Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/334

320 granted a right of appeal to a higher court. Finally, they exempted tutors in noblemen's families, noblemen being supposed incapable of countenancing any other than teachers of court principles. Stanhope seized on this to extend the privilege to the members of the house of commons, arguing that, as many members of the commons were connected with noble families, they must have an equal claim for the education of their children in sound principles. This was an exquisite bit of satire, but it was unavailing. The Hanoverian tories, headed by lord Anglesea, moved that the act should extend to Ireland, where, as the native population was almost wholly catholic, and therefore schismatic in the eye of the established church, the bill would have almost entirely extinguished education. The bill was carried on the 10th of June by a majority only of seventy-seven against seventy- two, and would not have been carried at all except for the late creation of tory peers.

The Jacobites were greatly elated by the passing of this infamous bill, especially as it was the work of their ally, Bolingbroke. They talked very boastfully, and they proceeded to a most audacious insolence of action; they commenced recruiting for the pretender. Two Irish officers, bearing passes from the earl of Middleton, were arrested, one at Gravesend and another at Deal, engaged in this impudent work—a circumstance which created a great alarm, as showing that the pretender now calculated confidently on the favour of the queen. These men, Hugh and Kelly, it was asserted, had been endeavouring to enlist men in the city, under the very eye of parliament and the queen. The Hanoverian tories now again joined the whigs, and their demands compelled the government to issue a proclamation offering a reward of five thousand pounds for the apprehension of the pretender should he attempt to land anywhere in Great Britain. Wharton proposed that the words "alive or dead" should be inserted in the proclamation, but the queen rejected them with horror. The house of lords passed a resolution increasing the reward to one hundred thousand pounds. It was made high treason, too, to enlist or be enlisted for the pretender. Bolingbroke, however, assured Iberville, a French agent, that "it would make no difference;" and that the queen regarded the whole as a mere placebo to the public was evinced by her immediately afterwards receiving the earl of Mar, a most determined Jacobite, at court on his marriage with lady Francis Pierrepoint, sister of the celebrated lady Mary Wortley Montague, and soon after making this man one of her ministers of state, who, in the very next year, headed the Jacobite rebellion.

The queen closed the session on the 9th of July, assuring the parliament that her chief concern was for the preservation of our holy religion and the liberty of the subject—this liberty having been most grievously invaded by her through the Schism Bill. But the dissolution of her ministry was also fast approaching. The hostility of Oxford and Bolingbroke was becoming intolerable, and paralysed all the proceedings of government. Swift, in writing to lord Peterborough at this crisis, says—"I never led a life so thoroughly uneasy as I do at present. We have never continued above four days to the same view, or four minutes with any manner of concert. Our situation is so bad that our enemies could not, without abundance of conviction and ability, have placed us so ill if we had left it entirely to their management." He adds—"The queen is pretty well at present; but the least disorder she has puts us all in alarm, and when it is over we act as if she were immortal. Neither is it possible to persuade people to make any preparation against an evil day."

In such a state of things the condition of the ministers themselves must, of course, be miserable; and it is some satisfaction to hear a man like Bolingbroke—a man without religion and without any principle but ambition, who, with talents capable of saving, was only employing them to ruin his country, by bringing in all that it had cost the revolution to cast out—complaining thus to Swift:—"If my grooms did not live a happier life than I have done this great while, I am sure they would quit my service." As for Oxford, he felt himself going, and had not the boldness and resolution to do what would ruin his rival. He coquetted with the whigs, Cowper, Halifax, and others; he wrote to Marlborough, and did all but throw himself into the arms of the opposition. Had he had the spirit to do that he might have been saved; but it was not in his nature. He might then have uncovered to the day the whole monstrous treason of Bolingbroke; but he had himself so far and so often, though never heartily or boldly, tampered with treason, that he dreaded Bolingbroke's retaliation. Bothmar, the Hanoverian envoy, saw clearly that Oxford was lost. He wrote home that there were numbers who would have assisted him to bring down his rival, but that he could not be assisted, because, according to the English maxim, he did not choose to assist himself. Swift endeavoured, but in vain, to reconcile his two jarring friends; and Oxford finally utterly lost himself by offending the great favourite, lady Masham. He had been imprudent enough to oppose her wishes, and refuse her some matter of interest. He now was treated by her with such marked indignity, that Dr. Arbuthnot declared that he would no more have suffered what he had done than he would have sold himself to the galleys. Still, with his singular insensibility to insult, he used to dine at the same table with her frequently, and also in company with Bolingbroke, too. There, in presence of his rival, watching for the moment of his fall, she would huff him and taunt him; and at length, on the 14th of July, she broke out upon him, saying, "You never did the queen any service, and you are incapable of doing her any." Oxford replied, "I have been abused by lies and misrepresentations; but I will leave some people as low as I found them." Yet he went to sup with her at her house the same evening! There the quarrel must have been renewed, for it is related that the altercation did not cease till two o'clock in the morning. But the lord treasurer, instead of leaving the favourite low, now found himself left low. Anne demanded his resignation. The dragon, as Arbuthnot styled him, held the white staff with a deadly gripe; but, on the 27th of July, he was compelled to relinquish it, and that afternoon her majesty stated to the council her reasons for dismissing him. His confidant and creature, Erasmus Lewis, himself thus records them:—"The queen has told all the lords the reasons of her parting with him, viz., that he neglected all business; that he was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he