. 
 It was perhaps partly for that reason that girls had 
 very little freedom, and were seldom allowed to 
 leave the house unaccompanied by some sort of
 
 26o 
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 duenna. On the other htmd, men were at great 
 pains to dress well, their behaviour was cere- 
 monious, and their compliments to the other sex 
 elaborate. They had almost as wide a range of 
 choice as women in the selection of costumes, and 
 if their wigs partly concealed their faces, their knee- 
 breeches set off their legs. The sword was even 
 more essential than the wig, in days when every 
 man might at any moment be required to defend 
 himself or his lady companion. A knowledge of 
 fencing was part of every gentleman's education, 
 and even in the streets of London it was not safe to 
 rely upon the forces of the law. The streets were 
 dimly lighted with oil lamps. The constables were 
 seldom nimble-minded, and not always able-bodied. 
 They had not altered very much since Shakespeare's 
 time, and were far more afraid of the Mohawks than 
 the Mohawks were of them. These Mohawks, or 
 Hawcubites, excited terror in 1712, and gave rise 
 to much the same kind of panic as the garrotters 
 established in London a hundred and fifty years 
 later. But they belonged to a very different order 
 of society. They were young blodds and men about 
 town who, from mere insolence and brutality, attacked 
 foot passengers of both sexes, beat them and cut 
 their noses. The rage of faction attributed their 
 exploits, without a particle of evidence, to a Whig 
 conspiracy, and Swift was so much alarmed by them
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 261 
 
 that, despite his habitual parsimony, he took to 
 hiring chairs. The importance of these particular 
 savages has been exaggerated by historians. They 
 were a transient, though embarrassing, phenome- 
 non, a phase of the lawless roystering which had 
 never reallv ceased since the Restoration. When 
 it reached scandalous proportions, the soldiers were 
 called out, and the sight of red coats had an im- 
 mediate effect. The true significance of the Mo- 
 hawks is that they svmbolize the barbarous cruelty 
 which underlay the ceremonious manners of the 
 age. The law itself was cruel. For small offences 
 culprits were still whipped, or burned in the hand. 
 All felonies, from grand larceny, or stealing goods 
 worth two pounds, up to murder, were alike capital. 
 The judicial Bench had vastly improved since the 
 Revolution, and prisoners were no longer brow- 
 beaten by the Judges. But they were not allowed 
 Counsel in cases of felony other than treason, and 
 the indictment, being in Latin, was very seldom 
 within their comprehension. At the Old Bailev 
 trials were conducted by the Citv Judges with 
 indecent haste, and wretches hanged that jurymen 
 might dine. Flogging in the army and navy was 
 inflicted without restraint. Press-gangs crimped 
 men for service in the fleet without regard to their 
 circumstances or situation. Arrest for debt, which 
 might mean lifelong imprisonment, was so common
 
 262 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 that bailiffs seized the Russian Ambassador in a 
 London street, and Chief Justice HoU, before whom 
 they were brought, could do nothing to them. The 
 Czar, however, in 17 12, was Peter the Great, whose 
 wrath, not unnaturally, knew no bounds, and led 
 to the passing of a statute which exempted foreign 
 diplomatists for the future. Peers and Members of 
 the House of Commons, with their servants, were 
 also protected, so that privilege of Parliament was 
 worth having in the eighteenth century, and did not 
 become absolutely meaningless until all arrest on 
 civil process was abolished in 1869. Humanity in 
 gaols was never thought of, and debtors' prisons 
 were as bad as any. Lunatics were chained and 
 flogged, under the horrible delusion that there was 
 no other safe way of treating them. Cockfighting, 
 bull-baiting, and even bear-baiting, were still 
 fashionable pursuits. Kindness to animals was 
 disregarded as mawkish sentimentalism. 
 
 Addison's account of the Tory foxhunter in the 
 Freeholder was written two years after the death of 
 Anne. But the time is too short to signify, and the 
 inimitable portrait of the man would do for any 
 period from the Dutch deliverance to the Hano- 
 verian Succession. That foxhunting implied Tory- 
 ism, Addison assumes as a matter of course. Whigs 
 attended race-meetings, and ran horses. Wharton, 
 for instance, did both, and usually won. But fox-
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 263 
 
 hunters in Addison's day were all, it seems, friends 
 of passive obedience, and enemies of foreign trade, 
 who considered Whigs to be dogs, whelps, and 
 curs. Witches and Presbyterians Addison's fox- 
 hunter held in equal horror. For the impossible 
 offence of witchcraft was still capital in Anne's 
 reign, and the foxhunter enlarged upon the happi- 
 ness of the neighbouring county, probably Wilt- 
 shire, where there was "scarce a Presbyterian except 
 the bishop." The foxhunter was against all foreign 
 alliances. "Our wooden walls," he said, "are our 
 security, and we may bid defiance to the whole 
 world, especially if they should attack us when the 
 militia is out." He was a logical protectionist, 
 maintaining that foreign trade was the ruin of Eng- 
 land. Addison, a free trader before Adam Smith, 
 reminded him that all the ingredients in the punch 
 they were drinking came from abroad except the 
 water. At this point the landlord ran to the rescue, 
 and observed with a humour too Addisonian to be 
 quite in character, that "there was no liquor like a 
 cup of English water provided it had malt enough 
 in it." Foxhunting soon became a national sport 
 and ceased to be identified with passive obedience. 
 But Addison's paper illustrates very well the social 
 condition of the English squires under the last of 
 the Stuarts. They were ignorant, for there was 
 little education either at school or college, except
 
 264 
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 in the case of those who, from ambition or love of 
 learning, educated themselves. The only tests 
 were theological, and there were no examinations. 
 Travelling was slow, difficult, tedious, and expen- 
 sive. The squire who was not a Parliament man 
 seldom came even to London. He could not afford 
 it. He knew, as a rule, little more than the labourers 
 on his estate, and had as little desire to rise. Eng- 
 land was an agricultural country, exporting corn, 
 importing most of the manufactures she consumed, 
 hardly suspecting the wealth of her coal, and feed- 
 ing her population from her own resources. There 
 was no overcrowding, and food was cheap. The 
 merchants who did business beyond the seas, like 
 Mr. Walter Shandy, whose trade had been with 
 Turkey, were mostly Whigs, hated rivals of the 
 landed interest. The character of Sir Andrew Free- 
 port in the Spectator is a faithful and sympathetic 
 description of a class to which the commercial 
 prosperity of England is mainly due. The South 
 Sea Company, founded in Queen Anne's reign, 
 came soon afterwards to a disgraceful and calamit- 
 ous end. The East India Company, which dates 
 from Charles the Second, was gradually rising to 
 the splendid position that might have lasted till our 
 own day if it had not been destroyed by the Indian 
 Mutiny in 1857. So early as 1687 the Directors of 
 that Company, merchant princes in every sense of
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 265 
 
 the word, declared that their will and pleasure was 
 to "establish such a polity of civil and military 
 power, and create and secure such a larjre revenue 
 as may be the foundation of a large, well grounded, 
 sure English dominion in India for all time to 
 come." Their rivals had been the Portuguese, and 
 were now the French. The Mogul conquest of 
 India was completed by Aurungzebe, whose long 
 reign came to an end in 1707. After his death his 
 empire fell gradually to pieces under incompetent 
 successors, and the Mahrattas who "asked no leave 
 of king or chief," plundered it at their will as they 
 rode through Hindostan. The great Frenchman, 
 Joseph Francois Dupleix, who was to dispute with 
 Clive for the paramount power of India, was yet 
 unknown. The possessions of the English Com- 
 pany, still small, were centred at Fort St. George, 
 in Madras. Their double duty, or at least their two- 
 fold business, was to negotiate for further territory 
 with native rulers, and to protect their valuable 
 monopoly from interloping traders, such as Thomas 
 Pitt, who, however, finally made terms with them, 
 and was for twelve years before 1709 President of 
 Fort St. George. He and other Nabobs "shook 
 the pagoda tree " with more energy than scruple, 
 coming home, if they survived the climate, to found 
 families and buy rotten boroughs, then openly sold 
 in the market by due process of law. Such was the
 
 266 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 origin of the Indian Empire, and of the British 
 Empire itself. The chief British colonies existing 
 in Queen Anne's time were those of North America, 
 to which Newfoundland was added by the Treaty of 
 Utrecht. They began with the arrival of the May- 
 flower in 1620. The charters taken from them by 
 James the Second were restored by William the 
 Third, who supported James's ally, William Penn, 
 the illustrious Quaker, in the foundation of Penn- 
 sylvania. Canada was still French ; and the 
 colonies were regarded with disfavour by the Tory 
 party as focuses of Whig politics and Nonconform- 
 ist schism. Scotland was looked down upon as a 
 nest of Presbyterian ism, which was as the sin of 
 witchcraft, and Ireland, who would willingly have 
 joined in a union with Great Britain if she could 
 have been assured of religious toleration, even for 
 the Protestant Nonconformists of the north, was 
 treated as a barbarous land, the home of wild Papist 
 rapparees. The ideal of the country party, which 
 ruled the roost from 17 10 to 17 14, was that good old 
 England should eat English beef, drink English 
 ale, and live on English corn. 
 
