Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/318

310 and go on to inform the present age, in some facts, which the great orator and politician thinks fit to misrepresent, with the utmost degree either of natural, or wilful ignorance. He asserts, that in the duke of Ormond's campaign, "after a suspension of arms between Great Britain and France proclaimed at the head of the armies, the British troops, in the midst of the enemy's garrisons, withdrew themselves from their confederates." The fact is directly otherwise; for the British troops were most infamously deserted by the confederates, after all that could be urged by the duke of Ormond and the earl of Strafford, to press the confederate generals not to forsake them. The duke was directed to avoid engaging in any action, until he had farther orders, because an account of the king of Spain's renunciation was every day expected: this, the Imperialists and Dutch knew well enough; and therefore proposed to the duke, in that very juncture, to engage the French, for no other reason but to render desperate all the queen's measures toward a peace. Was not the certain possession of Dunkirk, of equal advantage to the uncertainty of a battle? A whole campaign under the duke of Marlborough, with such an acquisition, although at the cost of many thousand lives, and several millions of money, would have been thought very gloriously ended.

Neither, after all, was it a new thing, either in the British general, or the Dutch deputies, to refuse fighting, when they did not approve it. When the duke of Marlborough was going to invest Bouchain, the deputies of the States pressed him in vain to engage the enemy; and one of them was so far discontented upon his grace's refusal, that he presently became