IX. CHAPTER IX. THE IMPEACHMENT OF SACHEVERELL. CHAP. THE ministry now in office presented, it will have been apparent, many contrasts to modern usage. Corporate responsibility, whatever place it may have held in the political ideals of Somers or of Sunderland, was practically unrecognised. The name of prime minister, which expresses this, was not in current use. It may be found occasionally in the writings of Swift, but it bore for long after an unpopular association as a term of French origin and of unconstitutional import. While, in fact, the lord treasurer exercised the functions of the leading member of the cabinet, its members did not conceive themselves bound to the alternative of carrying out his policy or resigning office. The tie between them was the sovereign of whom they were alike the "servants". Between Godolphin and the nominees of the junta co-operation was the outcome of necessity, not of choice. There was a sense among the whigs that the treasurer was ready, for the sake of office, to temporise with principle, and, rather than offend the queen, to allow the intrigues of Harley and Mrs. Masham to prepare their overthrow. There were yet unsatisfied ambitions among the junta. Orford desired office, Halifax had been irritated in 1708 by Marlborough's choice of Townshend as plenipotentiary to the States-general. Somers also, with a reputation for political "virtue," as Macaulay insists, second to none, was dissatisfied and talking of resignation. Though president of the council, he and the other ministers were, they complained, treated as nullities. Nothing but the fear of alarming the allies and the appeasement of Somers by the queen with £1,000 out of the secret service money1 induced the whigs to 1 His receipt is signed on April 2, 1709. R.O., MS., Secret Service, 266. It should be observed, however, that the next two receipts, dated October 14, I 709 THE MINISTRY AND THE JUNTA. 161 IX. remain in office. As for Godolphin, sensitive to the friction CHAP. with the queen on one side and with his whig supporters on the other, he wrote to Marlborough in January, 1709: "The life of a slave in the galleys is paradise in comparison of mine". The services of the Duke of Queensberry in the management of his countrymen were felt by Godolphin to be indispensable. On February 9, 1709, he was appointed a third secretary of state, to take charge of the affairs of Scotland. By this arrangement influential patronage was withdrawn from Sunderland, the most intractable in temper of the junta. Thenceforward undissembled hostility glowered between him and Godolphin. The junta felt that the time had arrived for delivering a counter-attack. Their first attempt to strengthen their position was by recommending Halifax as plenipotentiary to the peace conference in the Netherlands. Against this Marlborough, as before, stood firm, and in such a matter Marlborough's authority was indisputable. Their next effort was to oust Lord Pembroke from the office of lord high admiral. To Orford, the nominee of the junta, both Marlborough and Godolphin were at first opposed. The office was too well paid-Pembroke's salary had been fixed at £7,000 a year-and too influential to be bestowed on a politician beyond their control. Their disapproval was fortified by the resentment of the queen against Orford as an inspirer of the attacks upon her husband's administration of the admiralty. His political and family connexions were, however, too strong to be withstood. When Marlborough and Godolphin withdrew an opposition in which they found no support but that of Boyle, and themselves recommended the appointment, the queen's resistance ceased. At the beginning of November, 1709, Orford was nominated head of the admiralty, but, mindful of the contingencies of party government, he preferred the 1709, and June 24, 1710, respectively, run in the following form :-" £1,000 for an additional allowance of £2,000 which her majesty is pleased to make to my salary as president of her most honourable privy council". These payments, however, throw a disagreeable light upon the halting and equivocal attitude of Somers at the time of Godolphin's dismissal, and account for the distrust felt of him by Godolphin (see Lord Coningsby's "Account in Archæol., xxxviii., 10-14). Only the Duchess of Marlborough seems to have suspected the truth (Correspondence, 1838, ii., 148). 1 March 30, 1709, 30th Rept. of Deputy-keeper of Public Records, p. 460. II IX. CHAP. office of lord high admiral to be thrown into commission, being willing rather to reduce his post to the presidency of a board than to incur undivided responsibility. Sir George Byng and Sir John Leake were associated with him as commissioners. The contest over this appointment, into which the Duchess of Marlborough had thrown herself with her accustomed indiscretion, led to a further exchange of letters between herself and the queen, in which recriminations only served to mark the growing extinction of their friendship. The appearance of The New Atlantis, which bespattered the duchess with mud, while it extolled under transparent names the new favourite, Harley, and Peterborough, stirred no displeasure in the queen. No royal congratulations greeted the duchess on the news of Malplaquet. The omission was a symptom that the intriguers had already undermined the influence of the duke himself. The next step of Harley's faction was to prompt the queen to a direct attack upon him. Marlborough, anticipating a break-up of the ministry and alive to the precarious tenure of his position, judged it opportune to make an attempt to establish himself out of the reach of the vicissitudes of politics. In the autumn of 1709 he sounded the whig leaders as to a proposal for a patent conferring on him the office of captain-general for life. Cowper, whose opinion as