CHAP. carious situation to the half-heartedness of Oxford, Bolingbroke XII. made a bold bid for his place. To Lady Masham, whose avarice he had declined to gratify, the lord treasurer was now become odious. His intervention had lately deprived her of the share in the profits of the Asiento which Bolingbroke had promised. From the house of Hanover she had nothing to expect. She, therefore, threw her influence into the Jacobite scale. But the queen could not in a moment cast off her dependence upon Oxford. With tears she implored the two ministers to be reconciled, and begged Ormonde to act as peacemaker. Oxford weakly acquiesced. He promised everything, even the measure of which he had hitherto disapproved, the further purging of the army from its whig elements, upon which the queen and Ormonde were agreed,1 In order to tranquillise the suspicions of the court of Hanover and avert action by the whigs, Thomas Harley, the treasurer's cousin, was dispatched in February, 1714, with assurances to the electress, his real task being to dissuade the court from accepting an invitation to the electoral prince on the part of the whigs. The invitation, however, took the form of a demand by Schütz, the Hanoverian envoy (April 12), for a writ to the electoral prince as Duke of Cambridge, summoning him to the house of lords. "I never saw her majesty," wrote Oxford, so much moved in my life." 2 The writ could not be refused, but the elector, being made acquainted with the queen's feelings, prudently refused Schütz an audience on his arrival with it at Hanover. Nevertheless, when in May Thomas Harley brought back a suggestion that one of the electoral house should pay a complimentary visit to England, the queen again fell into a state of alarm and indignation. On the 19th, she dispatched three letters, one to the electress, one to the elector, and one to the electoral prince. A fourth letter to the elector was written by Oxford. All the letters emphatically protested against the projected visit. It was, however, decided to soften the rebuff by entrusting the Earl of Clarendon with a conciliatory mission to Hanover. In the meanwhile, the receipt of the letters had been marked by a tragic event. The 1 The Duke of Berwick to James III., April 20, 1714, Stuart Papers, i., 317. 2 To Thomas Harley, at Hanover, April 13-24, 1714, Portland MSS., v., 418. 3 Lord Harcourt to Baron Schütz, April 13, 14, 17, ibid., p. 416. 1714 DEATH OF THE ELECTRESS SOPHIA. 217 XII. Electress Sophia had attained the age of eighty-four, but so CHAP. excellent was her health and so lively her energy that she looked forward to outliving the queen. If, she said, she could but live to have "Sophia, Queen of England," engraved on her tomb, she should die content. The queen's letters threw her into a chagrin which, after three days, ended with her death on May 28, O.S. The elector thereby became heir to the English crown, and the policy of the court of Hanover was thenceforth directed by a single mind. Oxford seized the occasion of the incident of the writ to assert himself anew. Mere passive obstruction, he felt, was unequal to the task of baffling Bolingbroke. He now set himself to reconcile the queen to the prospect of the Hanoverian succession. The impracticability of the pretender on the subject of religion had radically affected the queen's disposition towards him. The maintenance of the Church of England was the dominant preoccupation of her statecraft. To expose the Church to a renewal of her father's assaults upon it would have been to betray a sacred trust. She took counsel of a number of High Church bishops as to her duty. The result presently appeared. In the previous December she had connived at an intimation to her brother, through Gaultier, that he need not leave Lorraine. On April 30, she herself dispatched a letter to the duke requesting his expulsion. At the same time she shewed signs of lapsing into her former dislike of Bolingbroke. The secretary's last resource remained. He had failed to establish a permanent influence over the queen. He must find his support in parliament. He would inspire the tory party with a common rallying cry, and one embarrassing to Oxford, by hounding on the churchmen against the nonconformists. Nottingham's occasional conformity act of 1711 had conceded facilities for the education of dissenters by allowing teachers and preachers to exercise their callings, upon conditions, elsewhere than in the counties where they were originally qualified. Shut out as they were from the public schools and universities, the dissenters had multiplied educational institutions of their own. Bolingbroke's idea was to poison dissent at the roots by taking the education of dissenters' children out of the hands of their parents, and handing it over to schoolmasters licensed by the bishops. The bill commonly known as the schism bill, was XII. CHAP. brought before the house of commons by Bolingbroke's friend, Sir William Wyndham. It was opposed by the whig leaders, Walpole, Stanhope, Lechmere, Jekyll, and King, but triumphantly carried by 237 to 126 votes. In the house of lords Bolingbroke himself took charge of the measure. The bill passed the lords on June 15 by the narrow majority of seventy-seven to seventy-two votes. Five bishops and twentyeight lay peers signed a protest against this act of persecution, among the bishops being William Wake, Bishop of Lincoln, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. The position of Oxford during the progress of the bill was embarrassing enough. He had never repudiated his connexion with the dissenters; his wife and children attended a presbyterian meeting-house; he had posed as the dissenters' friend and employed De Foe as a pamphleteer to disarm their suspicions and reconcile them to his ministry. In De Foe's Secret History of the White Staff, written under his inspiration, and in the Considerations upon the Secret History of the White Staff, ascribed to the pen of Bolingbroke, the picture of the situation is sketched