1714

DEATH OF QUEEN ANNE.

221

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appointment, Oxford would be the acting treasurer, he pro- CHAP. posed recommending the nomination of Shrewsbury. Anne had for an interval regained consciousness, and the council being admitted to her bedside, she gave Shrewsbury the white staff, bidding him use it for the good of her people. It was her last act as queen. On Sunday, August 1, soon after seven in the morning, she passed away.

Meanwhile the council, now joined by Somers and other whigs, was dominated by the friends of the protestant succession, who began taking energetic steps to secure it. The heralds with a troop of the life-guards were held in readiness to proclaim the new king; the younger Craggs was dispatched to summon him; the Earl of Berkeley, a 'whig, was ordered to sea with a fleet; ten battalions were recalled from Flanders; the States-general were called upon to fulfil their guarantee of the succession; orders were sent to the lords-lieutenant of the counties to disarm all papists and non-jurors. The whigs had long been prepared to resist the pretender, should the ministry attempt a restoration. They had formed an association, collected arms, enlisted troops, and planned to seize the fortresses and outposts of the kingdom. They had badges of fusees in brass ready to distinguish their men. By this sudden change of fortune they were now able to control, in addition, the resources of the government itself. That Bolingbroke's desire was for a restoration his measures sufficiently indicate. The steadfastness of the pretender to the Roman faith had cooled him; but, if we are to trust the reports of Iberville as to his confidential communications, in June he reverted to schemes for bringing him in without conditions. The murmurs of the dissenters over the schism act might break out into civil war.1 In that case, he believed that the friends of the Church, that is, the great majority of the nation, would welcome French troops and the pretender at their head. The officers of the army, who were chiefly whigs, were to be weeded out, and to paralyse their authority the mutiny act of 1712 abolished the penalty of death for disobedience.2 As it was, Bolingbroke bowed to necessity with an appearance of good 'Daniel De Foe to the Earl of Oxford, June 23, 1714, Portland MSS., v., 461.

2 See the Duke of Newcastle's speech on the mutiny bill of 1749, in Parl. Hist., xiv., 441.

CHAP. grace. He at times cherished a lingering hope, as did OxXII. ford, that the elector was not irreconcilable. At other times he was sunk in despair. "The grief of my soul," he said to Atterbury, "is this; I see plainly that the tory party is gone."

Little needs to be added to what has already been said of the character of the queen. Attempts have recently been made to portray her as a woman of political independence and initiative. This was not the opinion of foreign observers, such as the Prussian resident Spanheim, of the English statesmen of the day, or of the women who knew her in private life. Mrs. Masham frequently deplored her want of "ready money," her slang term for independence. She had been brought up in High Church principles and she clung to them with the doggedness natural to her. But the Duchess of Marlborough, who was certainly a judge, if a severe one, of character, gauged her accurately when she told Lord Cowper, as he records in his diary, that the queen "has no original thoughts on any subject; is neither good nor bad but as put into; that she has much love and passion while pleased, with those who please". The question never was as to the queen's judgement of a situation but as to the person who had her ear. Her predilections were personal rather than political. Her dislike of the Hanover family was believed by Spanheim to date from a visit of the then electoral prince George Lewis, in 1680, which was not followed, as had been anticipated, by an offer of marriage. She entertained, before the rise of Mrs. Masham, a personal affection for the Marlboroughs and for Godolphin. At first she distrusted Somers because he was a whig, but he became a favourite with her because he was ceremonious. Sunderland, had he been a tory, would not have reconciled her to his overbearing manner. She disliked St. John because he was a profligate, and Wharton and Swift because she thought them profane. Cowper was a whig, yet he won her heart. Lastly, the reasons alleged by her for the dismissal of Sunderland, Godolphin, and Oxford were the same-they had been guilty of personal disrespect. In the indulgence of personal preferences she had overthrown the most brilliantly successful administration the country had ever seen. But her political sympathies, dependent though they were upon such predilections, were those of the bulk of the nation, and the sense of this brought her a popularity which has outlived the memory of her mistakes.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I.

IMMEDIATELY after the queen's decease the council met. CHAP. Kreienberg, the Hanoverian resident, produced a document XIII. signed by the elector in accordance with the regency act 1 nominating the lords justices, who, with the great officers of state, were to act as regents till his arrival. Shrewsbury was the only minister upon the list, which contained the names of eighteen peers, most of them belonging to the whig party. The Hanover tories were represented by Anglesey, Abingdon, Nottingham, and Nottingham's son-in-law, the Duke of Roxburghe. Two omissions excited surprise. They were the names of Somers and Marlborough. Whether Somers was excepted on account of his health, or whether his receipt of secret service money was known to and misliked by the elector, remains a mystery. The exclusion of Marlborough provoked, as may be supposed, lively comment. Among the excluded, too, was his son-in-law, Sunderland.

