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 from the place of captain of the yeomen of the guard (13 June 1711). On 14 Feb. 1711–12 he was charged in the House of Commons with having exceeded his instructions in the negotiation of the barrier treaty. With characteristic frankness he admitted the substantial justice of the accusation (see the instructions in Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Rep. App. i. 36), and, the treaty being condemned as prejudicial to British commerce, he was voted an enemy to his country. At Utrecht (1713) the treaty was revised in a sense much less advantageous to Holland [see, (1672–1739)]. In opposition Townshend did not scruple to countenance the movement for the repeal of the union with Scotland elicited by the introduction of the malt tax into that country (24 May 1713). He also sought to harass the government by raising a debate (8 April 1714) on the practice of pensioning the highland clans, which, though designed only to keep them quiet, it was then convenient to represent as a covert fostering of Jacobitism. He signed the protests against the restraining order under which Ormonde had suspended operations in Flanders, opposed the schism bill, and, in concert with the other leading whig lords, lent his aid in committee to the remodelling of Bolingbroke's bill declaring enlisting and recruiting for the pretender to be high treason (28 May, 4 and 24 June 1714). Through John Robethon [q. v.], whose acquaintance he had made at The Hague, he was in touch with Hanoverian politics, and was thus able to act as intermediary between the electoral court and the whig junto. He was one of the regents nominated by the elector, and took an important though not a prominent part in concerting the arrangements preliminary to his accession. On that event he was appointed secretary of state for the northern department (17 Sept. 1714), and sworn of the privy council (1 Oct.) (Addit. MS. 22207, f. 325). At the coronation he was offered but declined an earldom. The support of the Hanoverians Bernstorff and Bothmer gave him the start of Halifax and Marlborough in the race for power; and in Sir Robert Walpole, for whom he procured the place of paymaster-general, he had a staunch ally in the House of Commons. Though, with a wisdom which the event justified, he advised the abandonment of the charge of high treason for that of misdemeanour in the case of Oxford, he concurred in the main in the proceedings against the negotiators of the peace of Utrecht, and was responsible for the attachment (11 Jan. 1714–15) of Strafford's papers, a violation of ambassadorial privilege which he justified on 1 Sept. by the plea of necessity. On the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion his vigilance suggested the arrest (21 Sept.) of Sir William Wyndham [q. v.] To his firmness was due the subsequent dismissal of the Duke of Somerset [see, sixth ]. His energy was unflagging (Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. iv. 155–87); and the ruthless proscription which followed the suppression of the insurrection was prompted by the same relentless spirit which he had previously manifested (1 June) in the decisive rejection of a petition for the discharge of the unfortunate persons, whom he described as ‘execrable wretches,’ still detained in prison on suspicion of complicity in the plot of 1696 for the assassination of William III [see ].

Of the Septennial Act he heartily approved, both as ‘the greatest support possible to the liberty of the country,’ and as a means of enabling the government ‘to speak in a more peremptory manner to France’ (, Walpole, i. 76–7, ii. 62).

In the duchies of Bremen and Verden, part of the dismembered Swedish empire purchased from Denmark by George I in his electoral capacity in 1715, Townshend hoped to find an accession of strength not only to Hanover, but to Holland and even England. The subsequent intervention of England in the naval war between Denmark and Sweden he therefore deplored and restricted, and was reconciled to it only by the discovery of the Jacobite intrigues of the Swedish ambassador, Gyllenborg (October 1716) [see, (1660?–1749)]. Recognising the establishment of Austrian ascendency in the catholic Netherlands as a political necessity, he co-operated with Stanhope in the difficult negotiations which resulted in the definitive barrier treaty (1715) [see, first ]. So wedded indeed was he at this time to the traditional whig foreign policy as to ignore the fact that the possibility of a schism between the two branches of the house of Bourbon in Louis XV's minority, rendered politic an understanding with the regent Orleans. Hence, while he pressed forward the negotiations for the defensive alliance with the emperor, he was somewhat slow to approve, though eventually he did approve, the pending negotiations with the regent, the supervision of which fell to Stanhope (, Walpole, ii. 50). The States-General, whose junction with England and Austria was a natural sequel of the barrier treaty, were willing to accede to both