 In London, which had a population of half a 
 million, then thought stupendously large, coffee was 
 a favourite drink with the well-to-do, and coffee 
 houses were the resort of the people who now 
 frequent clubs. The first number of the Spectator
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 267 
 
 describes a few of these haunts. " Sometimes," says 
 the anonymous writer, "I am seen thrusting my 
 Head into a round of Politicians at Will's, and 
 listening with great Attention to the Narratives that 
 are made in those little Circular Audiences. Some- 
 times I smoak a Pipe at Child's, and while I seem 
 attentive to nothing but the Postman, overhear the 
 Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear 
 on Sunday night at St. James's Coffee-house, and 
 sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in 
 the Inner Room, as one who comes there to hear 
 and improve. My Face is likewise very well known 
 at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree, and in the Theatres 
 both of Drury-Lane and the Hay -Market. I have 
 been taken for a Merchant upon the Exchange for 
 above these ten years, and sometimes pass for a 
 Jew in the Assembly of Stock-jobbers at Jonathan's. 
 In short, wherever I see a Cluster of People, I 
 always mix with them, though I never open my 
 Lips but in my own Club." 
 
 Of these Clubs the Beefsteak, for actors, is the 
 only one which now survives. The reference in the 
 Spectator is probably to the Kitcat, a Whig Club, 
 founded in i6gg. The members of the Kitcat had 
 their portraits painted by Kneller, and it is only in 
 reference to the pictures that we now use the name. 
 Christopher Katt was the pastrycook in Shire Lane 
 over whose shop the club first met, consisting of
 
 268 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 thirty-nine Members, all attached to the Protestant 
 Succession. Among them were Marlborough, 
 Somerset, Sunderland, \Miarton, Halifax, and 
 Somers. Garth, Vanbrugh, and Congreve were the 
 literary stars. Of Congreve and Vanbrugh enough 
 has been said. Sir Samuel Garth, author of a poem 
 called The Dispensary, is better known from Pope's 
 description as 
 
 "Garth, the best good Christian he. 
 Although he know it not." 
 
 The mutton-pies of this distinguished society were 
 known as "kitcats." Their toasts, and the inscrip- 
 tions on their glasses, were still more famous. 
 When Prior was expelled from the Kitcat as a Torv, 
 he assisted St. John to found the Brothers, who 
 began to meet on Thursdays in 171 1 "for the im- 
 provement of friendship, and the encouragement of 
 letters," as St. John wrote to T.ord Orrery. Besides 
 St. John and Prior, Harley, Arbuthnot, "Granville 
 the polite," afterwards Lord Lansdowne, Peter- 
 borough, and Swift were Brothers. Bolingbroke's 
 extraordinarv reputation with men of his own time, 
 so difficult for posterity to understand, was not due 
 merely to his speeches in Parliament, brilliant as 
 they must have been. There was no Hansard in 
 Queen Anne's days, and it was a breach of privilege 
 to report what it would now be considered almost 
 a breach of privilege to suppress. Electors were
 
 SOCIE TY A ND ._ MA NNERS 269 
 
 not even entitled to know how their representatives 
 voted, and it was not the greatest orators who, Hkc 
 Lord Haversham, edited their own speeches for 
 pubhcation. The mere fact tliat Members never 
 addressed the pubhc in general, or their constituents 
 in particular, through the newspapers, may have 
 fostered the excellence of debate as such. It is diffi- 
 cult to judge from traditional fragments, or from 
 publications which may have owed much to a sub- 
 sequent waste of midnight oil. St. John's success 
 in the House of Commons was universally acclaimed 
 so long as he sat there. His talk in the Brothers' 
 Club, and at private dinners, fascinated a far more 
 critical and exacting audience than the merchants, 
 foxhunters, lawyers, and men about town, who sat 
 in St. Stephen's Chapel, between the existing 
 Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall. 
 Bolingbroke's great effort to use his conversational 
 powers, and his personal magnetism, for a public 
 object was a failure. On the very day of Oxford's 
 dismissal from office, the 27th of July, 17 14, he 
 entertained Stanhope, Craggs, Pulteney, and Wal- 
 pole, all Whigs, at his house in Golden Square. 
 It was only after they had separated without any 
 practical result, and after the project of putting the 
 Treasury into Commission had failed for want of 
 five respectable Commissioners on the Tory side, 
 that Bolingbroke in despair turned to Shrewsbury
 
 270 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 iind begged him to take Oxford's post. But Boling- 
 broke could dazzle, if he could not persuade. Pre- 
 eminently clubable, to use Dr. Johnson's word, in 
 a clubable age, he was the life and soul of the 
 Brothers, to whom even Swift considered it an 
 honour to belong. The Brothers were not a Club 
 in our sense of the term. They had no club-house, 
 no newspapers, no library. They dined at different 
 taverns, and were often charged sums which Swift, 
 the sober man among them, considered, not un- 
 justly, to be extortionate. Professing to despise the 
 toasts and merriment of the Kitcat, they met to talk 
 and to drink. They did not gamble. There were 
 gaming houses for those who liked them, and no 
 attempt was made to check a vice which public 
 lotteries under the sanction of the Legislature 
 directly encouraged. The expenses of the war were 
 provided by loans, taxes, and lotteries. But betting, 
 though common enough, was in those days the 
 pursuit of idlers rather than, as it afterwards became, 
 the relaxation of statesmen. Even Godolphin laid 
 most of his wagers at Newmarket, where the races 
 were actually run. As to shutting up those tables 
 which existed, it would have had to be done by the 
 army. The watch, who could not keep the streets 
 in order, nor prevent chairmen in search of a job 
 from levying blackmail upon foot passengers, would 
 have been as unfit for the purpose as Dogberry and
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 271 
 
 Verges themselves. Colley Cibber, who wrote his 
 Apology for his Own Life in the reign of George 
 the Second, says, with a truly insular spirit, "We 
 are so happy as not to have a certain Power among 
 us which, in another country, is called the Police." 
 Better, he thought, endure even disorder in the 
 Playhouse than fly to such a remedy as that. 
 
 The position of women in Queen Anne's reign 
 would now be regarded as intolerable. A married 
 woman was the slave of her husband, who could 
 compel her by force to live with him. Marriage was 
 indissoluble, except by Act of Parliament, and no 
 woman could obtain a divorce. All property 
 acquired or earned by a wife, except under settle- 
 ments, then just becoming known, was the property 
 of her husband, who could squander it without 
 redress in any way he pleased. He might even 
 beat her if he did not use too large and heavy a 
 stick, "reasonable chastisement" being legal in her 
 case, as in her children's. Extreme indulgence to 
 the licentiousness of the male sex was combined 
 with extreme severity to the victims of seduction, 
 especially if their offspring became chargeable upon 
 the parish. On the other hand, a pretty woman in 
 easy circumstances had a very agreeable life while 
 she was single, and a good deal of practical freedom 
 after matrimony had abridged her nominal rights. 
 The art of gallantry has never been more assidu-
 
 272 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 ously cultivated than by the beaux of Queen Anne. 
 Amongst the famous toasts of the Kitcat Club was 
 Marlborough's favourite daughter, the Countess of 
 Sunderland, called by her father "the little Whig." 
 Addison has described, as he alone could, the privi- 
 leges of those fair charmers whom he calls Idols. 
 "The Playhouse," he writes, "is very frequently 
 filled with Idols; several of them are carried in 
 Procession every evening about the Ring, and 
 several of them set up their worship even in 
 Churches. They are to be accosted in the language 
 proper to the Deity. Life and Death are in their 
 Power : Joys of Heaven and Pains of Hell are at 
 their disposal : Paradise is in their Arms, and 
 Eternity in every moment that you are present with 
 them. Raptures, Transports, and Ecstasies are the 
 Rewards which they confer; Sighs and Tears, 
 Prayers and broken Hearts are the Offerings which 
 are paid to them. Their Smiles make men Happy ; 
 their Frowns drive them to Despair. I shall only 
 add under this Head, that Ovid's Book of the Art 
 of Love is a kind of Heathen Ritual, which contains 
 all the Forms of Worship which are made use of to 
 an Idol." Then, with a delightful touch of the true 
 Addisonian humour, not lost upon a humorist of 
 our own day, Mr. Anthony Hope, the essayist con- 
 tinues, "I must here observe that those Idolaters 
 who devote themselves to the Idols I am speaking
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 273 
 
 of differ very much from all other kinds of Idolaters. 
 For as others fall out because they worship different 
 Idols, these Idolaters quarrel because they worship 
 the same." The art of flirtation, essentially a 
 feminine art, kept pace with masculine gallantry. 
 The word is derived from the use of the fan, intro- 
 duced from Spain; for unfurling that banner of the 
 sex comprehends, as the Spectator says, "several 
 little flirts and vibrations," all going to make up 
 the complicated verb to flutter, which might be, 
 as we learn from the same high source, "angry, 
 modest, timorous, confused, merry, or amorous." 
 An academy for training girls in the exercise of the 
 fan was also proposed in the Spectator, and would 
 perhaps have been almost as useful as the few girls' 
 schools of the period. For if the education of boys 
 was sadly imperfect, and if Dr. Busby of Caroline 
 fame was worshipped by Sir Roger, whose grand- 
 father he had flogged, as a distant memory, the 
 education of girls was hardly intellectual at all. 
 They learnt to cook, as only English women would 
 condescend to cook, and to sew. Most of them 
 could read, after a fashion, and a few, a very few, 
 could spell. Fine ladies despised orthography, 
 which, in the absence of etymological research, was 
 become matter of argument, or of guess. Even 
 proper names were variously composed, on prin- 
 ciples which may be roughly described as phonetic.
 
