When the

with Walpole, Pulteney, and Stanhope. moment of crisis arrived, he was still drifting. A gentleman came up post haste from Cheshire. "Well, my

lord," he said to Bolingbroke, "what is to be done?" The eager partisan found his leader in a palsy of indecision.

The queen had no further part to play on the sublunary stage. The white staff had not yet been settled. On Friday, 30th July, the political committee of the Privy Council, sitting at the Cockpit at Whitehall, were summoned to Kensington by urgent representations of the queen's dangerous condition. While they were seated, two Whig peers, the Dukes of Argyll and Somerset, entered the room. As Privy Councillors they were within their technical right, though the fact of their using it shows how little the modern practice of the Cabinet was yet established. The physicians were summoned, and they reported that the queen's case was desperate. It was then agreed to recommend her to appoint the Duke of Shrewsbury to be Lord Treasurer. There is some reason for supposing that this step was taken on the proposition of Bolingbroke himself. He had perceived some time before that his character was too bad to carry the great ensign of power, but he felt that his ability would secure supreme authority whether with or without the wand. They approached the bedside of the dying sovereign. Rousing herself from her lethargy, she handed to Shrewsbury the white staff for which, or for the power of which it was the emblem, so many great men have been willing to barter away their souls. According to current story she handed it to him with the one regal

II

DEATH OF THE QUEEN

39

utterance of her dismal life: she hoped that he would hold it for the good of her people. Another story is that as she lay dying, she uttered several times the hopeless cry of remorseful affection, "Oh, my brother, my dear brother!" She only lived a day longer. "Sleep," wrote Arbuthnot to Swift, "was never more welcome to a weary traveller than death to her." To Swift also Bolingbroke wrote, two days after the cup had been dashed from his lips: "The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us.' "It is true, my lord," replied Swift; "the events of five days last week might furnish morals for another volume of Seneca." The artful fabric of policy and of party, in which all the crafty calculations, the fierce passions, the glowing hopes and confident ambitions of so many busy, powerful, and ardent minds had been for four years so eagerly concentrated, was in a single moment dashed to pieces. A century and a quarter elapsed before a queen again reigned over the British realm. The next memorable historic scene within the walls

of the palace at Kensington was on that summer morning in 1837, when the young Princess Victoria, before a captain as great as Marlborough, and counsellors of a higher and purer stamp than the baffled intriguers who hovered round the deathbed of Anne, went through the first ceremonial of the most fortunate reign in English history.

CHAPTER III

THE NEW REIGN-WHIG SCHISM

THE accession of the house of Hanover in the person of the great-grandson of James I. was once called by a Whig of this generation the greatest miracle in our history. It took place without domestic or foreign disturbance. Louis XIV was now in his seventy-eighth year, and his orb was sinking over a weak, impoverished, and depopulated kingdom. Even he did not dare to expose him

self to the hazards of a new war with Great Britain. Within our own borders a short lull followed the sharp agitations of the last six months. The new king appointed an exclusively Whig Ministry. The office of Lord Treasurer was not revived, and the title disappears from political history. Lord Townshend was made principal Secretary of State, and assumed the part of first Minister. Mr. Walpole took the subaltern office of paymaster of the forces, holding along with it the paymastership of Chelsea Hospital. Although he had at first no seat in the inner Council or Cabinet, which seems to have consisted of eight members, only one of them a commoner, it is evident that from the outset his influence was hardly second to that of Townshend

CHAP. III

THE TOWNSHEND MINISTRY

41

himself. In little more than a year (October 1715) he had made himself so prominent and valuable in the House of Commons, that the opportunity of a vacancy was taken to appoint him to be First Commissioner of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Halifax and Lord Carlisle had in turn preceded him in the latter office. Since Walpole, save for a few months after Stanhope accepted a peerage in 1717, and before Aislabie succeeded him in 1718, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has always been in the House of Commons, a change that marked one further stage in the growing ascendancy of the representative and the taxing chamber.

Historians have sometimes urged that Townshend and Walpole ought now to have advised the king to bring a section of Tories into the Ministry. At that date, at any rate, a policy of inclusion seems to have been practically out of the question. Passion had risen to far too high a degree of heat and violence to allow of the composition of a mixed government, even if a mixed government had been desirable. But in the interest of the national settlement, nothing could have been less desirable. A struggle for life and death had just been brought to a good end, less by design or concert than by the fortunate accident of the demise of the queen. It would have been irrational to expect men who had only a few weeks before been ready to resort to armed force against one another, and who had just been risking their estates and their heads on a great and decisive issue, now at a moment's notice to sit down in amity

round the new king's council table.

Even if the Whig

leaders had been free from personal repugnance, and the Tory leaders had been willing to come into the combina

tion, it would have been the height of infatuation to prepare to face wavering Parliaments and a visibly approaching insurrection, with a divided, lukewarm, or uncertain Cabinet. Experience both before and after Walpole's era was entirely adverse to mixed governments. William III tried it on two occasions, and each time it was the judgment of the best observers that the admission to place of men of doubtful allegiance only added to his troubles. Anne tried it from 1704 to 1708, and Marlborough and Godolphin found the failure complete. George II tried it when Walpole had disappeared, and no attempt to make a strong government was less successful than that made on the principle of the Broad Bottom. If ever there was a time when comprehension, even on a small scale, would have been at once perilous and futile, it was the quarter of a century after the accession of the House of Hanover.

The new

Besides excluding their opponents from power, the Whigs instantly took more positive measures. Parliament was strongly Whig. A secret committee was at once appointed to inquire into the negotiations for the Peace. Walpole was chairman, took the lead in its proceedings, and drew the report. The topics of the report were such as at the present day would figure in a motion of censure. They are a recapitulation of all the objections to be urged against the terms of the Peace. Every objection was supported by extracts from authentic documents. Walpole took five hours in reading the report to the House, and the clerk at the table read it over again on the following day. It is a great political indictment, charging the queen's ministers with deserting their allies and betraying the honour and the interests of