tary, but should be enforced on all members, clergy, and officeholders. And it is remarkable that one of Harley's closest Tory associates, Granville, was teller for the majority.

Indeed, there is every indication that the Tories had, as they claimed,1 still a majority of the House, and that their leaders were determined to quash the suspicion attaching to the party on the score of Jacobitism and friendship for France. The address in reply to the royal speech pledged the Commons to make good any alliances Your Majesty has made, or shall make, pursuant to the addresses and advice of your most dutiful and loyal Commons of the last Parliament'. Sir Charles Hedges, just deprived of the Secretary's seals, was put at the head of the committee which drew up this address, and a 'black-listed' Tory, Conyers, was (on a division) made Chairman of the Committee of the Whole House. Hedges and

St. John were ordered to bring in a bill for the further security of His Majesty's person', and ' extinguishing the hopes of the pretended Prince of Wales'. In one division after another, the Tories succeeded in maintaining the chief points in their policy. Seymour carried a resolution that the troops now pledged by treaty to the Allies should include, and not be additional to, the seven thousand left to the King by the last disbandment; the bogy of land armies' was still triumphant. The petitions and addresses against the Commissioners for the Irish forfeitures were voted false and scandalous, and 'the prevailing party' were resolute to maintain the forfeitures themselves.2 Thomas Culpepper, as one of those who promoted 'the scandalous, insolent, and seditious Kentish petition', was sent to Newgate, and aspersing the last House of Commons or any member thereof' with receiving French money was declared a groundless reflection', tending to create misunderstanding between the King and his people'.

The passage of the Abjuration Bill against the Pretender admirably illustrates both the even balance of parties, and the

1 'Notwithstanding all the management of the court which leans entirely to the interest of the Whigs, yet the Church (or country) party have at this time an actual majority in the House of Commons': James Craggs to Governor Pitt (B. M. Add. MSS., ut supra, 25 Feb. 1702).

2 Bonnet, 7 Feb. (Noorden); Ellis to Stepney, 13 Feb. (B. M. Add. MSS. 7074)

Tory managers' caution in avoiding extremes. If the Whigs, as Somers had suggested, tacked on a clause to remodel the Association, even Seymour, Finch, and Musgrave, while opposing the multiplication of oaths, were now willing to adapt the Association to the changed circumstances. If the Tories would protect Anne's life by the penalties of treason, or enforce the abjuration oath on separate congregations', their extremists' amendment, that officials 'should not depart from the communion of the Church of England', was rejected by 203 to 139-a minority which we suggest is inexplicable, except on the hypothesis that Harley refused to sponsor such a policy.1 Not a single ministerial peer opposed abjuration, and of the ten protestors the only man of weight was that arch-opponent of all abjurations, Nottingham, who kept the peers yawning till eight at night by his interminable objections.

Whether this atmosphere of national unity and comparative Tory moderation would have lasted, had King William lived, no one can tell. Godolphin had resigned when Parliament was dissolved and Rochester was dismissed on the 25th January, but the Cabinet changes actually made were moderate, and testify to the growing influence in the royal counsels of Marlborough, upon whom William's eagle eye, with a last flash, had lighted, as the one man fit to subordinate the English factions to the terrible necessity of saving Europe. Manchester, a very sober Whig, succeeded as Secretary to Hedges, who had been dismissed at the end of the old year' for refusing to comply with His Majesty's pleasure in the choice of a Speaker '.* Carlisle took Godolphin's place at the Treasury; the regally independent Somerset-who had acted in the past on Anne's side in her quarrel with Mary, and had lately voted on the Commons' side in the impeachments-became Lord President, Pembroke moving thence to the Admiralty, where the Tory Rooke was retained as his chief professional colleague. Sunderland, who had bent to accept the idea of Wharton as Secretary, was, indeed, generally supposed to be working with Somers for a full Whig restoration, but a visit of Henry Guy to Althorp makes one wonder, and in any case at the end of 1 Yard to Stepney, 10 Feb. 1702; C. J. Ellis to Stepney, 30 Dec. 1701.

• In December (Portland, iv. 29).