 274 
 
 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 according to the taste and fancy of the speller. 
 Some light is thrown by the invaluable Spectator 
 upon what the ladies of 171 1 read. There were no 
 novels, except some collections of short stories, such 
 as Mrs. Aphra Behn's, and The Grand Cyrus, 
 translated from the French of Mademoiselle de 
 Scudery, the only book in the lady's library 
 described by Addison which had "a Pin stuck in 
 one of the middle leaves." The Court of Cyrus was 
 the Court of Louis, and his real capital was Ver- 
 sailles. Addison's lady had also an English trans- 
 lation of Malebranche, which does not give a very 
 high idea of her literary accomplishments. For 
 some acquaintance with the French tongue, which 
 Marlborough is said to have known better than his 
 own, was then regarded as essential to an educated 
 woman, just as an educated man could not afford 
 to be ignorant of Latin, unless he was a soldier, 
 however complete might be his lack of science, 
 history, modern languages, and Greek. The lady's 
 copy of Locke on the Human Understanding had a 
 paper of patches in it, which meant, I presume, that 
 she had lost them. The classic authors, on the 
 other hand, were "in wood," while Mrs. Manley's 
 New Atlantis had a key to it. Tom Durfey's Tales 
 in Verse, which cannot have done their owner much 
 good, were "bound in Pvcd Leather gilt on the Back, 
 and doubled down in several Places." The lady
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 275 
 
 had Drydeii's Juvenal, which is coarser than Juvenal 
 himself, and somebody else's Virgil, which must 
 have been far inferior to Dryden's. Congreve's 
 Millamant in The Way of the World, perhaps the 
 most fascinating woman of the English drama 
 outside Shakespeare, was doubtless the type of 
 excellence in the younger circles of Queen Anne. 
 
 Besides the Duchess of Marlborough and Lady 
 Masham, the most prominent women in the Court 
 of Queen Anne were the Duchess of Somerset and 
 the Duchess of Shrewsbury. Charles Seymour, 
 sixth Duke of Somerset, was appointed Master of 
 the Horse on Queen Anne's accession. He had 
 been civil to Anne as a young Princess, when little 
 notice was taken of her, and continued in her favour 
 until he was dismissed with Marlborough in 171 1. 
 He was known as the Proud Duke, though what he 
 had to be proud of history does not disclose. His 
 wife, who was a Percy, the last Earl of Northumber- 
 land's daughter, succeeded the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough as Mistress of the Robes, and had great 
 influence with the Queen. She remained at Court 
 after the Duke had been turned out, and Swift's 
 impatience to get rid of her is one of the most 
 comical episodes in the Journal to Stella. Her lean- 
 ings were Whig, and opposed to Lady Masham's, 
 so that the two women were constantly struggling 
 
 for the poor Queen's soul. Swift called the Duchess 
 T 2
 
 2 76 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 a designing woman, because Iier designs were con- 
 trary to his own, and even alarmed him for his 
 personal safety. They did not procure, as he feared 
 they would, the dismissal of Oxford and Boling- 
 broke. But they were successful so far as she her- 
 self was concerned. For she retained her place 
 throughout the reign, and was chief mourner at the 
 Queen's funeral. Queen Anne was a stickler for 
 etiquette, and liked to have a Duchess as Mistress 
 of the Robes. The Duchess of Somerset was, more- 
 over, an English woman, whereas the Duchess of 
 Shrewsbury, though descended in the female line 
 from Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth's Earl of 
 Leicester, was an Italian. It was she who first gave 
 Swift the name of Presto, being unable to pro- 
 nounce his own, and was thought to have "wonder- 
 ful art in entertaining and diverting people, though 
 siie would sometimes exceed the bounds of decency." 
 She was, or thought herself, a Tory, and Lady 
 Cowper, who was a Whig, designates her as "the 
 most cunning, designing woman alive, obliging to 
 people in prosperity, and a great party woman." 
 Unlike her stately husband, a fine gentleman, and 
 a real scholar, she was a lively, agreeable rattle, 
 attractively indiscreet, and much admired by Swift, 
 whose neighbour she became in Ireland when the 
 Duke was Lord Lieutenant. Everybody liked the 
 Duke of Shrewsbury, and nobody trusted him. He
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 277 
 
 had been all things to all men, and was known as 
 the King of Hearts. Yet at the critical moment, 
 in the last days of July 17 14, it was Shrewsbury 
 as much as any one man who secured a peaceful 
 succession for the House of Hanover. 
 
 The England of Anne was not overpopulated. 
 There were no congested districts, and no factories. 
 The Poor Law dated from the reign of Elizabeth, 
 and justices of the peace had a theoretically un- 
 limited power of charging the rates for the relief 
 of the poor. The population of England was 
 scarcely greater than the population of London is 
 now, and the population of London then was about 
 equal to the population of Oldham at the present 
 time. It was the War of the Spanish Succession 
 which first raised the National Debt to a consider- 
 able figure. But the land tax was not augmented, 
 and there was no income tax at all. There were 
 heavy duties on the importation of goods from 
 abroad, partly for revenue, and partlv to encourage 
 native industries. The war drained the country of 
 able-bodied men, and no provision had been made 
 for the civil employment of soldiers when the Treaty 
 of Utrecht was signed. Chelsea Hospital had been 
 built for military veterans in the reign of Charles H ; 
 but otherwise those who had been fighting their 
 country's battles for years were left to starve, to beg, 
 to be a burden on the parish, or to swell the ranks
 
 278 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 of highwaymen, highway robbery being at that fime 
 a lucrative pursuit, of which the profits were large, 
 and in which the risks were small. 
 
 Defoe, who could not be happy for long without 
 a pen in his hand, conducted during the first decade 
 of the eighteenth century a journal which he called 
 the Revieiv, and of which he wrote the whole, or 
 almost the whole, himself. Although Defoe's 
 political conduct was not wise, and his relations 
 with Harlev are very little to his credit, he remained 
 in his published writings staunch to Whig prin- 
 ciples and to free trade. He satirized the Jacobites 
 with such successful irony that the Queen took him 
 to be a Jacobite himself, and Harley had solemnly 
 to assure his Sovereign that his facetious friend was 
 joking. He supported the unpopular Treaty with 
 France in 17 13, with arguments which Cobden might 
 have applied to the Commercial Treaty of i860. 
 Against bribery at elections, which there was then 
 nothing to check save public opinion, he declaimed 
 in words of almost brutal indignation. More light, 
 however, is thrown upon the habits of the times by 
 Defoe's curious outburst against begging. "If all 
 the beggars of this nation," he writes, "had a 
 charter to join themselves into a body, they would 
 be the richest corporation in the kingdom. The 
 disease is corroded ; the leprosy is on the walls ; 
 we are possessed with the begging devjl ; we have
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 279 
 
 poor without begging, and beggars without poverty. 
 Strange that nature can be depressed to so much 
 meanness, to ask a man's charity for mere covetous- 
 ness, and stoop to beg without want. How often 
 have we known men that have stood with a broom 
 in their hands to sweep a passage, and beg your 
 alms for God's sake, leave a thousand pounds in 
 gold behind them ? Two or three famous instances 
 of this we have had very lately, one of which has 
 left three thousand pounds to a charity." The laws 
 against vagrancy at this time were very severe. But 
 whipping sturdy beggars had about as much effect 
 as hanging highwaymen. It m.ade criminals more 
 desperate without subtracting from their number. 
 
 On this subject Addison wrote better, and with 
 more knowledge, than any of his contemporaries. 
 Into the mouth of his Whig merchant. Sir Andrew 
 Freeport, he has put language as sound and plain 
 as any to be found in the Wealth of Nations, which 
 did not appear till 1776. Addison introduces his 
 discourse, which occupies the two hundred and 
 thirty-second number of the Spectator, with his 
 usual simplicity and ease. "The other day," says 
 he, "as soon as we were got into his chariot, two or 
 three Beggars on each side hung upon the Doors, 
 and solicited our Charity with the usual Rhetorick 
 of a sick Wife or Husband at home, three or four 
 helpless little Children, all starving with Cold and
 
 28o QUEEN ANNE 
 
 Hunger. We were forced to part with some Money 
 to get rid of their Importunity; and then we pro- 
 ceeded on our Journey with the Blessings and 
 Acclamations of these People." Sir Andrew moral- 
 izes. What good, he asks, have they done by their 
 generosity? Their healths will be drunk at the 
 next alehouse. They will have promoted the trade 
 of the victualler, and contributed to the excise of 
 the Government. But how much wool have these 
 poor creatures upon their- backs ? Will they be 
 better dressed next time ? No, they must wear rags 
 to excite compassion. "I h'ave often thought," he 
 goes on, "that no Man should be permitted to take 
 Relief from the Parish, or to ask it in the Street, 
 till he has first purchased as much as possible of 
 his own Livelihood by the Labour of his own hands ; 
 and then the Publick ought only to be taxed to make 
 good the Deficiency. If this Rule was strictly 
 observed we should see everywhere such a multitude 
 of New Labourers as would in all probability reduce 
 the Prices of all our Manufactures. It is the very 
 Life of Merchandize to buy cheap and sell dear. 
 The Merchant ought to make his Out-Set as cheap 
 as possible that he may find the greater Profit upon 
 his Return, and nothing will enable him to do this 
 like the Reduction of the Price of Labour upon all 
 our Manufactures. This too would be the ready 
 way to increase the number of our Foreign Markets.
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 281 
 
