Chapter D: O. M (9)

Both in 1710 and 1711 the air was full of more or less unsubstantial schemes for bringing about, at what already seemed the eleventh hour, the succession of the Pretender; and rumours were rife as to the gradual transformation of the Ministry into a Jacobite Cabal. Though Leibniz was no doubt right in saying that the question of inviting to England, or (as the Electress so consistently repeated) of granting an income to, one or more members of the Electoral family, was the touchstone of the real intentions of the British Government, and though this may, as he asserts, have also been the opinion of the Elector, yet there was no question at Hanover of claiming any such concession. In April, 1711, the Electress declared herself wholly uncertain of what would happen even in the event of Queen Anne’s death—for ‘what Parliament does one day, it undoes the next.’ Thus, when, in the autumn of the same year, Lord Rivers made his second appearance at Hanover, the letter which he brought with him from Queen Anne, and his assurances of her care for the interests of the Electoral family, were received by Sophia with proper expressions of gratitude, whatever she might privately say as to the expense which this mission entailed upon the Hanoverian Court, with little prospect of return. There was, indeed, some talk of the Elector being offered the chief command in Flanders after Marlborough’s dismissal in December, 1711; but nothing came of the suggestion, and in January, 1712, the Electress is found expressing her satisfaction at the appointment of Ormonde, who had always been so friendly to her. But as to the main object of his mission Rivers completely failed; for George Lewis firmly declined to give his approval to the British overtures of peace to France, at the risk of deeply annoying the Queen and her ministers by thus falling in with the wishes of the Whigs. He took his stand on the principles of the Grand Alliance, from which he had never swerved; while his mother judiciously held the balance by refusing to accept the insinuations of her correspondent at the Hague, Lord Strafford, against the inclinations of her House and Bothmer towards the Whigs, and appealing with much dignity to her conviction that, beyond the devices of Whigs and Tories, the Protestant Succession could depend on the support of the nation. Meanwhile, the two parties were alike striving to apprise the Hanoverian Court of the direction in which to look for its friends. The anxiety of the Whigs to identify their party with the Electoral House is at the same time proved by the motion of the Duke of Devonshire to give precedence to the Duke of Cambridge over other Peers.[172] The Ministry overtrumped this modest effort by a Bill giving precedence to the entire Electoral family, which was passed in two days (January, 1712), and which the minister’s kinsman, Thomas Harley, was in July specially sent over to present to the Electress. She took the announcement of this new visit very coolly, regretting the expense to which she was put by it, and observing that, if the British throne were for sale, France on behalf of its client could afford the purchase better than the House of Hanover, which had no intention of imitating the prodigality of Augustus II of Poland.[173] Her instinct was correct, for Thomas Harley had instructions which, while pretending to put the blame on Bothmer, seriously reflected on the Elector’s opposition to the peace policy pursued by the British Government. In the course of the negotiations carried on at Paris in August, 1712, between Torcy and Bolingbroke, the latter on one occasion even went so far as to hint at the despatch of a British fleet into the Baltic, with a view not only to controlling the northern troubles, but also to frustrating possible designs on the part of the Dutch _and of Hanover_.[174]

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Footnote 172:

He had been created a Knight of the Garter in 1706, but not installed
till December, 1710, Lord Halifax acting as his proxy.

Footnote 173:

_À propos_ of the mention of this sovereign it may be noted that about
this time Queen Anne thought fit to impose upon the Electress the task
(specially disagreeable because she specially disliked him) of
dissuading King Augustus from forcing his son and namesake to follow
him into the Church of Rome. Augustus II actually promised Queen Anne
to send his son to England; but in the meantime the latter had been
received into the Catholic Church at Bologna.

Footnote 174:

O. Weber, _Der Friede von Utrecht_, p. 313.

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Meanwhile the Court of Hanover, while maintaining unchanged its attitude towards the general question of war or peace, had immediate interests of its own to watch besides such as might be involved in the question of the English Succession. The recognition of the Hanoverian Electorship, for instance, was demanded from France, _pari passu_ with that of the Prussian Kingship. Early in the year, in the negotiations already in progress, Bothmer, whom Oxford and Bolingbroke persisted in treating as antagonistic to their Government,[175] returned to his post at the Hague. In December, 1712, Baron Thomas von Grote, who belonged to a family of high distinction in the Hanoverian service, arrived in London, nominally with the special charge of returning thanks for the Act of Precedence. His instructions, drawn up by Robethon in the name of the Electress Sophia, illustrate the penultimate stage in the final period of the transactions concerning the Succession. He was to be polite to all, and not to consider himself debarred from taking counsel with the old friends of the House—in other words, with Marlborough and the Whig leaders—so long as this was done privately and secretly; and he was to avoid giving umbrage to the Queen’s ministers, and above all to the Queen herself. The Elector furnished him with a special commendatory letter to Oxford. He was to make friends with the clergy, and to reassure them by pointing out that the ecclesiastical system of the German Lutherans was to all intents and purposes an episcopal one. The everlasting delicate question as to the summoning of the Electress or another member of the Electoral family to England he was to treat as if this event might any day come to pass; and, at the same time, he was to press for a proposal to Parliament on the subject of an establishment—say at Somerset House. The Elector, while of opinion that such a proposal would furnish the best means of testing the sincerity of the Queen’s and her advisers’ intentions, declined to influence Parliamentary opinion by means of any expenditure of his own, though it would seem that he had previously not objected to Bothmer’s attempting to gain over some noble Lords against the Peace by similar inducements. But, though he still abstained from any intervention in British home affairs, his own instructions to Grote were less carefully balanced than those of the Electress, and left no doubt as to its being the leading Whigs on whom he reckoned as the true friends of the House of Hanover.

