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CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY
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LETTERS
TO
SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM
AND
MR. POPE
BY
LORD BOLINGBROKE
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
_LONDON_, _PARIS & MELBOURNE_
1894
INTRODUCTION.
HENRY ST. JOHN, who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, was born on the
1st of October, 1678, at the family manor of Battersea, then a country
village. His grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there with his wife
Johanna,—daughter to Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St. John,—in one
home with the child’s father, Henry St. John, who was married to the
second daughter of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick. The child’s
grandfather, a man of high character, lived to the age of eighty-seven;
and his father, more a man of what is miscalled pleasure, to the age of
ninety. It was chiefly by his grandfather and grandmother that the
education of young Henry St. John was cared for. Simon Patrick,
afterwards Bishop of Ely, was for some years a chaplain in their home.
By his grandfather and grandmother the child’s religious education may
have been too formally cared for. A passage in Bolingbroke’s letter to
Pope shows that he was required as a child to read works of a divine who
“made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth
Psalm.”
After education at Eton and Christchurch, Henry St. John travelled
abroad, and in the year 1700 he married, at the age of twenty-two,
Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winchescomb, a Berkshire
baronet. She had much property, and more in prospect.
In the year 1701, Henry St. John entered Parliament as member for Wotton
Bassett, the family borough. He acted with the Tories, and became
intimate with their leader, Robert Harley. He soon became distinguished
as the ablest and most vigorous of the young supporters of the Tory
party. He was a handsome man and a brilliant speaker, delighted in by
politicians who, according to his own image in the Letter to Windham,
“grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game.” He was active
in the impeachment of Somers, Montague, the Duke of Portland, and the
Earl of Oxford for their negotiation of the Partition Treaties. In later
years he said he had acted here in ignorance, and justified those
treaties.
James II. died at St. Germains, a pensioner of France, aged sixty-eight,
on the 6th of September, 1701.
His pretensions to the English throne passed to the son, who had been
born on the 10th of June, 1688, and whose birth had hastened on the
Revolution. That son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who was only thirteen
years old at his father’s death, is known sometimes in history as the Old
Pretender; the Young Pretender being his son Charles Edward, whose defeat
at Culloden in 1746 destroyed the last faint hope of a restoration of the
Stuarts. It is with the young heir to the pretensions of James II. that
the story of the life of Bolingbroke becomes concerned.
King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded by
James II.’s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old, and had
been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of Denmark.
She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a much-troubled
mother, who had lost five children in their infancy, besides one who
survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the year 1700. As his
death left the succession to the Crown unsettled, an Act of Settlement,
passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided that, in case of failure
of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown should pass to the next
Protestant in succession, who was Sophia, wife of the Elector of Hanover.
The Electress Sophia was daughter of the Princess Elizabeth who had
married the Elector Palatine in 1613, granddaughter, therefore, of James
I. She was more than seventy years old when Queen Anne began her reign.
For ardent young Tories, who had no great interest in the limitation of
authority or enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it was no treason to
think, though it would be treason to say, that the old Electress and her
more than forty-year-old German son George, gross-minded and clumsy, did
not altogether shut out hope for the succession of a more direct heir to
the Crown.
In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of State,
and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in under
Marlborough and Godolphin, and St. John’s successor was his rival Robert
Walpole. St. John retired then for two year from public life to his
country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which had come to him, through
his wife, by the death of his wife’s father the year before. He was
thirty years old, the most brilliant of the rising statesmen; impatient
of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as his younger rival from the other
side, both of them men who, in his eyes, were dull and slow. St. John’s
quick intellect, though eager and impatient of successful rivalry, had
its philosophic turn. During these two years of retirement he indulged
the calmer love of study and thought, whose genius he said once, in a
letter to Lord Bathurst “On the True use of Retirement and Study,”
“unlike the dream of Socrates, whispered so softly, that very often I
heard him not, in the hurry of those passions by which I was transported.
Some calmer hours there were; in them I hearkened to him. Reflection had
often its turn, and the love of study and the desire of knowledge have
never quite abandoned me.”
In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his
ministry as Secretary of State. “I am thinking,” wrote Swift to Stella,
“what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple because he
might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is a young fellow
hardly thirty in that employment.”
