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374

MARLBOROUGH'S LAST CAMPAIGN.

[1711. for peace was at that time going forward with the French minister, Torcy, under the immediate direction of St. John, through the Abbé Gautier, whilst the queen was made to pledge herself to the Dutch government that no step towards a pacification should be taken but in concert with them. How far St. John was at that time concerned in the schemes which the Jacobite party had for setting aside the Act of Settlement, and for bringing back the Pretender, in connection with these advances for peace, is a matter of inference from his subsequent conduct. "It is remarked by sir James Mackintosh in one of his note-books (we know not on what authority) that the first introduction of Bolingbroke into the secret negotiation was during the illness of Harley after he had been stabbed by Guiscard." It was for the interest of both these unscrupulous ministers, that their undoubted duplicity to the Allies, and their possible treason to the Constitution, should be covered by the pretence that each was meant to be assassinated by a French agent, for their zeal and fidelity to their sovereign and their country. They became rivals even for the honour of this miserable delusion.

The attempt of Guiscard upon the life of Harley led to the passing of the Statute, by which it was enacted that if any person or persons "shall unlawfully attempt to kill, or shall unlawfully assault, or strike or wound, any person, being one of the most honourable Privy Council of her majesty, her heirs or successors, when in the execution of his office of a Privy Counsellor in Council, or on any Committee of Council, that then the person or persons so offending, being thereof convicted in due form of law, shall be and are hereby declared to be felons, and shall suffer death as in cases of felony, without benefit of clergy." †

On the 4th of March Marlborough left England, to resume his command of the Allied forces in the Netherlands, but without a remnant of the political power which had once been entrusted to him. Yet the weakness of the ministry had induced Harley and Bolingbroke to relax somewhat in their hostility to the great general; and Swift evidently had his cue, when he wrote thus on the 15th of February: "Nobody that I know of did ever dispute the duke of Marlborough's courage, conduct, or success; they have been always unquestionable, and will continue to be so, in spite of the malice of his enemies, or, which is yet more, the weakness of his advocates. The nation only wishes to see him taken out of ill hands, and put in better." Three weeks after the attempt upon Harley's life, St. John wrote a letter to Marlborough, full of professions of respect: "Your grace may be assured of my sincere endeavours to serve you; and I hope never again to see the time when I shall be obliged to embark in a separate interest from you." § Marlborough was too experienced in the value of such professions not to be on his guard. He wrote to beg the duchess not to name any of the ministers in her letters to him, all of which he had certain assurance that they opened. "The concern you have for me must in kindness oblige you never to say anything of them which may give offence; since whilst I am in the service I am in their power, especially by the villainous way of printing, which stabs me to the heart." || This moral cowardice is a curious revelation of human

* "Edinburgh Review," vol. lxii. p. 19. § Coxe, vol. vi. p. 7.

+9 Annæ, c. 21.

Ibid. vol. vi. p. 8.

"Examiner."

1711.]

MARLBOROUGH'S LAST CAMPAIGN.

375

inconsistency. "The villainous way of printing" was ever a terror to the man who would charge a redoubt with the utmost coolness. "Paper-bullets of the brain" were far more terrible to him than a volley of grape-shot. But Marlborough very speedily had far more serious embarrassments than the discomfort produced by his dreaded enemies, the London pamphleteers. The emperor Joseph was attacked by small-pox, and died on the 17th of April, in his thirty-fourth year. His brother Charles would succeed to the hereditary dominions of Austria, and all the political interests of Germany would be concentrated upon the election to the empire. The British cabinet instantly sent orders to Marlborough to co-operate with the States of Holland and with Eugene, in forwarding the election of the Austrian prince, in preference to that of the king of Bavaria. Louis secretly promoted the same object. The governments of England and France saw that the great obstacle to a separate peace would be removed, if Charles were elected emperor; for the danger to the balance of power from the emperor being king of Spain, was really greater than the danger of the crowns of France and Spain being in the family of the Bourbons. Peace would assuredly arise. out of these complications, however unwilling the Austrian family might be to withdraw their pretensions to the Spanish monarchy. But the uncertainty of the future was too great to cause any essential difference in the conduct of the war in the Netherlands. Marlborough never stood in a loftier attitude than in the campaign of 1711. The expected co-operation of Prince Eugene in the command of the allied troops was interrupted by the necessity of his presence on the Upper Rhine. A portion of the British force was withdrawn from the Netherlands, to take part in a hopeless renewal of the war in Spain, or to be sent upon an ill-concerted expedition against Quebec. Marlborough, having lost the favour of the queen; distrusted and hated by the ministry; grown odious in the eyes of the people as the supposed obstacle to peace and relief from taxation; went about the performance of his military duties with a vigour and sagacity truly admirable. Marshal Villars, during the preceding autumn and winter, had constructed a series of fortified lines, which appeared well calculated to defy any irruption of the Allies upon the French frontier. They were boastfully asserted to be the ne plus ultra of Marlborough. The French army was also declared to be far stronger than that of the Allies. "The marshal de Villars was pleased to tell my trumpet yesterday, that the death of the emperor would occasion great disorders among the Allies, and that he should be thirty thousand stronger than we." Thus Marlborough writes to Godolphin on the 4th of May; and adds, “If their superiority be as great as he says it will be, I should not apprehend much from them, but that of their being able to hinder us from acting, which, to my own particular, would be mortification enough; for since constant success has not met with approbation, what may I not expect when nothing is done!" Marlborough was not hindered from acting by the French superiority of numbers, or by their impregnable lines. He had determined to invest Bouchain; but to do this it was necessary that he should pass those lines. By rapid changes of position; by taking an important post in one day, and suffering the enemy to concentrate their