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Footnote 175:

Bolingbroke hated Bothmer, and described him as, ‘notwithstanding that
air of coldness and caution which he wore, the most inveterate party
man that I ever saw, and the most capable of giving _tête baissée_
into the most extravagant measures that faction could propose.’ (Cf.
Salomon, p. 239, and note.)

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Both at Hanover and elsewhere, however, eager friends of the dynasty advocated a more expeditious procedure. In September, 1712, the indefatigable Leibniz submitted a scheme, concocted by busy brains in London, for including the demand for establishing the Electress in England among the conditions of the Peace of Utrecht. But, though both in her correspondence, and in conversation with Thomas Harley, she had given considerable attention to the scheme, she ultimately declared it impracticable. The unsatisfactory action of the English ministers in the matter of the Dutch guarantee of the Hanoverian Succession had once more rendered her diffident; she was, she said, so old that there was no reality in all her talk; were she younger, she added with a touch of her old spirit, the sovereignty of England should not pass by her.

The Peace of Utrecht, when actually concluded in the spring of 1713, was in many respects unsatisfactory to the Elector; and as an Estate of the Empire, he must have been well content to withhold his signature from it. But it contained a very explicit recognition of the Hanoverian Succession by France and the other signatory Powers; so that, in this respect at all events, Bothmer’s exertions had been entirely successful. Yet the tone prevailing at court and in ministerial circles in London very imperfectly agreed with this result; and in Hanover there was a growing disbelief in the sincerity of the sentiments entertained in these quarters. Grote found himself coolly received, and his attempts to obtain assurances baffled. Various suggestions offered by him were ignored; and in a lengthy despatch which he sent home in February (a few weeks before his death) he drew the darkest picture of the political situation which had as yet reached Hanover. He considered that, in spite of the generalities in which Oxford shrouded himself, he had gradually gone over to the Jacobites in order to please the Queen, while Bolingbroke he regarded as an open Jacobite on his own account. He thought that, as to the Pretender, there was reason for fearing the worst; he had heard that the Queen had expressed a wish to see her half-brother in England after the conclusion of the Peace, while the question of inviting over a member of the Electoral family had been indefinitely postponed. Part of this report sufficiently tallies with the information with which about this time the Pretender was being constantly supplied by his illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Berwick. Though sanguine as to methods of action, Berwick never minimised the chances of the Hanoverian Succession; the first thing requisite, he wrote to James in November, 1712, was to checkmate Hanover; the rest could then be easily accomplished without mentioning the name of the legitimate claimant. Both Oxford and Bolingbroke, Berwick wrote in May, 1713, were heartily resolved to go forward; in July, he reported them to be rather less ardent; but these were mere fluctuations. From all this it is tolerably clear that Oxford, in trying to deceive others, deceived himself. Much of his political life had consisted in a successful endeavour to face both ways without laying himself open to the charge of double-dealing. He now persuaded himself that he was throwing dust in the eyes of the Elector and Electress and the friends of the Hanoverian Succession, while at the same time drawing as near to the Jacobite projects as safety permitted. He was, above all things, a Parliamentary statesman, and nothing but the decision of Parliament would determine his ultimate choice of sides; but, as the majority was at present constituted, while the great achievement of the Peace assured the advance of Tory ascendancy, and the Queen seemed less and less inclined to reconcile herself to the Succession of the House of Hanover, he looked to the triumph of the Jacobite cause as the event towards which his course would be most safely shaped. With Bolingbroke, the case was wholly different. Oxford was prepared to be in the end guided by the Parliamentary majority; Bolingbroke was prepared to educate it up to that end—only he used a more sportsmanlike phraseology. For himself, he made no secret whatever of his likes and dislikes; kept up a constant intercourse with Jacobites and Frenchmen; and at times, as Grote complained, did him the honour of treating him ‘_de coquin ou de fou_.’[176]

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Footnote 176:

Salomon, _u.s._, p. 223, from the Hanover Archives.

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Meanwhile, the Queen and the Lord Treasurer continued their _banales_ expressions of friendship and goodwill at Hanover, where, on March 17th, 1713, the useful Thomas Harley presented a letter from the Queen, declaring her intention of treating the interests of the House of Hanover as her own. But neither this letter, nor the amicable phrases with which in April she opened Parliament after its adjournment, evoked any warm response at Hanover. Sophia, indeed, wrote to Strafford at the Hague, begging him to thank the Queen, and adding that, as she had no expectation of ever ascending the throne herself, she hoped that Her Majesty would entertain no aversion to her on that score. But, as she told Bothmer, she only paid back Strafford in the coin she received from England—words, not deeds; and, on the whole, Leibniz’s epigram not unaptly summed up the situation—

_‘Hannoverana domus magnâ me gaudet amicâ,’
Anna refert; tacita est Hannoverana domus._

