46.

The Tories dismiss Marlbor

ough, charge

ulation, and swamp the House of Peers, 31st Dec.

and peculation in the management of the public moneys intrusted to his management in the him with pec- Flemish campaign. The charges were founded on the report of certain commissioners to whom the matter had been remitted, and which charged the duke with having appropriated £63,319 of the public moneys destined for the use of the English troops, and £282,366, as a per centage of two per cent. on the sum paid to foreign embassadors during the ten years of the war. In reply to these abominable insinuations, the letter of the duke to the commissioners was published on the 27th of December, in which he entirely refuted the charges, and showed that he had never received any sums or perquisites not sanctioned by previous and uniform usage, and far fewer than had been received by the general in the reign of William III. And in regard to the £282,000 of per centage on foreign subsidies, this was proved to have been a voluntary gift from those powers to the English general, authorized by their signatures and sanctioned by warrants from the queen. This answer made a great impression; but ministers had gone too far to retreat, and they ventured on a step which, for the honor of the country, has never, even in the worst times, been since repeated Trusting to their majority in the Commons, they dismissed the duke from all his situations on the 31st of December, and in order to stifle the voice of justice in the Upper House, on the following day patents were issued calling twelve new peers to the Upper House. On the following day they were introduced, amid the groans of the House; the Whig noblemen, says a cotemporary annalist, “casting their eyes on the ground, as if they had been invited to the funeral of the peerage."* Unbounded was the joy diffused among the enemies of England by these unparalleled measures. On hearing of Marlborough's fall, Louis XIV. said with gland, and gen- triumph, "The dismission of Marlborough will do all we can desire." The court of St. Germain's

47. Universal joy among the enemies of En

erous conduct of Eugene.

* CUNNINGHAM, ii., 367.

was in exultation; and the general joy of the Jacobites, both at home and abroad, was sufficient to demonstrate how formidable an enemy to their cause they regarded the duke; and how destitute of truth are the attempts to show that he had been engaged in a secret design to restore the exiled family. Marlborough disdained to make any defense of himself in Parliament; but an able answer on his part was prepared and circulated, which entirely refuted the whole charges against the illustrious general. So convinced were ministers of this, that, contenting themselves with resolutions against him in the House of Commons, where their influence was predominant, they declined to prefer any impeachment or accusation in the Upper House, swamped even as it was by their recent creations. In the midst of this disgraceful scene of passion, envy, and ingratitude, Prince Eugene arrived in London for the purpose of trying to stem the torrent, and, if possible, prevent the secession of England from the confederacy. He was lodged with the lord-treasurer, and the generous prince omitted no opportunity of testifying, in the day of his tribulation, his undiminished respect for his illustrious rival. The treasurer having said to him at a great dinner, "I consider this day as the happiest of my life, since I have the honor to see in my house the greatest captain of the age." If it be so," replied Eugene, "I owe it to your lordship;" alluding to his dismissal of Marlborough, which had caused him to cease to be one. On another occasion, some one having pointed out a passage in one of the libels against Marlborough, in which he was said to have been "perhaps once fortunate,” It is true," said Eugene, "he was once fortunate, and it is the greatest praise which can be bestowed on him; for, as he was always successful, that implies that all his other successes were owing to his own conduct."*

66

99 66

Alarmed at the weight which Marlborough might derive from the presence and support of so great a commander, and the natural sympathy of all generous minds at the cordial ad* BURNET's History of his own Times, vi., 116.

48. Machinations

queen against

miration which these two great men entertained of the Tories for each other, the ministers had recourse to a preto inflame the tended conspiracy, which it was alleged had been Marlborough. discovered, on the part of Marlborough and Eugene, to seize the government and dethrone the queen, on the 17th of November. St. John and Oxford had too much sense to publish such a ridiculous statement; but it was made the subject of several secret examinations before the Privy Council, in order to augment the apprehensions and secure the concurrence of the queen in their measures. Such as it was, the tale was treated as a mere malicious invention even by the cotemporary foreign annalists,* though it has since been repeated as true by more than one party historian of our own country. This ridiculous calumny, and the atrocious libels. as to the embezzlement of the public money, however, produced the desired effect. They inflamed the mind of the queen, and removed that vacillation in regard to the measures of government, from which so much danger had been apprehended by the Tory administration. Having answered the desired end, they were allowed quietly to go to sleep. No proceedings in the House of Peers, or elsewhere, followed the resolutions of the Commons condemnatory of Marlborough's financial administration in the Low Countries. His defense, published in the newspapers, though abundantly vigorous, was neither answered nor prosecuted as a libel on the commissioners or House of Commons; and the alleged Stuart conspiracy was never more heard of, till it was long after drawn from its slumber by the malice of English party spirit. Meanwhile the negotiations at Utrecht for a general peace 49. continued, and St. John and Oxford soon found themselves embarrassed by the extravagant preturns into a pri- tensions which their own favor had revived in the plenipotentiaries of Louis. So great was the genand England. eral indignation excited by the publication of the * Mém. De Torcy, iii., 268, 269.