 The Abatement of the Price of the Manufacturer 
 would pay for the Carriage of it to more distant 
 Countries, and this Consequence would be equally 
 beneficial both to the Landed and Trading Interests. 
 As so great an Addition of Labouring Hands would 
 produce this happy Consequence both to the Mer- 
 chant and the Gentleman, our Liberality to common 
 Beggars and every other Obstruction to the Increase 
 of Labourers, must be equally pernicious to both." 
 After this most sensible exordium, upon which the 
 Charity Organization Society could not well im- 
 prove, Sir Andrew Freeport proceeds to philoso- 
 phize upon the division of employments in a style 
 which even Adam Smith has scarcely surpassed. 
 "It is certain," wrote Addison in Sir Andrew's 
 name, "that a single Watch could not be made so 
 cheap in proportion by one only man as a hundred 
 Watches by a hundred, for as there is vast variety 
 in the Work, no one person could equally suit him- 
 self to all the Parts of it, the Manufacture would be 
 tedious and at last but clumsily performed. But if 
 an hundred Watches were to be made by a hundred 
 Men, the case may be assigned to one, the Dials to 
 another, the Wheels to another, the Springs to 
 another, and every other part to a proper Artist. 
 As there would be no need of perplexing any one 
 Person with too much Variety, every one would be 
 able to perform his single part with greater Skill
 
 282 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 and Expedition, and the hundred Watches would be 
 finished in one-fourth Part of the Time of the first 
 one, and every one of them one-fourth Part of the 
 Cost, though the Wages of every man were equal. 
 The Reduction of the Price of the Manufacture 
 would increase the Demand of it, all the same 
 Hands would be still employed, and as well paid. 
 The same Rule will hold in the Cloathing, the Ship- 
 ping, and all the other Trades whatsoever. And 
 then an Addition of Hands to our Manufactures 
 will only reduce the Price of them, the Labourers 
 will still have as much Wages, and will conse- 
 quently be enabled to purchase more Conveniences 
 of Life, so that every Interest in the Nation would 
 receive a Benefit from an Increase of our working 
 People." If to be in advance of one's age is to state 
 clearly and prove conclusively propositions univer- 
 sally accepted a hundred years after one's death, 
 Addison is certainly entitled to that praise. But it 
 must not be supposed that Sir Andrew Freeport and 
 his theories are pure creations of the Addisonian 
 fancy. There would have been no point in Sir 
 Andrew, who fills so large a place in the Spectator, 
 if he had not expressed, of course with that curious 
 felicity which was Addison's own, the ideas that 
 prevailed among the better informed members of his 
 own class. Not one man of business in a hundred 
 had then, or has now, any theory of trade at all,
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 283 
 
 He subsists on experience and rule of thumb. Even 
 in the seventeenth century there were exceptions, 
 such as Sir Dudley North, and in the eighteenth 
 century there must have been many more. The 
 most interesting part of Addison's Sir Andrew is 
 that he saw the immense value of foreign trade in 
 promoting native industry. Woollen manufactures 
 owed much, as we have seen, to the Methuen Treaty 
 with Portugal, though unhappily the nature of that 
 instrument precluded a commercial treaty with 
 France in 17 13. But it is impossible to conceive 
 Sir Andrew Freeport sympathizing with the igno- 
 rant outcry against the linen trade of Ireland, or 
 believing that its restriction, even if just, would 
 help the woollen trade of England. Sir Andrew 
 knew, and therefore Addison knew, that trade was 
 not war, and that if Ireland were a foreign nation 
 instead of part of the Queen's dominions, her pros- 
 perity would still be advantageous to Great Britain. 
 The most wholesome feature of life in those days 
 is that so much of it was spent in the open air, not 
 in mines, factories, or workshops. If wages w^ere 
 low, and all combinations to raise them illegal, 
 food was reasonably abundant, and land was 
 plentiful. There were small yeomen, as well as 
 large squires, and copyhold, which is now a 
 nuisance, was then a protection. Poaching was 
 ordinarv trespass, not punishable as a crime,
 
 284 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 though man-traps and spring guns were set bv 
 the cruel for the unwary, and justices of the peace, 
 if we may believe Fielding, who wrote in the middle 
 of the century with his eye on the beginning, did 
 not always confine their jurisdiction within the 
 limits of the law. Game, however, was by no 
 means strictly preserved, and the lives of men were 
 not sacrificed to fur or feathers. Sheep-stealing 
 was the great crime in the country, as shop-lifting 
 was the great crime in the town, both being capital, 
 partly on the ground that they were difificult to 
 detect. When manslaughter was not an offence 
 for which a man could be hanged, and larceny was, 
 the law might fairly be said to regard property as 
 more sacred than life. But indeed the Parliaments 
 of Queen Anne were more concerned with the 
 extirpation of heresy than with the amendment of 
 criminal jurisprudence. Latitudinarian divines of 
 the establishment, such as Clarke and Hoadly, 
 were safe enough. Catholics were Jacobites, and 
 could not be really patriots. To give them votes 
 would have been like giving arms to rebels. Non- 
 conformists, on the other hand, acknowledged a 
 Parliamentary title to the throne, and were the 
 most zealous champions of the Protestant Succes- 
 sion. To persecute them was as foolish as it was 
 unjust, though it can scarcely be said to have been 
 unpopular, for the rigid rule of the Commonwealth
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 285 
 
 was still remembered. Baptists, Congregational- 
 ists, and Presbyterians were then the principal 
 bodies of Protestant Dissenters. Presbyterians were 
 perhaps the most offensive to militant High Church- 
 men, because they were the dominant Church in 
 Scotland, and sat in both Houses of the British 
 Parliament. When the enemies of Bishop Burnet 
 had exhausted all other terms of abuse, they called 
 him a Presbyterian, although he had done his best 
 to save the victims of Oates and Dangerfield. The 
 exhibition of militant and aggressive High Church- 
 manship at the close of Queen Anne's reign was 
 not accompanied by any spiritual movement in the 
 Church itself. The Queen herself was indeed truly 
 pious. So, in a different way, was Burnet. Swift 
 and Atterbury were ecclesiastical politicians, hating 
 Dissenters and Whigs, and so fulfilling the law 
 of Christ. Their triumph, however, was short, for 
 the pace was too good to last. It cannot be said 
 of the Whigs in those days that they were friends 
 of Protestant Dissenters or honest champions of 
 religious toleration. They used Nonconformity for 
 their own purposes, and did not hesitate to throw 
 the Nonconformist over when they had done with 
 him, as the Occasional Conformity Act is enough 
 to show. Between such a man as Lord Wharton, 
 and such a man as Dr. Watts, there could be no 
 community of motive or of aim. Bishop Burnet
 
 i86 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 approached more nearly than any other Whig or 
 Churchman of his day to the modern idea of 
 rehgious equahty. But Burnet's first wife had been 
 an ardent Presbyterian, and he was freely charged 
 by High Churchmen, as Archbishop Tait was in 
 the succeeding century, with being a Presbyterian 
 himself. To Bishop Atterbury, a courageous man, 
 whose private character was beyond reproach, the 
 heresy and schism of Presbyterians and Congre- 
 gationalists were more offensive than the ribaldry 
 of Swift or the immorality of Bolingbroke. While 
 the Queen, unassisted by any of her Ministers, 
 laboured for the spread of religion through the 
 Church, the Church itself, at least as represented 
 by Convocation, was absorbed in bitter ecclesiastical 
 disputes. Addison's jovial innkeeper was under the 
 especial patronage of the Tory foxhunting squire 
 because though he seldom went to church, he had 
 taken part in pulling down several chapels. Atter- 
 bury's eloquent and ostentatious zeal for the Church 
 of England did not prevent him from doing his best 
 to violate the Act of Settlement, by setting up a 
 sovereign who was devoted to the Church of Rome. 
 The Jacobite Catholics, including almost every 
 Catholic except Pope, did w^ork, whatever may be 
 thought of their methods, for the cause of a religion 
 in which they sincerely believed. Being forbidden 
 to take an open part in politics, they were exempt
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 287 
 
 from many of the temptations which beset the 
 practical poHtician. It was their misfortune as 
 much as their fault that their interests were not 
 the interests of the nation, and that they could 
 hardly be patriots, except in Ireland. 
 