An attempt had been indeed made, or suggested, to utilise the Queen’s friendly expressions for a bold venture on the part of the House of Hanover; but it had been still-born. After Grote’s death in March, Kreyenberg had carried on the affairs of the Hanoverian Legation in London; and reports were also from time to time sent to Hanover by the Dutch resident in London, L’Hermitage. In one of these (dated May 9th, 1713)[177] the very important proposal was made that the Electoral Prince should come over to England on his own account, inasmuch as the Queen would never send for him. The notion found the utmost favour with the Whig leaders, who knew how much depended on the issue of the approaching election, and who hoped that it might be influenced by so bold a step on the part of the Hanoverian family. But Bernstorff, who was in favour of the scheme and without whose persuasion there was no prospect at all of the Elector approving it, was ill at the time; and, when he recovered, the Elector was found to be entirely under the influence of advice against action. An attempt to bring about the repeal of the Union with Scotland was defeated, without the question of the Hanoverian Succession playing more than a subsidiary part in the dispute.

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Footnote 177:

Printed in Macpherson, Vol. ii. pp. 792-3. See on this transaction
Salomon, _u.s._, pp. 225 _sqq._

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When, in the following July, Parliament, after approving a number of the Treaties which formed the Peace of Utrecht,[178] was prorogued, on the eve of a General Election, the Queen’s Speech significantly omitted the usual announcement of her readiness to support the Protestant Succession. While the versatile intellect of Leibniz was still devising new schemes for bringing about the desired result, the Elector adhered more closely than ever to his original policy. In August, 1713, Baron von Schütz the younger (George William Helwig Sinold), the son of the former envoy of the Court of St. James and the grandson of the Celle Chancellor, arrived in London as envoy. The choice of this agent was at the time unfavourably criticised by some of the Whigs, who thought that a politician of greater experience should have been selected. Sophia would not commit herself to Bothmer on the question whether Schütz would be better liked than her correspondent had been in England; ‘at all events,’ she said, ‘nobody will be attracted by his appearance’ (_il ne payera pas de mine_). We shall have to enquire immediately whether, in the great diplomatic catastrophe which befell him, the younger Schütz was himself deserving of blame. He was instructed by the Elector in the sense of an absolute abstinence from interference in British affairs. Even as to the question of inviting a member of the Electoral family to England he was to take up a distinctly negative position; but, at the same time, he was to treat as indispensable measures the removal of the Pretender from Lorraine and a provision for the Electress as Heiress Presumptive of Great Britain. The envoy’s reports were far from encouraging, and his information as to the views and intentions of the Queen and her advisers again agrees with that transmitted by Berwick to the Pretender.

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Footnote 178:

By composing the _Te Deum und Jubilate_ for the celebration of the
Peace at St. Paul’s on July 7th, Handel gave great offence to the
Hanoverian Court; nor was he readmitted to favour till some little
time after the accession of George I.

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The tide of danger was unmistakably rising. Parliament was dissolved in August, 1713; and a proposal was on foot to bring to bear upon Queen Anne at the opening of the new Parliament the direct personal influence of the presence of her half-brother in England. In the attitude of Oxford and Bolingbroke no hopeful alteration occurred. In defiance of the manifest irritation of the Queen, the Elector coldly declared himself unsatisfied with the guarantees which he had so far received, and declined to sanction any expenditure on pamphlets or newspapers, or on more direct means of influencing elections or gaining over necessitous Peers. Yet, to the amusement of Sophia, whose sense of humour never deserted her, Hanover and Herrenhausen continued to attract not a few Englishmen desirous of being found in this vicinity at the critical moment. They were, however, she thought, reckoning without their host in hoping to strew palms before her on her entrance into London; she feared that she could not contrive to live as long as Queen Anne, so as to prove to them her gratitude. And yet, when in the last days of the year Queen Anne herself fell ill, and the agitation in England was raised to an unprecedented pitch, it seemed as if, notwithstanding what Sophia described as her ‘incurable malady of having passed her eighty-fourth year,’ her repeated prediction that she would never herself mount the British throne would after all be falsified. In November she had herself been ill, suffering so seriously from an affection (erysipelas) to which she was subject, that fears were entertained for her life. But she soon recovered sufficiently to write to the Duchess of Orleans, and with her usual spirit she insisted on following the Elector to the Göhrde.

The situation was now coming to be one of a very high tension. On the one hand, Strafford, who never ceased from trying to persuade the Electress that the Tories were her friends, and that there was not a Jacobite left in the party, assured her that what he had observed during the Queen’s illness had convinced him of the strength of popular opinion in England in favour of the Protestant Succession. And Steinghens, the Elector Palatine’s minister in London, who was on a footing of intimacy with Oxford, declared to his correspondent, General von der Schulenburg, that had Queen Anne died during her illness the Princess Sophia would have been proclaimed on the same day. Assurances of devotion poured in from every side; in February, Secretary Bromley laid himself at the Electress’ feet; and Archbishop Dawes entreated attention to his own humble endeavours and to the faithfulness and zeal of the whole body of the clergy. On the other hand, the demeanour and utterances of those in power were not growing more propitious as the new year came in. Cautious as Oxford was in his utterances, perhaps the most striking of all the self-revelations reported of him at this critical time was that which, in December, 1713, he made to the Abbé Gaultier, according to the statement of the latter to De Torcy: ‘So long as I live, England shall not be governed by a German.’ Except through Gaultier, however, Oxford was inaccessible on the subject, and though, in January, 1714, he was said to have sent a private messenger to the Pretender, in the following month Berwick heard that the Lord Treasurer’s intentions were still quite unknown, and suggested to James to make sure of the Queen and Bolingbroke by writing to them himself. Berwick’s scheme of the Pretender coming over to England in secret, so as to enable the Queen to declare in his favour at the opening of Parliament, was quite visionary; for Louis XIV was not inclined to make any move in his support, except by placing two men-of-war at Havre at his disposal; and the Tory leaders were wholly intent upon removing, in the first instance, the insuperable obstacle to any chance of the Pretender’s success by inducing him to come over—to the Church of England. As for Bolingbroke, who must have known that such a solution was not to be looked for, he seems to have been willing to depend on the double chance of something unexpected happening at the critical moment, and of the Hanoverian successor proving unable to maintain herself—or himself—on the throne even after mounting it. Thus, as the crisis drew nearer and nearer, the Tory leaders were becoming less and less prepared to meet it.[179]

