[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]

While the cares of his new throne were chaining him to England the confederacy of which he was the guiding spirit was proving too slow and too loosely compacted to cope with the swift and resolute movements of France. The armies of Lewis had fallen back within their own borders, but only to turn fiercely at bay. Even the junction of the English and Dutch fleets failed to assure them the mastery of the seas. The English navy was paralysed by the corruption which prevailed in the public service, as well as by the sloth and incapacity of its commander. The services of Admiral Herbert at the Revolution had been rewarded with the earldom of Torrington and the command of the fleet; but his indolence suffered the seas to be swept by French privateers, and his want of seamanship was shown in an indecisive engagement with a French squadron in Bantry Bay. Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the command of the Channel; the French dockyards were turning out ship after ship, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to reinforce the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast would have brought serious political danger; for the reaction of popular feeling which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the pressure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Nonjurors and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of the Jacobites or adherents of King James, was forming around the Nonjurors; and it was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of a French fleet on the coast.

[Sidenote: Schomberg in Ireland.]

In such a state of affairs William judged rightly that to yield to the Whig thirst for vengeance would have been to ruin his cause. He dissolved the Parliament, which had refused to pass a Bill of Indemnity for all political offences, and called a new one to meet in March. The result of the elections proved that William had only expressed the general temper of the nation. In the new Parliament the bulk of the members proved Tories. The boroughs had been alienated from the Whigs by their refusal to pass the Indemnity, and their desire to secure the Corporations for their own party by driving from them all who had taken part in the Tory misgovernment under Charles or James. In the counties the discontent of the clergy told as heavily against the Whigs; and parson after parson led his flock in a body to the poll. The change of temper in the Parliament necessarily brought about a change among the king's advisers. William accepted the resignation of the more violent Whigs among his counsellors and placed Danby at the head of affairs; and in May the Houses gave their assent to the Act of Grace. The king's aim in his sudden change of front was not only to meet the change in the national spirit, but to secure a momentary lull in English faction which would suffer him to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was king in Dublin the attempt to crush treason at home was a hopeless one; and so urgent was the danger, so precious every moment in the present juncture of affairs, that William could trust no one to bring the work as sharply to an end as was needful save himself. In the autumn of the year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg, an exiled Huguenot who had followed William in his expedition to England and was held to be one of the most skilful captains of the time, had been sent with a small force to Ulster to take advantage of the panic which had followed the relief of Londonderry. James indeed was already talking of flight, and looked upon the game as hopeless. But the spirit of the Irish people rose quickly from their despair, and the duke's landing roused the whole nation to a fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were filled up at once, and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda with a force double that of his opponent. Schomberg, whose men were all raw recruits whom it was hardly possible to trust at such odds in the field, did all that was possible when he entrenched himself at Dundalk and held his ground in a camp where pestilence swept off half his numbers.

[Sidenote: Battle of the Boyne.]

Winter at last parted the two armies, and during the next six months James, whose treasury was utterly exhausted, strove to fill it by a coinage of brass money while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder. William meanwhile was toiling hard on the other side of the Channel to bring the Irish war to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the winter with men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached thirty thousand men. Lewis too felt the importance of the coming struggle. Seven thousand picked Frenchmen under the Count of Lauzun were despatched to reinforce the army of James, but they had hardly arrived when William himself landed at Carrickfergus and pushed rapidly with his whole army to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish forces, hardly exceeding twenty thousand men in number but posted strongly behind the Boyne. Lauzun had hoped by falling back on Dublin to prolong a defensive war, but retreat was now impossible. "I am glad to see you, gentlemen," William cried with a burst of delight; "and if you escape me now the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the first of July 1690, the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish foot, who at first fought well, broke in a sudden panic as soon as the passage of the river was effected, but the horse made so gallant a stand that Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge and for a time the English centre was held in check. With the arrival of William however at the head of his left wing all was over. James, who had throughout been striving to secure the withdrawal of his troops to the nearest defile rather than frankly to meet William's onset, abandoned his troops as they fell back in retreat upon Dublin, and took ship at Kinsale for France.

[Sidenote: Irish War.]

But though James had fled in despair, and though the beaten army was forced by William's pursuit to abandon the capital, it was still resolute to fight. The incapacity of the Stuart sovereign moved the scorn even of his followers. "Change kings with us," an Irish officer replied to an Englishman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne, "change kings with us and we will fight you again." They did better in fighting without a king. The French indeed withdrew scornfully from the routed army as it turned at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. "Do you call these ramparts?" sneered Lauzun: "the English will need no cannon; they may batter them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand Irish soldiers remained with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who had seen service in England and abroad; and his daring surprise of the English ammunition train, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm the town, and the approach of winter forced William to raise the siege. The course of the war abroad recalled him to England, but he was hardly gone when a new turn was given to the struggle by one who was quietly proving himself a master in the art of war. Churchill, rewarded for his opportune desertion of James with the earldom of Marlborough, had been recalled from Flanders to command a division which landed in the south of Ireland. Only a few days remained before the operations were interrupted by the coming of winter, but the few days were turned to good account. The two ports by which alone Ireland could receive supplies from France fell into English hands. Cork, with five thousand men behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the greater part of Munster in Irish hands, the French force remained untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with arms and supplies encouraged the insurgents. But the summer of 1691 had hardly begun when Ginkell, the new English general, by his seizure of Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and Irish forces at Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his army was utterly broken.

[Sidenote: Ireland conquered.]

The defeat at Aughrim left Limerick alone in its revolt, and in October Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of surrender. Two treaties were drawn up between the Irish and English generals. By the first it was stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consistent with law, or as they had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. The Crown pledged itself also to summon a Parliament as soon as possible, and to endeavour to procure to the good Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as "may preserve them from any disturbance upon the account of the said religion." By the military treaty those of Sarsfield's soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France; and ten thousand men, the whole of his force, chose exile rather than life in a land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the wild cry of the women who stood watching their departure was hushed the silence of death settled down upon Ireland. For a hundred years the country remained at peace. But the peace was a peace of despair. No Englishman who loves what is noble in the English temper can tell without sorrow and shame the story of that time of guilt. The work of oppression, it is true, was done not directly by England but by the English settlers in Ireland; and the cruelty of their rule sprang in great measure from the sense of danger and the atmosphere of panic in which the Protestants lived. But if thoughts such as these relieve the guilt of those who oppressed they leave the fact of oppression as dark as before. The most terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the rising under Tyrconnell. The conquered people, in Swift's bitter words of contempt, became "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to their conquerors. Such as the work was, however, it was thoroughly done. Though local risings of these serfs perpetually spread terror among the English settlers in Ireland, all dream of a national revolt passed away. Till the very eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source of political danger and anxiety to England.

