Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope.
by Lord Bolingbroke.
INTRODUCTION
Henry St. John, who became Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, was born on the 1st of October, 1678, at the family manor of Battersea, then a country village. His grandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there with his wife Johanna,--daughter to Cromwell"s Chief Justice, Oliver St. John,--in one home with the child"s father, Henry St. John, who was married to the second daughter of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick.
The child"s grandfather, a man of high character, lived to the age of eighty-seven; and his father, more a man of what is miscalled pleasure, to the age of ninety. It was chiefly by his grandfather and grandmother that the education of young Henry St. John was cared for. Simon Patrick, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was for some years a chaplain in their home. By his grandfather and grandmother the child"s religious education may have been too formally cared for. A pa.s.sage in Bolingbroke"s letter to Pope shows that he was required as a child to read works of a divine who "made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm."
After education at Eton and Christchurch, Henry St. John travelled abroad, and in the year 1700 he married, at the age of twenty-two, Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winches...o...b.. a Berkshire baronet. She had much property, and more in prospect.
In the year 1701, Henry St. John entered Parliament as member for Wotton Ba.s.sett, the family borough. He acted with the Tories, and became intimate with their leader, Robert Harley. He soon became distinguished as the ablest and most vigorous of the young supporters of the Tory party. He was a handsome man and a brilliant speaker, delighted in by politicians who, according to his own image in the Letter to Windham, "grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game." He was active in the impeachment of Somers, Montague, the Duke of Portland, and the Earl of Oxford for their negotiation of the Part.i.tion Treaties. In later years he said he had acted here in ignorance, and justified those treaties.
James II. died at St. Germains, a pensioner of France, aged sixty- eight, on the 6th of September, 1701.
His pretensions to the English throne pa.s.sed to the son, who had been born on the 10th of June, 1688, and whose birth had hastened on the Revolution. That son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who was only thirteen years old at his father"s death, is known sometimes in history as the Old Pretender; the Young Pretender being his son Charles Edward, whose defeat at Culloden in 1746 destroyed the last faint hope of a restoration of the Stuarts. It is with the young heir to the pretensions of James II. that the story of the life of Bolingbroke becomes concerned.
King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded by James II."s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old, and had been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of Denmark. She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a much-troubled mother, who had lost five children in their infancy, besides one who survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the year 1700. As his death left the succession to the Crown unsettled, an Act of Settlement, pa.s.sed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided that, in case of failure of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown should pa.s.s to the next Protestant in succession, who was Sophia, wife of the Elector of Hanover. The Electress Sophia was daughter of the Princess Elizabeth who had married the Elector Palatine in 1613, granddaughter, therefore, of James I. She was more than seventy years old when Queen Anne began her reign. For ardent young Tories, who had no great interest in the limitation of authority or enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it was no treason to think, though it would be treason to say, that the old Electress and her more than forty-year-old German son George, gross-minded and clumsy, did not altogether shut out hope for the succession of a more direct heir to the Crown.
In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of State, and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in under Marlborough and G.o.dolphin, and St. John"s successor was his rival Robert Walpole. St. John retired then for two year from public life to his country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which had come to him, through his wife, by the death of his wife"s father the year before. He was thirty years old, the most brilliant of the rising statesmen; impatient of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as his younger rival from the other side, both of them men who, in his eyes, were dull and slow. St. John"s quick intellect, though eager and impatient of successful rivalry, had its philosophic turn.
During these two years of retirement he indulged the calmer love of study and thought, whose genius he said once, in a letter to Lord Bathurst "On the True use of Retirement and Study," "unlike the dream of Socrates, whispered so softly, that very often I heard him not, in the hurry of those pa.s.sions by which I was transported.
Some calmer hours there were; in them I hearkened to him.
Reflection had often its turn, and the love of study and the desire of knowledge have never quite abandoned me."
In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his ministry as Secretary of State. "I am thinking," wrote Swift to Stella, "what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple because he might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment."
It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with France, that was against all their political interests. The Whigs wished to maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of the Pretender. In the peace negotiations n.o.body was so active as Secretary St. John. On one occasion, without consulting his colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of Ormond, who commanded the English army in the Netherlands: "Her Majesty, my lord, has reason to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the great article of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier sent from Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen"s positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege or hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty.
I am at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen would have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her Majesty thinks you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so as to answer her ends without owning that which might at present have an ill effect if publicly known." He added as a postscript: "I had almost forgot to tell your grace that communication is given of this order to the Court of France." The peace was right, but the way of making it was mean in more ways than one, and the friction between Harley and St. John steadily increased. St. John used his majority in the House for the expulsion of his rival Walpole and Walpole"s imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of corruption. In 1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of Oxford, St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke, in the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct. His ill- will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank of Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of Commons, where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four, as Viscount Bolingbroke and Baron St. John. His father"s congratulation on the peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism: "Well, Harry, I said you would be hanged, but now I see you"ll be beheaded."