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Footnote 179:

These conclusions seem irresistible in view of the documents,
especially the despatches of Ibberville, collected by Grimblot and
reviewed by Salomon, _u.s._, pp. 235-64.

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And so it came to pass that, when, in February, 1714, the new Parliament met, with a Tory majority in the Commons outnumbering their opponents by at least two to one, the Queen’s Speech could hardly have been more ambiguous in tone than it actually proved. She, like her ministers, had no wish for the House of Hanover, and saw no present chance for the Stewarts. While, therefore, discrediting all reports implying that the Protestant Succession, as settled in the House of Hanover, was in danger, the Speech also referred to the attempts ‘to weaken the Queen’s authority or to render the possession of the Crown uneasy to her’—obviously alluding to the design of bringing over a member of the Electoral family. While Bolingbroke may have been prepared to make use of this design so as to bring about a complete rupture between the Queen and the House of Hanover, Oxford could not but directly oppose a step which would have forced the hands of the Government, and removed the ultimate use of the situation out of his own wary hands. Yet nothing could have been more distinctly double-faced than his action in the early months of 1714. He dangled before Schütz the offer of a revision of the Regency Bill of 1705, which was to enable the court of Hanover to name the whole body of Regents, but which also might have furnished an opportunity for giving the _quietus_ to the entire Bill. Not long afterwards, in March, he expressed his intention to bring in a Bill declaring the introduction of foreign troops into England an act of high treason. But ‘under which King,’ or under what Government, could the foreign troops whose arrival was thus to be prevented have been levied?[180]

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Footnote 180:

Salomon, _u.s._, p. 272. Klopp, vol. xiv. p. 540, gives a summary of
the discussion of Oxford’s announcement from the Lords’ Debates.

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Though the calculated untrustworthiness of Oxford, and the reckless speculativeness of Bolingbroke, had by this time become as much of an open secret as had the consuming desire of the Secretary of State to supplant the Lord Treasurer, there was even now no disposition on the part of the court of Hanover to commit itself by any rash act. There had never been any real divergence of policy between the Electress and her son, the Elector, though his consistency of conduct had perhaps been the more formally complete, and we cannot follow him, as we can the Electress, in his private comments on the angular points which from time to time presented themselves in the situation. Now, they were more than ever at one in their determination to abstain from precipitate action. Robethon’s memorandum of _Reasons for not sending the Electoral Prince to England_ (January, 1714), whether or not the Elector’s dislike of his son had anything to do with the conclusions reached, reiterated the old objection of the Electress to a course which would appear to be dictated by a desire to gratify the Whigs by offending the Tories, instead of uniting the moderate men of both parties in support of the Succession. Sophia had, by this time, come to have so little faith in either of the English political parties that, as she told Strafford, she disliked the very names of Whig and Tory; and, as an octogenarian, she was inevitably indisposed to run any great personal risk or court any serious personal change. She gave Schulenburg to understand that she would never consent to proceed to England without the Elector. Yet neither she nor her son, who might be depended upon not to start for England a day too soon, affected indifference towards the Succession; and even on the question of sending the Electoral Prince to England, there were signs that, in deference to Bothmer’s advice, this course might after all be adopted, so soon as the Emperor should have concluded his peace with France.[181] It is no doubt in this connexion that, in the very last letter to Leibniz preserved from the hand of the Electress Sophia—which bears the date of May 20th, 1714 (N.S.)—she refers to a step which, as we shall see, she had just taken, and which Queen Anne had chosen to regard as a provocation offered to herself.

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Footnote 181:

Bothmer to Robethon, January 2nd, 1714. (Cited by Salomon, _u.s._, p.
232, from the Stowe MSS. in Brit. Mus.)