from both points of view. Each writer agrees that, as De Foe puts it, "the schism bill was a mine dug to blow up the White Staff". The design was effectual. Oxford had neither the courage to oppose the second reading nor the address to become an advocate of the bill. "He had not yet considered of it," he said; yet he laid claim afterwards to having taken "out all the malicious and persecuting part". "Your lordship," retorted the rival pamphleteer, "did not speak one word through the whole debate: you sat dumb and swelling with a discontent that visibly spake your affections to the bill." In the game of countercheck it was now Oxford's turn to move. The whig leaders in the house of lords, in conjunction with Nottingham, upon the representations of a considerable body of merchants, addressed themselves to a scrutiny of the circumstances under which the court of Madrid had substituted three explanatory articles in the Spanish treaty of commerce, injurious to British trade and practically nullifying those agreed upon at Utrecht. This inquiry was resisted by Bolingbroke, but supported by the treasurer, who threw out dark hints as to hidden motives. An address of the house of lords requested the queen to fur 1714 DISMISSAL OF OXFORD. 219 XII. nish the papers relating to the negotiation of the treaty of CHAP. commerce with Spain and the names of the persons advising it. These, it was notorious, were Bolingbroke and Arthur Moore. The lords ordered the appearance of the commissioners of trade and plantations, of whom Moore was one, and of the directors of the South Sea Company. Evidence was extracted that in the original Asiento contract a share of profits was reserved by the Spanish court; and that this share had not been made over with the rest to the South Sea Company but retained nominally in the hands of the "treasury". The treasury, as was admitted by the secretary, William Lowndes, was ignorant of the matter, and scandal was loud that the money had been reserved for the pockets of Bolingbroke, Moore, and Lady Masham. The two allies, the secretary and the favourite, felt that it was time the inquiry should cease. On the day after the revelations of Lowndes, July 9, 1714, the queen came down in person to prorogue parliament. Public opinion, however, had formed its own conclusions. Arthur Moore was expelled without a hearing from the South Sea Company, and observers noted that "the dragon," as Oxford was nicknamed, was "more cheerful than usual ". With Oxford at the head of affairs neither the secretary nor the favourite could venture to face another session of parliament. Only the queen's presence had saved Bolingbroke from plain language in the house of lords. The Hanover tory Anglesey had vowed a prosecution. For more than three weeks Anne was hesitating, while each section of the cabinet was predicting its own victory. On July 27 Oxford received his dismissal at the council table. The scene is described in the Secret History of the White Staff. He made the queen a long speech, warning her against his supplanters. He then turned upon them and fiercely accused them of corruption and embezzlement. It was suggested by his enemies that the queen never recovered the shock of this outburst. She herself, it was said, declared she should "not outlive it". Her resentment was feminine in its spite. She indulged it in a tirade to the lords, apparently after his withdrawal, against his idleness, his unintelligibleness, his untruthfulness, his unpunctuality— all of which was probably true enough. "He often," she said, "came drunk. He behaved himself towards her with bad CHAP. manners, indecency, and disrespect." A council was held on XII. the spot for the reconstruction of the ministry, and sat, with no definite result, till two in the morning, the queen remaining to the end. Bolingbroke in his hour of triumph was yet foiled of his full reward, Oxford had some weeks previously in "a brief account," placed by him in the hands of the queen, charged him plainly with corruption. It was not possible that a politician sneered at as the "sharper secretary," whose name had been thrice associated with pecuniary scandals, -in the matter of the Quebec expedition, in that of the passports, and in the yet unsifted charges arising out of the Asiento, should be placed in command of the treasury. by putting the treasury in commission he could, as secretary, retain the general control of affairs and trust that time might rehabilitate him with the queen, or service done find its reward from her successor. Wyndham, as chancellor of the exchequer, was an appropriate head for this commission. for the rest of the cabinet, Harcourt was to remain chancellor. The other names in men's mouths, Bromley, Mar, Ormonde, Buckingham, and Atterbury, were those of suspected Jacobites. But As The health of the queen had never really recovered the attack of the winter. It had grown sensibly worse since the spring. She could no longer either walk or stand, yet she had eagerly watched every phase of the struggle in the cabinet. The final scene had been followed by a lethargy. The gout from which she was suffering was said to have attacked her brain. On the morning of Friday, July 30, she became sensible, but upon another relapse the council, which was sitting at their usual place of meeting, the cockpit at Whitehall, adjourned to Kensington. There the Dukes of Somerset and Argyll, who had received no summons and had during some months ceased to attend, presented themselves at the board and claimed their right as privy councillors to assist with their advice in the crisis. Bolingbroke was unprepared. His friends, Buckingham, the lord president, and Wyndham were not present. Shrewsbury, who was presiding, welcomed the two dukes, whose appearance had probably been arranged with him, for his attitude during the recent conflict had been regarded with suspicion by Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke was conscious of defeat; but as, in the event of the queen's death, without a new |