Part 3

After many delays, fatal to the general interest of Europe, this peace was signed: and the only considerable thing which he brought about afterwards was the marriage I have mentioned above; and by it an accession of riches and honour to a family whose estate was very mean, and whose illustration before this time I never met with anywhere, but in the vain discourses which he used to hold over claret. If he kept his word with any of the parties above-mentioned, it must be supposed that he did so with the Whigs; for as to us, we saw nothing after the peace but increase of mortification and nearer approaches to ruin. Not a step was made towards completing the settlement of Europe, which the treaties of Utrecht and Radstadt left imperfect; towards fortifying and establishing the Tory party; towards securing those who had been the principal actors in this administration against future events. We had proceeded in a confidence that these things should immediately follow the conclusion of the peace: he had never, I dare swear, entertained a thought concerning them. As soon as the last hand was given to the fortune of his family, he abandoned his mistress, his friends, and his party, who had borne him so many years on their shoulders: and I was present when this want of faith was reproached him in the plainest and strongest terms by one of the honestest men in Britain, and before some of the most considerable Tories. Even his impudence failed him on this occasion: he did not so much as attempt an excuse.

He could not keep his word which he had given the Pretender and his adherents, because he had formed no party to support him in such a design. He was sure of having the Whigs against him if he made the attempt, and he was not sure of having the Tories for him.

In this state of confusion and distress, to which he had reduced himself and us, you remember the part he acted. He was the spy of the Whigs, and voted with us in the morning against those very questions which he had penned the night before with Walpole and others. He kept his post on terms which no man but he would have held it on, neither submitting to the Queen, nor complying with his friends. He would not, or he could not, act with us; and he resolved that we should not act without him as long as he could hinder it. The Queen’s health was very precarious, and at her death he hoped by these means to deliver us up, bound as it were hand and foot, to our adversaries. On the foundation of this merit he flattered himself that he had gained some of the Whigs, and softened at least the rest of the party to him. By his secret negotiations at Hanover, he took it for granted that he was not only reconciled to that Court, but that he should, under his present Majesty’s reign, have as much credit as he had enjoyed under that of the Queen. He was weak enough to boast of this, and to promise his good offices voluntarily to several: for no man was weak enough to think them worth being solicited. In a word, you must have heard that he answered to Lord Dartmouth and to Mr. Bromley, that one should keep the Privy Seal, and the other the seals of Secretary; and that Lord Cowper makes no scruple of telling how he came to offer him the seals of Chancellor. When the King arrived, he went to Greenwich with an affectation of pomp and of favour. Against his suspicious character, he was once in his life the bubble of his credulity; and this delusion betrayed him into a punishment more severe in my sense than all which has happened to him since, or than perpetual exile; he was affronted in the manner in which he was presented to the King. The meanest subject would have been received with goodness, the most obnoxious with an air of indifference; but he was received with the most distinguishing contempt. This treatment he had in the face of the nation. The King began his reign, in this instance, with punishing the ingratitude, the perfidy, the insolence, which had been shown to his predecessor. Oxford fled from Court covered with shame, the object of the derision of the Whigs and of the indignation of the Tories.

The Queen might, if she had pleased, have saved herself from all those mortifications she met with during the last months of her reign, and her servants and the Tory party from those misfortunes which they endured during the same time; perhaps from those which they have fallen into since her death. When she found that the peace, from the conclusion of which she expected ease and quiet, brought still greater trouble upon her; when she saw the weakness of her Government, and the confusion of her affairs increase every day; when she saw her First Minister bewildered and unable to extricate himself or her; in fine, when the negligence of his public conduct, and the sauciness of his private behaviour had rendered him insupportable to her, and she took the resolution of laying him aside, there was a strength still remaining sufficient to have supported her Government, to have fulfilled in great part the expectations of the Tories, and to have constituted both them and the Ministers in such a situation as would have left them little to apprehend. Some designs were, indeed, on foot which might have produced very great disorders: Oxford’s conduct had given much occasion to them, and with the terror of them he endeavoured to intimidate the Queen. But expedients were not hard to be found by which those designs might have been nipped in the bud, or else by which the persons who promoted them might have been induced to lay them aside. But that fatal irresolution inherent to the Stuart race hung upon her. She felt too much inward resentment to be able to conceal his disgrace from him; yet, after he had made this discovery, she continued to trust all her power in his hands.