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We must go back for a moment to the previous month of April, in which the relations between Queen Anne and the House of Hanover seemed to have become rather easier. Had she and her advisers—Oxford in particular—gained some special insight into the fundamental weakness of the Jacobite position? Though the secret was open enough, one is almost inclined to some conclusion of the kind, in view of a communication from Berwick to James, dated April 11th, which describes the situation so lucidly that it seems worth while to extract from it the following passage (substituting real names for the transparent pseudonyms):—

I discours’d de Torcy about the King [James]’s resolution to be taken
in case Queen Anne should break. I find he knows not what to advise;
and in truth it is to be wish’d one could have some newse of Ormonde
[now Commander-in-chief], and see what disposition the Parliament will
be in, before one comes to a positive determination. The point is very
nice; on one side it would look odd in the world that King James
should see the Elector of Hannover quietly gett Queen Anne’s throne
without making the least opposition; on the other side to beginn an
expedition there must be money, provision of arms, and all many other
things which I fear the King [James] wants, besides that there can be
no hopes of success unless one can gett some officers of the army. A
great many of the Scotch will oppose the business and ’tis much feared
the Highlanders will have but very small means for so great an
undertaking. The Elector has actually the law for him; the United
Provinces are engaged to support him; the Kings of France and Spain
have promis’d not to meddle in it; and I find the English [i.e. the
English friends of the King] so very slow and cautious that ‘tis much
to be doubted their giving any helping hand.

Not long afterwards, Berwick had no better advice to give his royal kinsman, than that he should keep his own counsel as to the point on which he had made up his mind, and not allow his friends in England to think the desired consummation (his adoption of the Protestant faith) an event altogether out of the question. When the signs of the times seemed so unpromising to those who watched them with the most direct and personal interest, and when, as to the problem on which chances mainly turned, they could only advise a policy of temporising and dissimulation, Oxford may well have been more desirous than ever to safeguard his own future by seeking to maintain a good understanding with the other side. In this month of April, he is accordingly found tendering assurances not only of his own devotion, but also of Lady Masham’s, to the Hanoverian Succession, and declaring his conviction that the Queen was for it; though, as towards her, he again guarded himself by deprecating the establishment of a second Court in England. About the same time, his kinsman Thomas Harley again arrived at Hanover, with a letter from the Queen to the Electress, blandly enquiring whether there was anything which in her judgment would further secure the Succession of her House. Should she have no suggestion of further guarantees to offer, this would be taken as implying that the existing guarantees were regarded as sufficient. At the same time, the House of Hanover was warned against giving any encouragement, directly or indirectly, to a faction which was working for its own advantage only. Harley brought no message from the Queen inviting any member of the House to England; and the above-mentioned enquiry, as Bolingbroke’s comments on it to Strafford implied, suggested a defiance rather than an invitation. He was specifically instructed to offer her on the part of the Queen an annuity (_pension_) for herself; but this the Electress, with her usual quickness of insight, declined. The revenue desired by her was, she said, one that should be granted to her in due form as Heiress Presumptive by Queen and Parliament, in accordance with the precedent of the allowance made to Queen Anne herself, when Princess of Denmark in the preceding reign. Either before or after the Electress sent this reply—on May 7th—both she and the Elector attached their signatures to a formal answer to the enquiry brought by Thomas Harley. In this important memorandum they reiterated the view which had been expressed in Schütz’s instructions, that the Succession could not be held to be really assured unless an end were put to the danger of invasion by the Pretender by his being made to leave his present residence in Lorraine, and that it was desirable to secure a revenue to the Electress by Act of Parliament. They further declared it to be desirable that a member of the House of Hanover should be established in England, in order to watch over the important interests at issue. There can be no doubt but that the Electoral Prince was the member of the family whom the memorandum had in view. The document was signed and sealed by both the Elector and the Electress; and a covering letter from the former to the Queen thanked her in the most conciliatory tone for her continued care for the Protestant Succession. This memorandum, for which the Elector was directly responsible in conjunction with his mother, takes the bottom out of the supposition that he was at this time ready, if he could do so with honour, to relinquish his claims.

But before the memorandum was actually transmitted, a cold blast had suddenly blown athwart the relations between the House of Hanover and Queen Anne. In the ordinary course of things the Electoral Prince, as Duke of Cambridge, would have, like any other English Peer, received his writ of summons to attend the Queen in Parliament. Aware, however, of her sensitiveness on the subject of the presence of a member of the Hanoverian family in England, the Lord Chancellor (Lord Harcourt) had thought proper to delay indefinitely the issue of the writ. The demand for it had originally been suggested to Schütz by the Earl of Nottingham, who, though a High Church Tory, had long broken with the court; and, though an attempt to obtain the writ from the Lord Chancellor made at the instigation of the Whig Lord Cowper had failed, Schütz had naturally felt uneasy at its issue being delayed. When, in a letter to him, the Electress Sophia had given vent to her astonishment at the fact that the patent of the Duke of Cambridge had not been in due course followed by a writ, and had expressed her opinion that the Lord Chancellor would not object to Schütz’s ‘_asking for it and the reason_’ (of the delay), he had interpreted this expression of opinion as a command. The Whig leaders, including the Duke of Somerset, to whom Schütz had shown the Electress’ ‘order,’ had, according to his own account, been delighted with it, and had approved of his proposal to take action upon it. In the Electress’ letter to Leibniz of May 20th, already mentioned, she explicitly states, not, as Schütz puts it, that she had ‘ordered the writ,’ but that she had directed him to enquire from the Lord Chancellor whether the Electoral Prince ought not to receive it—which is not quite the same thing. But her letter to Schütz, on which the whole matter turns, cannot be said to be ambiguous, or to allow of any interpretation but that put upon it by him.[182] Even if it be the case that the memoranda of Hoffmann, the Imperial resident at the Court of St. James’, imply that, so far as he knew, there was no intention at Hanover of actually demanding the writ till the meeting of the next Parliament, this would not make it necessary to place a forced interpretation upon the Electress’ letter, with which in any case the Elector had no concern, and which can hardly have referred to the next Parliament, when the present was little more than two months old. The Hanoverian court had been pressed both by Marlborough and by Prince Eugene (who never believed in a policy of masterly inaction) to do what it could to obtain a summons for the Electoral Prince, and the Electress is known to have had this matter at heart, while the Elector’s feelings towards his son made him from first to last averse to carrying it into execution.