The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish Succession, was signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713.
Queen Anne died on the 1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe for the reaction that Bolingbroke had hoped to see. His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us to understand that in Queen Anne"s reign the possible succession of James II."s son, the Chevalier de St.
George, had never been out of his mind.
The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne. The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined. He was dismissed from office before the end of the month.
On the 26th of March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French messenger La Vigne. A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was Walpole"s impeachment of Bolingbroke. He was, in September, 1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased from the roll of peers. His own account of his policy will be found in this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the only weak feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke"s resentment against Harley.
When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few days in Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in Dauphiny. His Letter to Windham tells how he became Secretary of State to the Pretender, and how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels. The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to delay until there might be some chance of success. The death of Louis XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had removed the last prop of a falling cause.
Some part of Bolingbroke"s forfeited property was returned to his wife, who pleaded in vain for the reversal of his attainder.
Bolingbroke was ill-used by the Pretender and abused by the Jacobites. He had been writing philosophical "Reflections upon Exile," but when he found himself thus attacked on both sides Bolingbroke resolved to cast Jacobitism to the winds, speak out like a man, and vindicate himself in a way that might possibly restore him to the service of his country. So in April, 1717, at the age of thirty-nine, he began work upon what is justly considered the best of his writings, his Letter to Sir William Windham.
Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth, who had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been accepted by the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after Henry St. John had been sent to the House of Lords. Windham was "Dear Willie" to Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was sent to the Tower as a Jacobite. But he had powerful connections, was kindly and not dangerous, and was soon back in his place in the House fighting the Whigs. The Letter to Windham was finished in the summer of 1717. Its frankness was only suited to the prospect of a pardon. It was found that there was no such prospect, and the Letter was not published until 1753, a year or two after its writer"s death.
Bolingbroke"s first wife died in November, 1718. He married in 1720 a Marquise de Villette, with whom he lived on an estate called La Source, near Orleans, at the source of the small river Loiret.
There he talked and wrote philosophy. His pardon was obtained in May, 1723. In 1725 he was allowed by Act of Parliament the possession of his family inheritance; but as the attainder was not reversed he could never again sit in Parliament. So he came home in 1725, and bought an estate at Dawley, near Uxbridge. There he philosophised in his own way and played at farming, discoursed with Pope and plied his pen against the Whigs. In his letter to Pope, Bolingbroke writes of ministers of religion as if they had no other function than to maintain theological dogmas, and draws a false conclusion from false premisses. He died on the 12th of December, 1751.
H.M.
A LETTER TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM
I was well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind, and in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as much out of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had never lived and acted together. I depended on being forgot by them, and was far from imagining it possible that I should be remembered only to be condemned loudly by one half of them, and to be tacitly censured by the greatest part of the other half. As soon as I was separated from the Pretender and his interest, I declared myself to be so; and I gave directions for writing into England what I judged sufficient to put my friends on their guard against any surprise concerning an event which it was their interest, as well as mine, that they should be very rightly informed about.
As soon as the Pretender"s adherents began to clamour against me in this country, and to disperse their scandal by circular letters everywhere else, I gave directions for writing into England again.
Their groundless articles of accusation were refuted, and enough was said to give my friends a general idea of what had happened to me, and at least to make them suspend the fixing any opinion till such time as I should be able to write more fully and plainly to them myself. To condemn no person unheard is a rule of natural equity, which we see rarely violated in Turkey, or in the country where I am writing: that it would not be so with me in Great Britain, I confess that I flattered myself. I dwelt securely in this confidence, and gave very little attention to any of those scurrilous methods which were taken about this time to blast my reputation. The event of things has shown that I trusted too much to my own innocence, and to the justice of my old friends.
It was obvious that the Chevalier and the Earl of Mar hoped to load me with the imputation of treachery, incapacity, or neglect: it was indifferent to them of which. If they could ascribe to one of those their not being supported from France, they imagined that they should justify their precipitate flight from Scotland, which many of their fastest friends exclaimed against; and that they should varnish over that original capital fault, the drawing the Highlanders together in arms at the time and in the manner in which it was done.
The Scotch, who fell at once from all the sanguine expectations with which they had been soothed, and who found themselves reduced to despair, were easy to be incensed; they had received no support whatever, and it was natural for them rather to believe that they failed of this support by my fault, than to imagine their general had prevailed on them to rise in the very point of time when it was impossible that they should be supported from France, or from any other part of the world. The Duke of Ormond, who had been the bubble of his own popularity, was enough out of humour with the general turn of affairs to be easily set against any particular man.