Louis rises in

his demands at Utrecht, which

vate treaty between France

† SWIFT's Last Years of Queen Anne, 59. Contin. of RAPIN, xviii., 468, 8vo.

preliminaries at Utrecht, that St. John felt the necessity of discontinuing any general negotiation, and converting it into a private correspondence between the plenipotentiaries of the English and French crowns.* Great difficulty was experienced in coming to an accommodation, in consequence of the rising demands of the French plenipotentiaries, who, deeming themselves secure of support from the English ministry, not only positively refused to abandon Spain and the Indies, but now demanded the Netherlands for the Elector of Bavaria, and the cession of Lille and Tournay in return for the seizure of Dunkirk. The sudden death, however, first of the Dauphiness of France, and then of the dauphin, the former of whom was carried off by a malignant fever on the 12th, the latter on the 18th of February, 1712, followed by the death of their eldest son on the 23d, produced feelings of commiseration for the aged monarch, now in his seventy-third year, and broken down by misfortunes, which rendered the progress of the separate negotiations more easy. England agreed to abandon its allies, and the main object of the war, on condition that a guarantee should be obtained against the crowns of France and Spain being united on the same head. On this frail security, and the promised demolition of Dunkirk, the English ministry agreed to withdraw their contingent from the allied army; and to induce the Dutch to follow their example, Ypres was offered to them on the same terms as Dunkirk had been to Great Britain.† So overjoyed was Louis at the signing of these conditions on the part of Bolingbroke, that he immediately sent Queen Anne a present of six splendid dresses, and two thousand five hundred bottles of Champagne.‡

The disastrous effects of this secret and dishonorable seces

* "The French will see that there is a possibility of reviving the love of war in our people, by the indignation that has been expressed at the plan given in at Utrecht."- Mr. Secretary St. John to Brit. Plenip., Dec. 28, 1711. BOLINGBROKE's Corresp., ii., 93.

† CoxE, vi., 189, 194..

CAPEFIGUE, Louis XIV., vi., 249.

50.

Forces of the al

in Flanders, and

tion of Louis.

sion, on the part of England, from the confederacy, lies and French were soon apparent. Great had been the prepdesperate situa- arations of the continental allies for continuing the contest; and while the English contingent remained with them, their force was irresistible. Prince Eugene was at the head of the army in Flanders, and, including the British forces under the Duke of Ormond, it amounted to the immense force of one hundred and twenty-two thousand effective men, with one hundred and twenty guns, sixteen howitzers, and an ample pontoon train. Το oppose this, by far the largest army the French had yet had to confront in the Low Countries, Villars had scarcely at his command one hundred thousand men, and they were ill equipped, imperfectly supplied with artillery, and grievously depressed in spirit by a long series of disasters. Eugene commanded the forces of the confederates; for although the English ministry had been lavish in their promises of unqualified support, the Dutch had begun to entertain serious suspicions of their sincerity, and bestowed the command on that tried officer instead of the Duke of Ormond, who had succeeded Marlborough in the command of the English contingent. But Marlborough's soul still directed the movements of the army; and Eugene's plan of the campaign was precisely that which that great commander had chalked out at the close of the preceding one. This was to besiege Quesnoy and Landrecies, the last of those fortresses forming the iron barrier of France which in this quarter protected the frontier, and immediately after to inundate the open country, and advance as rapidly as possible to Paris. It was calculated they might reach it in ten marches from Landrecies; and it was well known that there was neither a defensible position nor fortress of any sort to arrest the invaders' march. Already the light horse had overspread the country as far as the Oise, within forty miles of Paris, and a plan had even been formed for surprising the king in his palace of Versailles by a body of hussars, which