conduct of one of his clerks, of which, however, he was subsequently proved innocent, Marlborough and Godolphin set to work at once. Finding the Queen firm, they had recourse to their favourite threat of resignation, but even against this Her Majesty was proof; and, strange to say, Marlborough and Godolphin did not resign. But the Junto were determined that Anne should bend her neck to the yoke. On Sunday, the 8th of February, a Cabinet Council was to meet, at which the Queen as usual would preside. Marlborough and Godolphin told her, that they did not mean to attend unless Harley was dismissed. The Queen took no notice of the threat, and went as usual. But when Harley began business, the Duke of Somerset declared that it was impossible to proceed in the absence of the two chiefs. The Queen rose and left the Council, uncertain, probably, what course she should adopt. But Harley understood the situation, and saw that the pear was not ripe. He tendered his resignation, and advised the Queen to submit. She had, in fact, no alternative; and on the 4th of February, 1708, the change was made. Harley, St. John, Harcourt, and Mansel, all retired together; and were succeeded by Henry Boyle, Robert Walpole, Earl Cholmondeley, and Sir James Montagu, all zealous Whigs.

This was the second reconstruction of the Godolphin ministry, which was now as decidedly Whig as in 1702 it had been Tory. It had passed through an intermediate phase, in which Godolphin would have wished to keep it. But the political passions of the period were too fierce to admit of such a system, and after a brief trial it was relinquished. What Godolphin really meant may fairly be inferred from his letter to William III. But what was possible under William was not possible under Anne. What Godolphin might have done, and in doing would have been faithful to his own convictions, was to reject the Whig dictation, and resign with Harley and St. John. In that case he would probably have come back again in two years, more powerful than ever. But Godolphin was not given to look ahead. To him, says Lord Stanhope, the nearer danger always seemed to be the worse.

The Queen was deeply wounded. She seems to have had a personal regard for Harley, whose 'facetiousness,' according to Somerville, she greatly relished. Of the quality of Harley's humour, Bolingbroke speaks in sufficiently contemptuous tones; he broke now and then a jest, which savoured of the Inns of Court, and the bad company in which he had been bred.' The Templars of that day, be it remembered, are not treated with much respect by either Pope or Addison: so that Bolingbroke's

Bolingbroke's sarcasm is intelligible. However, these ill-bred jests found favour at Court: and Harley after his retirement seems to have continued in the Queen's confidence.

But the Whigs had not done with Her yet. The general election of 1708 had given them a decisive majority, and they at once determined to give Her Majesty no quarter. They began by demanding, that the Earl of Pembroke should be dismissed from the Presidency of the Council in favour of Lord Somers. Again the Queen refused, and again the Whigs had recourse to violence. They intrigued with the Jacobites to secure a majority of anti-ministerialists among the sixteen Scottish Peers about to be elected at Holyrood. When they failed in this, they threatened the Queen with bringing over the electoral Prince of Hanover, a proposal which they knew to be eminently disagreeable to her; and finding that even this did not answer, they declared that, if she did not yield, they would, as soon as Parliament met, bring a motion of censure on Prince George of Denmark, then upon his deathbed, for mismanagement of the Navy. Before this atrocious menace the Queen's fortitude gave way. Somers became President of the Council, and Wharton Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and, on her husband's death, Lord Pembroke was transferred to the Admiralty. The arrangement lasted one year; and then Pembroke retired with a pension, and was succeeded by the Earl of Orford.

The transformation was now complete. The Tories were stamped out. The Queen, after reaching the verge of emancipation, had been thrown back into captivity.* And Godolphin at last was thoroughly broken in, and the very humble servant of the oligarchy. But the triumph had been bought dear. It had cost the victorious party the confidence of the Church. It had disgusted the majority of the people, who still respected the authority of the Crown, and resented the insults which the Whigs had offered to a woman. The war was fast ceasing to be popular. And the tide would soon have turned, even had the Government not been tempted, mainly we believe by Godolphin himself, to commit political suicide.

It was in the month of October 1709, that Lord Orford was placed at the head of the Admiralty: and it was on the 5th of November that Sacheverell's sermon was preached before the Lord Mayor. Godolphin had often been likened to Ben Jonson's Volpone.' Sacheverell denounced what he considered to be Godolphin's apostasy, who, after having been the leader

Somerville.

of

of the Tories and the professed friend of the Church of England, had gone over to the enemies of both, under this obnoxious nickname. 'It is not an open enemy that has done me this dishonour, but it was even thou, my companion, my guide, and mine own familiar friend.' Godolphin's opposition to the Occasional Conformity Bill was now read in the light of his junction with the Whigs, and men said it was only what might have been expected of him. Godolphin felt the taunt and lost his temper. He pronounced eagerly for Sunderland's proposal, namely that Sacheverell should be impeached, and thus precipitated the catastrophe which need not have occurred till after the next general election.