It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with France,
that was against all their political interests. The Whigs wished to
maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of the Pretender.
In the peace negotiations nobody was so active as Secretary St. John. On
one occasion, without consulting his colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of
Ormond, who commanded the English army in the Netherlands: “Her Majesty,
my lord, has reason to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the
great article of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier
sent from Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen’s
positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege or
hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty. I am
at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen would
have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her Majesty thinks
you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so as to answer her
ends without owning that which might at present have an ill effect if
publicly known.” He added as a postscript: “I had almost forgot to tell
your grace that communication is given of this order to the Court of
France.” The peace was right, but the way of making it was mean in more
ways than one, and the friction between Harley and St. John steadily
increased. St. John used his majority in the House for the expulsion of
his rival Walpole and Walpole’s imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of
corruption. In 1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of
Oxford, St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke,
in the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct. His
ill-will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank of
Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of Commons,
where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four, as Viscount
Bolingbroke and Baron St. John. His father’s congratulation on the
peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism: “Well, Harry, I said you
would be hanged, but now I see you’ll be beheaded.”
The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish Succession, was
signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713. Queen Anne died on the
1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe for the reaction that
Bolingbroke had hoped to see. His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us to
understand that in Queen Anne’s reign the possible succession of James
II.’s son, the Chevalier de St. George, had never been out of his mind.
The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne.
The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined. He was
dismissed from office before the end of the month. On the 26th of March,
1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French
messenger La Vigne. A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a
few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was
Walpole’s impeachment of Bolingbroke. He was, in September, 1715, in
default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased
from the roll of peers. His own account of his policy will be found in
this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the only weak
feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke’s resentment against Harley.
When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few days in
Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in Dauphiny. His Letter
to Windham tells how he became Secretary of State to the Pretender, and
how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels. The
hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to
delay until there might be some chance of success. The death of Louis
XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had removed the last prop of
a falling cause.
Some part of Bolingbroke’s forfeited property was returned to his wife,
who pleaded in vain for the reversal of his attainder. Bolingbroke was
ill-used by the Pretender and abused by the Jacobites. He had been
writing philosophical “Reflections upon Exile,” but when he found himself
thus attacked on both sides Bolingbroke resolved to cast Jacobitism to
the winds, speak out like a man, and vindicate himself in a way that
might possibly restore him to the service of his country. So in April,
1717, at the age of thirty-nine, he began work upon what is justly
considered the best of his writings, his Letter to Sir William Windham.
Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth, who
had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been accepted by
the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after Henry St. John had
been sent to the House of Lords. Windham was “Dear Willie” to
Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was sent to the Tower as a
Jacobite. But he had powerful connections, was kindly and not dangerous,
and was soon back in his place in the House fighting the Whigs. The
Letter to Windham was finished in the summer of 1717. Its frankness was
only suited to the prospect of a pardon. It was found that there was no
such prospect, and the Letter was not published until 1753, a year or two
after its writer’s death.
Bolingbroke’s first wife died in November, 1718. He married in 1720 a
Marquise de Villette, with whom he lived on an estate called La Source,
near Orleans, at the source of the small river Loiret. There he talked
and wrote philosophy. His pardon was obtained in May, 1723. In 1725 he
was allowed by Act of Parliament the possession of his family
inheritance; but as the attainder was not reversed he could never again
sit in Parliament. So he came home in 1725, and bought an estate at
Dawley, near Uxbridge. There he philosophised in his own way and played
at farming, discoursed with Pope and plied his pen against the Whigs. In
his letter to Pope, Bolingbroke writes of ministers of religion as if
they had no other function than to maintain theological dogmas, and draws
a false conclusion from false premisses. He died on the 12th of
December, 1751.
H.M.
A LETTER
TO
SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM.
I WAS well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind, and
in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as much out
of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had never lived and
acted together. I depended on being forgot by them, and was far from
imagining it possible that I should be remembered only to be condemned
loudly by one half of them, and to be tacitly censured by the greatest
part of the other half. As soon as I was separated from the Pretender
and his interest, I declared myself to be so; and I gave directions for
writing into England what I judged sufficient to put my friends on their
guard against any surprise concerning an event which it was their
interest, as well as mine, that they should be very rightly informed
about.
