Hitherto, she had wisely refrained—nor is there any indication that her

eldest son and her grandson had done otherwise—from identifying the

interests of her House with either of the two Parliamentary parties,

both of which had had a part in the Act of Settlement. No doubt it was

the Whigs who had most warmly supported the insertion of her name in

that Act; the embassy which had brought it over to Hanover had been

exclusively made up of Whigs; and, writing to Leibniz towards the close

of 1701, Sophia, apparently with reference to the approaching English

elections, excusably lets slip the phrase: ‘_le parti des Whigs qui est

le nostre_.’ But, already in the following year, when annoyed by the

officious importunities of Toland and that other _grand fâcheux_, Sir

Peter Fraiser, she confided to her niece Elizabeth Charlotte her

resolution not to mix herself up with the manœuvres of the Presbyterians

and Whigs, which, as we have seen, were at that time agitating Scotland.

‘Besides,’ she observed, with a fastidiousness not inexplicable when the

composition of Macclesfield’s embassy is remembered, ‘the Whigs that

came to me here I found anything but charming.’ And, again in 1703, she

ordered Baron Brauns not to answer one of Toland’s long diatribes

against the Tories by more than a simple acknowledgment. There was no

fear, she remarked, of their supporting the Pretender; no person of

substance, in fact nobody but Catholics and adventurers set on making

their fortunes, were on his side; for the rest, she found as many honest

men among the Tories as elsewhere. She had, as a matter of fact, certain

affinities with this party; while some of their opponents in the House

of Commons offended her, as a true Stewart who remembered the excesses

of the Commonwealth days, by comparing the Prince of Wales to Perkin

Warbeck and branding him as a bastard—all in order to tickle the ears of

_le petit peuple_. There could be no question, she told Leibniz in the

same letter, as to the Prince’s claims interfering with her own; her

right was based on her Protestantism; except for this, many others stood

between the Crown and herself. While, then, she adhered to her

determination to place herself in the hands of neither party, there was

no reason why the Tories should not in their turn seek to make her

listen to their charming. When, about the end of 1704, it had become

known through Marlborough that the Electress would be pleased to receive

a formal invitation to England, both parties seem to have risen to the

occasion; but, while the Whigs returned to the notion of bringing over

the Electoral Prince, some of the Tories became intent on the Electress

herself being invited. Partly to ingratiate themselves with her, partly

to spite Queen Anne, who preferred to their guidance that of the

moderates of both sides under the leadership of Marlborough, Godolphin,

and Harley, the malcontent Tories, led by Rochester and known as the

‘High-fliers,’ resolved on an attempt to take the game into their own

hands. With Rochester she had been on friendly terms from the first; in

June, 1702, she writes that he was among the first to vote for the Act

of Settlement, and that she had always mentioned this to those who

wished to set her against him.[163] Towards the end of September, 1705,

a correspondent informed Rochester of the cordial response returned by

the Electress to certain overtures made on his behalf; he declared

himself convinced that, whenever the Queen and Parliament called upon

her, the Electress would, in the face of all difficulties, wait upon Her

Majesty in England; and, more than this, she had told him, and those in

attendance on her, that, so soon as the Parliament summoned her, she was

ready to obey. (In a letter to Schütz of about the same date, Sophia,

however, qualifies this consent by requiring a proviso that she should

be supplied with means of living in England as became a Princess of

Wales.) Though, Rochester’s correspondent added, the Elector was

exceeding modest on the subject of some of his family coming to England,

the Electress spoke as the Elector thought. Sophia was on friendly terms

with other members of the Tory party besides Rochester. With Ormonde,

for instance, she kept up a correspondence both in this and in the

following year. But the task of moving an address to the Crown, in which

it was proposed that the Heiress Presumptive should be invited to

England, was committed to a quite recent convert to the ranks of the

High-flyers, Lord Haversham. He displayed a proper zeal by hazarding the

suggestion that it would be of the greatest advantage for the Electress

to make the personal acquaintance of the Bench of Bishops. The comedy

ended in the rejection of Haversham’s motion by a majority of Peers; but

he returned to the fray in a pamphlet. In the Commons a letter

advocating the proposal, hinting that it was approved by the Electress

and censuring the Whigs for opposing it, was voted libellous. This

much-vext letter was signed by Sir Rowland Gwynne, who was at the time

residing at Hanover; but its real author was Leibniz. Towards the close

of 1705, Marlborough made use of the opportunity of another visit paid

by him to Hanover for explaining the situation to the Elector.

Marlborough, who, while anxious both to please the Queen and to keep the

game so far as possible in his own hands, was more and more identifying

his own interests with the ascendancy of the Whigs, easily succeeded in

making clear to the Elector, how it was not in his interest that his

mother should at present proceed to England; and he was able to add

effect to his arguments by exhibiting an official notice of the

intention of the English Cabinet to introduce Naturalisation and Regency

Bills in the interests of the Electoral House. The understanding between

the Elector and Marlborough now became better than ever, while the

Elector’s confidence in the Whigs steadily grew. It is impossible to say

whether this was the time when Marlborough proffered at Hanover a loan

of £20,000 in return for a blank commission signed by the Electress

Sophia, which conferred on him the supreme command of the military and

naval forces of the three kingdoms after the death of Queen Anne.

-----

Footnote 163:

On Rochester’s sudden death, in 1711, Sophia expresses her deep regret

for him as her friend—‘he had plenty of _esprit_, and was in no way a

republican.’

-----

The High-fliers had thus merely played into the hands of the Whigs, who

were in the majority in the new House of Commons that met in October,

1705. The Address to the Queen had warmly thanked her for her great care

and endeavour to settle the Succession of the kingdom of Scotland in the

House of Hanover; and soon afterwards the Bills were brought in which

Marlborough had announced at Hanover. By the first of these, the

Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, and her issue

were naturalised as English subjects; and it is strange that the legal

status thus secured to her should have been so persistently ignored in

English national biography.[164] The second of these Bills, purporting

to provide for the better security of the Queen’s person and Government,

was introduced in the Lords with much eloquence by the ever-young Lord

Wharton. This Bill made it high treason to assert in writing, and

attached the penalties of a _præmunire_ to the assertion by word of

mouth, that the Queen was not a lawful Sovereign, or that the Sovereign

in Parliament could not limit the descent of the Crown; and it further

appointed seven great officers of State, and certain other persons, to

administer the government of the realm in the event of the Queen’s

demise and the absence from England of her lawful successor. The Bill

met with no opposition in the Lords, though Rochester contrived to carry

a limitation, supposed to safeguard the Act of Uniformity; but in the

House of Commons it lay long on the table. The High-fliers, putting

forward as their spokesman Sir Thomas Hanmer (who up to the last

professed the deepest devotion to the interests of the Electress

Sophia), were once more attempting to take the game out of the hands of

the Whigs by proposing that the Electress should be brought over. Much

use was made, as appears from a passage in Burnet’s inaccurate

narrative, of a letter written in November by the Electress Sophia to

the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which she had reiterated the position

consistently maintained by her, that she was prepared to come to

England, should both the Queen and Parliament desire it. This position

was alike logical and appropriate; but the letter did not suit the

Whigs, who were well aware that Queen Anne would never be brought to

express such a desire. On the rejection of Hanmer’s motion the Electress

informed Burnet with much dignity that, should it prove to be in the

interests of State and religion, she remained ready to cross to England

if invited, provided she were created Princess of Wales. But, at the

same time, she expressed to Marlborough her conviction that her

intentions had been so misrepresented to the Queen that her coming to

England now would be superfluous. There is no reason for accepting

Burnet’s statement that her letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury had

been instigated by the Tories; but neither did she show any disposition

towards encouraging the Whigs. In truth, though Sophia was not destined

to mount a royal throne, and though what might be termed her monarchical

apprenticeship had been served in a State that had but recently ceased

to be petty and whose system of government was to all intents and

purposes absolute, she displayed a higher capacity for constitutional

rule than Queen Anne, who could only maintain a balance between factions

by subjecting herself to their leaders in turn. It cannot be

satisfactorily shown that the Electress definitely preferred the Tories,

while the Elector favoured the Whigs. In fact, she remained on good

terms with both the leading parties; although she did not turn a deaf

ear even to overtures from so unsafe a politician as Buckingham, who,

after taking a leading part in the attempt to bring her over to England,

tried to engage her in a fresh intrigue to that end.[165] The Regency

Bill, as it was shortly called, in the end became law; and Parliament,

which had further shown its goodwill to the House of Hanover by voting a

modest subsidy for the payment of additional Hanoverian and Celle

troops, was prorogued in March, 1706.