The emissaries of this Court, whose commission was to amuse, had imposed upon him all along; and there were other busy people who thought to find their account in having him to themselves. I had never been in his secret whilst we were in England together: and from his first coming into France he was either prevailed upon by others, or, which I rather believe, he concurred with others, to keep me out of it. The perfect indifference I showed whether I was in it or no, might carry him from acting separately, to act against me.
The whole tribe of Irish and other papists were ready to seize the first opportunity of venting their spleen against a man, who had constantly avoided all intimacy with them; who acted in the same cause, but on a different principle, and who meant no one thing in the world less than raising them to the advantages which they expected.
That these several persons, for the reasons I have mentioned, should join in a cry against me, is not very marvellous; the contrary would be so to a man who knows them as well as I do. But that the English Tories should serve as echoes to them--nay more, that my character should continue doubtful at best amongst you, when those who first propagated the slander are become ashamed of railing without proof, and have dropped the clamour,--this I own that I never expected; and I may be allowed to say, that as it is an extreme surprise, so it shall be a lesson to me.
The Whigs impeached and attainted me. They went farther--at least, in my way of thinking, that step was more cruel than all the others- -by a partial representation of facts, and pieces of facts, put together as it best suited their purpose, and published to the whole world, they did all that in them lay to expose me for a fool, and to brand me for a knave. But then I had deserved this abundantly at their hands, according to the notions of party-justice. The Tories have not indeed impeached nor attainted me; but they have done, and are still doing something very like to that which I took worse of the Whigs than the impeachment and attainder: and this, after I have shown an inviolable attachment to the service, and almost an implicit obedience to the will of the party; when I am actually an outlaw, deprived of my honours, stripped of my fortune, and cut off from my family and my country, for their sakes.
Some of the persons who have seen me here, and with whom I have had the pleasure to talk of you, may, perhaps, have told you that, far from being oppressed by that storm of misfortunes in which I have been tossed of late, I bear up against it with firmness enough, and even with alacrity. It is true, I do so; but it is true likewise that the last burst of the cloud has gone near to overwhelm me.
From our enemies we expect evil treatment of every sort, we are prepared for it, we are animated by it, and we sometimes triumph in it; but when our friends abandon us, when they wound us, and when they take, to do this, an occasion where we stand the most in need of their support, and have the best t.i.tle to it, the firmest mind finds it hard to resist.
Nothing kept up my spirits when I was first reduced to the very circ.u.mstances I now describe so much as the consideration of the delusions under which I knew that the Tories lay, and the hopes I entertained of being able soon to open their eyes, and to justify my conduct. I expected that friendship, or, if that principle failed, curiosity at least, would move the party to send over some person from whose report they might have both sides of the question laid before them. Though this expectation be founded in reason, and you want to be informed at least as much as I do to be justified, yet I have hitherto flattered myself with it in vain. To repair this misfortune, therefore, as far as lies in my power, I resolve to put into writing the sum of what I should have said in that case. These papers shall lie by me till time and accidents produce some occasion of communicating them to you. The true occasion of doing it with advantage to the party will probably be lost; but they will remain a monument of my justification to posterity. At worst, if even this fails me, I am sure of one satisfaction in writing them: the satisfaction of unburdening my mind to a friend, and of stating before an equitable judge the account, as I apprehend it to stand, between the Tories and myself--"Quantum humano consilio efficere potui, circ.u.mspectis rebus meis omnibus, rationibusque subductis, summam feci cogitationum mearum omnium, quam tibi, si potero, breviter exponam."
It is necessary to my design that I call to your mind the state of affairs in Britain from the latter part of the year 1710 to the beginning of the year 1715, about which time we parted. I go no farther back because the part which I acted before that time, in the first essays I made in public affairs, was the part of a Tory, and so far of a piece with that which I acted afterwards. Besides, the things which preceded this s.p.a.ce of time had no immediate influence on those which happened since that time, whereas the strange events which we have seen fall out in the king"s reign were owing in a great measure to what was done, or neglected to be done, in the last four years of the queen"s. The memory of these events being fresh, I shall dwell as little as possible upon them; it will be sufficient that I make a rough sketch of the face of the Court, and of the conduct of the several parties during that time. Your memory will soon furnish the colours which I shall omit to lay, and finish up the picture.