 Froude has expressed the opinion, for which there 
 is much to be said, that an Act of Union between 
 Great Britain and Ireland should have immediately 
 followed the union between England and Scotland 
 in 1707. So early as the 4th of October, 1703, the 
 Duke of Ormond, then Viceroy of Ireland, wrote 
 to an English Secretary of State, Lord Notting- 
 ham, and told him that the Irish House of 
 Commons, which was exclusively Protestant, "con- 
 sidering the many misfortunes the country lay 
 under in point of trade," desired a union. The 
 reference is to the unjust and unwise legislation 
 of William w'hich, treating Ireland as a foreign 
 country, prohibited the import of Irish woollens 
 to the English market. That this protective measure 
 injured England as well as Ireland few, if any, 
 statesmen of that age were enlightened enough to 
 see. English Ministers, such as Godolphin, did 
 make an honest effort to right the balance, not of 
 trade but of justice, by fostering and extending the 
 encouragement granted to the manufacture of Irish 
 linen by a statute of Charles the Second. The 
 project of a Union between England and Ireland,
 
 288 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 though earnestly supported by the Irish Chan- 
 cellor, Sir Richard Cox, was quietly allowed to 
 drop. The difficulties were enormous. Cox was a 
 staunch Protestant, who had adhered at the Revolu- 
 tion to William of Orange, and had been present at 
 the battle of the Boyne. lie would have regarded 
 Catholic emancipation as madness, as equivalent 
 to making the Pretender a gift of Ireland. The 
 Penal Laws were in full force, and no one in 
 authority dreamt of consulting the Catholic popula- 
 tion, inside or outside the Pale. They were as 
 politically dumb as the people of India are to-day. 
 The Presbyterians of the North, of the Ulster Plan- 
 tation, were a much more serious obstacle to Union 
 from the English Churchman's point of view. The 
 Irish Church was the Church of a small minority, 
 but it monopolized political power. If men unfit 
 to be bishops anywhere were appointed to English 
 sees, the Irish sees were sometimes filled by men 
 whom no Minister would have set over an English 
 diocese. Most clergymen of the Irish Church, 
 including Swift, would have fought hard against 
 any relaxation of the tests imposed upon Pres- 
 byterians. Even the union with Scotland would 
 hardly have been carried without the personal 
 influence of the Queen, and there is no evidence 
 that Anne cared anything for Ireland. Scottish 
 Jacobitism was dangerous. Irish Jacobitism was
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 289 
 
 impotent, a quantity that could be neglected in the 
 problem of government. Regarding political, or 
 even commercial, union as impossible, Godolphin 
 turned his mind to the improvement of the linen 
 trade, which owed much of its progress in Ulster 
 to the skill and enterprise of Louis Crommelin, a 
 French refugee. It was proposed to remove Crom- 
 melin, if he would go, further south, and assist 
 him in establishing si linen manufactory at 
 Kilkenny, the most central place in the three 
 provinces of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught. 
 The argument for use in England was that the 
 spread of the linen trade on one side of St. George's 
 Channel would promote a corresponding growth of 
 the woollen trade on the other. But the English 
 merchant of 1706, when this scheme was broached, 
 firmly held that the prosperity of one country must 
 be detrimental to another, and the erection of the 
 Linen Hall in Belfast made him think that this 
 particular business was becoming too successful. 
 In vain was he assured that no boon would be 
 bestowed upon the "mere Irish;" that the English 
 of the Pale or the Scotsmen of Ulster would get 
 it all. He was afraid of any interference with the 
 importation of linen from Germany, Holland, and 
 Flanders. So nothing could be done to spread the 
 manufacture, and the Linen Board, a body of 
 trustees created by Royal Warrant in 1707, con-
 
 290 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 fined its operations to Ulster, with results that have 
 profoundly affected the history of Ireland from that 
 day to this. The Penal Laws of i\nne require no 
 epithet. A bare statement of them is enough. By 
 an Act of 1703 a Catholic was forbidden to be the 
 guardian of his own children, or to disinherit a 
 Protestant child. A Catholic could not purchase 
 real property, nor take a lease for more than thirty 
 years, nor succeed to an estate held by a Protestant. 
 Another Act, passed in 1709, compelled a Catholic 
 father to support any of his children who became 
 Protestants, and gave rewards to informers against 
 unregistered priests. Cruel as these laws were, it 
 does not appear that in Anne's reign they were 
 rigorously enforced. For one thing, Irish Pro- 
 testants were not united. An Irish Churchman did 
 not regard a Presbyterian as a Churchman at all. 
 He could not deny that title to a Catholic without 
 impeaching the validity of his own orders. For 
 another thing, public opinion, even when most 
 hostile to Catholic emancipation, was not in favour 
 of the penal laws, and it would have required a 
 whole country-side of informers to carry them out 
 in full. Catholic land-ov/ners had Protestant 
 friends who were willing to help them by legal 
 subterfuges, and in Ireland the person of a priest 
 has always been sacred to the people. Through- 
 out the eighteenth century Irish hatred of England
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 291 
 
 grew, until at length it became really formidable. 
 During the War of the Succession Irishmen were 
 eager to fight for France. But in Ireland itself the 
 Boyne and Aughrim had crushed out all danger 
 of rebellion. 
 
 If any age in English history can be described 
 as one of temperate felicity, it is probably that 
 which followed the Treaty of Utrecht. Twelve 
 years of war had not raised taxation to an oppressive 
 level, nor the debt to an alarming height. Pope 
 and Swift, Addison and Steele, were opening a 
 new and rich mine of literature, as various as it was 
 full and deep. The Spectator contained the germ 
 of the English novel, destined in a few years to 
 supplant for ever translations from Mademoiselle 
 de Scudery, and Tom Durfey, and Mrs. Aphra 
 Behn. That the Daily Courant would develop into 
 the modern Press was then as little foreseen as 
 that Daniel Defoe, the political reviewer and 
 pamphleteer, would write the best story of adven- 
 ture in the English language. India was already 
 a source of profit, and not yet a cause of anxiety. 
 The American colonies traded peaceably with their 
 metropolis, and gave no trouble. France was 
 crushed, Spain was contented; the Holy Roman 
 Empire, neither holy Roman nor imperial, had 
 received a new lease of its harmless, tolerant, 
 
 unaggressive existence. At home there was no 
 u 2
 
 292 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 surplus population, no chronic want of employment, 
 no poverty that could not be relieved. Competition 
 had hardly set in. Although the land laws were 
 bad, and the criminal law was worse, the squire 
 joined his tenants in sport, and juries gave a kind 
 of informal protection against the worst barbarities 
 of the statute-book. Judges who would have fainted 
 at the thought of abolishing capital punishment for 
 felony took care that it should not always be carried 
 out, and in the absence of counsel for the prisoners 
 were often the best check upon the prosecution. 
 Wool was woven and coal was dug by primitive 
 methods, but under healthy conditions. If there 
 was not much cricket or football, there was abund- 
 ance of fishing, hunting, shooting, and coursing, 
 without undue preservation of fish or of game. 
 The low standard of public morals, the excessive 
 gallantry of the fashionable class, did not affect the 
 private lives and conduct of humble folk. If the 
 spirit of enterprise was defective, a spirit of satis- 
 faction was pretty generally diffused. The great 
 cause of material misery, the pressure of population 
 upon means of subsistence, had not begun to work. 
 There were vast tracts of open space, even near 
 London, which nobody cared to occupy, and where 
 even highwaymen were seldom disturbed. High- 
 waymen were the terror of the rich, or at least of 
 the well-to-do. The common people heeded them 
 
 Jl
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 293 
 
 not at all. Popular education, in day schools or 
 in Sunday schools, there was none. Even reading, 
 writing, and arithmetic were luxuries of the upper 
 and middle classes. The lower orders were told 
 by the clergy, themselves at that time an obsequious 
 race, to obey their betters, meaning those who were 
 better off than themselves. On the other hand, 
 there was no fierce struggle for life, no disappoint- 
 ment with the fruits of ambitious training, no cities 
 overcrowded, no professions overstocked. Land- 
 lords could always let their farms, but they could 
 not let them at exorbitant rents that would not pay. 
 Domestic servants were numerous, but they could 
 not be had for starvation wages. There was no sweat- 
 ing. Apprenticeship meant duties on the part of the 
 master, as well as on the part of the servant. The 
 spirit of democracy was unborn in England, though 
 the Presbyterian system fostered it in Scotland, and 
 it had been taken to the American colonies by the 
 Nonconformist victims of religious or irreligious 
 persecution at home. William Penn, the most dis- 
 tinguished member of the Society of Friends, a 
 man of singularly beautiful character, deeply and 
 sincerely Christian, was nevertheless a fine gentle- 
 man and a courtier. Penn was a human being, 
 and therefore not always consistent. But the 
 serious charges made against him on plausible 
 evidence by Macaulay have broken down on further
 