-----

Footnote 164:

She told Schütz (January 1st, 1706) that she thought the

naturalisation unnecessary, as it had been held to be in the case of

King William III and in those of her late brothers, but that she was

quite prepared to act as the Queen and Parliament wished. She would

have preferred the name ‘Brunswick-Lüneburg’ to be substituted for

‘Hanover,’ and the style ‘_Sérénissime_’ in lieu of ‘Excellent.’ The

former of these criticisms, at all events, was perfectly just.

Footnote 165:

I have modified some expressions in my first edition, after comparing

the account of F. Salomon, _Die letzten Regierungsjahre der Königin

Anna_, pp. 276-7; but I cannot come to the conclusion that the

attitude of the Electress as between the parties was even at this time

incorrect.

-----

In the following May, Lord Halifax, who as Charles Montagu had been a

leading Whig statesman already under William III and had quite recently

been appointed one of the Commissioners for the Union with Scotland, was

chosen, no doubt on account of his position and accomplishments rather

than because of any personal attractiveness, to proceed to Hanover,

there to present the Naturalisation and Regency Acts to the Electress

Sophia, now the first subject of the English Crown.[166] Halifax was

also the bearer of a Garter for the Electoral Prince, on whom a few

weeks later the Queen conferred the title of Duke of Cambridge. On his

way Halifax had secured the inclusion of a guarantee of the established

Succession in future treaties with the United Provinces. In his suite

was Addison, now one of the Under-Secretaries of State; but the

reticence of this celebrated personage seems to have disappointed the

Electress.

-----

Footnote 166:

This visit synchronised very nearly with the coming of age of the

Pretender (June), who seized the opportunity to assure Pope Clement XI

that ‘no temptation of this world, and no desire to reign, should ever

make him wander from the right path of the Catholic faith.’ The

anecdote must go for what it is worth, which was said to have been

related by Halifax to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her husband: how,

at his first formal audience with the Electress, she ran across the

room in order to place herself in front of a portrait of the

Pretender, and thus screen it from the ambassador’s eyes.

-----

From a later remark of Leibniz we gather that, on the occasion of

Halifax’s embassy, the Electress made no secret of the view held by her

and the Elector with reference to the Succession. It rested, she

considered, on hereditary right; though, in the interests of the nation,

certain persons possessed of claims prior to her own had been excluded.

In other words, she acknowledged that Parliament had a right to exclude

Catholics from the Succession, but declined to regard her title to the

Crown as primarily a Parliamentary one. As a matter of fact, neither the

Electress nor the Elector was much edified by the embassy of Halifax. He

submitted to her a list of twenty-one persons, whom according to the

Regency Act she was called upon to appoint as Lords Justices, in

addition to the great officers of the Crown, for carrying on the

government after Queen Anne’s death in the event of her own absence from

England. Of these twenty-one names, as it afterwards appeared, she

struck out seven, one of which was that of Halifax himself.[167] As to

the titles conferred upon the Electoral Prince (which, Sophia said, were

so many that she had to write them down in her almanack lest she should

forget them), the grant of an annual income to herself as Heiress

Presumptive would have been more to the point; inasmuch as the titles

were given to enable the Prince to take his seat in Parliament, from

which Hanover was a long way off.

-----

Footnote 167:

It was said that, when, after the death of Sophia, it fell to the

Elector, her son, to substitute his nominations of additional Lords

Justices for hers, and the original document was accordingly produced

in London, the cover enclosing it was found to have been broken open.

It was further reported that, after much wrangling with her ministers,

Queen Anne cut the discussion short by taking upon herself the blame

of having opened the cover.

-----

The elements of satisfaction contained in the Acts brought to Hanover by

Halifax were not over-estimated by the Electress, to whom it must by

this time have become clear that the real difficulty in placing the

House of Hanover in its proper position towards the country with which

it was to be inseparably connected, lay with Queen Anne herself. More

especially after the publication of Sir Rowland Gwynne’s unfortunate

letter, the Queen thought that explanations were due to her from the

Electress, who in truth had none to give. Marlborough had been wise

enough to abstain from delivering at Hanover a letter written by the

Queen in this sense and entrusted by her to him, and, instead, had held

conciliatory language, advising both Electress and Elector to declare

themselves absolute strangers to the obnoxious manifesto. The advice was

judicious; for, as Marlborough had predicted, the original proposal did

not die out. In 1707, one Scott, an Englishman or Scotchman in the

service of the Elector, entered, according to Marlborough with the

cognisance of the Electress, into a negotiation with the High-fliers;

but he was stopped by the Elector himself. In July of the same year, the

Earl of Peterborough, when returning to England from Spain to give an

account of his proceedings there, spent some days at Hanover and

Herrenhausen, where he addressed a letter to the Elector and another to

the Electress, in which he insisted on the necessity of the residence of

a member of the Electoral House in England. Sophia handed the letter

intended for herself to her son, who, in the plainest terms, expressed

his determination to take no steps in this direction, unless with the

approval of the Queen and her ministers. Meanwhile, though perfectly

prudent in her own conduct, the Electress could not altogether conceal

the annoyance caused to her by the cold and suspicious attitude

maintained by Queen Anne towards everything connected with the

Succession. Sophia complained repeatedly that from England came nothing

but titles and compliments, and declared that she would not be made to

pay for any more special ambassadors from the Court of St. James. (Her

present of gold plate to Halifax had cost her some 30,000 florins.) For

the conveyance of honours that cost nothing she was, she said, perfectly

content with Mr. Howe.[168] When Leibniz reported to her as to prospects

of the Union between England and Scotland, which was actually achieved

early in 1707, she rather sharply replied that she had no wish to

discuss the affairs of either kingdom: ‘_comme je n’en tire rien, je n’y

suis point intéressée_.’ She can, however, hardly have been so

indifferent to the subject as she pretended to be; since a clause in the

Act of Union definitively settled the Scottish Succession upon herself

and her descendants. Nor can she have remained unaware that, as Queen

Anne’s reign continued and the apprehensions excited by the growing

intolerance of the Church of England more and more endangered the

maintenance of the Union, Scottish Presbyterianism was, irrespective of

this consideration, obliged to look to the Hanoverian Succession as the

best guarantee of its own security.

-----

Footnote 168:

Brigadier-General Emmanuel Scroope Howe was English resident at

Hanover from 1705 till his death in 1709. He was, as mentioned on a

previous page, the husband of Ruperta, Prince Rupert’s daughter by

Margaret Howes. Ruperta seems herself to have helped to embroil

matters by writing some highly indiscreet letters to England, in which

she dwelt on the apathy of the House of Hanover towards the

Succession.

-----

We know for certain that the Electress was well informed as to the

existence of a secret sympathy on Queen Anne’s part with the Pretender;

since we have the explicit statement of the Duchess of Orleans that her

aunt believed the Queen to be secretly desirous of the accession of her

half-brother, and further believed ‘that she would some day bestow the

Crown upon him.’ Nor can we regard the latter clause a mere phrase, when

we remember the earlier communications in this sense between Anne and

her exiled father. But it by no means follows from this that this

solution was one desired by the Electress Sophia herself. According to a

fairly well authenticated anecdote, a bundle of letters was, some time

in the reign of George III, found in Kensington Palace, endorsed in

William III’s own handwriting ‘_Letters of the Electress Sophia to the

Court of St. Germains_’; and a plan which had been formed for publishing

these letters was frustrated through their being destroyed by George

III’s orders. But as to the contents of these letters there is no

satisfactory evidence at all. Again, it is no doubt true, and of a piece

with George I’s habitual method of dealing with inconvenient evidence,

that, in 1714, he requested the Duchess of Orleans to destroy all the

letters received by her from the Electress which contained any reference

to the House of Stewart; and, though the Duchess of Orleans, who made no

secret of her own sympathies, and whose portrait quite appropriately

found a place in the Stewart family museum at Caillot, says that her

aunt did not obey this wish, no such letters have been found, with a

single exception. In this letter, dated March 21st, 1708, after

mentioning that the ‘Prince of Wales’ was at Dunkirk (whence he

afterwards started on his brief expedition to Scotland), the Electress

Sophia indulges in the reflexion: ‘Who knows whether God will not

elevate him who suffers so innocently?’ But though, in matters

concerning the line from which she was descended, as well as with regard

to her own immediate family, Sophia’s nature was very far from being

untouched by sentiment, she never allowed herself to be subdued by it.