* Coxe, vol. vi. p. 24.

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[1711.

attention by its recapture, whilst he carried forward his ultimate design; by inducing Villars to fancy that the Allies were about to give him battle, and then suddenly marching away at nightfall; this wonderful strategy produced a result as great as if Marlborough had added one more to his roll of victories. On the 6th of August he wrote to secretary St. John that the whole army had passed the lines on the previous day, and were drawn up in order of battle. The reply of St. John offers the highest tribute to the strategy of the general: My lord Stair had indeed opened to us the several steps which your grace intended to take in order to pass the enemy's lines in one part or other; it was, however, hard to imagine, and too much to hope, that a plan which consisted of so many parts, wherein so many different corps were to co-operate punctually together, should entirely succeed, and no one article fail of what your grace had projected. I most heartily congratulate with your grace on this great event, of which no more needs, I think, be said than that you have obtained, without losing a man, such an advantage as we should have bought with the expense of several thousand lives, and have reckoned ourselves gainers." On the 24th of August Marlborough writes to St. John, to apprise him of his proceedings in the siege of Bouchain. The answer of the secretary is again a tribute to the genius of Marlborough: "I shall be very glad to have the plan of the situation of both armies, which your grace has promised to send me. I expect indeed that it should be very extraordinary, since I believe there is hardly one instance of an inferior army posting themselves so as to be able to form a siege and keep the communication open with their own country, in sight of an enemy so much superior." + On the 14th of September, the successful general announces to the sceptical secretary that the difficulties had been overcome--that Bouchain had surrendered: "Thus you see a place, which is of such consequence to either party, has, by the blessing of God, been reduced even in the sight of a superior army, that has left nothing unattempted towards relieving it, and who, being apprehensive of our success, have for some days past been burning and destroying all the forage about Quesnoy and Valenciennes to hinder our further progress, by endeavouring to make it impossible for us to subsist." +

On the 8th of October Charles of Austria was elected emperor of Germany. He had previously left Spain; where, although troops were sent by the British government, nothing was done to retrieve the disasters of the previous year. In England, the conduct of the campaign by Marlborough was systematically disparaged. He was assailed for not having taken occasion to hazard battle with Villars; his passage of the French lines was termed crossing the kennel; and the capture of Bouchain was called the taking of a dove-cot, with the loss of sixteen thousand men. Marlborough was writhing under these attacks, and had the weakness to write to Harley, now lord Oxford, complaining that he "should be reviled in such a manner." Oxford replied that he was himself'every day the subject of some libel or other; and says, "I would willingly compound that all the ill-natured scribblers should have license to write ten times more against me, on condition that they would

Marlborough Dispatches, vol. v. p. 429. + Ibid. p. 462.

+ Ibid. p. 490.

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write against nobody else." * St. John informs the queen in a note that Marlborough's chaplain, Dr. Hare, had "published libels against your majesty's government;" and is particularly angry against a sermon preached before the duke, and afterwards printed. He calls it "seditious." It merely deprecated the conclusion of a precipitate and dishonourable peace. This was the sore point. Oxford and St. John had for some time been carrying on their secret negotiation with France for a peace, as if England were the. sole party; and had been writing to Marlborough as if there could only be one policy-that of vigorously conducting the war till a general peace could be accomplished, in concert with the Allies. They knew that the notion which Marlborough and the Allies had of a general peace was, that it should contain a provision that no Bourbon prince should ever wear the crown of Spain. The ministry had signed a preliminary treaty with France, in which it was agreed that the crowns of France and Spain should not be worn by the same prince. It would be easier to destroy Marlborough than to convert him; and the ministers vigorously set about his destruction.