As soon as the Pretender’s adherents began to clamour against me in this
country, and to disperse their scandal by circular letters everywhere
else, I gave directions for writing into England again. Their groundless
articles of accusation were refuted, and enough was said to give my
friends a general idea of what had happened to me, and at least to make
them suspend the fixing any opinion till such time as I should be able to
write more fully and plainly to them myself. To condemn no person
unheard is a rule of natural equity, which we see rarely violated in
Turkey, or in the country where I am writing: that it would not be so
with me in Great Britain, I confess that I flattered myself. I dwelt
securely in this confidence, and gave very little attention to any of
those scurrilous methods which were taken about this time to blast my
reputation. The event of things has shown that I trusted too much to my
own innocence, and to the justice of my old friends.
It was obvious that the Chevalier and the Earl of Mar hoped to load me
with the imputation of treachery, incapacity, or neglect: it was
indifferent to them of which. If they could ascribe to one of those
their not being supported from France, they imagined that they should
justify their precipitate flight from Scotland, which many of their
fastest friends exclaimed against; and that they should varnish over that
original capital fault, the drawing the Highlanders together in arms at
the time and in the manner in which it was done.
The Scotch, who fell at once from all the sanguine expectations with
which they had been soothed, and who found themselves reduced to despair,
were easy to be incensed; they had received no support whatever, and it
was natural for them rather to believe that they failed of this support
by my fault, than to imagine their general had prevailed on them to rise
in the very point of time when it was impossible that they should be
supported from France, or from any other part of the world. The Duke of
Ormond, who had been the bubble of his own popularity, was enough out of
humour with the general turn of affairs to be easily set against any
particular man. The emissaries of this Court, whose commission was to
amuse, had imposed upon him all along; and there were other busy people
who thought to find their account in having him to themselves. I had
never been in his secret whilst we were in England together: and from his
first coming into France he was either prevailed upon by others, or,
which I rather believe, he concurred with others, to keep me out of it.
The perfect indifference I showed whether I was in it or no, might carry
him from acting separately, to act against me.
The whole tribe of Irish and other papists were ready to seize the first
opportunity of venting their spleen against a man, who had constantly
avoided all intimacy with them; who acted in the same cause, but on a
different principle, and who meant no one thing in the world less than
raising them to the advantages which they expected.
That these several persons, for the reasons I have mentioned, should join
in a cry against me, is not very marvellous; the contrary would be so to
a man who knows them as well as I do. But that the English Tories should
serve as echoes to them—nay more, that my character should continue
doubtful at best amongst you, when those who first propagated the slander
are become ashamed of railing without proof, and have dropped the
clamour,—this I own that I never expected; and I may be allowed to say,
that as it is an extreme surprise, so it shall be a lesson to me.
The Whigs impeached and attainted me. They went farther—at least, in my
way of thinking, that step was more cruel than all the others—by a
partial representation of facts, and pieces of facts, put together as it
best suited their purpose, and published to the whole world, they did all
that in them lay to expose me for a fool, and to brand me for a knave.
But then I had deserved this abundantly at their hands, according to the
notions of party-justice. The Tories have not indeed impeached nor
attainted me; but they have done, and are still doing something very like
to that which I took worse of the Whigs than the impeachment and
attainder: and this, after I have shown an inviolable attachment to the
service, and almost an implicit obedience to the will of the party; when
I am actually an outlaw, deprived of my honours, stripped of my fortune,
and cut off from my family and my country, for their sakes.
Some of the persons who have seen me here, and with whom I have had the
pleasure to talk of you, may, perhaps, have told you that, far from being
oppressed by that storm of misfortunes in which I have been tossed of
late, I bear up against it with firmness enough, and even with alacrity.
It is true, I do so; but it is true likewise that the last burst of the
cloud has gone near to overwhelm me. From our enemies we expect evil
treatment of every sort, we are prepared for it, we are animated by it,
and we sometimes triumph in it; but when our friends abandon us, when
they wound us, and when they take, to do this, an occasion where we stand
the most in need of their support, and have the best title to it, the
firmest mind finds it hard to resist.