No people ever were in such a condition as ours continued to be from the autumn of 1713 to the summer following. The Queen’s health sank every day. The attack which she had in the winter at Windsor served as a warning both to those who wished, and to those who feared her death, to expect it. The party which opposed the court had been continually gaining strength by the weakness of our administration: and at this time their numbers were vastly increased, and their spirit was raised by the near prospect of the succession taking place. We were not at liberty to exert the strength we had. We saw our danger, and many of us saw the true means of avoiding it; but whilst the magic wand was in the same hands, this knowledge served only to increase our uneasiness; and, whether we would or no, we were forced with our eyes open to walk on towards the precipice. Every moment we became less able, if the Queen lived, to support her Government; if she died, to secure ourselves. One side was united in a common view, and acted upon a uniform plan: the other had really none at all. We knew that we were out of favour at the Court of Hanover, that we were represented there as Jacobites, and that the Elector, his present Majesty, had been rendered publicly a party to that opposition, in spite of which we made the peace: and yet we neither had taken, nor could take in our present circumstances, any measures to be better or worse there. Thus we languished till the 27th of July, 1714, when the Queen dismissed the Treasurer. On the Friday following, she fell into an apoplexy, and died on Sunday the 1st of August.

You do me, I daresay, the justice to believe that whilst this state of things lasted I saw very well, how little mention soever I might make of it at the time, that no man in the Ministry, or in the party, was so much exposed as myself. I could expect no quarter from the Whigs, for I had deserved none. There were persons amongst them for whom I had great esteem and friendship; yet neither with these, nor with any others, had I preserved a secret correspondence, which might be of use to me in the day of distress: and besides the general character of my party, I knew that particular prejudices were entertained against me at Hanover. The Whigs wanted nothing but an opportunity of attacking the peace, and it could hardly be imagined that they would stop there. In which case I knew that they could have hold on no man so much as myself: the instructions, the orders, the memorials had been drawn by me; the correspondence relating to it in France, and everywhere else, had been carried on by me; in a word, my hand appeared to almost every paper which had been writ in the whole course of the negotiation. To all these considerations I added that of the weight of personal resentment, which I had created against myself at home and abroad: in part unavoidably, by the share I was obliged to take in these affairs; and in part, if you will, unnecessarily, by the warmth of my temper, and by some unguarded expressions, for which I have no excuse to make but that which Tacitus makes for his father-in-law, Julius Agricola: “honestius putabam offendere, quam odisse.”

Having this prospect of being distinguished from the rest of my party, in the common calamity, by severer treatment, I might have justified myself, by reason and by great authorities too, if I had made early provision, at least to be safe when I should be no longer useful. How I could have secured this point I do not think fit to explain: but certain it is that I made no one step towards it. I resolved not to abandon my party by turning Whig, or, which is worse a great deal, whimsical; nor to treat separately from it. I resolved to keep myself at liberty to act on a Tory bottom. If the Queen disgraced Oxford and continued to live afterwards, I knew we should have time and means to provide for our future safety: if the Queen died, and left us in the same unfortunate circumstances, I expected to suffer for and with the Tories; and I was prepared for it.

The thunder had long grumbled in the air; and yet when the bolt fell, most of our party appeared as much surprised as if they had had no reason to expect it. There was a perfect calm and universal submission through the whole kingdom. The Chevalier, indeed, set out as if his design had been to gain the coast and to embark for Great Britain; and the Court of France made a merit to themselves of stopping him and obliging him to return. But this, to my certain knowledge, was a farce acted by concert, to keep up an opinion of his character, when all opinion of his cause seemed to be at an end. He owned this concert to me at Bar, on the occasion of my telling him that he would have found no party ready to receive him, and that the enterprise would have been to the last degree extravagant. He was at this time far from having any encouragement: no party numerous enough to make the least disturbance was formed in his favour. On the King’s arrival the storm arose. The menaces of the Whigs, backed by some very rash declarations, by little circumstances of humour which frequently offend more than real injuries, and by the entire change of all the persons in employment, blew up the coals.

At first many of the Tories had been made to entertain some faint hopes that they would be permitted to live in quiet. I have been assured that the King left Hanover in that resolution. Happy had it been for him and for us if he had continued in it; if the moderation of his temper had not been overborne by the violence of party, and his and the national interest sacrificed to the passions of a few. Others there were among the Tories who had flattered themselves with much greater expectations than these, and who had depended, not on such imaginary favour and dangerous advancement as was offered them afterwards, but on real credit and substantial power under the new government. Such impressions on the minds of men had rendered the two Houses of Parliament, which were then sitting, as good courtiers to King George as ever they had been to Queen Anne. But all these hopes being at once and with violence extinguished, despair succeeded in their room.