 294 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 investigation, and resolve themselves into ai strange 
 case of mistaken identity. He used his influence 
 with successive monarchs on behalf of his own 
 community, whether in England or in America, 
 and of complete toleration for all sects. Catholics 
 included. He was no more a democrat than Isaac 
 Watts. The Quakers, though they did not acknow- 
 ledge titles, or any distinctions of social rank, were 
 averse from political as from other quarrels, and 
 determined to live peaceably with all men. Among 
 Queen Anne's statesmen the one professed repub- 
 lican was the Earl of Sunderland, son-in-law of 
 the first, and father of the second, Duke of 
 Marlborough. Sunderland affected to call himself 
 Charles Spencer, and expressed a hope that he 
 should survive the peerage. The Queen was 
 shocked. Those who knew him better smiled; for 
 in an age of intrigue there were few such astute 
 intriguers, and he passed his whole life in courts. 
 Whigs were indeed even less democratic than Tories, 
 and more remote from the people. It was their 
 design to govern in the name of the sovereign, and 
 because they had also the capacity, they succeeded. 
 Circumstances favoured them. A second, or even 
 a long-lived William of Orange would have been 
 fatal to their plans. A Queen of less than average 
 ability with a perfect nonentity for her husband, 
 was the precise combination they required. Their
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 295 
 
 temporary failure in 17 10 was due to their own 
 mismanagement, and to the Duchess of Marl- 
 borough's temper. In 17 14 the stars in their 
 courses fought against Oxford and BoHngbroke. 
 Even Wharton might have seen the finger of 
 Providence in the sudden death of Queen Anne. 
 The quiet and almost undisputed succession of 
 George the First has been called the greatest miracle 
 in English history. There is no miraculous element 
 in it. What might have happened at the General 
 Election of 17 14 if a democratic suffr-age had 
 prevailed must always be doubtful. Happily for 
 the Whigs and for the Protestant cause, trade was 
 prosperous, and the mercantile community believed 
 that their business would be threatened by a dis- 
 puted succession. The Whigs had seized power 
 while Anne was dying, and in power they were left. 
 How little they could trust even such constituent 
 bodies as then existed the Septennial Act of 17 16 
 is enough to prove. They had no belief in the 
 people. They believed in a ruling aristocracy, in 
 themselves. They were not unwilling that this 
 privileged class should from time to time be 
 recruited from new men, such as Somers, Cowper, 
 and Walpole. Their habit of marrying untitled 
 heiresses prevented them from becoming a caste, 
 and they had a genuine zeal for personal freedom. 
 But the idea of the people governing themselves,
 
 296 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 through their representatives, or at all, was to theni 
 not even a dream. It was Utopianism or, in plain 
 English^ midsummer madness. The principles of 
 1688 were to Englishmen then what the principles 
 of 1789 are to Frenchmen now. As there are French 
 Royalists now, so there were English, and still 
 more Scottish, Jacobites then. But the bulk of the 
 upper and middle classes, the vocal part of the 
 nation, were loyal to the Act of Settlement as the 
 sequel of the Bill of Rights. 
 
 The hopes of the Jacobites, revived by the death 
 of William, were destroyed by the death of Anne. 
 They could no longer rely upon France, and Ireland 
 outside the English Pale was politically dead. 
 Exclusion of Catholics from all power in the State 
 was sure to be strengthened rather than weakened 
 by any rising on behalf of the Pretender. The 
 Union with Scotland was denationalizing the Low- 
 lands, and the Highlands were the one dangerous 
 part of Anne's three kingdoms. To be a Jacobite in 
 Great Britain under the first two Hanoverian Kings 
 was to risk not merely political position, but also 
 life and estate. Impeachment was still a regular 
 constitutional process, conviction involved for- 
 feiture, at least in England, and capital punishment 
 for treason was inflicted without scruple. There 
 was no possibility of a British Sovereign. The 
 choice lay between a German and a Frenchman ; a
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 297 
 
 German in possession and a Frenchman in exile. 
 Moreover the man in possession was a Protestant, 
 and the refugee was a Catholic. The Act of Settle- 
 ment had been acknowledged by the Treaty of 
 Utrecht. Louis the Fourteenth would as soon fight 
 the Duke of Marlborough single-handed as go to 
 war again. Few Englishmen had seen the Pre- 
 tender, and most Englishmen knew that he had 
 fought against England when the Hanoverians 
 fought on her side. No promises or guarantees of 
 religious liberty that he might give, could be 
 stronger than those which his father had broken. 
 The Elector of Hanover v/ould be King by Act of 
 Parliament, and would not violate the Constitution 
 unless he were mad. The greatest musician and 
 the greatest painter in England were Germans. 
 Even Marlborough could not have beaten France 
 so thoroughly without German aid. Scarcely any 
 one in England at that time thought of learning 
 German, for there was not supposed to be any Ger- 
 man literature, and educated Germans could speak 
 French. The Empire, however, had become by 
 custom hereditary in the House of Hapsburg; the 
 head of the Hohenzollerns had been crowned King 
 of Prussia ; and though Germany was still a geogra- 
 phical expression, the Emperor controlled the 
 balance of power in Europe. That Britain, having 
 been annexed to Holland, had nov^' been appro-
 
 298 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 priated by Hanover, was a good point for Jacobites. 
 But it was under a Stuart Prince who reigned by 
 right divine that the Dutch cannon were heard in 
 Fleet Street as Dutch ships sailed up the Thames. 
 
 The wife of Lord Chancellor Cowper, who 
 abolished the scandalous habit of taking annual 
 presents from the counsel practising before him, has 
 left in her Diary a striking description of the country 
 between Hampton Court and London. Lady 
 Cowper, an extremely clever, and a highly accom- 
 plished woman, wrote her journal at the beginning 
 of George the First's reign, when she was waiting 
 upon the future Queen Caroline, then Princess of 
 Wales. Although the date of the following entry is 
 the 28th of October, 17 16, it may be fairly applied 
 to the England which Queen Anne left, the England 
 of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. iVt that 
 autumnal season the Prince's Court left their subur- 
 ban, then their rural, retreat for their town house in 
 Leicester Fields. "The day," says Lady Cowper, 
 "was wonderfully fine and nothing in the world 
 could be pleasanter than the Passage," made in a 
 barge, "nor give one a better idea of the Riches 
 and Happiness of this Kingdom." Although 
 courtiers seldom see the less agreeable part of life, 
 Lady Cowper's observation is confirmed from other 
 sources, and trustworthy evidence paints this period 
 as one of the brightest in our annals. The two
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNE:RS 299 
 
 chief drawbacks were the highwaymen and the 
 beggars. Even Lady Cowper speai^s of footpads, 
 "pads " as they were then familiarly called, in Bed- 
 ford Row, and refers to her security at Kensington 
 when soldiers were camping in Hyde Park, as "one 
 might come from London any time of the Night 
 without Danger." 
 
 The age of Anne, great in politics, in literature, 
 and in war, was not very fruitful in scientific dis- 
 coveries. The looms which made its excellent 
 broadcloth were worked by hand. Coal was 
 brought from mines by men and horses. A 
 mechanical method of raising water had been de- 
 vised at the close of the seventeenth century by 
 Thomas Savery, the inventor of paddle-wheels. 
 But it was not altogether successful, until in 1698 
 Savery took into partnership an ingenious black- 
 smith from Dartmouth called Thomas Newcomen. 
 Newcomen's pumping-engine, which remained in 
 use for the greater part of the eighteenth century, 
 was equivalent in power to five horses and a half. 
 From a depth of a hundred and fifty-six feet it could 
 raise fifty gallons of water in a minute. Humble 
 as such an achievement must seem now, it had much 
 public utility then. Newcomen's was a kind of 
 atmospheric steam-engine, which obtained its motive 
 force by exhausting the air from a cylinder that had 
 been provided with a piston. Savery 's steam-
 
 300 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 engine scarcely deserves to be called an anticipation 
 of Watt's. But according to Mr. Ashton's Social 
 Life in the Reign of Queen Anne it "was as ingeni- 
 ous as it was simple. Two boilers with furnaces 
 supplied the steam. This was admitted alternately 
 by means of a handle worked by man or boy, into 
 one of two elliptical receivers, where it condensed, 
 formed a vacuum and the water rushed in and filled 
 its place. When full the application of steam 
 ejected it from the receiver, and forced it up the pipe, 
 and so de novo." This was an ingenious device, 
 no doubt, but it cannot be called a simple applica- 
 tion of the propelling power of steam. 
 
 Travelling in Queen Anne's reign was difficult, 
 uncomfortable, and even dangerous. The danger, 
 as has been said, was from highway robbery, which 
 flourished almost unchecked. Roads were bad, and 
 a traveller from London to Bath, about the year 
 1 7 10, describes the last part of the road, after 
 Chippenham, as more perilous than the Alps. The 
 time was two days, and the fare sixteen shillings. 
 Stage coaches ran to most towns, and traffic was 
 conducted by packhorses, waggons, or canals. 
 There were plenty of post-houses, and postmasters 
 were bound by their license to provide horses at a 
 fixed tariff, with guides, for riding or driving. In 
 London there were at this time eight hundred 
 hackney carriages, the fare being fixed at eighteen
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 301 
 
 pence a mile. A more fashionable conveyance was 
 the sedan-chair. There were three hundred licensed 
 chairs in London, the fixed charge being one shil- 
 ling a mile, though a gratuity was always demanded 
 by the chairmen, notorious bullies and cheats. Six 
 horses with postillions were usual for the coaches 
 of the rich, wealth without ostentation being even 
 rarer in the days of Anne than it is now. Eight 
 thousand pounds was the price of the chair which 
 Queen Anne gave to the first King of Prussia in 
 1709. Letters were taken out of London three days 
 a week by mail-coaches. Before 171 1, there was a 
 penny post for London, and a twopenny post for 
 the country, established by William Dockwra in 
 1684. The Duke of York as Postmaster General 
 obtained a prohibition of Dockwra's enterprise as 
 an infringement of his own monopoly, and in 171 1 
 the penny post was abolished. Correspondence be- 
 came expensive and rare, except for those who could 
 find Members of Parliament to frank their letters. 
 Private competition was rigorously suppressed, 
 and the public meekly acquiesced in the sacrifice 
 of convenience to revenue. 
 