[Sidenote: French Descent on England.]

Short as the struggle of Ireland had been it had served Lewis well, for while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes was restoring the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg won the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the Duke of Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory which France was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very throne of William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage than in quitting England to fight James in Ireland at a moment when the Jacobites were only looking for the appearance of a French fleet on the coast to rise in revolt. The French minister in fact hurried the fleet to sea in the hope of detaining William in England by a danger at home; and he had hardly set out for Ireland when Tourville, the French admiral, appeared in the Channel with strict orders to fight. Orders as strict had been sent to the allied fleets to engage even at the risk of defeat; and when Tourville was met on the 30th of June 1690 by the English and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly outnumbered it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid; but Herbert, whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were crushed, and withdrew with the English ships at nightfall to seek shelter in the Thames. The danger was as great as the shame, for Tourville's victory left him master of the Channel and his presence off the coast of Devon invited the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the discontent of Tories and Nonjurors against William might be all signs of it vanished with the landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by Tourville's sailors called the whole coast to arms; and the news of the Boyne put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James.

[Sidenote: Intrigues in England.]

The natural reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a new strength for the moment to William in England; but ill luck still hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his presence abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland undone, and crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the first time since the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king had appeared on the Continent at the head of an English army. But the slowness of the allies again baffled William's hopes. He was forced to look on with a small army while a hundred thousand Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the strongest fortress of the Netherlands, and made themselves masters of it in the presence of Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment all trust in William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt more heavily than elsewhere. The Jacobite hopes which had been crushed by the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life. Leading Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened communications with James; and some of the leading Whigs with the Earl of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as William's ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marlborough's mind the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. His design was to bring about a revolt which would drive William from the throne without replacing James on it, a revolt which would in fact give the crown to his daughter Anne whose affection for Marlborough's wife would place the real government of England in Churchill's hands. A yet greater danger lay in the treason of Admiral Russell who had succeeded Torrington in command of the fleet.

[Sidenote: Battle of La Hogue.]

Russell's defection would have removed the one obstacle to a new attempt which James was resolved to make for the recovery of his throne and which Lewis had been brought to support. James had never wavered from his design of returning to England at the head of a foreign force. He abandoned Ireland as soon as his hopes of finding such a force there vanished at the Boyne; and from that moment he had sought a base of invasion in France. Lewis was the more willing to make the trial that the pressure of the war had left few troops in England. So certain was he of success that the future ambassador to the court of James was already nominated, and a treaty of commerce sketched between France and England. In the beginning of 1692 an army of thirty thousand troops was quartered in Normandy in readiness for a descent on the English coast. Nearly a half of this force was composed of the Irish regiments who had followed Sarsfield into exile after the surrender of Limerick. Transports were provided for their passage, and Tourville was ordered to cover it with the French fleet at Brest. Though Russell had twice as many ships as his opponent the belief in his purpose of betraying William's cause was so strong that Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the allied fleets at any disadvantage. But whatever Russell's intrigues may have meant he was no Herbert. All he would promise was to keep his fleet out of the way of hindering a landing. But should Tourville engage, he would promise nothing. "Do not think I will let the French triumph over us in our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. "If I meet them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." When the allied fleet, which had been ordered to the Norman coast, met the French off the heights of Barfleur his fierce attack proved Russell true to his word. Tourville's fifty vessels were no match for the ninety ships of the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle the French were forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. Twenty-two of their vessels reached St. Malo; thirteen anchored with Tourville in the bays of Cherbourg and La Hogue; but their pursuers were soon upon them, and in a bold attack the English boats burned ship after ship under the eyes of the French army.

[Sidenote: The turn of the War.]

All dread of the invasion was at once at an end; and the throne of William was secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite conspiracy at home which the invasion was intended to support. The battle of La Hogue was a death-blow to the project of a Stuart restoration by help of foreign arms. Henceforth English Jacobitism would have to battle unaided against the throne of the Revolution. But the overthrow of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory. France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval power; for though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength the confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope too dawned on the Grand Alliance. The spell of French triumph was broken. On land indeed the French still held their old mastery. Namur, one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, surrendered to Lewis a few days after the battle of La Hogue. An inroad into Dauphine failed to rouse the Huguenots to revolt, and the Duke of Luxembourg maintained the glory of the French arms by a victory over William at Steinkirk. But the battle was a useless butchery in which the conquerors lost as many men as the conquered. From that moment France felt herself disheartened and exhausted by the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme. "The country," Fenelon wrote frankly to Lewis, "is a vast hospital." The tide too of the war began to turn. In 1693 the campaign of Lewis in the Netherlands proved a fruitless one, and Luxembourg was hardly able to beat off the fierce attack of William at Neerwinden. For the first time in his long career of prosperity therefore Lewis bent his pride to seek peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort was a vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were at an end and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically done.

[Sidenote: The Sovereignty of the Commons.]

Its final triumph however was in great measure brought about by a change which now passed over the face of English politics. In outer seeming the Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was transferring the sovereignty from the king to the House of Commons. From the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the constitutional change was complete the machinery of government was far from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of Commons might be it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown; it was from the king that they looked for direction, and to the king that they held themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the Commons could force a king to remove a Minister who contradicted their will; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will.

[Sidenote: Lord Sunderland.]

The result was the growth of a temper in the Lower House which drove William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood changed, as William bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate information, and destitute of that organization out of which alone a definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn political capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by compliance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic faith; but the ruin of James was no sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and his honour. Since the Revolution Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation in a country retirement, but at this crisis he came secretly forward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the king. His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House.

[Sidenote: The New Ministerial System.]

As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had existed. Each great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had in theory been independent of his fellow-officers; each was the "King's servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the king alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of government, but the predominance was merely personal and never permanent; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was common for a king to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at ministerial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunderland's plan aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing the same sentiments, and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had never had before. The Ministers who were representatives of the majority of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name to be the king's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the House to the other.

[Sidenote: The Junto.]

Such was the origin of that system of representative government which has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But though William showed his own political genius in understanding and adopting Sunderland's plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he ventured to carry it out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction Sunderland believed that the balance of political power was really on the side of the Whigs. Not only were they the natural representatives of the principles of the Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but they stood far above their opponents in parliamentary and administrative talent. At their head stood a group of statesmen whose close union in thought and action gained them the name of the Junto. Russell, as yet the most prominent of these, was the victor of La Hogue; John Somers was an advocate who had sprung into fame by his defence of the Seven Bishops; Lord Wharton was known as the most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers; and Montague was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English financiers. In spite of such considerations however it is doubtful whether William would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely Whig Ministry but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the war. Exhausted as France was the war still languished and the allies still failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all but ruined by the French privateers and the nation stood aghast at the growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold in their support of the Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs on the other hand remained resolute in their support of the war.

