Queen Anne

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Contents

CHAP.

I POLITICS — I

II POLITICS — II

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 Dtean of Carlisle, was the most eminent and intrepid, raised a cry that the Church was in danger. By the union with Presbyterian 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 offence 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, 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, Southwark. There he preached his favourite doctrines with much animation, and engaged in vehement controversy with Benjamin Hoadly, a Low Churchman 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 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 delighted 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 Sacheverell 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 thousands 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

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unknown in England, though she happened to be the grand-daughter of James the First. Her son George was as un-EngUsh 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 indifference 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 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 English, Edmund Burke.

Although Burke was not born till twenty years after Sacheverell's impeachment, he was nursed in the creed of the English Revolution, and the Whigs of 1688 were the fathers of his Church. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, he says, " It rarely happens to a Party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great constitutional event like that of the Revolution. The Whigs had that opportunity, or, to speak more properly, they made it. The impeachment of Dr. Sacheverell was undertaken 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 afterwards calumniated, in order, by a juridicial sentence 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 are weighty words, and so are those in which Burke describes the managers of the impeachment. "They were not," says he, "umbratiles doctores, men who had studied a free constitution only in its anatomy and upon dead systems." Unlike 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 Parliament, 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 Sacheverell. 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 Sacheverell and the Church. Colley Cibber mentions in his Autobiography that the trial withdrew numbers from the Opera at the Haymarket. When the Queen went privately without state in her sedan chair to hear the proceedings, the populace expressed 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 unanimously in favour of the accused, and she therefore leaned in that direction herself. The managers for the Commons were judiciously moderate and discreet. One of them, Sir Robert Eyre, Solicitor General, denied that "the resistance at the Revolution 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 prudent, 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 at the time popular with the lower orders. While Eyre and Jekyll and Stanhope and Parker were expounding the limits of royalty, and the safeguards 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 Succession, 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 pronounced 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 suspension from preaching, which was the only punishment 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 exhaustive 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 preferred 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 advising 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

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upon his military laurels, and todk mofe 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."

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, received the appointment, without the consent or knowledge of Godolphin. The Lord Treasurer submitted meekly to the affront, and went on betting 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 Cromwell, would have thought it possible in the seventeenth 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 she could not decently break, and the Dutch insisted that Louis should drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs. When he declined, the Peace Conference, held at Gertruydenberg, broke up, and the campaign was once more renewed. Marlborough 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 headquarters 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 Sunderland, 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 consulting him, was Lord Dartmouth, a Tory, a High

Churchman, and something very like a Jacobite himself. That Marlborough should retain his command, 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 Godolphin, 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 Whigs, 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

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 required, and his name must always be coupled with Marlborough's in joint responsibility for campaigns which were not less providently organized than they were brilliantly designed and splendidly achieved. His financial administration, assailed by unscrupulous opponents, was so conclusively defended 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, 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, however, 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 Newcastle, 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 Secretary, 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 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 Parliament of 1708. This assertion of her prerogative, though it would not now be regarded as constitutional, 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 had been at any time since the Revolution. The country party, who resorted to general and unscrupulous intimidation of electors, were zealous against Whigs, Dissenters, and the moneyed interest 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 7 ID 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 conclusion 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

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wished the Pretender to come bj^^ljif ,o4fn .iipoii the

next demise of the Crown ^ ^'e.w,indre cliSgrAcejEul' ,

and the final touch of infa'my is added by a recom^VV,

••• : :.' : •. ; • • . • .* Great Britain, should be kept by French Geherals

within the walls of Batcfelbfta. Different indee'd-- • was the management of British^iliplomacy ajid.VZar • under Harley and St. John ffort\.^hat,j*t h'Sd'b'eeh under Marlborough and Godolffhin* .* 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 illustrious 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 too QUEEN ANNE

tion' of this p6v7ef , "great employments to ourselves, aijd grestf opp6i(\fh^iss of rewarding those who had

/ ''helped to raise, us, a^d'oX hurting those who stood

' 'V-in opposition to us."', ,''

\Th:^''QeTrft9iff')liBtorian v©n Ranke has expressed an'opihlon 'that,* in' the. last four years of Queen

- ..Jinne's reign, durir^Vjh*^' Cabinet of Harley and ''S{»-*John, lies it§ ;;teal lilstoric importance. That is^to-'oprifquaiji the.' t'sa'nsitory with the permanent part 'of Jijifji^n. affairs. Tory predominance from 1 710 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 ascendency 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 indiscriminate to be just. St. Johri'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 reference to the thing expressed, they would be admirable indeed. But though he failed equally to

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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 17 lo 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 Irishman. 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 1710 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, which early hardships, and the patronage of his kinsman Sir William Temple, had developed to insolent arrogance, made him jealous for the establishment 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 contrast 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 anonymous, the secret had not been kept, and connoisseurs 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 substantial manner, and he was a perilous ally for 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 uncharitableness. 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 fortunate 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 himself the slave of a party, when he was writing for his employers two of his masterpieces. The Conduct of the Allies, and A Letter to the October

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.