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Footnote 182:

It seems necessary to quote the actual text of this much-vext letter:
‘_Je vous prie de dire à Monsieur le chancelier Mylord Harcourt qu’on
est fort étonné ici qu’on n’a pas envoyé un writ à mon petit-fils le
prince électoral pour pouvoir entrer au parlement comme duc de
Cambridge, comme cela lui est dû par la patente que la reine lui a
donnée. Comme il a toujours été de mes amis aussi bien que son cousin,
je crois qu’il ne trouvera pas mauvais que vous le lui demandiez et la
raison._’ (_Briefe der Kurfürstin Sophie an Hannoversche Diplomaten_,
p. 213.)

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Schütz, who, it must be remembered, was accredited from the Electress as well as from the Elector, had acted in accordance with his instructions; but he can hardly be acquitted of precipitancy, and of an excessive readiness to listen to the opinion of the Whig leaders before assuring himself of the approval of the Elector. In any case, the die had now been cast. Harcourt had replied that the writ was quite ready, but that it was not customary for Peers to demand their writ except when on the spot; he would, however, mention the subject to the Queen. The Cabinet, summoned to deal with the envoy’s demand, decided that the writ could not be refused, though, according to Gaultier’s information, Bolingbroke had supported the Queen’s opinion in favour of refusing it. On April 17th, it was handed to Schütz by the Lord Chancellor, or in accordance with his orders. Being requested to state by whom he had been directed to demand the writ, Schütz seems to have mentioned the name of the Electress; but this is not attested by evidence at first hand. Schütz was speedily informed by Oxford that he would do well not to show himself at Court, and was afterwards formally prohibited from appearing there; but, as a matter of course, there was no question whatever of breaking off diplomatic relations, these being carried on for the time by Kreyenberg. Presently—on April 22nd—the envoy took his departure. On his arrival at Hanover, the Elector made a point of declining to receive Schütz; censured him for having obeyed any orders but the Elector’s; and told Thomas Harley, who, before taking his departure from Hanover, waited on him, with his whole _posse_ of Englishmen, that Schütz had never been instructed to demand the writ, and that he (the Elector) had never intended to send his son to England without the knowledge of the Queen. This formula may perhaps be reconcilable with the information given by Robethon to Lord Polwarth,[183] according to which the Elector, though he knew nothing about the demand for the writ, would have sent the Electoral Prince to England in the end, had it not been for the Queen’s letter to be mentioned immediately, which ‘changed the entire system.’ There seems to have been a good deal of feeling at Hanover—a feeling shared both by the Whig leaders in England and by Bothmer at the Hague—that, the writ having been now secured, the Electoral Prince should be sent over. But this the Elector refused to do; and the success with which he had thus kept out of the whole of this transaction—the single wrong move made on the Hanoverian side in the whole course of the game—must be placed to the credit of his judgment, whatever course he may have intended to take at a later date. But how far both he and the Electress were from being intimidated by the displeasure of the Queen, is shown by the fact that at Thomas Harley’s farewell audience the Elector placed in his hands the outspoken memorandum signed by the Electress and himself on May 7th. As for Sophia, the tone of her letter to Leibniz containing a narrative of the entire transaction is perfectly cool; and in it she as usual expresses the belief that, in spite of her recent illness, Queen Anne will outlive her Heiress Presumptive, and cites the proverb, ‘_krakende Wagens gân lang_.’[184] Her reply to Strafford’s letter entreating her to signify her disapproval of Schütz’s action is unfortunately lost, though its purport was said to have been the same as that of the Elector’s parting declaration to Thomas Harley. The situation seemed far less terrific at Hanover than it did in London, where the Queen’s wrath was visibly ablaze, so that the House of Commons deferred voting payment of the arrears due to the Hanoverian troops, and where it was believed that if the Electoral Prince were after all sent over an invitation to the Pretender would follow. Moreover (though this is a matter into which it is impossible to enter here), the opposite views taken by Oxford and Bolingbroke as to the final issue of the writ undoubtedly helped materially to hasten the fleeting triumph of the younger over the older minister.

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Footnote 183:

Lord Polwarth, eldest son of the Earl of Marchmont and member for
Berwick-on-Tweed (who afterwards became an intimate friend of
Bolingbroke), had kept up a correspondence with the court of Hanover
since his visit there in 1712.

Footnote 184:

I do not know whether anything on the subject is mentioned in the
fifteen letters from Sophia to Lady Colt, said to range from 1681 to
May 15th, 1714, and to have been sold by auction in 1905.