Marlborough after the death of Godolphin on September 15, 1712, had retired abroad. There were pending against him two actions-one for the 2 per cent. which had been condemned by the house of commons; the other for loans to the amount of £30,000 advanced to workmen engaged upon Blenheim and really due from the treasury. It is said by Burnet 2 that these prosecutions were set on foot to get him out of the country, and by Lockhart that Oxford agreed that they should be suspended if he would go. His actions shew that he was in grave doubts as to the future. In December, 1713, he, a

14 & 5 Anne, c. 20.

2 Hanmer agreed with Burnet. Torcy's information was that his retirement was due to disgust at his treatment in England. Duke of Berwick to James, November 27, 1712, Stuart Papers, i., 254.

CHAP. notorious niggard, offered the elector £20,000 as a loan to be XIII. used for political purposes in England. Such an offer from

such a man is eloquent of his real wishes. Nevertheless, in the previous October he had dispatched a secret envoy to the exQueen Mary and his nephew Berwick to solicit through them the intervention in his favour of Louis XIV. with Oxford and the queen, "for he apprehends that young Puisieux (the new parliament) will sue him for an old debt which would quite beggar him ". When in March, 1714, the restoration of the pretender seemed probable, Marlborough went a step further. To insure against the contingency he applied to his nephew to obtain a free pardon. A fortnight before, the duke had received a commission from the elector and had written protesting that for his service he was "always ready to hazard both life and fortune". It is clear from the references to Oxford in Berwick's letters that the ministry in England were acquainted with the duke's correspondence with the pretender. Oxford is said by Bothmer to have acquired Marlborough's original letters and to have sent them to Hanover by Thomas Harley. But that the duke had not lost George's confidence is proved by the fact that the first document signed by George I. as king was his commission as captain-general of the forces, dated August 6-17, the day on which the news of the queen's death reached Hanover. Marlborough reached London on August 5 amid the plaudits of crowds. He retired to his mansion of Holywell House, near St. Alban's, and, perhaps doubtful of the intentions of George, announced his resolution to accept no place in the government.

The proclamation of the new king nowhere met with resistance. Politicians under suspicion of Jacobite leanings hastened to protest their loyalty. Oxford wrote professing his "zeal and devotion" as the promoter of the king's succession, and, in his own anticipation as in that of Swift,* stood fair for a return to office. Pending the arrival of the new

3

1 Duke of Berwick to James III., October 10, 1710, Stuart Papers, i., 278. 2 Same to same, March 13, 1714, ibid., p. 308.

3 [The Earl of Oxford] to the King, August 6-17, 1714, Portland MSS., v., 484. The Earl of Mar indulged like expectations. MSS. of Earl of Mar and Kellie, p. 505, Hist. MSS. Comm., 1904.

4 [Jonathan Swift to the Earl of Oxford], August 15, 1714, Portland MSS., v., 488.

1714

DISMISSAL OF BOLINGBROKE.

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king, Bothmer was the virtual ruler. The royal orders to the CHAP. lords justices were communicated through him. It was known that he had the king's ear, and aristocratic place-hunters crowded his house. A search was made for the late queen's will and for directions as to her burial; but, above all, the sealed packet, always carried about her, the existence of which was well known at court, excited the hopeful anticipations of Bolingbroke and the apprehension of the whigs. No will was discovered; only a few lines directing her body to be laid by the side of her husband's in Westminster Abbey. On the cover of the sealed packet was an order, written and signed by the queen, that it should be burnt unopened after her death. In the presence of Bothmer, Kreienberg, and a group of the regents, the Duke of Somerset threw the packet into the flames.

Neither at home nor abroad did circumstances seem to render necessary any haste on the part of the new king. Louis XIV. volunteered to Prior, the British envoy at Paris, his determination to maintain the conditions of the treaty of Utrecht. He promptly recognised the accession, and he stopped the pretender on his way from Bar-le-Duc to Paris. The pretender returned despondent to Lorraine and contented himself with issuing a manifesto protesting against the usurper and proving, with the aid of genealogical trees, that there were fifty-seven other persons with a better title to the throne.1

Bolingbroke's new tory foreign policy, an alliance with France, Spain, and Savoy, was, at the moment of the queen's death, being embodied in a treaty under negotiation by Prior at Paris. On a report to Hanover by the regents, a summary end was put to Prior's diplomacy. Dispatches addressed to Bolingbroke were ordered to be delivered by him to the regents, and the minister was compelled to wait outside the door of their council chamber with his papers. There, on August 31, his dismissal was announced to him. The doors of his office were sealed up, that his papers might be examined at leisure. Pursuant to the provisions of the act of regency, parliament met in the afternoon of the day of the queen's death, but, Hanmer, the speaker, being in Wales, adjourned till August 5. With wise foresight the whigs defeated a tory proposal to increase the

1 August 29, N.S, 1714, R. O., MS., State Papers, Domestic, George I., bundle 1, no. 37.