The army went into winter-quarters, and Marlborough came home, landing at Greenwich, on the 17th of November. He heard that London was in some confusion. The usual procession on the birth-day of queen Elizabeth, when it was customary to burn the effigies of the pope, the devil, and other illustrious personages, was conceived by the ministry to be as dangerous to the public peace as the similar procession in the time of Titus Oates. † A quantity of puppets was seized in a house in Drury-lane, on the night of the 16th; one of which, representing the lord treasurer, was a fearful libel. "I am assured," says Swift, "that the figure of the devil is made as like lord treasurer as they could." It was a capital occasion to get up a squib against the Whigs; and the reverend counsellor of the Tories says, "I have put an understrapper upon writing a twopenny pamphlet, to give an account of the whole design." The "understrapper" was the great ally of the lord treasurer and the secretary; and one object of the twopenny pamphlet is clear enough from this passage: "The duke of Marlborough was to make his entry through Aldgate, where he was to be met with the cry of Victory! Bouchain! the lines, the lines!"" Marlborough had as little to promise himself from mob-favour as from court-favour. The lines and Bouchain were worthless to his immediate fame, and did not save him from ungenerous reproach in the highest place. The parliament was opened by the queen on the 7th of December; and the application of the opening words of her speech could not be mistaken: "I have called you together as soon as the public affairs would permit; and I am glad that I can now tell you, that, notwithstanding the arts of those who delight in war, both place and time are appointed for opening the treaty of a general peace." In the debate which ensued, Marlborough spoke with an animation and solemnity which rarely marked his course in parliamentary proceedings. The queen was in the House: "He could declare with a safe conscience, in the presence of her majesty, of that illustrious assembly, and of that Supreme Being, who is infinitely above all the powers upon earth, and before whom, according to the ordinary course of nature, he must soon appear, to give an account of his

* Coxe, vol. vi. p. 123.

+ Ante, vol. iv. p. 335.

Journal to Stella.

878

THE MINISTRY DEFEATED IN THE LORDS.

[1711.

actions, that he ever was desirous of a safe, honourable, and lasting peace; and that he was always very far from any design of prolonging the war for his own private advantage, as his enemies had most falsely insinuated. That his advanced age, and the many fatigues he had undergone, made him earnestly wish for retirement and repose, to think of eternity the remainder of his days; the rather, because he had not the least motive to desire the continuance of the war, having been so generously rewarded, and had honours and riches heaped upon him, far beyond his desert and expectation, both by her majesty and her parliaments. That he thought himself bound to this public acknowledgment to her majesty and his country, that he should always be ready to serve them, if he could but crawl along, to obtain an honourable and lasting peace: but that, at the same time, he must take the liberty to declare, that he could, by no means, give into the measures that had lately been taken to enter into a negotiation of peace with France, upon the foot of the seven preliminary articles; for, he was of the same opinion with the rest of the Allies, that the safety and liberties of Europe would be in imminent danger, if Spain and the West Indies were left to the House of Bourbon; which, with all humility, and as he thought himself in duty bound, he had declared to her majesty, whom he had the honour to wait on after his return from Holland; and, therefore, he was for inserting in the Address the Clause offered by the earl of Nottingham." * The amendment of Nottingham was to the effect "that no peace could be safe or honourable to Great Britain, or Europe, if Spain and the West Indies were allotted to the House of Bourbon." The amendment was carried by a majority of sixty-two against fifty-four. A similar amendment in the Commons was rejected by a majority of two hundred and thirty-two against a hundred and six. In the Address of the lower House to the queen, the feeling against Marlborough was kept up by an especial reference to "the arts and devices of those who, for private views, may delight in war."

The ministers of queen Anne put a falsehood into her mouth in her answer to the Address of the Lords: "I should be sorry any one could think I would not do my utmost to recover Spain and the West Indies from the House of Bourbon." The ministerial duplicity was a result of the terror which they felt at their probable ejection from power, and at the prospect of Whig revenge upon the discovery of their clandestine dealings with France. Swift has related that the most bitter of their opponents, the earl of Wharton, "was observed in the House to smile, and put his hands to his neck when any of the ministry was speaking, by which he would have it understood that some heads were in danger."+ Swift begged St. John to send him abroad "before a change." He says, "I took him aside after dinner, told him how I had served them, and had asked no reward, but thought I might ask security." We doubt if he was altogether in a jocular mood, when he thus manifested his fears to Oxford: "I told lord-treasurer I should have the advantage of him; for he would lose his head, and I should only be hanged, and so carry my body entire to the grave." § Party-hatreds were becoming so intense, that heading and hanging were not altogether out of the question.

* "Parliamentary History," vol. vi. col. 1038.
Journal, Dec. 9.

+"Four Last Years of Queen Anne."

§ Ibid., Dec. 8.

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