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From what has been said it will appear how greatly the facts of the case are exaggerated and distorted in the tradition attributing the death of the Electress Sophia, which took place at Herrenhausen on June 8th, 1714, to the agitation caused by the letter addressed to her by Queen Anne in connexion with the affair of the writ, and accompanied by two letters from the Queen on the same subject to the Elector and the Electoral Prince. Undeniably, the Queen’s letter to the Electress Sophia, though taking a less severe form of reprimand than the companion missive to the Electoral Prince, was both offensive and insolent; for Queen Anne, who (with the exception of the Prayer-book Order) had taken no step towards admitting the Electress and her descendants into the royal family, could not lay claim to any formal authority over them. That this view was widely taken of the letters may be gathered from the fact that Boyer (Swift’s ‘Whig dog’), who had been taken into custody on a warrant from Bolingbroke for publishing them, was, a few months after the accession of George I, discharged—so that their publication was evidently regarded as having proved serviceable towards that result. Nor was the effect of the letters likely to be mitigated by the honeyed protestations of Oxford, whose system of procedure the letters almost hopelessly traversed, in a communication to the Elector accompanying them. The sharp wit of the Electoral Princess Caroline suspected that it was not he, but Bolingbroke, who was their draughtsman; and there can be little or no doubt as to the correctness of this surmise. It cannot but have been shared by the old Electress, and must have contributed to make her stand firm against a blow contrived by an all but avowed adversary of the lawful claims of herself and her House.

Yet there can be no doubt that at the time the death of the Electress Sophia was very generally connected with, if not directly attributed to, the advent of the Queen’s letters. The very straightforward account transmitted to Marlborough by Molyneux, who had been sent to Hanover by the Duke to counteract the effects of Thomas Harley’s mission, shows the Electress to have been much agitated on the evening of the day (Wednesday, June 6th) on which, about noon, the letters had been delivered to her at Herrenhausen. On the following day, though Molyneux was told she was not well, she ordered him to send copies of the letters to Marlborough;[185] on Friday, June 8th, she seemed well, but was still occupied with the subject and ordering fresh copies of the letters; she dined with the Elector, and in the evening was, according to her habit, walking in the gardens, when rain suddenly fell. As she quickened her speed in order to find a shelter, she dropped down and rapidly passed away. The letters of the Countess of Bückeburg[186] to the Electress’ niece and constant companion during the last fifteen years, the Raugravine Louisa, corroborates this account, and adds one or two significant touches. On the Wednesday the Electress said to the writer of the letter: ‘This affair will certainly make me ill—I shall never get over it’ (_j’y succombrai_). ‘But,’ she added, ‘I shall have this gracious letter printed, so that all the world may see that it will not have been by my fault, if my children lose the three Kingdoms.’ And, on the Friday, though to all appearance in her usual strength, she continued to talk of English affairs with the Electoral Princess. And, since the Electoral Princess Caroline herself informed Leibniz, on June 7th, that the Electress and the Electoral Prince intended to send the Queen’s letters to England, it may be concluded that this high-spirited but rather venturesome design still further excited the old lady. Although the outer world had continued to believe her to be as full of vigour as ever, she had of late begun to take some thought of her health—a notable sign, inasmuch as ordinarily she set no high value on medical advice, being of opinion that no doctor can predict anything with certainty except that a person who died in February will not be ill in March. Probably, she was aware of the tendency to apoplexy which, already thirteen years earlier, her faithful friend Leibniz had observed in her. On the whole, the natural conclusion appears to be that the agitation produced in her by the Queen’s letters, together with her own resolution not to sit still under the affront, contributed to the collapse of a frame enfeebled by advanced old age, but that this trouble was the occasion rather than the cause of her decease. For her epitaph seems to tell the truth when, in perfect agreement with the Countess of Bückeburg’s statement that ‘never was there seen a death more gentle or more happy,’ it describes the Electress’ death as having been not less peaceful than sudden. Her character lies almost open to us in her private letters, and, as she told Leibniz in April, 1713, she had made it a principle to keep her mind tranquil, and not to allow it to be affected by either public or private troubles. As to her death, she had written to him a little later, it would no doubt be a finer affair if, in accordance with his wishes, her remains were interred at Westminster; ‘but the truth is that my mind, which hitherto has managed to rule my body, at present suggests no such sad thoughts to me, and that the talk about the Succession annoys me.’ Read in the way in which so many of her letters ought to be read, as half-ironical, the words just quoted attest the self-control and self-possession that were on the whole the most noteworthy features in the character of this remarkable woman. But neither this passage, nor anything else that remains from her hand, contradicts the belief which is derived from a review of her entire career, that from first to last she proved herself equal to the responsibilities of her life, and that, had she been actually called to the throne, she would have been not less ready than worthy to reign as a Queen.

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Footnote 185:

It was through these copies that the letters seem afterwards to have
become known.

Footnote 186:

This appears to have been the Countess Johanna von der
Lippe-Bückeburg, who, on being divorced from her husband, was besieged
by him in her residence at Stadthagen near Bückeburg, from which he
thought himself entitled to expel her. She appears to have been a
welcome visitor at Herrenhausen, where she told the story of this
siege ‘_fort joliment_.’