chancellor was most important, declared that there was no precedent. Undeterred by this disappointment, the duke made direct application to the queen. Anne's ear had been already filled with suggestions that she was the tool of the ambitions of the Marlboroughs. "She talked," writes Swift, "to a person whom she had taken into confidence as if she apprehended an attempt upon the crown." Her alarm prompted a downright refusal and reconciled her to the duke's threat that he would retire at the end of the war. She followed this up by bestowing the constableship of the Tower, a post in Marlborough's patronage, on Lord Rivers, a friend of Harley's, and in Jauanry, 1710, ordered the duke, despite his energetic protest, to give a regiment to Mrs. Masham's brother, Colonel Hill. On this Marlborough appealed to the whigs. He laid before the leaders a letter addressed to the queen in which he detailed his grievences against Mrs. Masham, and added: "I hope your majesty will either dismiss her or myself". Sunderland, as 1710 RUPTURE BETWEEN QUEEN AND DUCHESS. 163 IX. usual, "rode on the whirlwind," and was supported by the CHAP. duchess and Walpole. The united cabinet, they maintained, must demand Mrs. Masham's dismissal and, in the event of refusal, must carry resolutions through the two houses to that effect. Godolphin, Somers, Cowper, and Boyle favoured milder measures. In this conflict of opinions Marlborough took a middle course. He wrote another letter to the queen to take the place of the first, inveighing against the mortifications inflicted upon him through "the malice of a bedchamber woman,” but abstaining from insistence on her removal as a condition of his continuance in office. The queen was becoming alarmed at the public feeling, at the possibility of the adoption by the whigs of Sunderland's resolutions and at hints of suspension of the supplies. Before Marlborough's substituted letter had been placed in her hands she told Godolphin that, upon the representations of Somers, she would not insist on the promotion of Colonel Hill. Marlborough, who had left town, returned accordingly, and, on January 24, was most graciously received by the queen. The command in dispute was given by him to his nominee, Colonel Meredith. But though he had been received back into a semblance of favour, no movement was made by the queen towards reconciliation with the duchess. Accused of disrespectful expressions towards her mistress, the duchess, who had withdrawn to the country, forced herself into the presence on April 6, and in spite of frequent rebuffs and a command to present her statement in writing, insisted on offering verbal explanations. Tears and protestations proved ineffective. The queen left the room, and, though the duchess retained her offices, they never saw one another again. A turn in the current of popular favour was all that was needed to sweep away the ministry. Discontent was in the air. Enthusiasm for war could not be rekindled out of the ashes of the negotiations for peace. The country was sated with victories, of which the latest was the most equivocal and the most costly. Financial difficulties were accumulating; taxation was oppressive; everywhere the tory squires, resenting the land tax and the rise of interest upon mortgages, which they imputed to the scarcity of money sunk in the loans of the whig financiers, were denouncing the war as a * IX. CHAP. waste of the national strength. Their murmurs were re-echoed by the inferior clergy, who exclaimed at the growing insolence of the dissenters and at the latitudinarianism of a ministry and a bench of bishops indifferent to the heterodox opinions daily issuing from the press. Against a party predominant in the legislature and successful in the field orthodoxy could still raise its head. Prominent among the High Church clergy was Henry Sacheverell, in 1710 about thirty-six years of age. As an Oxford undergraduate he had been intimate with the gentle Addison, who had in 1694 dedicated a poem to his friend. Nevertheless his contemporaries emphasise insolence as a main trait of his character. Even Hearne, who sympathised with his politics, speaks of him as "conceited, ignorant, impudent, a rascal and a knave ". The picture is coloured by personal pique, but it is certain that he was of a temper that delighted in acrimonious controversy. He had a striking presence, studied gestures, a rhetoric dripping with unction. Women hung upon his words; they named their sons after him and invited him to officiate at their children's christenings. Sacheverell's literary achievements consisted of polemical pamphlets and sermons. A violent attack on nonconformity delivered by him from the pulpit of the university church on June 2, 1702, was among the publications which had inspired De Foe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters. On December 23, 1705, he had preached from the same place a diatribe against latitudinarianism in Church and State, which had extorted the admiration of the narrow and splenetic Hearne. The text taken by him was St. Paul's recital of his sufferings in 2 Corinthians xi. 26, culminating in the words, "in perils among false brethren ". This text and discourse, with some additions and alterations, served as a sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on November 5, 1709, before Sir Samuel Garrard, lord mayor, and the aldermen of London. A complaint against it was laid before the house of commons on December 13. With it was coupled another sermon preached by him at the assizes at Derby on the previous August 15, and published under the seemingly innocuous title of The Communication of Sin. The title of the St. Paul's sermon was less ambiguous. It was The Perils of False Brethren both in Church and State. gist of the earlier sermon was that the communicators of The |