In her tenderness of feeling towards the House of Stewart she set an

example followed by the Hanoverian dynasty when in possession of the

British throne—from George I downwards, of whose kindliness of feeling

towards the exiled House instances might easily be cited.[169]

-----

Footnote 169:

The same feeling notably descended to George III, who granted an

‘apanage’ to the Cardinal of York in his last years; to George IV, who

as Prince Regent provided a solemn sepulture for the remains of James

II, and erected a monument to the last of his descendants; and, as is

well known, to the last and most illustrious sovereign of the

Hanoverian dynasty.

-----

Thus, in this period Sophia returned to Queen Anne coolness for

coolness, and though at times she might almost have seemed to herself

indifferent to her prospects and those of her posterity, while at other

times she thought of herself as ‘a candidate for Sion’ rather than as

the heiress to a throne, she was content to avoid any false step, and to

leave unjeopardised a future which she could not control. As late as

September, 1708, in mentioning the visit of Lord Hereford and two Whig

M.P.s, she writes that she found them very warm for the Succession, and

that she supposed they would always continue of the same mind, so long

as it paid them; at present it did not seem to pay _her_, for she was

not treated as its Princess of Wales. But, in the course of this year,

the Whigs were fully established in power; and, when the death, in the

autumn, of Prince George of Denmark, together with the subsequent

refusal of Queen Anne to remarry, had removed the last possibility of

issue from the reigning sovereign, the Hanoverian prospects of course

grew brighter. The House stood well at this season in the eyes of Europe

and of England. George Lewis’ envoy at Ratisbon in this very year at

last gained admittance into the Electoral College; and in the previous

year (1707) the Elector had assumed the command of the army of the Lower

Rhine, though his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Grand Alliance

had met with an incomplete response of confidence on the part of its

military leaders. Courtiers and others cultivating a consciousness of

coming events began to recognise the necessity of turning their faces

towards the rising sun. Mrs. Charles Howard, for instance, had the

honour of being (with her husband) presented to the Electress Dowager,

and of receiving particular notice, both from her and from the Electoral

Princess—as one of whose bed-chamber women she was in later days to play

so conspicuous a part at the British Court. But Queen Anne persisted in

the attitude which she had assumed, and in the autumn of this year

frankly told Lord Haversham that she could not tolerate the notion of

the presence in this country of any successor, even were it to last no

longer than a week.

When the approach of the great ministerial crisis of 1710 first

announced itself by the dismissal of Sunderland, the Elector was moved

to perhaps the most distinct expression of political opinion in British

affairs to which he committed himself at any time before his accession

to the throne. In a spirited remonstrance addressed by him to the Queen,

he gave words to the hope that she would enter into no further changes

in the present Ministry and Parliament. The Electress in the meantime

remained mistress of herself; and George Lewis followed her example,

when the crisis reached its height, and the wheel of fortune once more

brought the Tories uppermost. Neither Sophia nor her confidential

counsellor Leibniz looked with fear or even with disfavour upon the

transactions which seemed to have put a new face on the entire scheme of

British State policy. The leading spirit of the new combination was

Robert Harley, who possessed many valuable political qualities, but who

was above all a born intriguer. The moderation of his conduct was set

off by his personal merits, among which, in a brilliant literary age,

his genuine love of literature was by no means the least important.[170]

Leibniz, whose own political influence at Hanover had of late visibly

declined, was much gratified by the marked civility shown to him by one

of his London correspondents, Dr. Hutton, a follower of Harley.

-----

Footnote 170:

The latest tribute to it is the conjecture crediting him with the

original authorship of _Robinson Crusoe_.

-----

Queen Anne herself lost no time in communicating to the House of Hanover

her own view of the political changes which opened the concluding period

of her reign. In the autumn of 1710, Earl Rivers (by whose appointment

to the constableship of the Tower these changes had been heralded) made

his appearance at Hanover. His personal reputation was far from

immaculate; but he had been a successful general. At the time of his

arrival at Hanover, Sunderland’s dismissal had been succeeded by no

further ministerial changes. That Queen Anne should not have resented

the protest against this step transmitted by the Elector through Bothmer

at the Hague, indicates her hesitancy in the process. But, when a

further series of ministerial changes had been accomplished in England,

Rivers, who had made himself very acceptable at Hanover even to the

Elector, began to develop the ulterior purpose of his mission.

Unmistakably, it was intended to facilitate the overthrow of

Marlborough, without which these changes would remain incomplete, by

putting the Elector in his place as commander-in-chief in the war,

which, as Rivers assured him, the new British Government intended to

carry on with undiminished vigour. The ambassador was instructed to

state that the Queen could no longer suffer the insolence of those whom

she had raised to the highest pitch of power and authority. But, before

Rivers reached the Electoral Court, Marlborough had already conveyed to

George Lewis assurances of his fidelity to the Hanoverian Succession;

and the House of Hanover was thus confirmed in the attitude of caution

which it maintained in this very trying turn of affairs. There was no

reason why Elector and Electress should remain deaf to the blandishments

of the well-affected and reasonable Tories, whose theory of the

Succession harmonised with Sophia’s own. But, at the same time, it would

have been not less unwise to court the goodwill of the Queen and her new

ministers by cutting communications with Marlborough and the Whigs, than

it would have been to yield to the Whig proposal, communicated through

Robethon, to base the claims of the House of Hanover on the principles

of the Revolution of 1688. Leibniz was able to demonstrate the perfect

consistency of the course pursued by the House he served; and the

firmness and prudence with which the Elector resisted perhaps the single

temptation which, in the whole course of these transactions, he

personally found it hard to withstand—the offer of the supreme command

in the war—deserves a fuller recognition than has usually been accorded

to it.

The final period in the history of the Hanoverian Succession—though even

during this period the question had, as will be seen, still to pass

through a series of stages before it was solved—began with the

transformation of the British Ministry into a Tory Government, and the

overthrow of the Marlborough influence, which, with that of Godolphin,

had so long cast its spell over Queen Anne. During the last month or two

of 1710,[171] Schütz having died in the previous August, Bothmer was

performing the duties of envoy extraordinary in London, where he

remained till the following March. The Electress was extremely desirous

that he should, unlike Schütz and Kreyenberg, refrain from showing any

inclination towards either of the political parties; here in Hanover,

she assured him in January, 1711, ‘we do not know the meaning of the

terms Whig and Tory, and decline to distinguish individuals under those

names’; and she applauds him for having already, as she hears, managed

to create a far more agreeable impression than that made by his

predecessor. But this attempt on the part of the Electress to hold the

balance between the two parties, and to make Bothmer do the same, could

not be of long endurance. On April 17th, 1711, the Emperor Joseph I

died; there could be no reasonable doubt as to the succession of his

brother, the titular King Charles III of Spain, to the Imperial throne;

and an irresistible impulse was given to the desire for peace, with

which the new British Ministry was known to be in sympathy.

-----

Footnote 171:

The Electress wishes him a happy voyage on October 29th.

-----

Henceforth, until the Peace had been actually concluded, the question of

its conclusion dominated all others, and that of the Succession among

the rest. It might suit the purposes of the Whigs, who were opposed to

the Peace, to represent the desire of bringing it about as put forward

with a view to covering Jacobite designs with regard to the Succession;

as a matter of fact, the Tory leaders, though they might amuse

Berwick—or others who were as ignorant of England as he was—with

proposals about bringing over the Pretender to reside in England on his

half-sister’s invitation, were very careful not to allow any premature

Jacobite outbreak to interrupt the peace negotiations. When, in October,

1711, Bothmer returned to London as envoy extraordinary, the situation

had, for better or for worse, cleared up; and it would have been

impossible for the most skilful of diplomatists, with the strongest wish

to carry out the conciliatory intentions cherished by the good

Electress, to avoid an early collision with the Queen’s ministers, and,

in consequence, to place in his own way an insuperable obstacle against

securing her own goodwill. For the Elector was, heart and soul, in

favour of the continuance of the war; and the immediate purpose of

Bothmer’s present mission was to overthrow the peace policy to which the

Queen’s ministers had made up their minds. He brought with him an

elaborate memorandum from the Elector, dated November 28th, 1711,

against the conclusion of peace with France; and in January, 1712, this

memorandum was supported by a letter from the Elector asking for a

hearing for his envoy. These documents were presented to the Queen on

February 14th. As a matter of course, they were ascribed by the

ministerialists to Whig influence, and represented as implying an

attempt to bring about the continuance of Marlborough in the command.

