STANHOPE'S REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE.*
IT is sometimes supposed that Lord Macaulay's History of England includes the whole of the reign of William III., since it contains the account of the last illness ahd death of that King ; but this is only a detached passage, and the events of the last year or two of his reign remained unwritten. This book includes that period, and represents the reign of Queen Anne until the Peace of Utrecht. Lord Stanhope says it has been written "as a connecting link be- tween the close of Lord Macaulay's History of England and the commencement of that from the Peace of Utrecht which I pub- lished while still bearing the title of Mahon." This was a laudable and ambitious desire, but we must confess that whilst we approved the aim, we were not sanguine as to the result ; the undertaking was too bold and impracticable, and in no other sense but that of actual time can we regard it as the proposed "connecting link." Lord Macaulay's eloquence—and as he spoke he wrote—has been com- pared to an express train that did not stop even at the chief stations ; we would say of Lord Stanhope's writing that it is like a parliamentary train that stops everywhere, is very crowded, and very slow from its great weight. Parliaments and campaigns, statesmen and soldiers, all travel along the same low-level line of bare truth, with little landscape of illustration to relieve the eye, little distraction of anecdote to refresh the mind ; readers will complain of the sudden change of pace and temperature, and we sympathise with them. It was unfortunate that some one with a more brilliant and flowing pen did not take up the thread of the narrative, particularly when we remember how rich the period was with everything that could dazzle and inspire.
Lord Stanhope is now well known as an author. Great ac- curacy of detail and the sternest impartiality distinguish him from and elevate him above other writers, but, as has been elsewhere remarked, his:style is not easy and is now and then unpleasantly stiff ; his writing wants a more graceful and fluent dressing, a more historical garb ; it is too much of a compilation, too bare of ornament, too wound-up. Lord Stanhope cannot rise for a moment into pictorial language or ready metaphor, but he does not, on the other hand, wander from his subject nor sink into the monotony of a diary ; he has his facts laid out before him, carefully arranged and labelled so that he may grasp them and mould them into shape ; the mass of informa- tion collected is enormous, yet it remains unfashioned ; like the precious stones stored away in the drawers of a jeweller's shop, his facts wait for a clever and tasteful setting to show them off, whilst * History of England, comprising the Reign of Queen Anne Vali: the Peace of Utrecht,
1701-1718. By Earl Stanhope. London: John Murray. 1870.
in the meantime they suffer from overcrowding and want of con- trast. We have the body of history well developed, but it lacks the fire and spirit to animate it. Having said this, we have said all we can against the style of the book ; its other points are good and numerous, and show that its author has all the fine qualities of the historian. Of the greatness and speciality of Queen Anne's reign he writes :—
" As the Ancients might boast of their Augustan age; as in England men point with pride to the age of Elizabeth, in Italy to the age of Leo the Tenth, and in France to the age of Louis the Fourteenth, so again among the English a halo has gathered round the age of Anne. Suc- ceeding as she did a Dutch and to be succeeded by a German king, she holds in our literature an especial and an English place ; and thus full many works of genius and renown, though they may have been com- menced under William or continued under George, are taken by the world to be centred in her reign. Certainly it was an illustrious period, a period not easily paralleled elsewhere, that could combine the victories of Marlborough with the researches of Newton—the states- manship of Somers with the knight-errantry of Peterborough—the pub- lication of Clarendon's History with the composition of Burnot's,—the eloquence of Bolingbroke in Parliament and of Atterbnry in the pulpit, with the writings in prose and verse of Swift and Addison, of Pope and Prior."
From this cluster of illustrious names that of Marlborough stands forth alone, as the one around which all others circled and to which all others bowed,—' from Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow.' The extraordinary influence he possessed in his own and other countries could not be estimated in his own time, but it is now allowed that he was the ruling, guiding genius of his age, and that to him England owes most of her subsequent pros- perity. Of his career as general politician and diplomatist Lord Stanhope writes with great judgment and accuracy ; dispassionate in his view, so far as he gives it, of the great services Marlborough performed, he has sought out facts and investigated authorities with a diligence and care that will weigh with his readers and secure their confidence ; without inquiring too closely the motives or judging too nicely the consequences, he has detailed consecutively the numerous passages which make up the history of the man said to be the greatest General and the greatest Minister that our country, or perhaps any other, has produced.
"It was he who gave to the Germanic Empire another century of life, since but for him it would have ended in 1704 instead of 1806. It was he who step by stop—siege after siege and battle after battle—wrested the Low Countries from the portentous union of France and Spain. It was he who was the soul, the animating genius of the whole confederacy, not merely in the army where he commanded but in all where he advised. But above all our gratitude as Englishmen is due to him because he so 'signally retrieved' (let us adopt those words from the Commons' votes the ancient glory of England. That glory had been dimmed during the ignoble reigns of James I. and Charles II., while William who succeeded them had upon the Continent far more of merit than success. To Marlborough beyond all others belongs the praise of bringing back to our arms the full lustre that beamed upon them in the days of the Edwards and the Henries."
