Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/301

A.D. 1712.] illiberal and unjust measure, they were weak enough, in the hope of strengthening their party, to permit it to pass. The dissenters, greatly exasperated at this treachery, abandoned the whig cause; the promised proselytes did not come over, and lord Dartmouth adds that "lord Nottingham himself had the mortification afterwards to see his bill repulsed with some scorn, and himself not much better treated."

In this state of affairs closed the year 1711. During the Christmas holiday the ministry matured several measures for the advancement of their party. It was necessary to augment the number of their friends in the house of lords. The Scotch lords had generally voted with them as tories, and there had been an attempt to increase their number in that house, by giving English titles to such Scotch peers as had not seats in the lords. The whigs saw this stratagem, and resolutely opposed it. The duke of Hamilton was created duke of Brandon, but when he went to take his seat as an English peer, there was a strong opposition. The whig lords represented that their house might soon be crowded by Scotch lords with English names, for there were plenty of them poor enough to be ready to take bribes and vote as government pleased. They declared the constitution to be in danger, and that there ought to be no extension of the number of Scottish peers qualified to sit in that house, prescribed by the act of union. The right of the duke to take his seat was rejected by a majority of five. The whigs had not been so rigorous when the duke of Queensberry claimed his seat on being made duke of Dover; and the Scottish lords were so greatly incensed at this partiality, and at the remarks on the poverty and venality of their order, that they absented themselves for some time both from court and parliament; and it was only by well applied blandishment, on the part of the queen, and, as it was asserted, as well applied money, that they were won back again.

But, with the aid of the Scottish peers, the ministers were still in a minority in the lords, and they sought to remedy this by inducing the queen to create twelve new peers. Lord Dartmouth, in his notes to Burnet, expresses his astonishment on seeing the queen suddenly take from her pocket a list of twelve new lords, and ordering him to bring warrants for them. Dartmouth, unprepared for so sweeping a measure, asked whether her majesty intended to have them all made at once; and Anne replied, Certainly; that the whigs and lord Marlborough did all they could to distress her; that she had made fewer lords than any of her predecessors, and that she must help herself as well as she could. Amongst these new peers were again two Scotchmen, but not peers, only the sons of peers, and the husband of her favourite, Mrs. Masham. The claims of the favourite herself to this distinction were not remarkable, but they were quite as good as lady Marlborough's had been, for she was precisely of the same family and original standing; but Masham himself had no victories like Marlborough's to plead in his favour. He was the very poor son of a ruined cavalier baronet, and, though he was made a general, he was of the feather-bed school only; and, if we are to trust lady Marlborough's not good authority where the Mashams are concerned, he was "a soft, good-natured, insignificant man, always making low bows to everybody, and ready to skip to open a door." He was, however, of royal descent, being descended legitimately from George Plantagenet, duke of Clarence, through Margaret, countess of Salisbury. Anne, therefore, was fully justified in this respect.

The twelve were—lord Compton, eldest son of the earl of Northampton; lord Bruce, eldest son of the earl of Aylesbury; lord Duplin, eldest son of the earl of Kinnoul, who was married to one of the lord treasurer's daughters, made baron Hay; Thomas, viscount Windsor of Ireland, made baron Mountjoy in the Isle of Wight; the son of lord Paget, made baron Burton; Sir Thomas Mansell, of Margam, county of Glenmorgan, made baron Mansell; Sir Thomas Willoughby, of Nottingham, made baron Middleton; Sir Thomas Trevor, chief justice of common pleas, made baron Trevor; George Grenville, made baron Lansdowne, of Biddeford, in Cornwall; Samuel Masham, of Oates, in Essex, made baron Masham; Thomas Foley, of Whitby, in Worcestershire, made baron Foley; and Allen Bathurst, of Battlesdon, in the county of Bedford, made baron Bathurst. A motion of adjournment to the 14th of the month being made immediately after the introduction of these new peers, to which the opposition was opposed, they enabled the government to carry it by all voting for it. The witty lord Wharton did not spare a joke upon them at the time, by asking one of them, when the question was put, whether "they voted by their foreman?" as though they had been a jury.

The disgrace of Marlborough was now completed. On the 21st of December he had been charged in the house of commons with having made use of his command of the army to make enormous sums of money at the expense of the men; that he had appropriated more than half a million by taking two and a half per cent. out of the pay of the foreign troops maintained by England, and sixty-three thousand pounds from Sir Solomon de Medina and Antonio Alvarez Machado, the Jew contractors for bread for the army; that his secretary, Cardonel, had exacted five hundred gold ducats from the contractors each time a new contract was signed, all which had to be taken out of the quality of the food or clothing of the soldiers.

In order to move the queen's indignation, care was taken that some of the soldiers who had returned from the Netherlands should throw their old clothing over the wall of the queen's garden; and equal care was taken that these miserable garments should be brought to the queen to let her see what sort of defence the avarice of the general and of the contractors had provided for the poor soldiers against the damp and cold of the marshy low countries; and Anne is said to have wept over them. She was consequently soon moved to forget all the glory which the victories of Marlborough had shed on her reign, and to remember only his sins. She therefore wrote to him, informing him that, as there was a serious charge made against him by the commissioners of accounts, she thought it best to dismiss him from all his employments in order that the matter might be impartially investigated. Nor did she neglect to add that the conduct of his wife towards herself had made her more willing to adopt this measure.

Marlborough, in defence, pleaded to the queen as he had to the commissioners of inquiry, that he had appropriated