There was no warrant for either assumption; and it may be added that the

Electress instructed Bothmer to express to Ormonde, as a tried friend of

hers, the particular gratification with which she had heard of his

appointment.

Violent altercations in Parliament ensued; and Bothmer clearly perceived

that any attempt to renew at present the proposal of inviting over the

Electress and the Electoral Prince, if not the Elector himself, could

have no other effect than that of uniting with the Jacobite wing of the

Tory party the followers of Harley, with whom it was a cardinal

principle to ‘use the Queen with all duty and respect imaginable.’ On

the representations of Bothmer, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin agreed

not to move in the matter without the Elector’s assent; and this was

sure not to be given, until an invitation should have been approved by

Queen and Parliament. Thus a blunder was avoided which must have proved

more disastrous to the prospects of the House of Hanover than that

actually committed three years later.

Both in 1710 and 1711 the air was full of more or less unsubstantial

schemes for bringing about, at what already seemed the eleventh hour,

the succession of the Pretender; and rumours were rife as to the gradual

transformation of the Ministry into a Jacobite Cabal. Though Leibniz was

no doubt right in saying that the question of inviting to England, or

(as the Electress so consistently repeated) of granting an income to,

one or more members of the Electoral family, was the touchstone of the

real intentions of the British Government, and though this may, as he

asserts, have also been the opinion of the Elector, yet there was no

question at Hanover of claiming any such concession. In April, 1711, the

Electress declared herself wholly uncertain of what would happen even in

the event of Queen Anne’s death—for ‘what Parliament does one day, it

undoes the next.’ Thus, when, in the autumn of the same year, Lord

Rivers made his second appearance at Hanover, the letter which he

brought with him from Queen Anne, and his assurances of her care for the

interests of the Electoral family, were received by Sophia with proper

expressions of gratitude, whatever she might privately say as to the

expense which this mission entailed upon the Hanoverian Court, with

little prospect of return. There was, indeed, some talk of the Elector

being offered the chief command in Flanders after Marlborough’s

dismissal in December, 1711; but nothing came of the suggestion, and in

January, 1712, the Electress is found expressing her satisfaction at the

appointment of Ormonde, who had always been so friendly to her. But as

to the main object of his mission Rivers completely failed; for George

Lewis firmly declined to give his approval to the British overtures of

peace to France, at the risk of deeply annoying the Queen and her

ministers by thus falling in with the wishes of the Whigs. He took his

stand on the principles of the Grand Alliance, from which he had never

swerved; while his mother judiciously held the balance by refusing to

accept the insinuations of her correspondent at the Hague, Lord

Strafford, against the inclinations of her House and Bothmer towards the

Whigs, and appealing with much dignity to her conviction that, beyond

the devices of Whigs and Tories, the Protestant Succession could depend

on the support of the nation. Meanwhile, the two parties were alike

striving to apprise the Hanoverian Court of the direction in which to

look for its friends. The anxiety of the Whigs to identify their party

with the Electoral House is at the same time proved by the motion of the

Duke of Devonshire to give precedence to the Duke of Cambridge over

other Peers.[172] The Ministry overtrumped this modest effort by a Bill

giving precedence to the entire Electoral family, which was passed in

two days (January, 1712), and which the minister’s kinsman, Thomas

Harley, was in July specially sent over to present to the Electress. She

took the announcement of this new visit very coolly, regretting the

expense to which she was put by it, and observing that, if the British

throne were for sale, France on behalf of its client could afford the

purchase better than the House of Hanover, which had no intention of

imitating the prodigality of Augustus II of Poland.[173] Her instinct

was correct, for Thomas Harley had instructions which, while pretending

to put the blame on Bothmer, seriously reflected on the Elector’s

opposition to the peace policy pursued by the British Government. In the

course of the negotiations carried on at Paris in August, 1712, between

Torcy and Bolingbroke, the latter on one occasion even went so far as to

hint at the despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic, with a view not

only to controlling the northern troubles, but also to frustrating

possible designs on the part of the Dutch _and of Hanover_.[174]

-----

Footnote 172:

He had been created a Knight of the Garter in 1706, but not installed

till December, 1710, Lord Halifax acting as his proxy.

Footnote 173:

_À propos_ of the mention of this sovereign it may be noted that about

this time Queen Anne thought fit to impose upon the Electress the task

(specially disagreeable because she specially disliked him) of

dissuading King Augustus from forcing his son and namesake to follow

him into the Church of Rome. Augustus II actually promised Queen Anne

to send his son to England; but in the meantime the latter had been

received into the Catholic Church at Bologna.

Footnote 174:

O. Weber, _Der Friede von Utrecht_, p. 313.

-----

Meanwhile the Court of Hanover, while maintaining unchanged its attitude

towards the general question of war or peace, had immediate interests of

its own to watch besides such as might be involved in the question of

the English Succession. The recognition of the Hanoverian Electorship,

for instance, was demanded from France, _pari passu_ with that of the

Prussian Kingship. Early in the year, in the negotiations already in

progress, Bothmer, whom Oxford and Bolingbroke persisted in treating as

antagonistic to their Government,[175] returned to his post at the

Hague. In December, 1712, Baron Thomas von Grote, who belonged to a

family of high distinction in the Hanoverian service, arrived in London,

nominally with the special charge of returning thanks for the Act of

Precedence. His instructions, drawn up by Robethon in the name of the

Electress Sophia, illustrate the penultimate stage in the final period

of the transactions concerning the Succession. He was to be polite to

all, and not to consider himself debarred from taking counsel with the

old friends of the House—in other words, with Marlborough and the Whig

leaders—so long as this was done privately and secretly; and he was to

avoid giving umbrage to the Queen’s ministers, and above all to the

Queen herself. The Elector furnished him with a special commendatory

letter to Oxford. He was to make friends with the clergy, and to

reassure them by pointing out that the ecclesiastical system of the

German Lutherans was to all intents and purposes an episcopal one. The

everlasting delicate question as to the summoning of the Electress or

another member of the Electoral family to England he was to treat as if

this event might any day come to pass; and, at the same time, he was to

press for a proposal to Parliament on the subject of an

establishment—say at Somerset House. The Elector, while of opinion that

such a proposal would furnish the best means of testing the sincerity of

the Queen’s and her advisers’ intentions, declined to influence

Parliamentary opinion by means of any expenditure of his own, though it

would seem that he had previously not objected to Bothmer’s attempting

to gain over some noble Lords against the Peace by similar inducements.

But, though he still abstained from any intervention in British home

affairs, his own instructions to Grote were less carefully balanced than

those of the Electress, and left no doubt as to its being the leading

Whigs on whom he reckoned as the true friends of the House of Hanover.

-----

Footnote 175:

Bolingbroke hated Bothmer, and described him as, ‘notwithstanding that

air of coldness and caution which he wore, the most inveterate party

man that I ever saw, and the most capable of giving _tête baissée_

into the most extravagant measures that faction could propose.’ (Cf.

Salomon, p. 239, and note.)

-----

Both at Hanover and elsewhere, however, eager friends of the dynasty

advocated a more expeditious procedure. In September, 1712, the

indefatigable Leibniz submitted a scheme, concocted by busy brains in

London, for including the demand for establishing the Electress in

England among the conditions of the Peace of Utrecht. But, though both

in her correspondence, and in conversation with Thomas Harley, she had

given considerable attention to the scheme, she ultimately declared it

impracticable. The unsatisfactory action of the English ministers in the

matter of the Dutch guarantee of the Hanoverian Succession had once more

rendered her diffident; she was, she said, so old that there was no

reality in all her talk; were she younger, she added with a touch of her

old spirit, the sovereignty of England should not pass by her.

The Peace of Utrecht, when actually concluded in the spring of 1713, was

in many respects unsatisfactory to the Elector; and as an Estate of the

Empire, he must have been well content to withhold his signature from

it. But it contained a very explicit recognition of the Hanoverian

Succession by France and the other signatory Powers; so that, in this

respect at all events, Bothmer’s exertions had been entirely successful.