[Sidenote: Bank of England.]

William, in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was thus driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. Already in 1694 indeed Montague established his political position and weakened that of the Tory Ministers by his success in a great financial measure which at once relieved the pressure of taxation and added strength to the new monarchy. The war could be kept up only by loans: and loans were still raised in England by personal appeal to a few London goldsmiths in whose hands men placed money for investment. But the bankruptcies which followed the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal had shaken public confidence in the goldsmiths, while the dread of a restoration of James made these capitalists appear shy of the Ministers' appeals for aid. Money therefore could only be raised in scanty quantities and at a heavy loss. In this emergency Montague came forward with a plan which had been previously suggested by a Scotchman, William Paterson, for the creation of a National Bank such as already existed in Holland and in Genoa. While serving as an ordinary bank for the supply of capital to commercial enterprises the Bank of England, as the new institution was called, was in reality an instrument for procuring loans from the people at large by the formal pledge of the State to repay the money advanced on the demand of the lender. For this purpose a loan of L1,200,000 was thrown open to public subscription; and the subscribers to it were formed into a chartered company in whose hands the negotiation of all after loans was placed. The plan turned out a perfect success. In ten days the list of subscribers was full. A new source of power revealed itself in this discovery of the resources afforded by the national credit and the national wealth; and the rapid growth of the National Debt, as the mass of these loans to the State came to be called, gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts whose first work would have been the repudiation of the claims of the lenders or as they were termed the "fundholders."

[Sidenote: The Whig Ministry.]

The evidence of the public credit gave strength to William abroad as at home. In 1694 indeed the army of 90,000 men which he commanded in the Netherlands did no more than hold the French successfully at bay; but the English fleet rode triumphant in the Channel, ravaged and alarmed the coast of France, and foiled by its pressure the attack of a French army on Barcelona. The brighter aspect of affairs abroad coincided with a new unity of action at home. The change which Sunderland counselled was quietly carried out. One by one the Tory Ministers had been replaced by members of the Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty; Somers was named Lord Keeper; Shrewsbury, Secretary of State; Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Even before this change was completed its effect was felt. The House of Commons took a new tone. The Whig majority of its members, united and disciplined, moved quietly under the direction of their natural leaders, the Whig Ministers of the Crown. It was this which enabled William to face the shock which was given to his position by the death of Queen Mary at the end of 1694. It had been provided indeed that on the death of either sovereign the survivor should retain the throne; but the renewed attacks of the Tories under Nottingham and Halifax on the war and the Bank showed what fresh hopes had been raised by William's lonely position. The Parliament however, whom the king had just conciliated by assenting at last to the Triennial Bill, went steadily with the Ministry; and its fidelity was rewarded by triumph abroad. In September 1695 the Alliance succeeded for the first time in winning a great triumph over France in the capture of Namur. The king skilfully took advantage of his victory to call a new Parliament, and its members at once showed their temper by a vigorous support of the measures necessary for the prosecution of the war. The Houses indeed were no mere tools in William's hands. They forced him to resume the prodigal grants of lands which he had made to his Dutch favourites, and to remove his Ministers in Scotland who had aided in a wild project for a Scotch colony on the Isthmus of Darien. They claimed a right to name members of the new Board of Trade which was established in 1696 for the regulation of commercial matters. They rejected a proposal, never henceforth to be revived, for a censorship of the Press. But there was no factious opposition. So strong was the Ministry that Montague was enabled to face the general distress which was caused for the moment by a reform of the currency, which had been reduced by clipping to far less than its nominal value, and although the financial embarrassments created by the currency reform hindered any vigorous measures abroad William was able to hold the French at bay.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Succession.]

But the war was fast drawing to a close. The Catholic powers in the Grand Alliance were already in revolt against William's supremacy as they had been in revolt against that of Lewis. In 1696 the Pope succeeded in detaching Savoy from the league and Lewis was enabled to transfer his Italian army to the Low Countries. But France was now simply fighting to secure more favourable terms, and William, though he held that "the only way of treating with France is with our swords in our hands," was almost as eager as Lewis for a peace. The defection of Savoy made it impossible to carry out the original aim of the Alliance, that of forcing France back to its position at the Treaty of Westphalia, and a new question was drawing every day nearer, the question of the succession to the Spanish throne. The death of the King of Spain, Charles the Second, was now known to be at hand. With him ended the male line of the Austrian princes who for two hundred years had occupied the Spanish throne. How strangely Spain had fallen from its high estate in Europe the wars of Lewis had abundantly shown, but so vast was the extent of its empire, so enormous the resources which still remained to it, that under a vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once return. Its sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces of the Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of Naples and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a blow the work of European independence which William had wrought; and it was with a view to prevent either of these results that William resolved to free his hands by a conclusion of the war.

[Sidenote: Peace of Ryswick.]

In May negotiations were opened at Ryswick; the obstacles thrown in the way of an accommodation by Spain and the Empire were set aside in a private negotiation between William and Lewis; and peace was finally signed in October 1697. In spite of failure and defeat in the field William's policy had won. The victories of France remained barren in the face of a united Europe; and her exhaustion forced her for the first time since Richelieu's day to consent to a disadvantageous peace. On the side of the Empire France withdrew from every annexation save that of Strassburg which she had made since the Treaty of Nimeguen, and Strassburg would have been restored but for the unhappy delays of the German negotiators. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The Duke of Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. A far more important provision of the peace pledged Lewis to an abandonment of the Stuart cause and a recognition of William as King of England. For Europe in general the peace of Ryswick was little more than a truce. But for England it was the close of a long and obstinate struggle and the opening of a new aera of political history. It was the final and decisive defeat of the conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever since the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a Roman Catholic country and into a dependency of France. But it was even more than this. It was the definite establishment of England as the centre of European resistance against all attempts to overthrow the balance of power.

[Sidenote: William's aims.]