Our party began soon to act like men delivered over to their passions, and unguided by any other principle; not like men fired by a just resentment and a reasonable ambition to a bold undertaking. They treated the Government like men who were resolved not to live under it: and yet they took no one measure to support themselves against it. They expressed, without reserve or circumspection, an eagerness to join in any attempt against the Establishment which they had received and confirmed, and which many of them had courted but a few weeks before; and yet in the midst of all this bravery, when the election of the new Parliament came on, some of these very men acted with the coolness of those who are much better disposed to compound than to take arms.

The body of the Tories being in this temper, it is not to be wondered at if they heated one another, and began apace to turn their eyes towards the Pretender; and if those few who had already engaged with him, applied themselves to improve the conjuncture, and endeavoured to list a party for him.

I went, about a month after the Queen’s death, as soon as the Seals were taken from me, into the country; and whilst I continued there, I felt the general disposition to Jacobitism increase daily among people of all ranks; amongst several who had been constantly distinguished by their aversion to that cause. But at my return to London in the month of February or March, 1715, a few weeks before I left England, I began for the first time in my whole life to perceive these general dispositions ripen into resolutions, and to observe some regular workings among many of our principal friends, which denoted a scheme of this kind. These workings, indeed, were very faint; for the persons concerned in carrying them on did not think it safe to speak too plainly to men who were, in truth, ill disposed to the Government because they neither found their account at present under it nor had been managed with art enough to leave them hopes of finding it hereafter, but who at the same time had not the least affection for the Pretender’s person, nor any principle favourable to his interest.

This was the state of things when the new Parliament which his Majesty had called assembled. A great majority of the elections had gone in favour of the Whigs; to which the want of concert among the Tories had contributed as much as the vigour of that party and the influence of the new Government. The Whigs came to the opening of this Parliament full of as much violence as could possess men who expected to make their court, to confirm themselves in power, and to gratify their resentments by the same measures. I have heard that it was a dispute among the Ministers how far this spirit should be indulged; and that the King was determined, or confirmed in a determination, to consent to the prosecutions, and to give the reins to the party, by the representations that were made to him that great difficulties would arise in the conduct of the Session if the Court should appear inclined to check this spirit, and by Mr. W—’s undertaking to carry all the business successfully through the House of Commons if they were at liberty. Such has often been the unhappy fate of our Princes: a real necessity sometimes, and sometimes a seeming one, has forced them to compound with a part of the nation at the expense of the whole; and the success of their business for one year has been purchased at the price of public disorder for many.

The conjuncture I am speaking of affords a memorable instance of this truth. If milder measures had been pursued, certain it is that the Tories had never universally embraced Jacobitism. The violence of the Whigs forced them into the arms of the Pretender. The Court and the party seemed to vie with one another which should go the greatest lengths in severity: and the Ministers, whose true interest it must at all times be to calm the minds of men, and who ought never to set the examples of extraordinary inquiries or extraordinary accusations, were upon this occasion the tribunes of the people.

The Council of Regency which began to sit as soon as the Queen died, acted like a council of the Holy Office. Whoever looked on the face of the nation saw everything quiet; not one of those symptoms appearing which must have shown themselves more or less at that moment if in reality there had been any measures taken during the former reign to defeat the Protestant succession. His Majesty ascended the throne with as little contradiction and as little trouble as ever a son succeeded a father in the possession of a private patrimony. But he who had the opportunity, which I had till my dismission, of seeing a great part of what passed in that Council, would have thought that there had been an opposition actually formed, that the new Establishment was attacked openly from without and betrayed from within.

The same disposition continued after the King’s arrival. This political Inquisition went on with all the eagerness imaginable in seizing of papers, in ransacking the Queen’s closet, and examining even her private letters. The Whigs had clamoured loudly, and affirmed in the face of the world that the nation had been sold to France, to Spain, to the Pretender; and whilst they endeavoured in vain, by very singular methods, to find some colour to justify what they had advanced without proof, they put themselves under an absolute necessity of grounding the most solemn prosecution on things whereof they might indeed have proof, but which would never pass for crimes before any judges but such as were parties at the same time.