 Of social reform there was very little idea. 
 Prisons were pest-houses, scenes of every moral and 
 physical evil that can be imagined. Debtors, who 
 might be confined for life if they could not satisfy 
 their creditors, were in as wretched a plight as
 
 302 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 criminals. Women as well as men were flogged. 
 Hanging meant slow strangulation. If a man 
 accused of any crime refused to plead, he was liable 
 to a lingering death of torture and starvation, known 
 as the peine forte et dure. On the other hand, the 
 most minutely technical flaw in the indictment was 
 enough to defeat the ends of justice, and benefit of 
 clergy was a defence for any one who could read, 
 unless he had been convicted before. Nobody 
 thought of the criminal law as a reforming agency. 
 Punishment was mere vengeance, though the fear 
 of the gallows was not found to deter the criminal 
 classes from coining, or sheep-stealing, or highway 
 robbery. Indeed war, and duels, and assassination, 
 and smallpox, and courts of justice seem to have 
 familiarized people's minds with the idea of death 
 until they became callous, and almost indifferent. 
 Insanity excited so little compassion that lunatics 
 were used like wild beasts, and Bedlam was one of 
 the" sights of London, with the lions at the Tower. 
 One of the many excuses for intoxication was the 
 badness of the water. Wells were often contamin- 
 ated by cesspools or graveyards, even in London, 
 where the New River Company supplied to those 
 who could pay for it the only safe form of Adam's 
 ale. Ale itself was good enough, though strong, 
 and labouring men drank little else. Tea, which 
 came from China, was the luxury of the rich, and
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 303 
 
 chocolate found much favour with women of fashion, 
 who also took snuff as freely as their modern suc- 
 cessors smoke cigarettes. Pipes, the only method 
 of smoking then practised, were common in all 
 classes of society, and for the well-to-do there was 
 abundance of excellent wine from France, Spain, 
 Portugal, or Italy. Bolingbroke was especially 
 fond of "Florence wine," probably Chianti or 
 Montepulciano. Fuel, like food, was cheap and 
 plentiful, England being still overgrown with 
 timber. Coal, however, which came to London by 
 sea from Northumberland, and from Scotland, was 
 dear on account of carriage. The mixture of damp 
 from the river with the smoke of coal from chimneys 
 had not begun to poison the atmosphere of the 
 capital. 
 
 The social position of the clergy at the commence- 
 ment of the eighteenth century has been the subject 
 of much dispute. Mr. Gladstone vehemently pro- 
 tested, and ingeniously argued, that Macaulay had 
 decried and underrated it as it was in the reign of 
 William the Third. Macaulay may have been on 
 this, as on some other occasions, too rhetorical. 
 His own eloquence, though usually supported by 
 profound knowledge, was apt to carry him away. 
 But most of the available evidence shows that he 
 was substantially right, and it was not in Anne's 
 power, much as she would have liked, to effect a
 
 304 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 change. She was herself excessively conventional, 
 a great stickler for the observance of rank and 
 etiquette. She considered Matthew Prior socially 
 unfit to represent her at Paris. When Bolingbroke 
 approached her in a " Ramillies," or bob wig, instead 
 of the full-bottomed peruke, she said, "I suppose 
 his lordship will soon be coming to Court in his 
 night-cap." It is true that the high places in the 
 Church of England, with all the precedence they 
 involve, have always been open to men of plebeian 
 origin, though they have often been bestowed upon 
 otherwise unqualified cadets of ennobled houses. 
 But between bishops and inferior clergy the distance 
 in the eighteenth century was immeasurable. Be- 
 fore Anne came to the throne Tillotson, a man of 
 real eminence, had been succeeded as Archbishop 
 of Canterbury by Tenison, formerly Bishop of Lin- 
 coln, a Low Churchman and a Whig, too warm a 
 friend of the Hanoverian Succession to please the 
 Queen. She preferred Archbishop Sharp of York, 
 whom she appointed a Commissioner for the Scot- 
 tish Union, and Bishop Compton of London, who 
 had confirmed her. Compton was an active poli- 
 tician, an ardent Protestant, and a very able man. 
 His colleagues were not distinguished, with the 
 exception of Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, the 
 historian, Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, joint author 
 of the Rehearsal, and Atterbury, a Jacobite politician
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 305 
 
 rather than a High Church divine, who succeeded 
 Sprat in 1713. The country clergymen of this date 
 were, as a rule, miserably poor, unless they were 
 pluralists. The landed class, the squires, did not 
 recognize them as equals. When Sir Roger de 
 Coverley went to church, it was for him, not for 
 the parson, that the congregation rose. Yorick in 
 Tristram Shandy is a scholar, a gentleman, and a 
 humorist. But then Yorick is Sterne himself, put 
 back into an older time. Tusher in Esmond is a 
 more faithful copy. What Thackeray says is not 
 evidence for the historian of Queen Anne. It is 
 when we go to Thackeray's sources, to Addison and 
 Swift, or even to Fielding, who was near enough in 
 date for all practical purposes, that we find out the 
 fidelity of the portraits in that literary masterpiece. 
 Fielding's Parson Trulliber is, no doubt, a rather 
 gross caricature. His Parson Adams, on the other 
 hand, is a type of the best, not the worst, and shows 
 therefore conclusively how low the clerical profes- 
 sion then ranked in the esteem of the vulgar, "both 
 the great vulgar and the small." The domestic 
 chaplain, the "tame Levite," was a feature of social 
 life in those days, and such posts in wealthy estab- 
 lishments were earnestly coveted. " For my own 
 part," says Addison, whose respect for the Church 
 marked him out from his literary friends, "I have 
 often blushed to see a gentleman, whom I know to
 
 3o6 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 have much more wit and learning than myself, and 
 who was bred up with me at the University upon 
 the same footing of a Liberal Education, treated in 
 such an ignominious manner, and sunk beneath 
 those of his own rank, by reason of that Character, 
 which ought to bring him honour." It is difficult to 
 account for this sentiment at a time when the 
 political influence of the Church was almost un- 
 bounded. A partial explanation may perhaps be 
 found in the current idea of a gentleman as a man 
 who fought duels, which a clergyman obviously 
 could not do. Addison knew what he was writing 
 about, and it seems useless to support him by a host 
 of minor authorities. One great name will suffice. 
 Swift, when he was in London, lived with states- 
 men, authors, and fine ladies, not with clergymen. 
 But he felt and resented every slight to his cloth. 
 When he was at Windsor in 171 1, and the object 
 of emulous attentions from the society of the Court, 
 he wrote to Stella, "I never dined with the chaplains 
 till to-day; but my friend Gastrell, and the Dean 
 of Rochester (Pratt) had often invited me, and I 
 happened to be disengaged : it is the worst pro- 
 vided table at Court. We ate on pewter : every 
 chaplain, when he is made a dean, gives a piece of 
 plate, and so they have got a little, some of it very 
 old. One who was made Dean of Peterborough (a 
 small deanery) said he would give no plate ; he was
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 307 
 
 only Dean of Pewterborough." Swift elsewhere 
 contrasts the triumph of aspiring mediocrity with 
 the neglect of modest genius. Such comparisons 
 have been made, and such morals have been drawn, 
 in other callings and at other times. If Swift, who 
 was doubtless thinking of himself, had gone to the 
 Bar, his advancement would probably have been 
 more rapid, and would certainly have been less 
 exposed to criticism. There was not much spiritual 
 fervour in the Church of Anne, and the drinking 
 habits of the period were not confined to the laity. 
 The level of the sermon, always written, was not 
 high, and the best sermons of the day have been not 
 ill described as essays from the Spectator without 
 the Addisonian elegance. Religious life was more 
 active among the Dissenters, who had the stimulus 
 of persecution. Edmund Calamy, a Presbyterian, 
 and Matthew Henry, who was a lawyer before he 
 became a Nonconformist minister, enjoyed a just 
 reputation as devout and learned theologians. 
 Daniel Burgess, whose chapel was destroyed by the 
 mob at the time of Sacheverell's impeachment, had 
 something of Hugh Latimer's popular eloquence 
 and racy wit. Buried in the ponderous tomes, 
 which contain the verse and prose of Isaac Watts, 
 is a quaint example of the hopes and the disappoint- 
 ment inspired by the accession of Anne, and by her 
 surrender to Toryism. In the year which followed 
 
 X 2
 
 3o8 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 the battle of Blenheim, Watts addressed to the 
 Queen a congratulatory Ode, in which, with refer- 
 ence to the Old Pretender, then young, her Majesty 
 is loyally assured that — 
 
 "The vengeance of thy rod, with general joy- 
 Shall scourge rebellion and the rival boy." 
 
 Sixteen years later, in 1721, Watts republished 
 
 this Ode, appending to it, however, a Palinode or 
 
 recantation. "George, not Anne," he explained, 
 
 "was the name of promise. The latter part of 
 
 Anne's reign was by no means attended with the 
 
 accomplishment of those glorious hopes which we 
 
 had conceived." 
 