In leaving England face to face with France the Treaty of Ryswick gave a new turn to the policy of William. Hitherto he had aimed at saving the balance of European power by the joint action of England and the rest of the European states against France. He now saw a means of securing what that action had saved by the co-operation of France and the two great naval powers. In his new course we see the first indication of that triple alliance of France, England, and Holland, which formed the base of Walpole's foreign policy, as well as of that common action of England and France which since the fall of Holland has so constantly recurred to the dreams of English statesmen. Peace therefore was no sooner signed than William by stately embassies and a series of secret negotiations drew nearer to France. It was in direct negotiation and co-operation with Lewis that he aimed at bringing about a peaceful settlement of the question which threatened Europe with war. At this moment the claimants of the Spanish succession were three: the French Dauphin, a son of the Spanish king's elder sister; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a grandson of his younger sister; and the Emperor, who was a son of Charles's aunt. In strict law—if there had been any law really applicable to the matter—the claim of the last was the strongest of the three; for the claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renunciation of all right to the succession at his mother's marriage with Lewis XIV., a renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of the Pyrenees; and a similar renunciation barred the claim of the Bavarian candidate. The claim of the Emperor was more remote in blood, but it was barred by no renunciation at all. William however was as resolute in the interests of Europe to repulse the claim of the Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis; and it was the consciousness that the Austrian succession was inevitable if the war continued and Spain remained a member of the Grand Alliance, in arms against France and leagued with the Emperor, which made him suddenly conclude the Peace of Ryswick.

[Sidenote: The first Partition Treaty.]

Had England and Holland shared William's temper he would have insisted on the succession of the Electoral Prince to the whole Spanish dominions. But both were weary of war, and of the financial distress which war had brought with it. In England the peace of Ryswick was at once followed by the reduction of the army at the demand of the House of Commons to ten thousand men; and a clamour had already begun for the disbanding even of these. It was necessary therefore to bribe the two rival claimants to a waiver of their claims; and Lewis after some hesitation yielded to the counsels of his Ministers, and consented to waive his son's claims for such a bribe. The secret treaty between the three powers, which was concluded in the summer of 1698, thus became necessarily a Partition Treaty. The succession of the Electoral Prince of Bavaria was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its Italian possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese was to pass to the Emperor; the Two Sicilies, with the border province of Guipuzcoa, to France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death of the Bavarian prince in February 1699 made the Treaty waste paper. Austria and France were left face to face; and a terrible struggle, in which the success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe, seemed unavoidable. The peril was the greater that the temper of both England and Holland left William without the means of backing his policy by arms. The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class and the pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every day a more bitter resentment in the people of both countries. While the struggle lasted the value of English exports had fallen from four millions a year to less than three, and the losses of ships and goods at sea had been enormous. Nor had the stress been less felt within the realm. The revenue from the post-office, a fair index to the general wealth of the country, had fallen from seventy-six thousand to fifty-eight. With the restoration of peace indeed the energies of the country had quickly recovered from the shock. In the five years after the Peace of Ryswick the exports doubled themselves; the merchant-shipping was quadrupled; and the revenue of the post-office rose to eighty-two thousand pounds. But such a recovery only produced a greater disinclination to face again the sufferings of a renewed state of war.

[Sidenote: The second Partition Treaty.]

The general discontent at the course of the war, the general anxiety to preserve the new gains of the peace, told alike on William and on the party which had backed his policy. In England almost every one was set on two objects, the reduction of taxes and the disbanding of the standing army. The war had raised the taxes from two millions a year to four. It had bequeathed twenty millions of debt and a fresh six millions of deficit. The standing army was still held to be the enemy of liberty, as it had been held under the Stuarts; and hardly any one realized the new conditions of political life which had robbed its existence of danger to the State. The king however resisted desperately the proposals for its disbanding; for the maintenance of the army was all-important for the success of the negotiations he was carrying on. But his stubborn opposition only told against himself. Personally indeed the king still remained an object of national gratitude; but his natural partiality to his Dutch favourites, the confidence he gave to Sunderland, his cold and sullen demeanour, above all his endeavours to maintain the standing army, robbed him of popularity and of the strength which comes from popularity. The negotiations too which he was carrying on were a secret he could not reveal; and his prayers failed to turn the Parliament from its purpose. The army and navy were ruthlessly cut down. How much William's hands were weakened by this reduction of forces and by the peace-temper of England was shown by the Second Partition Treaty which was concluded in 1700 between the two maritime powers and France. The demand of Lewis that the Netherlands should be given to the Elector of Bavaria, whose political position would always leave him a puppet in the French king's hands, was indeed successfully resisted. Spain, the Netherlands, and the Indies were assigned to the second son of the Emperor, the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the whole of the Spanish territories in Italy were now granted to France; and it was provided that Milan should be exchanged for Lorraine, whose Duke was to be summarily transferred to the new Duchy. If the Emperor persisted in his refusal to come into the Treaty the share of his son was to pass to another unnamed prince, who was probably the Duke of Savoy.

[Sidenote: Fall of the Junto.]

The Emperor, indifferent to the Archduke's personal interest, and anxious only to gain a new dominion in Italy for the House of Austria, stubbornly protested against this arrangement; but his protest was of little moment so long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly together. The new Western Alliance indeed showed how wide its power was from the first. The mediation of England and Holland, no longer counteracted by France, secured peace between the Emperor and the Turks in the Treaty of Carlowitz. The common action of the three powers stifled a strife between Holstein and Denmark which would have set North Germany on fire. William's European position indeed was more commanding than ever. But his difficulties at home were increasing every day. In spite of the defection of their supporters on the question of a standing army the Whig Ministry for some time retained fairly its hold on the Houses. But the elections for a new Parliament at the close of 1698 showed the growth of a new temper in the nation. A Tory majority, pledged to peace as to a reduction of taxation and indifferent to foreign affairs, was returned to the House of Commons. The fourteen thousand men still retained in the army were at once cut down to seven. It was voted that William's Dutch guards should return to Holland. It was in vain that William begged for their retention as a personal favour, that he threatened to leave England with them, and that the ill effect of this strife on his negotiations threw him into a fever. Even before the elections he had warned the Dutch Pensionary that in any fresh struggle England could be relied on only for naval aid. He was forced to give way; and, as he expected, this open display of the peace-temper of England told fatally on the resistance he had attempted to the pretensions of France. He strove indeed to appease the Parliament by calling for the resignation of Russell and Montague, the two ministers most hated by the Tories. But all seemed in vain. The Houses no sooner met in 1699 than the Tory majority attacked the Crown, passed a Bill for resuming estates granted to the Dutch favourites, and condemned the Ministers as responsible for these grants. Again Sunderland had to intervene, and to press William to carry out the policy which had produced the Whig Ministry by its entire dismissal. Somers and his friends withdrew, and a new administration composed of moderate Tories, with Lords Rochester and Godolphin as its leading members, took their place.

[Sidenote: Accession of the Duke of Anjou.]