Yet the tone prevailing at court and in ministerial circles in London

very imperfectly agreed with this result; and in Hanover there was a

growing disbelief in the sincerity of the sentiments entertained in

these quarters. Grote found himself coolly received, and his attempts to

obtain assurances baffled. Various suggestions offered by him were

ignored; and in a lengthy despatch which he sent home in February (a few

weeks before his death) he drew the darkest picture of the political

situation which had as yet reached Hanover. He considered that, in spite

of the generalities in which Oxford shrouded himself, he had gradually

gone over to the Jacobites in order to please the Queen, while

Bolingbroke he regarded as an open Jacobite on his own account. He

thought that, as to the Pretender, there was reason for fearing the

worst; he had heard that the Queen had expressed a wish to see her

half-brother in England after the conclusion of the Peace, while the

question of inviting over a member of the Electoral family had been

indefinitely postponed. Part of this report sufficiently tallies with

the information with which about this time the Pretender was being

constantly supplied by his illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of

Berwick. Though sanguine as to methods of action, Berwick never

minimised the chances of the Hanoverian Succession; the first thing

requisite, he wrote to James in November, 1712, was to checkmate

Hanover; the rest could then be easily accomplished without mentioning

the name of the legitimate claimant. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke,

Berwick wrote in May, 1713, were heartily resolved to go forward; in

July, he reported them to be rather less ardent; but these were mere

fluctuations. From all this it is tolerably clear that Oxford, in trying

to deceive others, deceived himself. Much of his political life had

consisted in a successful endeavour to face both ways without laying

himself open to the charge of double-dealing. He now persuaded himself

that he was throwing dust in the eyes of the Elector and Electress and

the friends of the Hanoverian Succession, while at the same time drawing

as near to the Jacobite projects as safety permitted. He was, above all

things, a Parliamentary statesman, and nothing but the decision of

Parliament would determine his ultimate choice of sides; but, as the

majority was at present constituted, while the great achievement of the

Peace assured the advance of Tory ascendancy, and the Queen seemed less

and less inclined to reconcile herself to the Succession of the House of

Hanover, he looked to the triumph of the Jacobite cause as the event

towards which his course would be most safely shaped. With Bolingbroke,

the case was wholly different. Oxford was prepared to be in the end

guided by the Parliamentary majority; Bolingbroke was prepared to

educate it up to that end—only he used a more sportsmanlike phraseology.

For himself, he made no secret whatever of his likes and dislikes; kept

up a constant intercourse with Jacobites and Frenchmen; and at times, as

Grote complained, did him the honour of treating him ‘_de coquin ou de

fou_.’[176]

-----

Footnote 176:

Salomon, _u.s._, p. 223, from the Hanover Archives.

-----

Meanwhile, the Queen and the Lord Treasurer continued their _banales_

expressions of friendship and goodwill at Hanover, where, on March 17th,

1713, the useful Thomas Harley presented a letter from the Queen,

declaring her intention of treating the interests of the House of

Hanover as her own. But neither this letter, nor the amicable phrases

with which in April she opened Parliament after its adjournment, evoked

any warm response at Hanover. Sophia, indeed, wrote to Strafford at the

Hague, begging him to thank the Queen, and adding that, as she had no

expectation of ever ascending the throne herself, she hoped that Her

Majesty would entertain no aversion to her on that score. But, as she

told Bothmer, she only paid back Strafford in the coin she received from

England—words, not deeds; and, on the whole, Leibniz’s epigram not

unaptly summed up the situation—

_‘Hannoverana domus magnâ me gaudet amicâ,’

Anna refert; tacita est Hannoverana domus._

An attempt had been indeed made, or suggested, to utilise the Queen’s

friendly expressions for a bold venture on the part of the House of

Hanover; but it had been still-born. After Grote’s death in March,

Kreyenberg had carried on the affairs of the Hanoverian Legation in

London; and reports were also from time to time sent to Hanover by the

Dutch resident in London, L’Hermitage. In one of these (dated May 9th,

1713)[177] the very important proposal was made that the Electoral

Prince should come over to England on his own account, inasmuch as the

Queen would never send for him. The notion found the utmost favour with

the Whig leaders, who knew how much depended on the issue of the

approaching election, and who hoped that it might be influenced by so

bold a step on the part of the Hanoverian family. But Bernstorff, who

was in favour of the scheme and without whose persuasion there was no

prospect at all of the Elector approving it, was ill at the time; and,

when he recovered, the Elector was found to be entirely under the

influence of advice against action. An attempt to bring about the repeal

of the Union with Scotland was defeated, without the question of the

Hanoverian Succession playing more than a subsidiary part in the

dispute.

-----

Footnote 177:

Printed in Macpherson, Vol. ii. pp. 792-3. See on this transaction

Salomon, _u.s._, pp. 225 _sqq._

-----

When, in the following July, Parliament, after approving a number of the

Treaties which formed the Peace of Utrecht,[178] was prorogued, on the

eve of a General Election, the Queen’s Speech significantly omitted the

usual announcement of her readiness to support the Protestant

Succession. While the versatile intellect of Leibniz was still devising

new schemes for bringing about the desired result, the Elector adhered

more closely than ever to his original policy. In August, 1713, Baron

von Schütz the younger (George William Helwig Sinold), the son of the

former envoy of the Court of St. James and the grandson of the Celle

Chancellor, arrived in London as envoy. The choice of this agent was at

the time unfavourably criticised by some of the Whigs, who thought that

a politician of greater experience should have been selected. Sophia

would not commit herself to Bothmer on the question whether Schütz would

be better liked than her correspondent had been in England; ‘at all

events,’ she said, ‘nobody will be attracted by his appearance’ (_il ne

payera pas de mine_). We shall have to enquire immediately whether, in

the great diplomatic catastrophe which befell him, the younger Schütz

was himself deserving of blame. He was instructed by the Elector in the

sense of an absolute abstinence from interference in British affairs.

Even as to the question of inviting a member of the Electoral family to

England he was to take up a distinctly negative position; but, at the

same time, he was to treat as indispensable measures the removal of the

Pretender from Lorraine and a provision for the Electress as Heiress

Presumptive of Great Britain. The envoy’s reports were far from

encouraging, and his information as to the views and intentions of the

Queen and her advisers again agrees with that transmitted by Berwick to

the Pretender.

-----

Footnote 178:

By composing the _Te Deum und Jubilate_ for the celebration of the

Peace at St. Paul’s on July 7th, Handel gave great offence to the

Hanoverian Court; nor was he readmitted to favour till some little

time after the accession of George I.

-----

The tide of danger was unmistakably rising. Parliament was dissolved in

August, 1713; and a proposal was on foot to bring to bear upon Queen

Anne at the opening of the new Parliament the direct personal influence

of the presence of her half-brother in England. In the attitude of

Oxford and Bolingbroke no hopeful alteration occurred. In defiance of

the manifest irritation of the Queen, the Elector coldly declared

himself unsatisfied with the guarantees which he had so far received,

and declined to sanction any expenditure on pamphlets or newspapers, or

on more direct means of influencing elections or gaining over

necessitous Peers. Yet, to the amusement of Sophia, whose sense of

humour never deserted her, Hanover and Herrenhausen continued to attract

not a few Englishmen desirous of being found in this vicinity at the

critical moment. They were, however, she thought, reckoning without

their host in hoping to strew palms before her on her entrance into

London; she feared that she could not contrive to live as long as Queen

Anne, so as to prove to them her gratitude. And yet, when in the last

days of the year Queen Anne herself fell ill, and the agitation in

England was raised to an unprecedented pitch, it seemed as if,

notwithstanding what Sophia described as her ‘incurable malady of having

passed her eighty-fourth year,’ her repeated prediction that she would

never herself mount the British throne would after all be falsified. In

November she had herself been ill, suffering so seriously from an

affection (erysipelas) to which she was subject, that fears were

entertained for her life. But she soon recovered sufficiently to write

to the Duchess of Orleans, and with her usual spirit she insisted on

following the Elector to the Göhrde.