Nothing kept up my spirits when I was first reduced to the very
circumstances I now describe so much as the consideration of the
delusions under which I knew that the Tories lay, and the hopes I
entertained of being able soon to open their eyes, and to justify my
conduct. I expected that friendship, or, if that principle failed,
curiosity at least, would move the party to send over some person from
whose report they might have both sides of the question laid before them.
Though this expectation be founded in reason, and you want to be informed
at least as much as I do to be justified, yet I have hitherto flattered
myself with it in vain. To repair this misfortune, therefore, as far as
lies in my power, I resolve to put into writing the sum of what I should
have said in that case. These papers shall lie by me till time and
accidents produce some occasion of communicating them to you. The true
occasion of doing it with advantage to the party will probably be lost;
but they will remain a monument of my justification to posterity. At
worst, if even this fails me, I am sure of one satisfaction in writing
them: the satisfaction of unburdening my mind to a friend, and of stating
before an equitable judge the account, as I apprehend it to stand,
between the Tories and myself—“Quantum humano consilio efficere potui,
circumspectis rebus meis omnibus, rationibusque subductis, summam feci
cogitationum mearum omnium, quam tibi, si potero, breviter exponam.”
It is necessary to my design that I call to your mind the state of
affairs in Britain from the latter part of the year 1710 to the beginning
of the year 1715, about which time we parted. I go no farther back
because the part which I acted before that time, in the first essays I
made in public affairs, was the part of a Tory, and so far of a piece
with that which I acted afterwards. Besides, the things which preceded
this space of time had no immediate influence on those which happened
since that time, whereas the strange events which we have seen fall out
in the king’s reign were owing in a great measure to what was done, or
neglected to be done, in the last four years of the queen’s. The memory
of these events being fresh, I shall dwell as little as possible upon
them; it will be sufficient that I make a rough sketch of the face of the
Court, and of the conduct of the several parties during that time. Your
memory will soon furnish the colours which I shall omit to lay, and
finish up the picture.
From the time at which I left Britain I had not the advantage of acting
under the eyes of the party which I served, nor of being able from time
to time to appeal to their judgment. The gross of what happened has
appeared; but the particular steps which led to those events have been
either concealed or misrepresented—concealed from the nature of them or
misrepresented by those with whom I never agreed perfectly except in
thinking that they and I were extremely unfit to continue embarked in the
same bottom together. It will, therefore, be proper to descend under
this head to a more particular relation.
In the summer of the year 1710 the Queen was prevailed upon to change her
Parliament and her Ministry. The intrigue of the Earl of Oxford might
facilitate the means, the violent prosecution of Sacheverel, and other
unpopular measures, might create the occasion and encourage her in the
resolution; but the true original cause was the personal ill-usage which
she received in her private life and in some trifling instances of the
exercise of her power, for indulgence in which she would certainly have
left the reins of government in those hands which had held them ever
since her accession to the throne.
I am afraid that we came to Court in 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
conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great
opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us, and of
hurting those who stood in opposition to us. It is, however, true that
with these considerations of private and party interest there were others
intermingled which had for their object the public good of the nation—at
least what we took to be such.
We looked on the political principles which had generally prevailed in
our government from the Revolution in 1688 to be destructive of our true
interest, to have mingled us too much in the affairs of the Continent, to
tend to the impoverishing our people, and to the loosening the bands of
our constitution in Church and State. We supposed the Tory party to be
the bulk of the landed interest, and to have no contrary influence
blended into its composition. We supposed the Whigs to be the remains of
a party formed against the ill designs of the Court under King Charles
II., nursed up into strength and applied to contrary uses by King William
III., and yet still so weak as to lean for support on the Presbyterians
and the other sectaries, on the Bank and the other corporations, on the
Dutch and the other Allies. From hence we judged it to follow that they
had been forced, and must continue so, to render the national interest
subservient to the interest of those who lent them an additional
strength, without which they could never be the prevalent party. The
view, therefore, of those amongst us who thought in this manner was to
improve the Queen’s favour, to break the body of the Whigs, to render
their supports useless to them, and to fill the employments of the
kingdom, down to the meanest, with Tories. We imagined that such
measures, joined to the advantages of our numbers and our property, would
secure us against all attempts during her reign, and that we should soon
become too considerable not to make our terms in all events which might
happen afterwards: concerning which, to speak truly, I believe few or
none of us had any very settled resolution.