From the time at which I left Britain I had not the advantage of acting under the eyes of the party which I served, nor of being able from time to time to appeal to their judgment. The gross of what happened has appeared; but the particular steps which led to those events have been either concealed or misrepresented--concealed from the nature of them or misrepresented by those with whom I never agreed perfectly except in thinking that they and I were extremely unfit to continue embarked in the same bottom together. It will, therefore, be proper to descend under this head to a more particular relation.
In the summer of the year 1710 the Queen was prevailed upon to change her Parliament and her Ministry. The intrigue of the Earl of Oxford might facilitate the means, the violent prosecution of Sacheverel, and other unpopular measures, might create the occasion and encourage her in the resolution; but the true original cause was the personal ill-usage which she received in her private life and in some trifling instances of the exercise of her power, for indulgence in which she would certainly have left the reins of government in those hands which had held them ever since her accession to the throne.
I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have done; that the princ.i.p.al spring of our actions was to have the government of the state in our hands; that our princ.i.p.al views were the conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us, and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us. It is, however, true that with these considerations of private and party interest there were others intermingled which had for their object the public good of the nation--at least what we took to be such.
We looked on the political principles which had generally prevailed in our government from the Revolution in 1688 to be destructive of our true interest, to have mingled us too much in the affairs of the Continent, to tend to the impoverishing our people, and to the loosening the bands of our const.i.tution in Church and State. We supposed the Tory party to be the bulk of the landed interest, and to have no contrary influence blended into its composition. We supposed the Whigs to be the remains of a party formed against the ill designs of the Court under King Charles II., nursed up into strength and applied to contrary uses by King William III., and yet still so weak as to lean for support on the Presbyterians and the other sectaries, on the Bank and the other corporations, on the Dutch and the other Allies. From hence we judged it to follow that they had been forced, and must continue so, to render the national interest subservient to the interest of those who lent them an additional strength, without which they could never be the prevalent party. The view, therefore, of those amongst us who thought in this manner was to improve the Queen"s favour, to break the body of the Whigs, to render their supports useless to them, and to fill the employments of the kingdom, down to the meanest, with Tories. We imagined that such measures, joined to the advantages of our numbers and our property, would secure us against all attempts during her reign, and that we should soon become too considerable not to make our terms in all events which might happen afterwards: concerning which, to speak truly, I believe few or none of us had any very settled resolution.
In order to bring these purposes about, I verily think that the persecution of Dissenters entered into no man"s head. By the Bills for preventing Occasional Conformity and the growth of schism, it was hoped that their sting would be taken away. These Bills were thought necessary for our party interest, and, besides, were deemed neither unreasonable nor unjust. The good of society may require that no person should be deprived of the protection of the Government on account of his opinions in religious matters; but it does not follow from hence that men ought to be trusted in any degree with the preservation of the Establishment, who must, to be consistent with their principles, endeavour the subversion of what is established. An indulgence to consciences, which the prejudice of education and long habits have rendered scrupulous, may be agreeable to the rules of good policy and of humanity, yet will it hardly follow from hence that a government is under any obligation to indulge a tenderness of conscience to come, or to connive at the propagating of these prejudices and at the forming of these habits.
The evil effect is without remedy, and may, therefore, deserve indulgence; but the evil cause is to be prevented, and can, therefore, be ent.i.tled to none. Besides this, the Bills I am speaking of, rather than to enact anything new, seemed only to enforce the observation of ancient laws which had been judged necessary for the security of the Church and State at a time when the memory of the ruin of both, and of the hands by which that ruin had been wrought, was fresh in the minds of men.
The Bank, the East India Company, and in general the moneyed interest, had certainly nothing to apprehend like what they feared, or affected to fear, from the Tories--an entire subversion of their property. Mult.i.tudes of our own party would have been wounded by such a blow. The intention of those who were the warmest seemed to me to go no farther than restraining their influence on the Legislature, and on matters of State; and finding at a proper season means to make them contribute to the support and ease of a government under which they enjoyed advantages so much greater than the rest of their fellow-subjects. The mischievous consequence which had been foreseen and foretold too, at the establishment of those corporations, appeared visibly. The country gentlemen were vexed, put to great expenses and even baffled by them in their elections; and among the members of every parliament numbers were immediately or indirectly under their influence. The Bank had been extravagant enough to pull off the mask; and, when the Queen seemed to intend a change in her ministry, they had deputed some of their members to represent against it. But that which touched sensibly even those who were but little affected by other considerations, was the prodigious inequality between the condition of the moneyed men and of the rest of the nation. The proprietor of the land, and the merchant who brought riches home by the returns of foreign trade, had during two wars borne the whole immense load of the national expenses; whilst the lender of money, who added nothing to the common stock, throve by the public calamity, and contributed not a mite to the public charge.