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We possess a minute official account of the proceedings after the Electress Sophia’s death—of the sealing-up of her personal effects by the Elector’s orders; of the embalming of the corpse, the night-watch over it, and its transportation on the evening of the following day to Hanover.[187] Unfortunately, the list of those who paid her the last honours at Herrenhausen does not include the names of the ladies and ‘_cavaliers_’ who had been in personal attendance upon her.[188] Her remains were deposited in the chapel of the royal palace—the old church of the Minorites—at Hanover, with proper care and decorum, but, as is formally stated, ‘without ceremony,’ i.e. without any religious service. A record likewise exists of the Court-mourning ordered, and the black draping of the chapel and of the apartments of the late Electress and the members of the Electoral family at Herrenhausen. To make the formal announcement of his mother’s death and of his own assumption of her claims to the British Succession, the Elector George Lewis once more sent Bothmer to London, the real object of the choice being of course the intention that this most capable diplomatist should, while keeping on good terms with the Queen’s ministers, concert further action with the Whig leaders. On June 15th, the Elector signed certain powers for the event of the Queen’s death, which would have given to his envoy an authority superior to that of the Lords Justices; but, as theirs rested on an Act of Parliament, the special authority entrusted to Bothmer was really as futile as that which had in similar terms been previously conferred on the elder Schütz, Grote, and the younger Schütz in turn. Bothmer’s reports show that Bolingbroke was believed to be acting in the interest of the Pretender; and of the truth of this charge, after he had succeeded in ousting Oxford from office, the latter, who had himself continued to be suspected of Jacobitism, personally assured the Elector’s envoy. On the part of Queen Anne, the Earl of Clarendon, a Tory Peer of high connexion, but of marked incapacity,[189] arrived at Hanover on July 7th to express to the Elector the Queen’s sympathy with his loss. Clarendon, who had been entrusted with an extraordinary mission to Hanover before the occurrence of the Electress’ death, also brought with him an answer to the Electoral memorandum of May 7th, drafted by Bolingbroke, which declined all the demands made in the memorandum. Clarendon was charged with some polite explanations; but the Elector had no intention of trusting either to these or to the chapter of accidents. With an alertness rarely shown by him before his mother’s death in regard to matters connected with the Succession, he promptly caused a fresh instrument of Regency comprising his own nominations of Lords Justices to be prepared: and from this revised list Marlborough was omitted—either because he was not in England, or in consequence of a knowledge on the part of the Elector of the double game which even now the Duke was playing. At Hanover things seemed to be taking their usual course; but the visit paid to the Elector early in August by his nephew, the new King Frederick William I of Prussia, was not without its significance. For George Lewis was already taking thought of the safety of his Electorate in the event of his being called to England, and welcomed the assurances of support received by him from the King of Prussia and other German Princes. They could not know, but they might well suspect, the secret offers of assistance which Louis XIV had made to Queen Anne through Bolingbroke, and which the latter had contingently accepted. It was a few days after the termination of the King of Prussia’s visit that the news arrived in Hanover of the death of Queen Anne on August 1st.

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Footnote 187:

Malortie, _Der Hannoversche Hof_, &c., pp. 225 _sqq._

Footnote 188:

The continuous series of the letters addressed by her youngest son,
Duke Ernest Augustus, to his friend J. F. D. von Wendt, breaks off in
November 1713.

Footnote 189:

He had, as Lord Cornbury, been Governor of New Jersey and New York,
where he left no honoured name behind him.

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The events which had crowded on one another between the death of the Electress Sophia and that of Queen Anne belong, not to Sophia’s biography, but to that of the sovereign whose Heir Presumptive was now Sophia’s son. That this heir was a ruling foreign prince, whom no immediate descent or early associations connected with the House of Stewart, and whose own dealings (apart from his mother’s) with English politicians had been to all intents and purposes entirely with Whigs, could not but intensify the aversion from the Hanoverian Succession entertained not only by the Jacobites but also, though in a less degree, by those of the Tories whose political sentiments were in nearest touch with theirs. The bonds of party union had just been drawn closer among the Tories at large by the Schism Act, and the Church had been more decisively than before rallied to the Government. But even so, Oxford was still unable to make up his mind to risk everything by inviting or allowing the Pretender to appear on English ground. Hence, not quite a fortnight after the Electress Sophia’s death, the proclamation against the Pretender was issued, and, a fortnight later (July 9th), Parliament was prorogued to an early date in August.

During the interval, it was manifest, the Queen must make up her mind between her two chief counsellors, of whom one still thought it possible to tack and tack about, while the other was still hoping for a wind so strong and straight that he might drift before it into the desired port. The Queen decided for Bolingbroke, and, on July 27th, Oxford was dismissed from office. Bolingbroke’s moment had come, but he was unequal to its call. Instead of bringing the Pretender to England, he thought that even now there remained time for him to weld the Tory party still more closely together, by means of his Church policy above all, and to form a Jacobite Ministry that would be in readiness at the critical moment, while in any case the Whigs must be prevented from bringing over the Elector or the Electoral Prince in the interval. Bolingbroke and those in his confidence were very hopeful in this their brief day of authority; but the Whigs were more than hopeful—they were prepared.[190] The organisation set on foot by their leaders overspread the country, and the very symbol or token of action was agreed upon, while Marlborough was waiting at Ostend to resume the command of the army. And, throughout the great body of the middle classes in England—among the Nonconformists in particular—a ready expectancy awaited the accomplishment of the Protestant Succession.

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Footnote 190:

The Whig ‘plot’ to which Mr. Sichel refers in his _Life of
Bolingbroke_ p. 351, as revealed by Chesterfield at a later date,
seems to belong to March 1714, when the Queen had (on the 11th) a
sudden attack of erysipelas.

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