In order to bring these purposes about, I verily think that the
persecution of Dissenters entered into no man’s head. By the Bills for
preventing Occasional Conformity and the growth of schism, it was hoped
that their sting would be taken away. These Bills were thought necessary
for our party interest, and, besides, were deemed neither unreasonable
nor unjust. The good of society may require that no person should be
deprived of the protection of the Government on account of his opinions
in religious matters; but it does not follow from hence that men ought to
be trusted in any degree with the preservation of the Establishment, who
must, to be consistent with their principles, endeavour the subversion of
what is established. An indulgence to consciences, which the prejudice
of education and long habits have rendered scrupulous, may be agreeable
to the rules of good policy and of humanity, yet will it hardly follow
from hence that a government is under any obligation to indulge a
tenderness of conscience to come, or to connive at the propagating of
these prejudices and at the forming of these habits. The evil effect is
without remedy, and may, therefore, deserve indulgence; but the evil
cause is to be prevented, and can, therefore, be entitled to none.
Besides this, the Bills I am speaking of, rather than to enact anything
new, seemed only to enforce the observation of ancient laws which had
been judged necessary for the security of the Church and State at a time
when the memory of the ruin of both, and of the hands by which that ruin
had been wrought, was fresh in the minds of men.
The Bank, the East India Company, and in general the moneyed interest,
had certainly nothing to apprehend like what they feared, or affected to
fear, from the Tories—an entire subversion of their property. Multitudes
of our own party would have been wounded by such a blow. The intention
of those who were the warmest seemed to me to go no farther than
restraining their influence on the Legislature, and on matters of State;
and finding at a proper season means to make them contribute to the
support and ease of a government under which they enjoyed advantages so
much greater than the rest of their fellow-subjects. The mischievous
consequence which had been foreseen and foretold too, at the
establishment of those corporations, appeared visibly. The country
gentlemen were vexed, put to great expenses and even baffled by them in
their elections; and among the members of every parliament numbers were
immediately or indirectly under their influence. The Bank had been
extravagant enough to pull off the mask; and, when the Queen seemed to
intend a change in her ministry, they had deputed some of their members
to represent against it. But that which touched sensibly even those who
were but little affected by other considerations, was the prodigious
inequality between the condition of the moneyed men and of the rest of
the nation. The proprietor of the land, and the merchant who brought
riches home by the returns of foreign trade, had during two wars borne
the whole immense load of the national expenses; whilst the lender of
money, who added nothing to the common stock, throve by the public
calamity, and contributed not a mite to the public charge.
As to the Allies, I saw no difference of opinion among all those who came
to the head of affairs at this time. Such of the Tories as were in the
system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon after from us, and
such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion deserted to us, seemed
equally convinced of the unreasonableness, and even of the impossibility,
of continuing the war on the same disproportionate footing. Their
universal sense was, that we had taken, except the part of the States
General, the whole burden of the war upon us, and even a proportion of
this; while the entire advantage was to accrue to others: that this had
appeared very grossly in 1709, and 1710, when preliminaries were insisted
upon, which contained all that the Allies, giving the greatest loose to
their wishes, could desire, and little or nothing on the behalf of Great
Britain: that the war, which had been begun for the security of the
Allies, was continued for their grandeur: that the ends proposed, when we
engaged in it, might have been answered long before, and therefore that
the first favourable occasion ought to be seized of making peace; which
we thought to be the interest of our country, and which appeared to all
mankind, as well as to us, to be that of our party.
These were in general the views of the Tories: and for the part I acted
in the prosecution of them, as well as of all the measures accessory to
them, I may appeal to mankind. To those who had the opportunity of
looking behind the curtain I may likewise appeal, for the difficulties
which lay in my way, and for the particular discouragements which I met
with. A principal load of parliamentary and foreign affairs in their
ordinary course lay upon me: the whole negotiation of the peace, and of
the troublesome invidious steps preliminary to it, as far as they could
be transacted at home, were thrown upon me. I continued in the House of
Commons during that important session which preceded the peace; and
which, by the spirit shown through the whole course of it, and by the
resolutions taken in it, rendered the conclusion of the treaties
practicable. After this I was dragged into the House of Lords in such a
manner as to make my promotion a punishment, not a reward; and was there
left to defend the treaties almost alone.
