gland has done such things in Continental warfare, with an army which never brought fifty thousand native British sabers and bayonets into the field, what would be the result if national distress or necessities, or a change in the objects of eral desire, wore to send two hundred thousand?

gen

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PEACE OF UTRECHT.

1.

Moral charac.

of Marlbor

THE wars in which the Duke of Marlborough was engaged were not contests produced merely by the ambitions of kings or the rivalry of ministers; they ter of the Duke were not waged for the acquisition of a province ough's wars. or the capture of a fortress; they were not incurred, like those of Frederic, for the gain of Silesia, or impelled to, like those of Charles XII., by the thirst for glory. Great moral principles were involved in the contest. The League of Augsburg, which terminated in the peace of Ryswick, and first put a bridle on the ambition of France, was the direct and immediate consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the exile of the persecuted Protestants by Louis XIV. The War of the Succession arose unavoidably from this selfish ambition, and desire to appropriate the whole magnificent spoils of the Spanish monarchy, which he had won by diplomatic astuteness, for the aggrandizement of the house of Bourbon. The great interests of religious freedom and national independence were at stake in the struggle.

ests and causes

parties con

Freedom of thought, emancipation from Romish tyranny, liberty in the choice of worship, the preaching of 2. the Gospel to the poor, were borne aloft on Marl- Opposite interborough's banners; national independence, death for which the to the Bourbons, hatred to France, were inscribed tended. on those of Eugene. The Church of Rome, indeed, had few more faithful subjects than the house of Hapsburg; but dread

of the ambition of Louis XIV., and the glittering prospect of the Spanish succession, had brought her Catholic sovereigns. into a close union with the Protestants of the north; and the admirable temper and judgment of the English and Austrian chiefs kept their troops in a state of concord and amity, rarely witnessed in the best-cemented alliances. Feudal honor, chivalrous loyalty, the unity of the Church, were the principles which had roused the armies and directed the councils of Louis XIV. The exaltation of France, the glory of their sovereign, the spoils of Spain, awakened the ambition of its government, and animated the spirit of its people. The influence of these opposite principles was felt not only in the council, but in the field; not only in the minister's cabinet, but in the soldier's Divine service, after the Protestant form, was regularly performed, morning and evening, in every regiment of Marlborough's army; they prepared for battle by taking the sacra ment; they terminated their victories by thanksgiving. The armies of Louis, in a gay and gallant spirit, set out for the conflict. If any ecclesiastic appeared to bless their arms, it was the gorgeous priests of the ancient faith; they struck rather for the honor of their country, or the glory of their sovereign, than the unity in Church and State on which he was so strongly bent; and went to battle dreaming more of the splendor of Versailles or the smiles of beauty, than the dogmas of religion or the crusade of the Church of Rome.

tent.

Magnitude of the danger

ened Europe,

proved suc

cessful.

As the principles and passions which animated the contend3. ing parties were thus opposite, proportionately great was the peril alike to the cause of religious freedom which threat and European independence, if the coalition had not if France had proved successful. That no danger was to be apprehended from its triumph has been decisively proved by the event; the allies were victorious, and both have been preserved. But very different would have been the results if a power, animated by the ambition, guided by the fanaticism, and directed by the ability of that of Louis XIV., had gained the ascendency in Europe. Beyond all question, a universal

despotic dominion would have been established over the bodies, à cruel spiritual thraldom over the minds of men. France and Spain united under Bourbon princes, and in a close family alliance the empire of Charlemagne with that of Charles V. -the power which revoked the Edict of Nantes, and perpetrated the massacre of St. Bartholomew, with that which banished the Moriscoes, and established the Inquisition, would have proved irresistible, and beyond example destructive to the best interests of mankind.