 '"Twas George diffused a vital ray, 
 And gave the dying nations day : 
 His influence soothes the Russian bear, 
 Calms rising wars, and heals the air." 
 
 The doctor is still sanguine, and cheerfulness is 
 its own reward. Very slowly, and at very long- 
 intervals, did the Nonconformists obtain freedom and 
 justice from hostile Tories and lukewarm Whigs. 
 For the free churches the last four years of Queen 
 Anne were the darkest hour before the dawn. 
 
 At William's death, even more than at James's 
 flight, the fate of England trembled in the balance. 
 His profound designs for securing the cause of Pro- 
 testantism were cut short by the "little gentleman 
 in black," and Anne was quite incapable of under- 
 standing them, or carrying them on. No one fore-
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 309 
 
 saw, no one could foresee, that at that precise 
 moment an English soldier as sagacious in counsel 
 as supreme in war would step to the front, and lead 
 Europe against Louis. Still less could it have been 
 predicted that the general would be able to control 
 the sovereign, not by his own splendid talents and 
 subtle manoeuvres, but by the personal ascendency 
 of his wife over the Queen. The Duchess of Marl- 
 borough's personal government did not last for ever, 
 but it lasted just long enough. When it began, 
 France was supreme. When it ended, France was 
 insignificant. The reign of Anne is the reign of 
 Marlborough, who might have restored under con- 
 ditions either James the Second or the Old Pre- 
 tender. Whatever may be the theological depth 
 or value of his Protestantism, it saved England, and 
 preserved the liberties of Europe. The Toryism of 
 the last four years, though not ostensibly Jacobite, 
 alarmed the mercantile community, and thus fos- 
 tered the growth of the Hanoverian Whigs. If 
 Oxford and Bolingbroke had acted more like 
 Solomon, less like Rehoboam, they might have 
 retained, or at least shared, supreme power even 
 after the death of the Queen. They did what the 
 Whigs would have wished them to do, and played 
 into the hands of their political adversaries. 
 Walpole and the Hanoverian Succession were the 
 natural consequences that ensued.
 
 310 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 To sum up : the reign of Anne was distinguished 
 by splendid military achievements, by great material 
 prosperity, by supreme excellence in literature, and 
 by the auspicious union of England with Scotland. 
 Of scientific discovery there was little, and of social 
 reform there was less. Triennial Parliaments, and 
 a disputed succession, were injurious to political 
 stability. An Erastian Church reared its mitred head 
 against heresy rather than against vice, and thought 
 more of excluding Dissenters from power than of 
 promoting Christianity among the people. Tories 
 upheld the establishment, and Whigs became cham- 
 pions of Nonconformity, for their own factious and 
 selfish ends. While politicians struggled for place, 
 the mass of the people were forgotten. Those 
 Englishmen who adhered to the ancient faith, and 
 acknowledged the authority of Rome, were shut out 
 from public life, and could only further the interests 
 of their religion bv rebellion or by intrigue. The 
 bulk of the nation, absorbed in making money and 
 enjoying life, were ready to accept any form of 
 Government which gave them tranquillity and order. 
 England was self-supporting, thinly peopled, im- 
 perfectly cultivated, yielding an ample profit to the 
 makers of English cloth, the diggers of English 
 coal, and the tillers of English soil. Except wine 
 and tobacco, the former a luxury of the rich, scarcely 
 anything in general use came from abroad, for tea,
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 311 
 
 coffee, and chocolate had a limited vogue. The 
 England of Anne was scarcely more conscious than 
 the England of Elizabeth that this island would 
 become the centre of an Empire bounded only by 
 the limits of the world. Elizabethan seamanship, 
 with all its dazzling intrepidity, is a record of per- 
 sonal adventure, and the navy of Queen Anne, 
 despite the almost accidental capture of Gibraltar, 
 did little to be compared with the achievements of 
 her army. Although the freedom and independence 
 of England were directly threatened by the preten- 
 sions of Louis, Englishmen did not readily under- 
 stand why they should go on fighting for the balance 
 of power. The oldest of those British colonies 
 which still retain their allegiance dates from the 
 Treaty of Utrecht. But little was thought of New- 
 foundland at the time, and Bolingbroke very 
 naturally laid more stress upon the retention of Gib- 
 raltar, as a sign of British ascendency in the politics 
 of Europe. The American colonies notwithstand- 
 ing. Queen Anne's Ministers did not look beyond 
 the sphere of European diplomacy. Even Ireland 
 was to them a foreign, conquered nation, and the 
 Highlands of Scotland little better than a den of 
 thieves. If the Jacobites looked to France, the eyes 
 of Whigs, and of Hanoverian Tories, were bent upon 
 the Empire and upon Holland. Charles the Second 
 and his brother had not succeeded in destroying the
 
 312 QUEEN ANNE 
 
 monarchical sentiment, the spirit of personal loyalty, 
 in the minds of Englishmen who believed that the 
 Revolution of 1688 was the smaller of two evils. 
 How much the story of the warming-pan, and the 
 general credit which it received, had to do with the 
 Act of Settlement and the Hanoverian dynasty, we 
 cannot tell. George the First was accepted as a 
 King in fact by many who regarded James Stuart 
 as King in law. Even now, when nobody argues 
 in favour of divine right, the direct descent of the 
 Sovereign from James the First is a circumstance 
 of immense practical value. George was not a mere 
 stranger like William. Anne was not a stranger 
 at all. The Jacobites could urge nothing but her 
 sex against her claim, and her sex appealed to the 
 chivalry of her subjects. Marlborough would never 
 have prostrated himself before a man as he did 
 before her. William the Third had to depend en- 
 tirely upon his own courage, clemency, and state- 
 craft. Anne was a Stuart, and her person was 
 sacred. She showed sympathy with her people by 
 attending Parliament, subscribing to the Church, 
 touching for the King's Evil. She set an example 
 of conjugal fidelity and private decorum. She was 
 generous without being extravagant, and virtuous 
 without being Puritanical. She owned racehorses, 
 and her husband was a regular attendant at New- 
 market. Her prejudice against Dissenters was not
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 313 
 
 unpopular, and she gave no countenance to the 
 licentiousness of the stage. Her indifference to 
 literature did her no harm with the middle classes, 
 whose representative she really was. When they 
 were for war, she was for w-ar. When she was for 
 peace, they were for peace. In the reign of Eliza- 
 beth the people worshipped their magnificent Queen. 
 When the imperial votaress passed on, in maiden 
 meditation fancy free, they bowed their heads. She 
 was the equal in scholarship and in statecraft of the 
 ablest Ministers round her throne. She was too 
 much above ordinary folk for the common sort of 
 popularity. Anne's mind \vas like thousands of 
 other minds. She felt and thought with her people. 
 Even her confusions were theirs. They were not in 
 theory averse from passive obedience, so long as it 
 was not translated into practice. They approved of 
 Whiggery, so far as it had delivered them from 
 Popery and wooden shoes. They suspected Whigs 
 of being half Republicans, and Republicanism had 
 no support. If Protestantism meant hatred of 
 Popery, they were Protestants, and so was the Queen. 
 If it meant Puritanism, and the Conventicle, she 
 detested it, and so did they. The freethinking 
 Electress Sophia would have shocked public 
 opinion, and Anne at least kept Sophia from the 
 throne. Between 1702 and 1714 the English nation 
 had time to consider the future, and to make up their
 
 31^ QUEEN ANNE 
 
 minds. Their Sovereign was thoroughly English, 
 though her Scottish origin was not forgotten north 
 of the Tweed. She did not intrigue with foreign 
 powers, and her people never had to pay her debts. 
 Her domestic sorrows, especially the little Duke of 
 Gloucester's death, appealed to the hearts of her 
 future subjects before her reign began. In her sub- 
 sequent quarrel with the Duchess of Marlborough 
 she had the sympathetic support of all who disliked 
 tyranny and ingratitude. When she refused to 
 make the Duke Captain General for life, her conduct 
 appealed to the national hatred of a military dictator- 
 ship. When she dismissed Godolphin and the 
 Whigs, she was at least rebelling against tutelage, 
 and behaving like a Queen. Her dignified answer 
 to the rude request of Parliament that she should 
 marry again touched the heart of every wife and 
 mother who respected herself. The pettiness of 
 court life, which abounded in the Court of Anne, was 
 unknown to the public. They knew, and liked to 
 know, that the Queen disapproved of Bolingbroke, 
 and would not make Swift a bishop. Even her 
 unreasoning patronage of Sacheverell, brawler and 
 mischief-maker as he was, could be made to look 
 like hatred of persecution ; and for the Schism Act, 
 which certainly was persecution, her Majesty's 
 Ministers, together with Parliament itself, were 
 responsible. Her obstinate refusal to see the
 
 SOCIETY AND MANNERS 315 
 
 Electress, or the Elector, or the Electoral Prince, her 
 statutory heirs, was just one of those human weak- 
 nesses which common folk appreciate and under- 
 stand. Anne has not found many enthusiastic 
 admirers besides Miss Strickland. But she has a 
 useful, and even an honourable, place in history : 
 she bridged a gulf, and supplied a want. Her reign 
 of splendour abroad, and peace at home, smoothed 
 the path of constitutional progress through that 
 loyal passion for our temperate kings which our 
 great poet has described. 
 
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