It would not have been hard to have forced the Earl of Oxford to use me
better. His good intentions began to be very much doubted of; the truth
is, no opinion of his sincerity had ever taken root in the party, and,
which was worse perhaps for a man in his station, the opinion of his
capacity began to fall apace. He was so hard pushed in the House of
Lords in the beginning of 1712 that he had been forced, in the middle of
the session, to persuade the Queen to make a promotion of twelve peers at
once, which was an unprecedented and invidious measure, to be excused by
nothing but the necessity, and hardly by that. In the House of Commons
his credit was low and my reputation very high. You know the nature of
that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them
game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged. The thread of
the negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going
back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made himself
master of the business much time would have been lost, and great
inconveniences would have followed. Some, who opposed the Court soon
after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I
should have wanted no help to do mischief. I knew the way of quitting my
employments and of retiring from Court when the service of my party
required it; but I could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the
consequence of it must have been the breaking my party and the distress
of the public affairs. I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the
sense of that duty which I owed her came in aid of other considerations,
and prevailed over my resentment. These sentiments, indeed, are so much
out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a
bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the
true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the
troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under the
utmost satisfaction. I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the
friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford. I
was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means
which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin me in
the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else. I saw, however, that he
had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me, instead of
having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire,
an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of his jealousy
and a reason for undermining me. In this temper of mind I went on till
the great work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at
Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as
well as for me, opened itself.
I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to
them, exempt from faults. Many were made no doubt in both by those who
were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many were owing
purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their progress.
I never look back on this great event, passed as it is, without a secret
emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the undertaking and the
importance of its success, with the means employed to bring it about, and
with those which were employed to traverse it. To adjust the pretensions
and to settle the interests of so many princes and states as were engaged
in the late war would appear, when considered simply and without any
adventitious difficulty, a work of prodigious extent. But this was not
all. Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands to
the most extravagant height. They had been encouraged to this, first, by
the engagements which we had entered into with several of them, with some
to draw them into the war, with others to prevail on them to continue it;
and, secondly, by the manner in which we had treated with France in 1709
and 1710. Those who intended to tie the knot of the war as hard, and to
render the coming at a peace as impracticable as they could, had found no
method so effectual as that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on
all he could think of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these
concessions should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands.
That this was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one
of the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who
communicated to me and to two others of the Queen’s Ministers an instance
of the Duke of Marlborough’s management at a critical moment, when the
French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed inclinable to come into an
expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh article of the preliminaries,
which could not have been refused. Certain it is that the King of France
was at that time in earnest to execute the article of Philip’s
abdication, and therefore the expedients for adjusting what related to
this article would easily enough have been found, if on our part there
had been a real intention of concluding. But there was no such
intention, and the plan of those who meant to prolong the war was
established among the Allies as the plan which ought to be followed
whenever a peace came to be treated. The Allies imagined that they had a
right to obtain at least everything which had been demanded for them
respectively, and it was visible that nothing less would content them.
These considerations set the vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient
light.