In the King’s first Speech from the Throne all the inflaming hints were given, and all the methods of violence were chalked out to the two Houses. The first steps in both were perfectly answerable; and, to the shame of the peerage be it spoken, I saw at that time several lords concur to condemn in one general vote all that they had approved of in a former Parliament by many particular resolutions. Among several bloody resolutions proposed and agitated at this time, the resolution of impeaching me of high treason was taken; and I took that of leaving England, not in a panic terror improved by the artifices of the Duke of Marlborough (whom I knew even at that time too well to act by his advice or information in any case), but on such grounds as the proceedings which soon followed sufficiently justified, and as I have never repented building upon. Those who blamed it in the first heat were soon after obliged to change their language; for what other resolution could I take? The method of prosecution designed against me would have put me immediately out of condition to act for myself, or to serve those who were less exposed than me, but who were, however, in danger. On the other hand, how few were there on whose assistance I could depend, or to whom I would, even in those circumstances, be obliged? The ferment in the nation was wrought up to a considerable height; but there was at that time no reason to expect that it could influence the proceedings in Parliament in favour of those who should be accused. Left to its own movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions? The Tories who had been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour could be expected from them. The Whimsicals, disappointed of the figure which they hoped to make, began, indeed, to join their old friends. One of the principal amongst them was so very good as to confess to me that if the Court had called the servants of the late Queen to account, and had stopped there, he must have considered himself as a judge, and have acted according to his conscience on what should have appeared to him; but that war had been declared to the whole Tory party, and that now the state of things was altered. This discourse needed no commentary, and proved to me that I had never erred in the judgment I made of this set of men. Could I then resolve to be obliged to them, or to suffer with Oxford? As much as I still was heated by the disputes in which I had been all my life engaged against the Whigs, I would sooner have chose to owe my security to their indulgence than to the assistance of the Whimsicals; but I thought banishment, with all her train of evils, preferable to either. I abhorred Oxford to that degree that I could not bear to be joined with him in any case. Nothing, perhaps, contributed so much to determine me as this sentiment. A sense of honour would not have permitted me to distinguish between his case and mine own; and it was worse than death to lie under the necessity of making them the same, and of taking measures in concert with him.

I am now come to the time at which I left England, and have finished the first part of that deduction of facts which I proposed to lay before you. I am hopeful that you will not think it altogether tedious or unnecessary; for although very little of what I have said can be new to you, yet this summary account will enable you with greater ease to recall to your memory the passages of those four years wherewith all that I am going to relate to you has an immediate and necessary connection.

In what has been said I am far from making my own panegyric. I had not in those days so much merit as was ascribed to me, nor since that time have I had so little as the same persons allowed me. I committed, without dispute, many faults, and a greater man than I can pretend to be, constituted in the same circumstances, would not have kept clear of all; but with respect to the Tories I committed none. I carried the point of party honour to the height, and specified everything to my attachment to them during this period of time. Let us now examine whether I have done so during the rest.

When I arrived in France, about the end of March, 1715, the affairs of England were represented to me in another light than I had seen them in when I looked upon them with my own eyes very few weeks before. I found the persons who were detached to speak with me prepared to think that I came over to negotiate for the Pretender; and when they perceived that I was more ignorant than they imagined, I was assured by them that there would be suddenly a universal rising in England and Scotland. The leaders were named to me, their engagements specified, and many gentlemen, yourself among others, were reckoned upon for particular services, though I was certain you had never been treated with; from whence I concluded, and the event has justified my opinion, that these assurances had been given on the general characters of men by such of our friends as had embarked sooner and gone farther than the rest.

This management surprised me extremely. In the answers I made I endeavoured to set the mistake right, to show that things were far from the point of maturity imagined, that the Chevalier had yet no party for him, and that nothing could form one but the extreme violence which the Whigs threatened to exercise. Great endeavours were used to engage me in this affair, and to prevail on me to answer the letter of invitation sent me from Bar. I alleged, as it was true, that I had no commission from any person in England, and that the friends I left behind me were the only persons who could determine me, if any could, to take such a step. As to the last proposition, I absolutely refused it.

In the uncertainty of what would happen—whether the prosecutions would be pushed, which was most probable, in the manner intended against me, and against others, for all of whom, except the Earl of Oxford, I had as much concern as for myself; or whether the Whigs would relent, drop some, and soften the fate of others—I resolved to conduct myself so as to create no appearance which might be strained into a pretence for hard usage, and which might be retorted on my friends when they debated for me, or when they defended themselves. I saw the Earl of Stair; I promised him that I would enter into no Jacobite engagements, and I kept my word with him. I wrote a letter to Mr. Secretary Stanhope which might take off any imputation of neglect of the Government, and I retired into Dauphine to remove the objection of residence near the Court of France.

This retreat from Paris was censured in England, and styled a desertion of my friends and of their cause, with what foundation let any reasonable man determine. Had I engaged with the Pretender before the party acted for him, or required of me that I should do so, I had taken the air of being his man; whereas I looked on myself as theirs. I had gone about to bring them into his measures; whereas I never intended, even since that time, to do anything more than to make him as far as possible act conformably to their views.