As to the Allies, I saw no difference of opinion among all those who came to the head of affairs at this time. Such of the Tories as were in the system above mentioned, such of them as deserted soon after from us, and such of the Whigs as had upon this occasion deserted to us, seemed equally convinced of the unreasonableness, and even of the impossibility, of continuing the war on the same disproportionate footing. Their universal sense was, that we had taken, except the part of the States General, the whole burden of the war upon us, and even a proportion of this; while the entire advantage was to accrue to others: that this had appeared very grossly in 1709, and 1710, when preliminaries were insisted upon, which contained all that the Allies, giving the greatest loose to their wishes, could desire, and little or nothing on the behalf of Great Britain: that the war, which had been begun for the security of the Allies, was continued for their grandeur: that the ends proposed, when we engaged in it, might have been answered long before, and therefore that the first favourable occasion ought to be seized of making peace; which we thought to be the interest of our country, and which appeared to all mankind, as well as to us, to be that of our party.
These were in general the views of the Tories: and for the part I acted in the prosecution of them, as well as of all the measures accessory to them, I may appeal to mankind. To those who had the opportunity of looking behind the curtain I may likewise appeal, for the difficulties which lay in my way, and for the particular discouragements which I met with. A princ.i.p.al load of parliamentary and foreign affairs in their ordinary course lay upon me: the whole negotiation of the peace, and of the troublesome invidious steps preliminary to it, as far as they could be transacted at home, were thrown upon me. I continued in the House of Commons during that important session which preceded the peace; and which, by the spirit shown through the whole course of it, and by the resolutions taken in it, rendered the conclusion of the treaties practicable. After this I was dragged into the House of Lords in such a manner as to make my promotion a punishment, not a reward; and was there left to defend the treaties almost alone.
It would not have been hard to have forced the Earl of Oxford to use me better. His good intentions began to be very much doubted of; the truth is, no opinion of his sincerity had ever taken root in the party, and, which was worse perhaps for a man in his station, the opinion of his capacity began to fall apace. He was so hard pushed in the House of Lords in the beginning of 1712 that he had been forced, in the middle of the session, to persuade the Queen to make a promotion of twelve peers at once, which was an unprecedented and invidious measure, to be excused by nothing but the necessity, and hardly by that. In the House of Commons his credit was low and my reputation very high. You know the nature of that a.s.sembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged. The thread of the negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made himself master of the business much time would have been lost, and great inconveniences would have followed. Some, who opposed the Court soon after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I should have wanted no help to do mischief. I knew the way of quitting my employments and of retiring from Court when the service of my party required it; but I could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the consequence of it must have been the breaking my party and the distress of the public affairs. I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the sense of that duty which I owed her came in aid of other considerations, and prevailed over my resentment. These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of pa.s.sing for a bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the troublesome and dangerous work a.s.signed me as if I had been under the utmost satisfaction. I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford. I was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin me in the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else. I saw, however, that he had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me, instead of having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire, an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of his jealousy and a reason for undermining me. In this temper of mind I went on till the great work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as well as for me, opened itself.
I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to them, exempt from faults. Many were made no doubt in both by those who were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many were owing purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their progress. I never look back on this great event, pa.s.sed as it is, without a secret emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the undertaking and the importance of its success, with the means employed to bring it about, and with those which were employed to traverse it. To adjust the pretensions and to settle the interests of so many princes and states as were engaged in the late war would appear, when considered simply and without any advent.i.tious difficulty, a work of prodigious extent. But this was not all.
Each of our Allies thought himself ent.i.tled to raise his demands to the most extravagant height. They had been encouraged to this, first, by the engagements which we had entered into with several of them, with some to draw them into the war, with others to prevail on them to continue it; and, secondly, by the manner in which we had treated with France in 1709 and 1710. Those who intended to tie the knot of the war as hard, and to render the coming at a peace as impracticable as they could, had found no method so effectual as that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on all he could think of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these concessions should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands. That this was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one of the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who communicated to me and to two others of the Queen"s Ministers an instance of the Duke of Marlborough"s management at a critical moment, when the French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed inclinable to come into an expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh article of the preliminaries, which could not have been refused. Certain it is that the King of France was at that time in earnest to execute the article of Philip"s abdication, and therefore the expedients for adjusting what related to this article would easily enough have been found, if on our part there had been a real intention of concluding.
But there was no such intention, and the plan of those who meant to prolong the war was established among the Allies as the plan which ought to be followed whenever a peace came to be treated. The Allies imagined that they had a right to obtain at least everything which had been demanded for them respectively, and it was visible that nothing less would content them. These considerations set the vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient light.