February the stumble of the King's horse, Sorrel, cut short these imaginings.

On the 8th March 1702 King William died, with little sign of public grief.1 His successor was the Princess Anne, who in the previous year had been groaning to Godolphin against the cruelty of' Mr. Caliban'. Her views, her associates, her blood relations, were known in the heart of the Tories of the Right dawned a hope, that the 'Sunshine day', for which 'Mrs. Morley' had years earlier bidden 'Mrs. Freeman' wait in, patience, had at length arrived.

1 Mocenigo, 12/23 March, P. R. O. Venetian Transcripts.

XIII

THE MARLBOROUGH-GODOLPHIN MINISTRY 1702-5

THE causes of a party's rise, decline, and fall have rarely been so signally illustrated as in the age of Anne, when the Tories-nursed in new ways and with wonderful skill by Harley, St. John, and Swift, three men separated by polar distances from the Musgraves or the Seymours-entered into the land of promise, held it for two brief periods of three and four years, and at last were driven by the sudden sword of destiny into the wilderness, whence they were to emerge only fifty years later with changed views and a new language. Both the rise and the fall turn essentially on matters personal to the Queen, and the dominant fact of her reign is that in the long run the personality of a very ordinary woman governed politics.

The last Stuart sovereign had qualities and prejudices as marked as those of Queen Elizabeth, for whom she had something of a cult, or of Queen Victoria, like her a pattern of many English virtues. She was still young, but she had buried sixteen children, and at thirty-seven was already so lame with gout that the journey by coach or chair from her palace at St. James's to her Parliament at Westminster was an agony. The motions of her mind, her affections, and her passions were similarly slow, unwieldy, but determined, and where she gave affection or confidence it was with a lavish hand. For her husband Prince George-poor, asthmatic, ' Est-il-possible', who always 'looked as if it were dinner time '-nothing could be too good. She made him Generalissimo and, Lord High Admiral, she induced the Commons to vote him a huge income of £100,000 for life if he survived her, she even suggested to her startled Allies that her consort might fittingly take the field as their captain-general.1 Only the warmth of a heart true to old 1 Klopp, x. 40.

friendship could palliate the vast gifts and grants to the two Marlboroughs, or explain the Queen's long-suffering with the Duchess, most intolerable of household tyrants.

Her confidence once given, it was not quickly destroyed. Three years of objurgation from the Duchess hardly dislodged the Tory moderates in 1708; Godolphin's fall needed two years' spade-work by Harley and Abigail Masham, while Bolingbroke's triumph in Harley's final dismissal was so long postponed that it was rotten before he could harvest it. A constitutional obstinacy thus reinforced her limited reasoning powers, and when her fan went up to her mouth ministers knew that her mind had closed with a snap. On certain questions she resolutely refused to face reality, and above all, on the thought of who was to succeed her. Her real wishes in this matter she left, like Queen Elizabeth, to the guess-work that multiplies around Queens' death-beds, or buried in packets of papers burnt in 1714 under the curious eyes of Hanoverian agentshardly to be extracted even now when the archives of Europe have yielded up their secrets. No proof exists that she ever encouraged her wronged brother to hope for the succession; on the contrary, it is clear that she detested Popery even more than Hanoverians; but her attitude to the legal successor was cold and barely correct, and any notion of a Hanoverian prince arriving in England plunged her into almost unbalanced excitement.

There were, then, dangerous reserves in Queen Anne, and it is a mistake to attribute the party changes of her reign too exclusively to her rival bedchamber ladies, whether to the beautiful Sarah Jennings or to the plain Abigail Masham. For in spite of ill health, vacillation, and thoroughly secondrate ability, Anne had fixed ideals on which the ablest politician shipwrecked. She would be Queen, and in the last resort ministers must learn to obey. Even to Harley, the Prime Minister nearest her ideal, to whom she signed as 'your very affectionate friend', she made this perfectly, though hardly grammatically, clear: 'You cannot wonder', she wrote, ' that I who have been so ill-used so many years should desire to keep myself from being again enslaved; and if I must always comply and not be complied with, is I think very hard and