During the short time I continued on the banks of the Rhone the prosecutions were carried on at Westminster with the utmost violence, and the ferment among the people was risen to such a degree that it could end in nothing better—it might have ended in something worse—than it did. The measures which I observed at Paris had turned to no account; on the contrary, the letter which I wrote to Mr. Secretary Stanhope was quoted as a base and fawning submission, and what I intended as a mark of respect to the Government and a service to my friends was perverted to ruin me in the opinion of the latter. The Act of Attainder, in consequence of my impeachment, had passed against me for crimes of the blackest dye; and among other inducements to pass it, my having been engaged in the Pretender’s interest was one. How well founded this Article was has already appeared; I was just as guilty of the rest. The correspondence with me was, you know, neither frequent nor safe. I heard seldom and darkly from you, and though I saw well enough which way the current ran, yet I was entirely ignorant of the measures you took, and of the use you intended to make of me. I contented myself, therefore, with letting you all know that you had but to command me, and that I was ready to venture in your service the little which remained, as frankly as I had exposed all which was gone. At last your commands came, and I shall show you in what manner I executed them.

The person who was sent to me arrived in the beginning of July, 1715, at the place where I was. He spoke in the name of all the friends whose authority could influence me, and he brought me word that Scotland was not only ready to take arms, but under some sort of dissatisfaction to be withheld from beginning; that in England the people were exasperated against the Government to such a degree that, far from wanting to be encouraged, they could not be restrained from insulting it on every occasion; that the whole Tory party was become avowedly Jacobite; that many officers of the army and the majority of the soldiers were very well affected to the cause; that the City of London was ready to rise; and that the enterprises for seizing of several places were ripe for execution: in a word, that most of the principal Tories were in a concert with the Duke of Ormond, for I had pressed particularly to be informed whether his Grace acted alone, or, if not, who were his council; and that the others were so disposed that there remained no doubt of their joining as soon as the first blow should be struck. He added that my friends were a little surprised to observe that I lay neuter in such a conjuncture. He represented to me the danger I ran of being prevented by people of all sides from having the merit of engaging early in this enterprise, and how unaccountable it would be for a man impeached and attainted under the present Government to take no share in bringing about a revolution so near at hand and so certain. He entreated that I would defer no longer to join the Chevalier, to advise and assist in carrying on his affairs, and to solicit and negotiate at the Court of France, where my friends imagined that I should not fail to meet with a favourable reception, and from whence they made no doubt of receiving assistance in a situation of affairs so critical, so unexpected, and so promising. He concluded by giving me a letter from the Pretender, whom he had seen in his way to me, in which I was pressed to repair without loss of time to Commercy; and this instance was grounded on the message which the bearer of the letter had brought me from my friends in England. Since he was sent to me, it had been more proper to have come directly where I was; but he was in haste to make his own court, and to deliver the assurances which were entrusted to him. Perhaps, too, he imagined that he should tie the knot faster on me by acquainting me that my friends had actually engaged for themselves and me, than by barely telling me that they desired I would engage for myself and them.

In the progress of the conversation he related a multitude of facts which satisfied me as to the general disposition of the people; but he gave me little satisfaction as to the measures taken for improving this disposition, for driving the business on with vigour if it tended to a revolution, or for supporting it with advantage if it spun into a war. When I questioned him concerning several persons whose disinclination to the Government admitted of no doubt, and whose names, quality, and experience were very essential to the success of the undertaking, he owned to me that they kept a great reserve, and did, at most, but encourage others to act by general and dark expressions.

I received this account and this summons ill in my bed; yet, important as the matter was, a few minutes served to determine me. The circumstances wanting to form a reasonable inducement to engage did not escape me. But the smart of a Bill of Attainder tingled in every vein; and I looked on my party to be under oppression and to call for my assistance. Besides which I considered, first, that I should certainly be informed, when I conferred with the Chevalier, of many particulars unknown to this gentleman; for I did not imagine that you could be so near to take arms, as he represented you to be, on no other foundation than that which he exposed. And, secondly, that I was obliged in honour to declare, without waiting for a more particular information of what might be expected from England, since my friends had taken their resolution to declare, without any previous assurance of what might be expected from France. This second motive weighed extremely with me at that time; there is, however, more sound than sense in it, and it contains the original error to which all your subsequent errors, and the thread of misfortunes which followed, are to be ascribed.

My resolution thus taken, I lost no time in repairing to Commercy. The very first conversations with the Chevalier answered in no degree my expectations; and I assure you, with great truth, that I began even then, if not to repent of my own rashness, yet to be fully convinced both of yours and mine.