Sacheverell was impeached and convicted, and at once became a popular martyr. Hoadley, his pulpit rival, an extreme Low Churchman, was made a Whig hero, and recommended to the Queen for high preferment. The action against Sacheverell had driven the ultra-High Churchmen, already hostile to the Government, into furious opposition; the exaltation of Hoadley equally inflamed the rest; and the two together constituted four-fifths of the Church of England. The people everywhere espoused the same side: all through the winter the feeling continued to grow, and the Queen at length saw that she might safely strike the blow which, we may well believe, she had been long burning to deliver. One by one the leading Whig Ministers were dismissed. First, in the middle of April, went the Marquis of Kent, Lord Chamberlain, who had come in as a moderate Tory in 1704, but was now a Godolphinite Whig. He was ordered to break his staff, as less painful to his feelings than giving it up. He did so, in a rage: and threw the pieces into the fire. Sunderland went next; and then came Godolphin's own turn. Somers, Halifax, Cowper, and others followed; and presently re-appeared in their places, Harley, St. John, Shrewsbury, Rochester, Buckingham, and Harcourt, and the leading men of that particular connection. These changes were all going on during the summer of 1710. On the 21st of September Parliament was dissolved, and a powerful Tory majority was once more returned.

6

Mr. Froude speaks of this as a strange freak of popular feeling.' There is surely nothing either strange or freakish about it. The Whig majorities of 1705 and 1708 were due entirely to the divisions in the Tory party. In 1710 these had disappeared, and the party were once more firmly welded together, with the whole influence of the Court on their side. They went to the country with a popular cry, which, always effective in the quietest times, was rendered doubly so by the Vol. 168.-No. 335.

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trial of Sacheverell. The dissolution was an appeal from the Queen to her subjects, against the dictation of the Whigs: an appeal from the friends of the Church, to be delivered from the yoke of those who were believed to be the enemies of the Church. The Tories were the peace party, and the country was tired of the war; and, with these mingled recommendations to popular support, the triumph of the new Government was a foregone conclusion. The Tory majority of 1710 was so far from being a freak,' that in 1713 it was renewed; and in 1716 the Government was obliged to pass the Septennial Act, to prevent it from being renewed again. It was not till Sir Robert Walpole came to an understanding with the Church, on what Lord Beaconsfield called 'the best-bargain principle,' that the Tories ceased to be formidable.

The key to the whole situation was the Church question, and unless we recognize this truth, we shall never understand the history of that period. During the thirty years that followed the Revolution, the mission of the Tory Party was the defence of the Church of England. That there was a party in the country which would have willingly made great alterations in her constitution and ritual, is as certain as that the bulk of the nation. was devotedly attached to both. The Tory party was therefore in this respect the national party; and it is idle to say that their vigilance was unnecessary, because no attack was made, or that nothing was intended, because nothing was done. Who shall say that it was not the consciousness of a strong Tory party existing throughout the whole kingdom, ready to one man in defence of the Church, that kept her enemies inactive? Whether the undisputed supremacy of the Church of England throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century was for good or for evil; whether the sober piety' which she is thought to have fostered be a subject for reverenceor derision; whether the affection and respect which she inspired in the people was due to her own merits or to their ignorance: however these questions may be answered, the fact that she has come down to us as she now is, and that we have preserved intact her ordinances, ceremonies, and Liturgy, is due to the Tory party under William, Anne, and George I.

rise as

Nothing in Godolphin's career became him so little as the ending of it. He clung to power with a tenacity which seems to have excited the contempt of some of his colleagues; and it is said that he implored the Dutch and Austrian Ambassadors to intercede for him. According to Mr. Elliot, Godolphin was only too glad to go, and his attempts to retain office were solely on account of the Duke of Marlborough, and

contrary

contrary to his own intentions. We should be glad to think that this was true; and we can, indeed, easily believe that anxiety for his friend's interests was coupled with anxiety for his own, for Godolphin does not seem to have been either a heartless or a selfish man. To speak positively about the motives and conduct of a man who lived two hundred years ago; to call one thing incontestably right, and another thing incontestably wrong, is not only presumptuous, but silly. Apparently, there was some want of dignity in Godolphin's retirement from power; and he did not take any leading part in public affairs afterwards. He was dismissed on the 8th of November, 1708, and he died at Holywell House, Marlborough's seat, near St. Albans, on the 15th of September, 1713.

Of his public character very different estimates have been formed. M. Remusat likens him to Chatham; but there is more resemblance between Lord Liverpool and Lord Godolphin, than between Godolphin and any other English Minister. If we add to the financial abilities, the gravity, the modesty, and the conciliatory manners of Lord Liverpool, the sporting and amatory propensities of Lord Palmerston, we have Godolphin before us.

To what extent his Jacobitism extended we shall never know, till the family archives mentioned by Mr. Elliot are explored, if we do then. He is reported to have told Lord Arran, the Jacobite agent, that, if he had been left alone, he could have restored James III. at the death of Queen Anne without any help from France. The violence of the high Tories, he used to say, drove him into the arms of the Junto. But what he could have done, and what he would have done, are two different things. The worst charge ever brought against him in his public capacity is his privity to an alleged plot, in which Prince Eugene was the chief figure, the object of which was to get up a riot in London, set fire to St. James's Palace, and carry off the Queen to France. Swift professes to believe it, and we are to suppose from him that Harley believed in it too. But most modern historians have agreed to treat it with contempt.

Whatever blame may attach to Godolphin on the score of political dishonesty, it is not denied that from the corruption and nepotism, which were hardly thought vices in the reign of Queen Anne, he was honourably free. Burnet speaks of his having been thirty years at the Treasury, and nine years at the head of it, without ever being accused of a job. He praises his clear head and unsullied integrity,' and calls him 'the worthiest and wisest man that has been employed in our time.' Horace Walpole says much the same of him, and a foreign states