The moment indeed was one in which the king needed at any price the co-operation of the Parliament. Spain had been stirred to bitter resentment as news of the Partition Treaty crept abroad. The Spaniards cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the throne of Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismemberment of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. The nobles too dreaded the loss of their vast estates in Italy and of the lucrative posts they held as governors of these dependencies. Even the dying king shared the anger of his subjects. He hesitated only whether to leave his dominions to the House of Austria or the House of Bourbon; but in either case he was resolved to leave the whole. A will wrested from him by the factions which wrangled over his deathbed bequeathed at last the whole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of Anjou, the second son of the Dauphin. It was doubtful indeed whether Lewis would suffer his grandson to receive the crown. He was still a member of that Triple Alliance on which for the last three years the peace of Europe had depended. The Treaty of Partition was so recent and the risk of accepting this bequest so great that Lewis would have hardly resolved on it but for his belief that the temper of England must necessarily render William's opposition a fruitless one. Never in fact had England been so averse from war. So strong was the antipathy to William's policy that men openly approved the French king's course. Hardly any one in England dreaded the succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they believed soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events. The succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far better than the increase of power which France would have derived from the cessions of the last treaty of Partition. The cession of the Sicilies would have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French lake, and have ruined the English trade with the Levant, while the cession of Guipuzcoa and the annexation of the west coast of Spain, which was looked on as certain to follow, would have imperilled the American trade and again raised France into a formidable power at sea. Backing all these considerations was the dread of losing by a contest with Spain and its new king the lucrative trade with the Spanish colonies. "It grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, "that almost every one rejoices that France has preferred the Will to the Treaty." Astonished and angered as he was at his rival's breach of faith, he had no means of punishing it. In the opening of 1701 the Duke of Anjou entered Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there were no Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: Seizure of the Dutch Barrier.]

The life-work of William seemed undone. He knew himself to be dying. His cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, his frame so weak that he could hardly get into his coach. But never had he shown himself so great. His courage rose with every difficulty. His temper, which had been heated by the personal affronts lavished on him through English faction, was hushed by a supreme effort of his will. His large and clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments of French diplomacy and English party strife to the great interests which he knew must in the end determine the course of European politics. Abroad and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had no ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, while the attitude of Bavaria divided Germany and held the House of Austria in check. The Bavarian Elector indeed, who had charge of the Spanish Netherlands and on whom William had counted, openly joined the French side from the first and proclaimed the Duke of Anjou as king in Brussels. In England a new Parliament, which had been called by way of testing public opinion, was crowded with Tories who were resolute against war. The Tory Ministry pressed him to acknowledge the new king of Spain; and as even Holland did this, William was forced to submit. He could only count on the greed of Lewis to help him, and he did not count in vain. The general approval of the French king's action had sprung from a belief that he intended honestly to leave Spain to the Spaniards under their new boy-king. Bitter too as the strife of Whig and Tory might be in England, there were two things on which Whig and Tory were agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the Spanish Netherlands. Neither would endure a French attack on the Protestant succession which the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the arrogance of Lewis blinded him to the need of moderation in his hour of good-luck. The wretched defence made by the strong places of the Netherlands in the former war had brought about an agreement between Spain and Holland at its close, by which seven fortresses, including Luxemburg, Mons, and Charleroi, were garrisoned with Dutch in the place of Spanish troops. The seven were named the Dutch barrier, and the first anxiety both of Holland and of William was to maintain this arrangement under the new state of things. William laid down the maintenance of the barrier in his negotiations at Madrid as a matter of peace or war. But Lewis was too eager to wait even for the refusal of William's demand which the pride of the Spanish Court prompted. In February 1701 his troops appeared at the gates of the seven fortresses; and a secret convention with the Elector, who remained in charge of the Netherlands, delivered them into his hands to hold in trust for his grandson. Other French garrisons took possession at the same time of Ostend and the coast towns of Flanders.

[Sidenote: The Act of Settlement.]

The Parliament of 1701, a Parliament mainly of Tories, and in which the leader of the moderate Tories, Robert Harley, came for the first time to the front, met amidst the general panic and suspension of trade which followed this seizure of the barrier fortresses. Peace-Parliament as it was and bitterly as it condemned the Partition Treaties, it at once supported William in his demand for a withdrawal of the French troops, and authorized him to conclude a defensive alliance with Holland, which would give that State courage to join in the demand. The disclosure of a new Jacobite plot strengthened William's position. The hopes of the Jacobites had been raised in the preceding year by the death of the young Duke of Gloucester, the only living child of the Princess Anne, and who as William was childless ranked, after his mother, as heir-presumptive of the throne. William was dying, the health of Anne herself was known to be precarious; and to the partisans of James it seemed as if the succession of his son, the boy who was known in later life as the Old Pretender, was all but secure. But Tory as the Parliament was, it had no mind to undo the work of the Revolution. When a new Act of Succession was laid before the Houses in 1701 not a voice was raised for James or his son. By the ordinary rules of heritage the descendants of the daughter of Charles the First, Henrietta of Orleans, whose only child had married the Duke of Savoy, would come next as claimants; but the house of Savoy was Catholic and its pretensions were passed over in the same silence. No other descendants of Charles the First remained, and the Parliament fell back on his father's line. Elizabeth, the daughter of James the First, had married the Elector Palatine; but of her twelve children all had died save one. This was Sophia, the wife of the late and the mother of the present Elector of Hanover. It was in Sophia and the heirs of her body, being Protestants, that the Act of Settlement vested the Crown. But the jealousy of a foreign ruler accompanied this settlement with remarkable provisions. It was enacted that every English sovereign must be in communion with the Church of England as by law established. All future kings were forbidden to leave England without consent of Parliament, and foreigners were excluded from all public posts, military or civil. The independence of justice, which had been inadequately secured by the Bill of Rights, was now established by a clause which provided that no judge should be removed from office save on an address from Parliament to the Crown. The two principles that the king acts only through his ministers and that these ministers are responsible to Parliament were asserted by a requirement that all public business should be formally done in the Privy Council and all its decisions signed by its members. These two last provisions went far to complete the parliamentary Constitution which had been drawn by the Bill of Rights.

[Sidenote: The Country and the War.]