The importance of succeeding in the work of the peace was equally great
to Europe, to our country, to our party, to our persons, to the present
age, and to future generations. But I need not take pains to prove what
no man will deny. The means employed to bring it about were in no degree
proportionable. A few men, some of whom had never been concerned in
business of this kind before, and most of whom put their hands for a long
time to it faintly and timorously, were the instruments of it. The
Minister who was at their head showed himself every day incapable of that
attention, that method, that comprehension of different matters, which
the first post in such a Government as ours requires in quiet times. He
was the first spring of all our motion by his credit with the Queen, and
his concurrence was necessary to everything we did by his rank in the
State, and yet this man seemed to be sometimes asleep and sometimes at
play. He neglected the thread of business, which was carried on for this
reason with less dispatch and less advantage in the proper channels, and
he kept none in his own hands. He negotiated, indeed, by fits and
starts, by little tools and indirect ways, and thus his activity became
as hurtful as his indolence, of which I could produce some remarkable
instances. No good effect could flow from such a conduct. In a word,
when this great affair was once engaged, the zeal of particular men in
their several provinces drove it forward, though they were not backed by
the concurrent force of the whole Administration, nor had the common
helps of advice till it was too late, till the very end of the
negotiations; even in matters, such as that of commerce, which they could
not be supposed to understand. That this is a true account of the means
used to arrive at the peace, and a true character of that Administration
in general, I believe the whole Cabinet Council of that time will bear me
witness. Sure I am that most of them have joined with me in lamenting
this state of things whilst it subsisted, and all those who were employed
as Ministers in the several parts of the treaty felt sufficiently the
difficulties which this strange management often reduced them to. I am
confident they have not forgotten them.
If the means employed to bring the peace about were feeble, and in one
respect contemptible, those employed to break the negotiation were strong
and formidable. As soon as the first suspicion of a treaty’s being on
foot crept abroad in the world the whole alliance united with a powerful
party in the nation to obstruct it. From that hour to the moment the
Congress of Utrecht finished, no one measure possible to be taken was
omitted to traverse every advance that was made in this work, to
intimidate, to allure, to embarrass every person concerned in it. This
was done without any regard either to decency or good policy, and from
hence it soon followed that passion and humour mingled themselves on each
side. A great part of what we did for the peace, and of what others did
against it, can be accounted for on no other principle. The Allies were
broken among themselves before they began to treat with the common enemy.
The matter did not mend in the course of the treaty, and France and
Spain, but especially the former, profited of this disunion.
Whoever makes the comparison, which I have touched upon, will see the
true reasons which rendered the peace less answerable to the success of
the war than it might and than it ought to have been. Judgment has been
passed in this case as the different passions or interests of men have
inspired them. But the real cause lay in the constitution of our
Ministry, and much more in the obstinate opposition which we met with
from the Whigs and from the Allies. However, sure it is that the defects
of the peace did not occasion the desertions from the Tory party which
happened about this time, nor those disorders in the Court which
immediately followed.
Long before the purport of the treaties could be known, those Whigs who
had set out with us in 1710 began to relapse back to their party. They
had among us shared the harvest of a new Ministry, and, like prudent
persons, they took measures in time to have their share in that of a new
Government.
The whimsical or the Hanover Tories continued zealous in appearance with
us till the peace was signed. I saw no people so eager for the
conclusion of it. Some of them were in such haste that they thought any
peace preferable to the least delay, and omitted no instances to quicken
their friends who were actors in it. As soon as the treaties were
perfected and laid before the Parliament, the scheme of these gentlemen
began to disclose itself entirely. Their love of the peace, like other
passions, cooled by enjoyment. They grew nice about the construction of
the articles, could come up to no direct approbation, and, being let into
the secret of what was to happen, would not preclude themselves from the
glorious advantage of rising on the ruins of their friends and of their
party.
The danger of the succession and the badness of the peace were the two
principles on which we were attacked. On the first the whimsical Tories
joined the Whigs, and declared directly against their party. Although
nothing is more certain than this truth: that there was at that time no
formed design in the party, whatever views some particular men might
have, against his Majesty’s accession to the throne. On the latter, and
most other points, they affected a most glorious neutrality.
Instead of gathering strength, either as a Ministry or as a party, we
grew weaker every day. The peace had been judged, with reason, to be the
only solid foundation whereupon we could erect a Tory system; and yet
when it was made we found ourselves at a full stand. Nay, the very work
which ought to have been the basis of our strength was in part demolished
before our eyes, and we were stoned with the ruins of it. Whilst this
was doing, Oxford looked on as if he had not been a party to all which
had passed; broke now and then a jest, which savoured of the Inns of
Court and the bad company in which he had been bred. And on those
occasions where his station obliged him to speak of business, was
absolutely unintelligible.
