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 for each thought mainly of their own interests, and quarrelled with the others continually. But Marlborough thought of only one thing—how to beat the French, and very handsomely did he beat them. At Blenheim, 1704, Ramillies, 1706, Oudenarde, 1708, Malplaquet, 1709, he won victories as complete as those of Edward III and Henry V. And our redcoats were foremost in all these battles and won immortal glory. By 1710 we had swept the French out of Germany and Flanders, and were well on the road to Paris. Our navy had been equally successful; we had beaten a great French fleet off Malaga in Spain, and had taken Gibraltar and the Isle of Minorca. In America our colonists, with little aid from home, had begun to bite away the frontier of the French colony of Canada. All looked like ending in a Treaty of Peace of great glory for Great Britain.

But in Great Britain itself things were not going so well. ‘Politics’ had now become a sort of unpleasant cheating game, between a lot of great families of the nobility, Whigs on one side, Tories on the other. Each party strove to control the House of Commons by getting its own friends elected to it, and thus to get itself into office. The Tories, who were also the ‘High Church’ men, hated, or pretended to hate, the war and the Duke of Marlborough. They said, ‘It is a Whig war, a war for the interests of the merchants, many of them Dissenters too, the brutes! It is a war for foreigners. It is all the fault of those who made that wicked Revolution of 1688 and turned out our natural King. Anne, of course, is a native, but who is to come after her?—a disgusting, fat German!’

Moreover, the war was expensive, and, whatever