But, firm as it was in its loyalty to the Revolution, and in its resolve to maintain the independence of the Netherlands, the Parliament had still no purpose of war. It assented indeed to the alliance with Holland in the belief that the pressure of the two powers would bring Lewis to a peaceful settlement of the question. Its aim was still to avoid a standing army and to reduce taxation; and its bitterness against the Partition Treaties sprang from a belief that William had entailed on England by their means a contest which must bring back again the army and the debt. The king was bitterly blamed, while the late ministers, Somers, Russell, and Montague (now become peers), were impeached for their share in the treaties; and the Commons prayed the king to exclude the three from his counsels for ever. But a counter-prayer from the Lords gave the first sign of a reaction of opinion. Outside the House of Commons indeed the tide of national feeling rose as the designs of Lewis grew clearer. He refused to allow the Dutch barrier to be re-established; and a great French fleet gathered in the Channel to support, it was believed, a fresh Jacobite descent which was proposed by the ministers of James in a letter intercepted and laid before Parliament. Even the House of Commons took fire at this, and the fleet was raised to thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand. But the country moved faster than the Parliament. Kent sent up a remonstrance against the factious measures by which the Tories still struggled against the king's policy, with a prayer "that addresses might be turned into Bills of Supply"; and William was encouraged by these signs of a change of temper to despatch an English force to Holland, and to conclude a secret treaty with the United Provinces for the recovery of the Netherlands from Lewis and for their transfer with the Milanese to the house of Austria as a means of counterbalancing the new power added to France.

[Sidenote: The Grand Alliance.]

England however still clung desperately to a hope of peace; and even in the Treaty with the Emperor, which followed on the French refusal to negotiate on a basis of compensation, William was far from disputing the right of Philip of Anjou to the Spanish throne. Hostilities had indeed already broken out in Italy between the French and Austrian armies; but the king had not abandoned the dream of a peaceful settlement when France by a sudden act forced him into war. Lewis had acknowledged William as king in the Peace of Ryswick and pledged himself to oppose all attacks on his throne; but in September 1701 he entered the bedchamber at St. Germain where James the Second was breathing his last, and promised to acknowledge his son at his death as king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The promise which was thus made was in fact a declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at one in accepting the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no longer a matter of European politics, but a question whether the work of the Revolution should be undone, and whether Catholicism and despotism should be replaced on the throne of England by the arms of France. On such a question as this there was no difference between Tory and Whig. Every Englishman backed William in his open resentment of the insult and in the recall of his ambassador. The national union showed itself in the warm welcome given to the king on his return from the Hague, where the conclusion of a new Grand Alliance in September between the Empire, Holland, and the United Provinces had rewarded William's patience and skill. The Alliance was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate, and the bulk of the German States. William seized the moment of enthusiasm to dissolve the Houses whose action had hitherto embarrassed him; and though the new Parliament which met in 1702 was still Tory in the main, its Tory members were now as much for war as the Whigs, and the House of Commons replied to the king's stirring appeal by voting forty thousand soldiers and as many sailors for the coming struggle. As a telling reply to the recognition of the young James by Lewis, a Bill of Attainder was passed against the new Pretender, and correspondence with him or maintenance of his title was made treason. At the same time all members of either House and all public officials were sworn to uphold the succession of the House of Hanover as established by law.

[Sidenote: Marlborough.]

The king's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking the field; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to the one Englishman who had shown himself capable of a great command. John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the son of a Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restoration mistress of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more perhaps than her father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission in the royal Guards; and after five years' service abroad under Turenne the young captain became colonel of an English regiment which was retained in the service of France. He had already shown some of the qualities of a great soldier, an unruffled courage, a temper naturally bold and venturesome but held in check by a cool and serene judgement, a vigilance and capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. In later years he was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, and at Blenheim he remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But courage and skill in arms did less for Churchill on his return to the English court than his personal beauty. In the French camp he had been known as "the handsome Englishman"; and his manners were as winning as his person. Even in age his address was almost irresistible; "he engrossed the graces," says Chesterfield; and his air never lost the careless sweetness which won the favour of Lady Castlemaine. A present of L5000 from the king's mistress laid the foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to greatness, as the prudent forethought of the handsome young soldier hardened into the avarice of age.

[Sidenote: Churchill and James.]

But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked mainly for advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member of his household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days of the Popish Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and on his master's return he was rewarded with a peerage and the colonelcy of the Life Guards. The service he rendered James after his accession by saving the royal army from a surprise at Sedgemoor would have been yet more splendidly acknowledged but for the king's bigotry. In spite of his master's personal solicitations Churchill remained true to Protestantism. But he knew James too well to count on further favour after a formal refusal to abandon his faith. Luckily for him he had now found a new groundwork for his fortunes in the growing influence of his wife over the king's second daughter, Anne; and at the crisis of the Revolution the adhesion of Anne to the cause of Protestantism was of the highest value. No sentiment of gratitude to his older patron hindered Churchill from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, from promising Anne's sympathy to William's effort, or from deserting the ranks of the king's army when it faced William in the field. His desertion proved fatal to the royal cause; but great as this service was it was eclipsed by a second. It was by his wife's persuasion that Anne was induced to forsake her father and take refuge in Danby's camp. Unscrupulous as his conduct had been, the services which Churchill thus rendered to William were too great to miss their reward. On the new king's accession he became Earl of Marlborough; he was put at the head of a force during the Irish war where his rapid successes at once won William's regard; and he was given high command in the army of Flanders.

[Sidenote: Churchill and William.]

But the sense of his power over Anne soon turned Marlborough from plotting treason against James to plot treason against William. Great as was his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was strangely combined with a power of winning and retaining love. Churchill's affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the dark web of his career. In the midst of his marches and from the very battle-field he writes to his wife with the same passionate tenderness. The composure which no danger or hatred could ruffle broke down into almost womanish depression at the thought of her coldness or at any burst of her violent humour. To the last he never left her without a pang. "I did for a great while with a perspective glass look upon the cliffs," he once wrote to her after setting out on a campaign, "in hopes that I might have had one sight of you." It was no wonder that the woman who inspired Marlborough with a love like this bound to her the weak and feeble nature of the Princess Anne. The two friends threw off the restraints of state, and addressed each other as "Mrs. Freeman" and "Mrs. Morley." It was on his wife's influence over her friend that the Earl's ambition counted in its designs against William. His subtle policy aimed at availing itself both of William's unpopularity and of the dread of a Jacobite restoration. His plan was to drive the king from the throne by backing the Tories in their opposition to the war, as well as by stirring to frenzy the English hatred of foreigners, and then to use the Whig dread of James's return to seat Anne in William's place. The discovery of these designs roused the king to a burst of unusual resentment. "Were I and my Lord Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, "the sword would have to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of his offices and command and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne followed her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the centre of the Tory opposition: while Marlborough opened a correspondence with James. So notorious was his treason that on the eve of the French invasion which was foiled by the victory of La Hogue the Earl was one of the first among the suspected persons who were sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: Death of William.]