For a moment we must revert to the darker side of his character. The evidence of treachery on two important occasions is too strong to be palliated, even by the too general practice of other politicians of his age. His secret disclosure of the Brest project in 1694, by which the expedition failed and hundreds of lives were lost, is well known and rests on his own letter to King James ; of the second charge, Lord Stanhope says the public are not so fully aware, viz., that Marlborough being in 1715, in name at least, Commander- n-Chief for King George, sent over in secret a sum of money to assist the exiled Prince in his invasion of this kingdom ; this charge rests on a letter from Bolingbroke to the Pretender, whose Secretary of State he then was, in which occurs the passage, "And the Marquis d'Effiat told me the very sum which Marlborough has advanced to you ;" and though this evidence is only indirect, Lord Stanhope is himself convinced that this second charge is sufficiently proved. To the imputation of avarice, shown alike in his large accumulations and in his petty savings, we can find no better reply than that of Bolingbroke, "He was so great a man that I forgot he had that defect." Alany are the writers who have endeavoured to unravel his perplexing character, and to determine
for good or evil the motives that prompted his conduct ; the diver- sity of their conclusions has proved how difficult was their task,
and Lord Stanhope has found it more impracticable than the rest ; he has shrunk from giving a verdict at all ; having separated the good material from the bad and placed each in the scales, he leaves the reader to decide which way the balance turns.
Without doubt the most readable and interesting part of this book is to be found in the last chapter. Politics at home and abroad are abandoned, except where directly associated with literature, and we are taken into the arena of literature and social life ; there we find that the hard fighting of the tongue and sword was exchanged for the fierce and bitter warfare of the pen,
and that this strife of pamphlets, of satires, and of libels was carried on with no less acrimony than ability. There is too a capital account of the rise and fall of the Taller and Spectator, and the share that Addison and Steele took in them, together with a review of the period so rich in political and other writing.
The concluding remarks upon the present state of society as compared with that of Queen Anne's time are needlessly lugubrious. Lord Stanhope says :— " The tendency of the people in Queen Anne's reign was I think . . . . . `to dwell safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree.' The tendency of the present age, unless I much mistake it, would be rather to contend by ingenious arguments that the vine and fig are not the boat of all possible fruit-trees—that we ought immediately to root them up and to plant in their stead some saplings of another kind Is there any real happiness in such constant yearning and striving for something other than exists? Is it good to live in an age when everything is being improved away off the face of the earth ?"
Certainly not, but Lord Stanhope's " everything " means only "somethings," and includes a good many things better lost than saved. Again, when speaking of the liberal professions and the employments in the Civil Service during the reign of Queen Anne, and after telling us there was then more of equality between the supply and the demand, Lord Stanhope continues :— " How greatly the times have changed! At present there are few things more distressing to any one who desires to see general prosperity and content prevail than to find start up whenever any opening in any career is made known, not one or two, but ten or twenty candidates. Every one of these twenty may be in many cases perfectly well qualified to fill the place that he seeks, yet only one can be chosen. What then is to become of the nineteen ? Of this superabundance, however, increasing from year to year, the cause is twofold and easy to assign. The general spread of first-class education has on this point perhaps been no unmixed advantage. It has sent forth a crowd of persons of both sexes well qualified by their position for any liberal profession or place of intellectual labour ; and it has in the same measure disinclined them for other posts less literate, or of less rank in the social scale, which in former days would have contented them. Thus it happens that while the number of claimants has immensely increased, the number of places to which they aspire has, at least in some departments, grown less. It is certainly a great practical hardship, such as we do not trace under Queen Anne or under the first Georges, that a young man entering life with a good character and careful education should see every profession overcrowded, every avenue of advancement hemmed in, that he should be unable in so many cases to earn his bread, and be cast back for subsistence on his family. There is something very grievous both to himself and others in this not his wilful but his compulsory idleness."
We would willingly quote more of his remarks on so many of the topics of the day in which politicians and benefactors and others were then as now deeply engrossed for the public welfare, but we have not space. Much praise is due to Lord Stanhope for the trouble he has taken with this work, and for the pains he has been at to represent people and things as they really were and from an unprejudiced point of view ; the extreme care to place all facts before his readers, his great anxiety to write without bias, and the close attention he has paid to recognized authorities, will claim such a value for his book and a name for himself as will amply repay him for his labours.
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