Whether this man ever had any determined view besides that of raising his
family is, I believe, a problematical question in the world. My opinion
is that he never had any other. The conduct of a Minister who proposes
to himself a great and noble object, and who pursues it steadily, may
seem for a while a riddle to the world; especially in a Government like
ours, where numbers of men, different in their characters and different
in their interests, are at all times to be managed; where public affairs
are exposed to more accidents and greater hazards than in other
countries; and where, by consequence, he who is at the head of business
will find himself often distracted by measures which have no relation to
his purpose, and obliged to bend himself to things which are in some
degree contrary to his main design. The ocean which environs us is an
emblem of our government, and the pilot and the Minister are in similar
circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct
course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently seem
to carry them from it. But as the work advances the conduct of him who
leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies
are reconciled, and when it is once consummated the whole shows itself so
uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be
apt to think he could have done the same. But, on the other hand, a man
who proposes no such object, who substitutes artifice in the place of
ability, who, instead of leading parties and governing accidents, is
eternally agitated backwards and forwards by both, who begins every day
something new, and carries nothing on to perfection, may impose awhile on
the world; but a little sooner or a little later the mystery will be
revealed, and nothing will be found to be couched under it but a thread
of pitiful expedients, the ultimate end of which never extended farther
than living from day to day. Which of these pictures resembles Oxford
most you will determine. I am sorry to be obliged to name him so often,
but how is it possible to do otherwise while I am speaking of times
wherein the whole turn of affairs depended on his motions and character?
I have heard, and I believe truly, that when he returned to Windsor in
the autumn of 1713, after the marriage of his son, he pressed extremely
to have him created Duke of Newcastle or Earl of Clare, and the Queen
presuming to hesitate on so extraordinary a proposal, he resented this
hesitation in a manner which little became a man who had been so lately
raised by the profusion of her favours upon him. Certain it is, that he
began then to show a still greater remissness in all parts of his
Ministry, and to affect to say that from such a time, the very time I am
speaking of, he took no share in the direction of affairs, or words to
that effect.
He pretended to have discovered intrigues which were set on foot against
him, and particularly he complained of the advantage which was taken of
his absence during the journey he made at his son’s marriage to undermine
him with the Queen. He is naturally inclined to believe the worst, which
I take to be a certain mark of a mean spirit and a wicked soul. At
least, I am sure that the contrary quality, when it is not due to
weakness of understanding, is the fruit of a generous temper and an
honest heart. Prone to judge ill of all mankind, he will rarely be
seduced by his credulity, but I never knew a man so capable of being the
bubble of his distrust and jealousy. He was so in this case, although
the Queen, who could not be ignorant of the truth, said enough to
undeceive him. But to be undeceived, and to own himself so, was not his
play. He hoped by cunning to varnish over his want of faith and of
ability. He was desirous to make the world impute the extraordinary
part, or, to speak more properly, the no part, which he acted with the
staff of Treasurer in his hand, to the Queen’s withdrawing her favour
from him and to his friends abandoning him—pretences utterly groundless
when he first made them, and which he brought to be real at last. Even
the winter before the Queen’s death, when his credit began to wane apace,
he might have regained it; he might have reconciled himself perfectly
with all his ancient friends, and have acquired the confidence of the
whole party. I say he might have done all this, because I am persuaded
that none of those I have named were so convinced of his perfidy, so
jaded with his yoke, or so much piqued personally against him as I was;
and yet if he would have exerted himself in concert with us to improve
the few advantages which were left us and to ward off the visible danger
which threatened our persons and our party, I would have stifled my
private animosity and would have acted under him with as much zeal as
ever. But he was incapable of taking such a turn. The sum of all his
policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long
as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them. When it
became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the
end of his line.
By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the
intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had
endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs.
The Tories were attached to him at first by the heat of a revolution in
the Ministry, by their hatred of the people who were discarded, and by
the fond hopes which it is easy to give at the setting out of a new
administration. Afterwards he held out the peace in prospect to them and
to the Jacobites separately, as an event which must be brought about
before he could effectually serve either. You cannot have forgot how
things which we pressed were put off upon every occasion till the peace;
the peace was to be the date of a new administration, and the period at
which the millenary year of Toryism should begin. Thus were the Tories
at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of
knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in
the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French
Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as
soon as the peace had rendered them practicable. He was to attempt
nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all.