The death of Mary however forced William to recall the Princess, who became by this event his successor; and with Anne the Marlboroughs returned to court. Now indeed that Anne's succession was brought near by the rapid decay of William's health their loyalty to the throne might be counted on; and though William could not bend himself to trust the Earl again, he saw in him as death drew near the one man whose splendid talents fitted him in spite of the perfidy and treason of his life to rule England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He employed Marlborough therefore to negotiate the treaty of alliance with the Emperor, and put him at the head of the army in Flanders. But the Earl had only just taken the command when a fall from his horse on the twenty-first of February 1702 proved fatal to the broken frame of William of Orange. "There was a time when I should have been glad to have been delivered out of my troubles," the dying man whispered to Portland, "but I own I see another scene, and could wish to live a little longer." He knew however that the wish was vain; and he died on the morning of the 8th of March, commending Marlborough to Anne as the fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. Anne's zeal in her friend's cause needed no quickening. Three days after her accession the Earl was named Captain-General of the English forces at home and abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction of the war. His supremacy over home affairs was secured by the expulsion of the few remaining Whigs among the ministers, and the construction of a purely Tory administration with Lord Godolphin, a close friend of Marlborough's, as Lord Treasurer at its head. The Queen's affection for his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment when Anne's personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with the nation. In England indeed party feeling for the moment died away. The Parliament called on the new accession was strongly Tory; but all save the extreme Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged on behalf of a Tory queen by a Tory general, while the most extreme of the Whigs were ready to back even a Tory general in waging a Whig war.

[Sidenote: Marlborough and the Allies.]

Abroad however William's death shook the Alliance to its base; and even Holland wavered in dread of being deserted by England in the coming struggle. But the decision of Marlborough soon did away with this distrust. Anne was made to declare from the throne her resolve to pursue with energy the policy of her predecessor. The Parliament was brought to sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The new general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the Dutch as well as of the English forces, and drew the German powers into the Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even William might have envied. Never indeed was greatness more quickly recognised than in the case of Marlborough. In a few months he was regarded by all as the guiding spirit of the Alliance, and princes whose jealousy had worn out the patience of the king yielded without a struggle to the counsels of his successor. His temper fitted him in an especial way to be the head of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of his power to any early training. The trace of his neglected education was seen to the last in his reluctance to write. "Of all things," he said to his wife, "I do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was a far greater trouble to Marlborough than to plan a campaign. But nature had given him qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. His capacity for business was immense. During the next ten years he assumed the general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. He managed every negotiation with the courts of the allies. He watched over the shifting phases of English politics. He crossed the Channel to win over Anne to a change in the cabinet, or hurried to Berlin to secure the due contingent of Electoral troops from Brandenburg. At one and the same moment men saw him reconciling the Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring the Calvinists of the Cevennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of Portugal, and providing for the protection of the Duke of Savoy.

[Sidenote: His temper.]

But his air showed no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained to the last the indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was never ruffled by an outbreak of temper. Amidst the storm of battle his soldiers saw their leader "without fear of danger or in the least hurry giving his orders with all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he was as cool as on the battle-field. He met with the same equable serenity the pettiness of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition of his officers, the libels of his political opponents. There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by which he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabinets. The touchy pride of the king of Prussia in his new royal dignity, when he rose from being a simple Elector of Brandenburg to a throne, made him one of the most vexatious among the allies; but all difficulty with him ceased when Marlborough rose at a state banquet and glutted his vanity by handing him a napkin. Churchill's composure rested partly on a pride which could not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner men. In the bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn some querulous letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung from him; "My desire," he wrote, "is that the world may continue in their error of thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment which tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. In all else he was without affection or resentment, he knew neither doubt nor regret. In private life he was a humane and compassionate man; but if his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death or lead his army to a butchery such as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer sentiments of mankind he knew nothing; and he turned without a shock from guiding Europe and winning great victories to heap up a matchless fortune by peculation and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a man of real greatness who loved money for money's sake. No life indeed, no temper ever stood more aloof from the common life and temper of mankind. The passions which stirred the men around him, whether noble or ignoble, were to Marlborough simply elements in an intellectual problem which had to be solved by patience. "Patience will overcome all things," he writes again and again. "As I think most things are governed by destiny, having done all things we should submit with patience."

[Sidenote: Opening of the War.]

As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by his bitterest foes. "Over the Confederacy," says Lord Bolingbroke, "he, a new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more decided influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the crown of Great Britain had given to King William." But great as he was in the council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone amongst the masters of the art of war as a captain whose victories began at an age when the work of most men is done. Though he served as a young officer under Turenne, and for a few months in Ireland and the Netherlands, Marlborough had held no great command till he took the field in Flanders at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone too in his unbroken good fortune. Voltaire notes that he never besieged a fortress which he did not take, or fought a battle which he did not win. His difficulties indeed came not so much from the enemy as from the ignorance and timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in the field, but victory after victory was snatched from him by the incapacity of his officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled the cautious strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his plans. Old as he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all the dash and boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once resolved to force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled by the timidity and resistance of the Dutch deputies. But his resolute advance across the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him to reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges, till the surrender of Liege closed a campaign which cut off the French from the Lower Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of invasion.

[Sidenote: The French in Germany.]

The successes of Marlborough had been brought into bolder relief by the fortunes of the war in other quarters. Though the Imperialist general, Prince Eugene of Savoy, showed his powers by a surprise of the French army at Cremona, no real successes had been won in Italy. An English descent on the Spanish coast ended in failure. In Germany, where the Bavarians joined the French, their united armies defeated the army of the Empire and opened the line of the Danube to a French advance. It was in this quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes in the coming year. In the spring of 1703 a French army under Marshal Villars again relieved the Bavarian Elector from the pressure of the Austrian forces, and only a strife which arose between the two commanders hindered their joint armies from marching on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the Dutch deputies served Lewis well in the Low Countries. The hopes of Marlborough, who had been raised to a dukedom for his services in the previous year, were again foiled by the deputies of the States-General. Serene as his temper was, it broke down before their refusal to co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French Flanders; and the prayers of Godolphin and of the Pensionary Heinsius alone induced him to withdraw his offer of resignation. In spite of his victories on the Danube, indeed, of the blunders of his adversaries on the Rhine, and the sudden aid of an insurrection against the Court of Vienna which broke out in Hungary, the difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in Italy with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of operations against Spain. The French king's energy however rose with the pressure; and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, was despatched against Portugal, and three small armies closed round Savoy, the flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria on the Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes of the war by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire under the walls of Vienna.

[Sidenote: Marlborough in Germany.]