The situation was now coming to be one of a very high tension. On the

one hand, Strafford, who never ceased from trying to persuade the

Electress that the Tories were her friends, and that there was not a

Jacobite left in the party, assured her that what he had observed during

the Queen’s illness had convinced him of the strength of popular opinion

in England in favour of the Protestant Succession. And Steinghens, the

Elector Palatine’s minister in London, who was on a footing of intimacy

with Oxford, declared to his correspondent, General von der Schulenburg,

that had Queen Anne died during her illness the Princess Sophia would

have been proclaimed on the same day. Assurances of devotion poured in

from every side; in February, Secretary Bromley laid himself at the

Electress’ feet; and Archbishop Dawes entreated attention to his own

humble endeavours and to the faithfulness and zeal of the whole body of

the clergy. On the other hand, the demeanour and utterances of those in

power were not growing more propitious as the new year came in. Cautious

as Oxford was in his utterances, perhaps the most striking of all the

self-revelations reported of him at this critical time was that which,

in December, 1713, he made to the Abbé Gaultier, according to the

statement of the latter to De Torcy: ‘So long as I live, England shall

not be governed by a German.’ Except through Gaultier, however, Oxford

was inaccessible on the subject, and though, in January, 1714, he was

said to have sent a private messenger to the Pretender, in the following

month Berwick heard that the Lord Treasurer’s intentions were still

quite unknown, and suggested to James to make sure of the Queen and

Bolingbroke by writing to them himself. Berwick’s scheme of the

Pretender coming over to England in secret, so as to enable the Queen to

declare in his favour at the opening of Parliament, was quite visionary;

for Louis XIV was not inclined to make any move in his support, except

by placing two men-of-war at Havre at his disposal; and the Tory leaders

were wholly intent upon removing, in the first instance, the insuperable

obstacle to any chance of the Pretender’s success by inducing him to

come over—to the Church of England. As for Bolingbroke, who must have

known that such a solution was not to be looked for, he seems to have

been willing to depend on the double chance of something unexpected

happening at the critical moment, and of the Hanoverian successor

proving unable to maintain herself—or himself—on the throne even after

mounting it. Thus, as the crisis drew nearer and nearer, the Tory

leaders were becoming less and less prepared to meet it.[179]

-----

Footnote 179:

These conclusions seem irresistible in view of the documents,

especially the despatches of Ibberville, collected by Grimblot and

reviewed by Salomon, _u.s._, pp. 235-64.

-----

And so it came to pass that, when, in February, 1714, the new Parliament

met, with a Tory majority in the Commons outnumbering their opponents by

at least two to one, the Queen’s Speech could hardly have been more

ambiguous in tone than it actually proved. She, like her ministers, had

no wish for the House of Hanover, and saw no present chance for the

Stewarts. While, therefore, discrediting all reports implying that the

Protestant Succession, as settled in the House of Hanover, was in

danger, the Speech also referred to the attempts ‘to weaken the Queen’s

authority or to render the possession of the Crown uneasy to

her’—obviously alluding to the design of bringing over a member of the

Electoral family. While Bolingbroke may have been prepared to make use

of this design so as to bring about a complete rupture between the Queen

and the House of Hanover, Oxford could not but directly oppose a step

which would have forced the hands of the Government, and removed the

ultimate use of the situation out of his own wary hands. Yet nothing

could have been more distinctly double-faced than his action in the

early months of 1714. He dangled before Schütz the offer of a revision

of the Regency Bill of 1705, which was to enable the court of Hanover to

name the whole body of Regents, but which also might have furnished an

opportunity for giving the _quietus_ to the entire Bill. Not long

afterwards, in March, he expressed his intention to bring in a Bill

declaring the introduction of foreign troops into England an act of high

treason. But ‘under which King,’ or under what Government, could the

foreign troops whose arrival was thus to be prevented have been

levied?[180]

-----

Footnote 180:

Salomon, _u.s._, p. 272. Klopp, vol. xiv. p. 540, gives a summary of

the discussion of Oxford’s announcement from the Lords’ Debates.

-----

Though the calculated untrustworthiness of Oxford, and the reckless

speculativeness of Bolingbroke, had by this time become as much of an

open secret as had the consuming desire of the Secretary of State to

supplant the Lord Treasurer, there was even now no disposition on the

part of the court of Hanover to commit itself by any rash act. There had

never been any real divergence of policy between the Electress and her

son, the Elector, though his consistency of conduct had perhaps been the

more formally complete, and we cannot follow him, as we can the

Electress, in his private comments on the angular points which from time

to time presented themselves in the situation. Now, they were more than

ever at one in their determination to abstain from precipitate action.

Robethon’s memorandum of _Reasons for not sending the Electoral Prince

to England_ (January, 1714), whether or not the Elector’s dislike of his

son had anything to do with the conclusions reached, reiterated the old

objection of the Electress to a course which would appear to be dictated

by a desire to gratify the Whigs by offending the Tories, instead of

uniting the moderate men of both parties in support of the Succession.

Sophia had, by this time, come to have so little faith in either of the

English political parties that, as she told Strafford, she disliked the

very names of Whig and Tory; and, as an octogenarian, she was inevitably

indisposed to run any great personal risk or court any serious personal

change. She gave Schulenburg to understand that she would never consent

to proceed to England without the Elector. Yet neither she nor her son,

who might be depended upon not to start for England a day too soon,

affected indifference towards the Succession; and even on the question

of sending the Electoral Prince to England, there were signs that, in

deference to Bothmer’s advice, this course might after all be adopted,

so soon as the Emperor should have concluded his peace with France.[181]

It is no doubt in this connexion that, in the very last letter to

Leibniz preserved from the hand of the Electress Sophia—which bears the

date of May 20th, 1714 (N.S.)—she refers to a step which, as we shall

see, she had just taken, and which Queen Anne had chosen to regard as a

provocation offered to herself.

-----

Footnote 181:

Bothmer to Robethon, January 2nd, 1714. (Cited by Salomon, _u.s._, p.

232, from the Stowe MSS. in Brit. Mus.)

-----

We must go back for a moment to the previous month of April, in which

the relations between Queen Anne and the House of Hanover seemed to have

become rather easier. Had she and her advisers—Oxford in

particular—gained some special insight into the fundamental weakness of

the Jacobite position? Though the secret was open enough, one is almost

inclined to some conclusion of the kind, in view of a communication from

Berwick to James, dated April 11th, which describes the situation so

lucidly that it seems worth while to extract from it the following

passage (substituting real names for the transparent pseudonyms):—

I discours’d de Torcy about the King [James]’s resolution to be taken

in case Queen Anne should break. I find he knows not what to advise;

and in truth it is to be wish’d one could have some newse of Ormonde

[now Commander-in-chief], and see what disposition the Parliament will

be in, before one comes to a positive determination. The point is very

nice; on one side it would look odd in the world that King James

should see the Elector of Hannover quietly gett Queen Anne’s throne

without making the least opposition; on the other side to beginn an

expedition there must be money, provision of arms, and all many other

things which I fear the King [James] wants, besides that there can be

no hopes of success unless one can gett some officers of the army. A

great many of the Scotch will oppose the business and ’tis much feared

the Highlanders will have but very small means for so great an

undertaking. The Elector has actually the law for him; the United

Provinces are engaged to support him; the Kings of France and Spain

have promis’d not to meddle in it; and I find the English [i.e. the

English friends of the King] so very slow and cautious that ‘tis much

to be doubted their giving any helping hand.

Not long afterwards, Berwick had no better advice to give his royal

kinsman, than that he should keep his own counsel as to the point on

which he had made up his mind, and not allow his friends in England to

think the desired consummation (his adoption of the Protestant faith) an

event altogether out of the question. When the signs of the times seemed

so unpromising to those who watched them with the most direct and

personal interest, and when, as to the problem on which chances mainly

turned, they could only advise a policy of temporising and

dissimulation, Oxford may well have been more desirous than ever to

safeguard his own future by seeking to maintain a good understanding

with the other side. In this month of April, he is accordingly found

tendering assurances not only of his own devotion, but also of Lady

Masham’s, to the Hanoverian Succession, and declaring his conviction

that the Queen was for it; though, as towards her, he again guarded

himself by deprecating the establishment of a second Court in England.

About the same time, his kinsman Thomas Harley again arrived at Hanover,

with a letter from the Queen to the Electress, blandly enquiring whether

there was anything which in her judgment would further secure the

Succession of her House. Should she have no suggestion of further

guarantees to offer, this would be taken as implying that the existing

guarantees were regarded as sufficient. At the same time, the House of

Hanover was warned against giving any encouragement, directly or

indirectly, to a faction which was working for its own advantage only.

