The End of Queen Aime
England Under Queen Anne. III. The Peace and the Protestant Succession. By George Macaulay Trevelyan. 0.31. (Li:I:igniting. 21s.)
%Vim this volume, Professor Trevelyan's masterly survey of Queen Anne's reign is complete. Finis coronat opus. Queen Anne is dead ; but in the vivid pages of his trilogy the drums and tramplings, the events and intrigues of her reign at home and abroad survive. To the professed student of history, as well as to the common reader, this volume, like its predecessors Blenheim and Ramillies and the Union with Scotland, needs no recommendation. The brilliance
of Professor Trevelyan's exposition, his critical and, on the whole, strictly impartial judgement, and the fairness of his conclusions are evident alike in the text, the notes and
appendices. In England Under Queen Anne he has restored to the advantage of every type of reader the all but lost
art of reconstructing and inanimating the dry bones of the past.
The story of the last years of Queen Anne's life is, in Professor Trevelyan's words, " highly complicated in detail, but intensely dramatic in the march of events." Its main outlines, however, stand out perfectly distinctly in his absorbing narrative. They include the last battles of Marl- borough's campaigns on the Continent—the costly defeat of Villars at Malplaquet and the bloodless victory of the Ne Plus Ultra Lines ; the Captain-General's dishonourable dismissal ; the party struggle, initiated by the Sacheverell
trial, of those " vile and 'enOrnious. factions " the Whigs and Tories ; the celebrated Change of Ministry, which swept the
Tories back to power under Harley and St. John ; and the negotiations for peace with France, which became desperately involved in the question of the Succession. Many of the details of these events, though not by any means the most significant of them, will be familiar to anyone who has read Swift's "Journal to Stella" or " The Conduct of the Allies," which did more for the cause of peace, the restoration of the fortunes of the Tory party and the damnation of the Whigs than any other speech or pamphlet. But Professor Trevelyan produces evidence from the archives at.the Quai d'Orsay, which were not available to Swift or indeed to later historians until quite recently, to show that Swift and his understrappers and in fact the world at large were completely in the dark about the secret negotiations which Oxford and Bolingbroke were carrying on with Saint Germains. " The cause of Peace," Professor Trevelyan remarks, " and the cause of the Pretender became identified in the minds of politicians." Thus, while to most men and women the possibility of the restoration of a Protestant James, when his sister died, was at the best a dream and folly of expectation of the great country houses, it was a lively hope, even a positive certainty to the leaders of Government. The peace, which Bolingbroke, with this happy end in view, arranged at Utrecht, could only be purchased, therefore, at the price of disloyalty to the Act of Settlement and the House of Hanover. Boling- broke was prepared to pay it. It was a disgraceful compact and a treacherous one at that, even admitting that politics are above morals. On its account, we betrayed our allies, and the Dutch in particular, brushing aside the Barrier Treaty we had made with them in 1709 like a scrap of paper ; and betrayed, also, with the notorious " Restraining Orders " the men who had won for us the battles of Blenheim, Ramillies and Malplaquet. And yet, in the result, one is forced to
agree with Professor Trevelyan, who .does not attempt to palliate Bolingbroke's conduct of affairs, that when all is said he produced a peace more .,.satisfactory- than any other that has ended a general European conflict in modern times." With the negotiations at Versailles still poisoning inter- national polities, this assertion seems relatively true enough. The course of English history might well have been changed if Swift had not been carried away by personal hatred of the Whigs, and if he had known exactly what was dictating the policy of the men he so blindly served. Their duplicity could not have survived his savage indignation. But it is, idle to speculate.
Having drawn up the terms of the peace and dictated them to the allies who had fought with us to save Europe from a. French hegemony, .Bolingbroke, with the uneasy -support of.- Oxford, spent the interval between Utrecht and the Queen's
-death- in a feverish effort to-bring back the Pretender. For- tunately for England—and here Professor Trevelyan's moderate whiggism peeps out—James flatly refused to apostasize ; more important, if not necessarily more for, tunate, was the fact that the Whigs—the rulers of the City— still represented the country in matters of commerce and over the question of the Succession. The remaining months of the reign were, for Bolingbroke, a frenzied race against time. The way seemed clear enough. The Schism Act— designed to level the most formidable obstacle in his path— due to become law the very day on which, by a providential coincidence, the Queen died ; the Queen's intransigence towards the House of Hanover and her refusal to admit one of its representatives into the country while she, was
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alive ; the certain support of Louis XIV, equally worried about his successor, on behalf of Old Rowley's nephew—all these favourable signs encouraged Bolingbroke to proceed: But, as Professor Trevelyan shows, he had miscalculated, the strength of the forces arrayed against him. The closing scene—the final meetings of the cabinet at Kensington Palace, the last of the Stuart kings, tired out and friendless,. passing away with embittered memories of her old favourites, Sarah, Godolphin and the Mashams, the comings and goings between the Council Chamber and the royal deathbed, the feeble fingers signing for the last time a warrant for the. appointment of Oxford's successor—is a fitting and deeply impressive climax to an anxious and troubled period of English history. Bolingbroke had been beaten by death and the Protestant Succession was secure. The work that Shaftesbury, had taken up nearly half a century before was finished, and the party lie had led to defeat at Oxford his successors were soon to bring back in triumph to Westminster. Queen Anna was dead, and with her were laid for ever the fearful spectres, of Popery and the Pretender. " The understanding between the House of Hanover and the Established Church was to be the true basis of peace and stability " in the years to come,, the basis of that"' classic calm " which we feel to be charac- teristic of England in the eighteenth century.
JOHN HAYWARD.
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