The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 1704 to a master-stroke in return; but the secrecy and boldness of the Duke's plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French army in Flanders saw in his march from the Netherlands upon Maintz only a design to transfer the war into Elsass. The Dutch on the other hand were lured into suffering their troops to be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz by the Duke's proposals for an imaginary campaign on the Moselle. It was only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar and struck through the centre of Germany for the Danube that the true aim of his operations was revealed to both. After struggling through the hill country of Wurtemberg he joined the Imperial army under the Prince of Baden, stormed the heights of Donauwerth, crossed the Danube and the Lech, and penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis drew two other armies which were facing one another on the Upper Rhine to the scene. The arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thousand French troops saved the Elector of Bavaria for the moment from the need of submission; but the junction of his opponent, Prince Eugene, with Marlborough raised the contending forces again to an equality. After a few marches the armies met on the north bank of the Danube near the small town of Hochstaedt and the village of Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to one of the most memorable battles in the history of the world.

[Sidenote: Battle of Blenheim.]

In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled, for the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange medley of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wurtembergers and Austrians who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The French and Bavarians, who numbered like their opponents some fifty thousand men, lay behind a little stream which ran through swampy ground to the Danube. Their position was a strong one, for its front was covered by the swamp, its right by the Danube, its left by the hill-country in which the stream rose; and Tallard had not only entrenched himself but was far superior to his rival in artillery. But for once Marlborough's hands were free. "I have great reason," he wrote calmly home, "to hope that everything will go well, for I have the pleasure to find all the officers willing to obey without knowing any other reason than that it is my desire, which is very different from what it was in Flanders, where I was obliged to have the consent of a council of war for everything I undertook." So formidable were the obstacles, however, that though the allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of August it was not till midday that Eugene, who commanded on the right, succeeded in crossing the stream. The English foot at once forded it on the left, and attacked the village of Blindheim in which the bulk of the French infantry were entrenched; but after a furious struggle the attack was repulsed, while as gallant a resistance at the other end of the line held Eugene in check. It was the centre however, where the French believed themselves to be unassailable, and which this belief had led them to weaken by drawing troops to their wings, that had been chosen by Marlborough from the first for the chief point of attack. By making an artificial road across the morass which covered it, he was at last enabled to throw his eight thousand horsemen on the mass of the French cavalry, which occupied this position; and two desperate charges which the Duke headed in person decided the day. The French centre was flung back on the Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell back in confusion on Hochstaedt: while their right, cooped up in Blindheim and cut off from retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army only twenty thousand men escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen thousand were captured. Vienna was saved, Germany finally freed from the French, and Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its flight to Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle.

[Sidenote: Occasional conformity.]

But the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the armies of Lewis as all but invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrook" became a name of fear to every child in France. In England itself the victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a great change in the political aspect of affairs. The Tories were already pressing hard on the defeated Whigs. If they were willing to support the war abroad, they were resolved to use the accession of a Stuart to the throne to secure their own power at home. They resolved therefore to make a fresh attempt to create a permanent Tory majority in the Commons by excluding Nonconformists from the municipal corporations, which returned the bulk of the borough members, and whose political tendencies were for the most part Whig. The test of receiving the sacrament according to the ritual of the Church of England, effective as it was against Catholics, was useless against Protestant Dissenters. While adhering to their separate congregations, in which they were now protected by the Toleration Act, they "qualified for office," as it was called, by the "occasional conformity" of receiving the sacrament at church once in the year. It was against "occasional conformity" that the Tories introduced a test which by excluding the Nonconformists would have given them the command of the boroughs; and this test at first received Marlborough's support. But it was rejected by the Lords as often as it was sent up to them, and it was soon guessed that the resistance of the Lords was secretly backed by both Marlborough and Godolphin. Tory as he was, in fact, Marlborough had no mind for an unchecked Tory rule, or for a measure which would be fatal to the war by again reviving religious strife. But it was in vain that he strove to propitiate his party by inducing the Queen to set aside the tenths and first-fruits hitherto paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for the augmentation of small benefices, a fund which still bears the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. The Commons showed their resentment against Marlborough by refusing to add a grant of money to the grant of a dukedom after his first campaign; and the higher Tories, with Lord Nottingham at their head, began to throw every obstacle they could in the way of the continuance of the war.

[Sidenote: The Coalition Ministry.]

Nottingham and his followers at last quitted office in 1704, and Marlborough replaced them by Tories of a more moderate stamp who were still in favour of the war; by Robert Harley, who became Secretary of State, and by Henry St. John, a young man of splendid talents, who was named Secretary at War. Small as the change seemed, its significance was clear to both parties; and the Duke's march into Germany gave his enemies an opportunity of embittering the political strife. The original aim of the Tories had been to limit English efforts to what seemed purely English objects, the defence of the Netherlands and of English commerce; and the bulk of them shrank even now from any further entanglement in the struggle. But the Duke's march seemed at once to pledge England to a strife in the very heart of the Continent, and above all to a strife on behalf of the House of Austria, whose designs upon Spain were regarded with almost as much suspicion as those of Lewis. It was an act indeed of even greater political than military daring. The High Tories and Jacobites threatened if Marlborough failed to bring his head to the block; and only the victory of Blenheim saved him from political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from his own party to the party which really backed his policy. He availed himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve Parliament; and when the election of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority in favour of the war, his efforts brought about a coalition between the moderate Tories who still clung to him and the Whig Junto, whose support was purchased by making a Whig, William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and by sending Lord Sunderland as envoy to Vienna.

[Sidenote: Ramillies.]

The bitter attacks of the peace party were entirely foiled by this union, and Marlborough at last felt secure at home. But he had to bear disappointment abroad. His plan of attack along the line of the Moselle was defeated by the refusal of the Imperial army to join him. When he transferred the war again to the Netherlands and entered the French lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops; and his proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of Waterloo was rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the States with cries of "murder" and "massacre." Even Marlborough's composure broke into bitterness at this last blow. "Had I the same power I had last year," he wrote home, "I could have won a greater victory than that of Blenheim." On his complaint indeed the States recalled their commissaries, but the year was lost; nor had greater results been brought about in Italy or on the Rhine. The spirits of the allies were only sustained by the romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. Profligate, unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius for war, and his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, a step followed by his recognition of the old liberties of Aragon, roused that province to support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles the Third. Catalonia and Valencia soon joined Aragon in declaring for Charles: while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotiations at Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations for the coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of the Imperial generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the Alps and a campaign in Italy; and though these designs were defeated by the opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he again appeared in Flanders in 1706. Marshal Villeroy, the new French general, was as eager as Marlborough for an engagement; and the two armies met on the 23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on an undulating plain which forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in a wide curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on their left, Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, crushed it in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along their whole line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the walls of Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen thousand men, their baggage, and their guns; and the line of the Scheldt, Brussels, Antwerp and Bruges became the prize of the victors. It only needed four successful sieges which followed the battle of Ramillies to complete the deliverance of Flanders.