Harley brought no message from the Queen inviting any member of the

House to England; and the above-mentioned enquiry, as Bolingbroke’s

comments on it to Strafford implied, suggested a defiance rather than an

invitation. He was specifically instructed to offer her on the part of

the Queen an annuity (_pension_) for herself; but this the Electress,

with her usual quickness of insight, declined. The revenue desired by

her was, she said, one that should be granted to her in due form as

Heiress Presumptive by Queen and Parliament, in accordance with the

precedent of the allowance made to Queen Anne herself, when Princess of

Denmark in the preceding reign. Either before or after the Electress

sent this reply—on May 7th—both she and the Elector attached their

signatures to a formal answer to the enquiry brought by Thomas Harley.

In this important memorandum they reiterated the view which had been

expressed in Schütz’s instructions, that the Succession could not be

held to be really assured unless an end were put to the danger of

invasion by the Pretender by his being made to leave his present

residence in Lorraine, and that it was desirable to secure a revenue to

the Electress by Act of Parliament. They further declared it to be

desirable that a member of the House of Hanover should be established in

England, in order to watch over the important interests at issue. There

can be no doubt but that the Electoral Prince was the member of the

family whom the memorandum had in view. The document was signed and

sealed by both the Elector and the Electress; and a covering letter from

the former to the Queen thanked her in the most conciliatory tone for

her continued care for the Protestant Succession. This memorandum, for

which the Elector was directly responsible in conjunction with his

mother, takes the bottom out of the supposition that he was at this time

ready, if he could do so with honour, to relinquish his claims.

But before the memorandum was actually transmitted, a cold blast had

suddenly blown athwart the relations between the House of Hanover and

Queen Anne. In the ordinary course of things the Electoral Prince, as

Duke of Cambridge, would have, like any other English Peer, received his

writ of summons to attend the Queen in Parliament. Aware, however, of

her sensitiveness on the subject of the presence of a member of the

Hanoverian family in England, the Lord Chancellor (Lord Harcourt) had

thought proper to delay indefinitely the issue of the writ. The demand

for it had originally been suggested to Schütz by the Earl of

Nottingham, who, though a High Church Tory, had long broken with the

court; and, though an attempt to obtain the writ from the Lord

Chancellor made at the instigation of the Whig Lord Cowper had failed,

Schütz had naturally felt uneasy at its issue being delayed. When, in a

letter to him, the Electress Sophia had given vent to her astonishment

at the fact that the patent of the Duke of Cambridge had not been in due

course followed by a writ, and had expressed her opinion that the Lord

Chancellor would not object to Schütz’s ‘_asking for it and the reason_’

(of the delay), he had interpreted this expression of opinion as a

command. The Whig leaders, including the Duke of Somerset, to whom

Schütz had shown the Electress’ ‘order,’ had, according to his own

account, been delighted with it, and had approved of his proposal to

take action upon it. In the Electress’ letter to Leibniz of May 20th,

already mentioned, she explicitly states, not, as Schütz puts it, that

she had ‘ordered the writ,’ but that she had directed him to enquire

from the Lord Chancellor whether the Electoral Prince ought not to

receive it—which is not quite the same thing. But her letter to Schütz,

on which the whole matter turns, cannot be said to be ambiguous, or to

allow of any interpretation but that put upon it by him.[182] Even if it

be the case that the memoranda of Hoffmann, the Imperial resident at the

Court of St. James’, imply that, so far as he knew, there was no

intention at Hanover of actually demanding the writ till the meeting of

the next Parliament, this would not make it necessary to place a forced

interpretation upon the Electress’ letter, with which in any case the

Elector had no concern, and which can hardly have referred to the next

Parliament, when the present was little more than two months old. The

Hanoverian court had been pressed both by Marlborough and by Prince

Eugene (who never believed in a policy of masterly inaction) to do what

it could to obtain a summons for the Electoral Prince, and the Electress

is known to have had this matter at heart, while the Elector’s feelings

towards his son made him from first to last averse to carrying it into

execution.

-----

Footnote 182:

It seems necessary to quote the actual text of this much-vext letter:

‘_Je vous prie de dire à Monsieur le chancelier Mylord Harcourt qu’on

est fort étonné ici qu’on n’a pas envoyé un writ à mon petit-fils le

prince électoral pour pouvoir entrer au parlement comme duc de

Cambridge, comme cela lui est dû par la patente que la reine lui a

donnée. Comme il a toujours été de mes amis aussi bien que son cousin,

je crois qu’il ne trouvera pas mauvais que vous le lui demandiez et la

raison._’ (_Briefe der Kurfürstin Sophie an Hannoversche Diplomaten_,

p. 213.)

-----

Schütz, who, it must be remembered, was accredited from the Electress as

well as from the Elector, had acted in accordance with his instructions;

but he can hardly be acquitted of precipitancy, and of an excessive

readiness to listen to the opinion of the Whig leaders before assuring

himself of the approval of the Elector. In any case, the die had now

been cast. Harcourt had replied that the writ was quite ready, but that

it was not customary for Peers to demand their writ except when on the

spot; he would, however, mention the subject to the Queen. The Cabinet,

summoned to deal with the envoy’s demand, decided that the writ could

not be refused, though, according to Gaultier’s information, Bolingbroke

had supported the Queen’s opinion in favour of refusing it. On April

17th, it was handed to Schütz by the Lord Chancellor, or in accordance

with his orders. Being requested to state by whom he had been directed

to demand the writ, Schütz seems to have mentioned the name of the

Electress; but this is not attested by evidence at first hand. Schütz

was speedily informed by Oxford that he would do well not to show

himself at Court, and was afterwards formally prohibited from appearing

there; but, as a matter of course, there was no question whatever of

breaking off diplomatic relations, these being carried on for the time

by Kreyenberg. Presently—on April 22nd—the envoy took his departure. On

his arrival at Hanover, the Elector made a point of declining to receive

Schütz; censured him for having obeyed any orders but the Elector’s; and

told Thomas Harley, who, before taking his departure from Hanover,

waited on him, with his whole _posse_ of Englishmen, that Schütz had

never been instructed to demand the writ, and that he (the Elector) had

never intended to send his son to England without the knowledge of the

Queen. This formula may perhaps be reconcilable with the information

given by Robethon to Lord Polwarth,[183] according to which the Elector,

though he knew nothing about the demand for the writ, would have sent

the Electoral Prince to England in the end, had it not been for the

Queen’s letter to be mentioned immediately, which ‘changed the entire

system.’ There seems to have been a good deal of feeling at Hanover—a

feeling shared both by the Whig leaders in England and by Bothmer at the

Hague—that, the writ having been now secured, the Electoral Prince

should be sent over. But this the Elector refused to do; and the success

with which he had thus kept out of the whole of this transaction—the

single wrong move made on the Hanoverian side in the whole course of the

game—must be placed to the credit of his judgment, whatever course he

may have intended to take at a later date. But how far both he and the

Electress were from being intimidated by the displeasure of the Queen,

is shown by the fact that at Thomas Harley’s farewell audience the

Elector placed in his hands the outspoken memorandum signed by the

Electress and himself on May 7th. As for Sophia, the tone of her letter

to Leibniz containing a narrative of the entire transaction is perfectly

cool; and in it she as usual expresses the belief that, in spite of her

recent illness, Queen Anne will outlive her Heiress Presumptive, and

cites the proverb, ‘_krakende Wagens gân lang_.’[184] Her reply to

Strafford’s letter entreating her to signify her disapproval of Schütz’s

action is unfortunately lost, though its purport was said to have been

the same as that of the Elector’s parting declaration to Thomas Harley.

The situation seemed far less terrific at Hanover than it did in London,

where the Queen’s wrath was visibly ablaze, so that the House of Commons

deferred voting payment of the arrears due to the Hanoverian troops, and

where it was believed that if the Electoral Prince were after all sent

over an invitation to the Pretender would follow. Moreover (though this

is a matter into which it is impossible to enter here), the opposite

views taken by Oxford and Bolingbroke as to the final issue of the writ

undoubtedly helped materially to hasten the fleeting triumph of the

younger over the older minister.

-----

Footnote 183:

Lord Polwarth, eldest son of the Earl of Marchmont and member for

Berwick-on-Tweed (who afterwards became an intimate friend of

Bolingbroke), had kept up a correspondence with the court of Hanover

since his visit there in 1712.

Footnote 184:

I do not know whether anything on the subject is mentioned in the

fifteen letters from Sophia to Lady Colt, said to range from 1681 to

May 15th, 1714, and to have been sold by auction in 1905.