The Protestants might have been driven, like the Pagan heathens of old by the son of Pepin, beyond the Elbe; the Stuart race, and with them Romish

4. Results which

might have fol

lowed the tri

ascendency, might have been re-established in umph of France. England; the fire lighted by Latimer and Ridley might have been extinguished in blood; and the energy breathed by religious freedom into the Anglo-Saxon race might have expired. The destinies of the world would have been changed. Europe, instead of a variety of independent states, whose mutual hostility kept alive courage, while their national rivalry stimulated talent, would have sunk into the slumber attendant on universal dominion. The colonial empire of England would have withered away and perished, as that of Spain has done in the grasp of the Inquisition. The Anglo-Saxon race would have been arrested in its mission to overspread the earth and subdue it. The centralized despotism of the Roman empire would have been renewed on Continental Europe; the chains of Romish tyranny, and with them the general infidelity of France before the Revolution, would have extinguished or perverted thought in the British Islands. There, too, the event has proved the justice of these anticipations. France, during the eighteenth century, has taught us in what state our minds would have been had Marlborough been overthrown; the infidelity of Voltaire, to what a state of anarchy our religious. opinions would have been reduced; the despotism of Napoleon at its close, to what tyranny our persons would have been subjected.

5.

Opposite sides on political questions on which the par

ed, similar to what after

ward occur.

red.

The opposite principles which animated the contending parties were very similar to those which a century after ranged Europe against France, in the wars of the French Revolution; the great conflict of the ties were rang- eighteenth century was but an extension, to the political and social relations of men, of the relig ious divisions which distracted the seventeenth. But in one respect the antagonists were on opposite sides. In so far as they were banded together against the ambition of France, the coalition of 1689 was guided by the same principles as that of 1793; the armies of Eugene struck for the same cause as those of the Archduke Charles. But in so far as they contended for a moral principle, their relative position was in a great measure reversed: England, in the wars of William and Anne, was on the side of civil and religious freedom; she stood foremost in the contest for liberty of thought and the free choice of worship; she was herself the first and greatest of revolutionary powers. France supported the despotism of the Romish faith, and that system of unity in civil government which aimed at extending claims as strong over the temporal concerns of men. The industry of towns, the wealth of commerce, arrayed a numerous but motley array of many nations around the banner of St. George; the strength of feudal attachment, the loyalty of chivalrous devotion, brought the strength of a gallant people round the oriflamme of St. Denis.

6.

Yet fundamentally the allies and France were in both

cases ranged on

Yet, though apparently on opposite, the forces of the Coalition and of France were in reality ranged on the same sides in the War of the Succession as in that of the French Revolution. In both, religion and the same sides. freedom were the principles on which the allies rested, and unity of government and military glory were the moving springs of effort in France. The iron rule of the Convention, the despotism of Napoleon, were essentially identical, though wielded by different hands and in a different name, with the government of Louis XIV. National independence,

religious duty, breathed in the proclamations of Alexander, not less than the daily services amid the tents of Marlborough. It matters not by whom despots are elected, provided they are despots and support power. The absolute nature of a contest is not to be judged of merely by the war-cries which the parties raise, or the banners under which their forces are nominally enrolled. The true test is to be found in the practical tendency and social results of the institutions for which its partisans contend. The cause of real freedom is often advanced by the victories gained by a monarch's armies; the march of practical despotism is never so accelerated as by the triumph of Republican bayonets. William III. was the head of a revolutionary dynasty, but he established the government of Great Britain on a far more aristocratic basis during the succeeding century than it had ever before attained. Louis XIV. was the leader of a crusade of the faithful against the Protestant party, but he bequeathed a century of irreligion to France, which ended in the overthrow of its government. The Committee of Public Salvation, wielding the forces of the Revolution, established a centralized military despotism in France, far exceeding any thing dreamed of by Richelieu or Louvois, and which has never since been shaken off in that country. The spread of political power, the popularization of social institutions, have never been so rapid in Great Britain as during the thirty years which immediately succeeded the glorious termination of the anti-revolutionary war.

a

7.

Important dif

ference in the

parties by

whom the war was opposed in the time of

But from this ranging of the contending parties, in name at least, on opposite sides, and the important fact of the legitimate dynasty having been displaced by revolutionary monarch on the throne of England, there arose a most important difference between the respective parties who opposed the war, commencing in 1679, and that which began in 1793. which terminated with the Treaty of Ryswick was waged by William, himself the Louis Philippe of the younger branch of the Stuart dynasty; that of the Succession was headed by

Marlborough

and Napoleon. The war