-----

From what has been said it will appear how greatly the facts of the case

are exaggerated and distorted in the tradition attributing the death of

the Electress Sophia, which took place at Herrenhausen on June 8th,

1714, to the agitation caused by the letter addressed to her by Queen

Anne in connexion with the affair of the writ, and accompanied by two

letters from the Queen on the same subject to the Elector and the

Electoral Prince. Undeniably, the Queen’s letter to the Electress

Sophia, though taking a less severe form of reprimand than the companion

missive to the Electoral Prince, was both offensive and insolent; for

Queen Anne, who (with the exception of the Prayer-book Order) had taken

no step towards admitting the Electress and her descendants into the

royal family, could not lay claim to any formal authority over them.

That this view was widely taken of the letters may be gathered from the

fact that Boyer (Swift’s ‘Whig dog’), who had been taken into custody on

a warrant from Bolingbroke for publishing them, was, a few months after

the accession of George I, discharged—so that their publication was

evidently regarded as having proved serviceable towards that result. Nor

was the effect of the letters likely to be mitigated by the honeyed

protestations of Oxford, whose system of procedure the letters almost

hopelessly traversed, in a communication to the Elector accompanying

them. The sharp wit of the Electoral Princess Caroline suspected that it

was not he, but Bolingbroke, who was their draughtsman; and there can be

little or no doubt as to the correctness of this surmise. It cannot but

have been shared by the old Electress, and must have contributed to make

her stand firm against a blow contrived by an all but avowed adversary

of the lawful claims of herself and her House.

Yet there can be no doubt that at the time the death of the Electress

Sophia was very generally connected with, if not directly attributed to,

the advent of the Queen’s letters. The very straightforward account

transmitted to Marlborough by Molyneux, who had been sent to Hanover by

the Duke to counteract the effects of Thomas Harley’s mission, shows the

Electress to have been much agitated on the evening of the day

(Wednesday, June 6th) on which, about noon, the letters had been

delivered to her at Herrenhausen. On the following day, though Molyneux

was told she was not well, she ordered him to send copies of the letters

to Marlborough;[185] on Friday, June 8th, she seemed well, but was still

occupied with the subject and ordering fresh copies of the letters; she

dined with the Elector, and in the evening was, according to her habit,

walking in the gardens, when rain suddenly fell. As she quickened her

speed in order to find a shelter, she dropped down and rapidly passed

away. The letters of the Countess of Bückeburg[186] to the Electress’

niece and constant companion during the last fifteen years, the

Raugravine Louisa, corroborates this account, and adds one or two

significant touches. On the Wednesday the Electress said to the writer

of the letter: ‘This affair will certainly make me ill—I shall never get

over it’ (_j’y succombrai_). ‘But,’ she added, ‘I shall have this

gracious letter printed, so that all the world may see that it will not

have been by my fault, if my children lose the three Kingdoms.’ And, on

the Friday, though to all appearance in her usual strength, she

continued to talk of English affairs with the Electoral Princess. And,

since the Electoral Princess Caroline herself informed Leibniz, on June

7th, that the Electress and the Electoral Prince intended to send the

Queen’s letters to England, it may be concluded that this high-spirited

but rather venturesome design still further excited the old lady.

Although the outer world had continued to believe her to be as full of

vigour as ever, she had of late begun to take some thought of her

health—a notable sign, inasmuch as ordinarily she set no high value on

medical advice, being of opinion that no doctor can predict anything

with certainty except that a person who died in February will not be ill

in March. Probably, she was aware of the tendency to apoplexy which,

already thirteen years earlier, her faithful friend Leibniz had observed

in her. On the whole, the natural conclusion appears to be that the

agitation produced in her by the Queen’s letters, together with her own

resolution not to sit still under the affront, contributed to the

collapse of a frame enfeebled by advanced old age, but that this trouble

was the occasion rather than the cause of her decease. For her epitaph

seems to tell the truth when, in perfect agreement with the Countess of

Bückeburg’s statement that ‘never was there seen a death more gentle or

more happy,’ it describes the Electress’ death as having been not less

peaceful than sudden. Her character lies almost open to us in her

private letters, and, as she told Leibniz in April, 1713, she had made

it a principle to keep her mind tranquil, and not to allow it to be

affected by either public or private troubles. As to her death, she had

written to him a little later, it would no doubt be a finer affair if,

in accordance with his wishes, her remains were interred at Westminster;

‘but the truth is that my mind, which hitherto has managed to rule my

body, at present suggests no such sad thoughts to me, and that the talk

about the Succession annoys me.’ Read in the way in which so many of her

letters ought to be read, as half-ironical, the words just quoted attest

the self-control and self-possession that were on the whole the most

noteworthy features in the character of this remarkable woman. But

neither this passage, nor anything else that remains from her hand,

contradicts the belief which is derived from a review of her entire

career, that from first to last she proved herself equal to the

responsibilities of her life, and that, had she been actually called to

the throne, she would have been not less ready than worthy to reign as a

Queen.

-----

Footnote 185:

It was through these copies that the letters seem afterwards to have

become known.

Footnote 186:

This appears to have been the Countess Johanna von der

Lippe-Bückeburg, who, on being divorced from her husband, was besieged

by him in her residence at Stadthagen near Bückeburg, from which he

thought himself entitled to expel her. She appears to have been a

welcome visitor at Herrenhausen, where she told the story of this

siege ‘_fort joliment_.’

-----

We possess a minute official account of the proceedings after the

Electress Sophia’s death—of the sealing-up of her personal effects by

the Elector’s orders; of the embalming of the corpse, the night-watch

over it, and its transportation on the evening of the following day to

Hanover.[187] Unfortunately, the list of those who paid her the last

honours at Herrenhausen does not include the names of the ladies and

‘_cavaliers_’ who had been in personal attendance upon her.[188] Her

remains were deposited in the chapel of the royal palace—the old church

of the Minorites—at Hanover, with proper care and decorum, but, as is

formally stated, ‘without ceremony,’ i.e. without any religious service.

A record likewise exists of the Court-mourning ordered, and the black

draping of the chapel and of the apartments of the late Electress and

the members of the Electoral family at Herrenhausen. To make the formal

announcement of his mother’s death and of his own assumption of her

claims to the British Succession, the Elector George Lewis once more

sent Bothmer to London, the real object of the choice being of course

the intention that this most capable diplomatist should, while keeping

on good terms with the Queen’s ministers, concert further action with

the Whig leaders. On June 15th, the Elector signed certain powers for

the event of the Queen’s death, which would have given to his envoy an

authority superior to that of the Lords Justices; but, as theirs rested

on an Act of Parliament, the special authority entrusted to Bothmer was

really as futile as that which had in similar terms been previously

conferred on the elder Schütz, Grote, and the younger Schütz in turn.

Bothmer’s reports show that Bolingbroke was believed to be acting in the

interest of the Pretender; and of the truth of this charge, after he had

succeeded in ousting Oxford from office, the latter, who had himself

continued to be suspected of Jacobitism, personally assured the

Elector’s envoy. On the part of Queen Anne, the Earl of Clarendon, a

Tory Peer of high connexion, but of marked incapacity,[189] arrived at

Hanover on July 7th to express to the Elector the Queen’s sympathy with

his loss. Clarendon, who had been entrusted with an extraordinary

mission to Hanover before the occurrence of the Electress’ death, also

brought with him an answer to the Electoral memorandum of May 7th,

drafted by Bolingbroke, which declined all the demands made in the

memorandum. Clarendon was charged with some polite explanations; but the

Elector had no intention of trusting either to these or to the chapter

of accidents. With an alertness rarely shown by him before his mother’s

death in regard to matters connected with the Succession, he promptly

caused a fresh instrument of Regency comprising his own nominations of

Lords Justices to be prepared: and from this revised list Marlborough

was omitted—either because he was not in England, or in consequence of a

knowledge on the part of the Elector of the double game which even now

the Duke was playing. At Hanover things seemed to be taking their usual

course; but the visit paid to the Elector early in August by his nephew,

the new King Frederick William I of Prussia, was not without its

significance. For George Lewis was already taking thought of the safety

of his Electorate in the event of his being called to England, and

welcomed the assurances of support received by him from the King of

Prussia and other German Princes. They could not know, but they might

well suspect, the secret offers of assistance which Louis XIV had made

to Queen Anne through Bolingbroke, and which the latter had contingently

accepted. It was a few days after the termination of the King of

Prussia’s visit that the news arrived in Hanover of the death of Queen

Anne on August 1st.

-----

Footnote 187: