was. William chose to be king, and the force of circumstances decided in his favour. Parliament had virtually no choice but to accept him. When, then, keeping his Dutchmen on guard in London, he distributed all military commands over Englishmen to his Dutch officers, and lavished English estates on his Dutch followers, it must have seemed to Marlborough as if the precise dangers which the Non-jurors, and especially Turner, had foreseen, had been realized. Glad enough himself to escape service in Ireland whilst James was in the field there, Marlborough may well have been content to serve his first campaign during William's reign under Waldeck. But when Schomberg had done nothing in Ireland, whilst Waldeck's only success in Flanders had been due to Marlborough, it was not he only, or he apparently in the first instance, who began to resent the fact that everywhere only Dutchmen were favoured, whilst the best work was done by Englishmen. William's judgment as a soldier was too sound, his appreciation of Marlborough's ability too great, and his sense of the importance to him of the capture of Cork and Kinsale too keen, for him not to accept eagerly Marlborough's proposal to reduce them. When, however, Marlborough's brilliant campaign was brought to a successful issue, the fact that for services in Ireland large grants were again made to Dutchmen, whilst Marlborough's services were ignored, and a specifically promised Garter was withheld from him, was a national as much as a personal offence.

Marlborough's position under William now became very much what Churchill's had been under James. His action appears to have been the same in both cases. He warned William of the risk he was running just as he had warned James. He told William that he was fully content with his own position, but that the English people exceedingly disliked foreigners being put over their heads, and the distribution of forfeited estates and crown heirlooms among foreigners. William, like James, bitterly resented his advice. Like James, though not to the same extent, he had to submit to grave humiliation for rejecting it. These are not the ways of one suffering from a 'deep and incurable moral disease which had infected the whole man.'* Had his original purpose and design been to play the traitor, it is obvious that he would have worn the smoothest and most flattering exterior to William. No one could have done it with more grace and skill. He did nothing of the kind. Apart from this wise and bold counsel, he had deeply offended both William and Mary by supporting

* Macaulay, vol. vi. p. 64.

the

the Parliamentary grant to Anne, which they had resisted. Since at this time Mary's life appeared to be a much better one than her sister's, it is difficult to see how personal motives can have entered into the deliberate choice of both Marlboroughs to remain loyal to Anne rather than to curry favour with the King and Queen.

About three months after the completion of his campaign in Ireland, of which Lord Wolseley has given a full account drawn from various sources, but especially valuable because of his personal study of the ground and of local information, Marlborough began his correspondence with James. What were his objects? His success had created the greatest enthusiasm throughout England, because it was the success of an English and not of a Dutch general. He became almost inevitably the centre of the popular discontent against the Dutch domination. It was scarcely likely that the English officers who had smarted under the authority everywhere given to Dutchmen, or the English noblemen who had stood like lacqueys behind William's chair whilst he caroused with his Dutch favourites, or the ladies who, like Anne, had been subjected to his boorishness, would restrain their tongues when in the presence of a singularly genial and frank-spoken leader, who had notoriously suffered as they had done. Marlborough had the best means of gauging the strength of the rising feeling, and had to choose whether to restrain it or to lead it. The Nonjuring Bishops, six months earlier, while his attention was absorbed by the preparations for his Irish campaign, had been subjected to a scandalous attack, in which it had been suggested that they should be murdered by the mob as the De Witts had been. They had not been allowed by the Government to publish their defence, but had printed it without licence. The feelings of all those with whom Marlborough associated had been enlisted in their favour. soon after this that Turner had begun to correspond with James, and had come to regret, not apparently the part that he had played with the others in refusing to publish James's illegal declaration of tolerance, but their insistence on their rights as English peers, which had been the actual cause of their incarceration in the Tower, and so had led more directly than any other incident to the Revolution.* Marlborough at all events did not restrain the rising feeling of opposition to the foreign ascendency, but ostentatiously and publicly led it and fomented it. Under such circumstances, it was natural for him to wish to unite

It was

* See the careful working out of this question and of Turner's conduct in Dean Plumptre's 'Life of Ken.'

together

together all those who could help in freeing England from the foreign rule. There is nothing to show that he desired to do more than to reduce William to that position of administrator to which it had been the object of Churchill's party originally to limit him. He wanted the assistance of the Jacobites and of James in gaining this end. If Turner had the influence over Churchill which we incline to attribute to him, the ex-Bishop may well have persuaded his friend that, in agreeing to the actual deposition of James, he had exceeded the advice formerly given him, and that he ought to express regret for having so far injured his benefactor and deposed the Lord's anointed.' William had not hesitated to obtain information from Ministers whilst they held office under James. Why should William's Ministers serve him, the de facto king, with a loyalty which William had not expected from the servants of the king de jure, with a faithfulness which he had not exhibited to his father-in-law or to his wife? We are stating the arguments as they would present themselves to Turner or to Churchill. We, of course, do not defend the consequent action. What seems to us to be required is that dramatic treatment which in the hands of a master makes us almost sympathise with John as well as with Arthur, which at least makes human and real the workings of the mind of Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. We want to understand the man. Mere invective does not help us to that end.

As Marlborough's whole scheme, whatever it was, was never disclosed, much of it is a mere matter of conjecture. It is practically certain that, whether as a final or a preliminary step, he intended to anticipate by a year or two that Parliamentary vote which ultimately obliged William to send his Dutchmen home, and forced his Dutch favourites to disgorge a portion of their spoils. We fully agree with Lord Wolseley that it is clear that he never intended to assist James in remounting the throne without valid guarantees, such as it was practically impossible to secure from a man on whose word, as he well knew, no reliance could be placed. But we hardly think that Lord Wolseley does justice to the nicety of the distinction, into which an attempt to reconcile their theories with the hard necessities of the case had forced many more besides Marlborough. Though they had no wish whatever to put power into James's hand to introduce Popery, and, with Popery, dragonnades, they did wish to have things done in his name as king; they did not wish the succession to be broken.

It seems to us that Marlborough was affected by all those feelings of the Cavalier which had grown with his growth and

strengthened

strengthened with his strength, up to 1685 at least. The bloody assize and the dragonnades had inflicted on them a deadly wound. That they should wake to life in 1691 was very natural. That they should affect his language when writing to James would almost inevitably follow. That, mingled with all this, there should be the swellings of personal pride and personal ambition, the sense of power and the desire to clutch from incompetent hands by any means the tools they could not use, which he knew that he could use so brilliantly, is only in accordance with human nature. That among the forces which he intended to employ for his ends were his own and his wife's influence over Anne, that he was in fact making a 'party of the heir apparent,' is obvious enough. But it seems to us that James was right in thinking that it was a mere blunder of his partisans to assume that Marlborough was contemplating an attempt by violence to seat Anne on the throne during Mary's or William's lifetime. He was not, like James, the man to seek the path of most resistance. He did want to force William into employing English troops with English officers and himself at the head of them. He concentrated for that purpose all the forces he could bring to bear on it. William thoroughly understood and feared him. The reasons that William assigned to Burnet for Marlborough's dismissal almost exactly correspond with the explanation which we have offered of his conduct.

A puzzling feature in the transactions is that it does not seem to have occurred to such clever people as Marlborough and his wife that their bosom friend Lady Fitz-William was as certain to be in daily correspondence with her sister, William's mistress, as Lady Marlborough was with her own sister, Lady Tyrconnel. Perhaps the explanation is that Marlborough was not particularly unwilling to let William know that he had a second string to his bow. If he had wished to carry on a secret intrigue, he would hardly have talked as openly as he did. He trusted for his safety to the fact that he expressed the feeling of the English nation and army. It was the attitude of the tribune, of the king-maker, and, in the strength of that position, he boldly fronted his enemies, even when he was sent to the Tower. No public charges could have been brought against him that would not have fomented a counter-revolution. As to the charges of peculation and the like, Mr. Stephen and Lord Wolseley have independently shown that there is one simple answer. Had they been true, his enemies had every facility for proving them and every motive for doing so. They failed to do so in any single instance.

We may now sum up our view of the man, as we under

stand

stand his history. Brought up with the feelings of a Cavalier, and passing his younger days in a most licentious Court, he yielded as a young man to one of the many temptations around him and kept himself aloof from others. By penurious care he escaped debt, and the habit of not spending enabled him to accumulate a vast fortune, which, together with the enormous power that he wielded under Anne, excited the jealousy of his contemporaries, and led to those charges of preferring money to honour which have formed the staple accusations against him. Yet he frequently refused to accept money that was offered him; notably, in one instance, an income of 60,000l. a year, which the Emperor had intended to bestow on him. Among a generation of courtly adulterers he was faithful to his wife. To James and William and Anne he was loyal during dark days, and began to plot when the sun was shining on them. Forced at the Revolution to choose between unlimited power if he would join in forcing the yoke of Popery on England, and the abandonment of a master under whom he had risen, he chose to abandon his master. He had never wished to see William king; but, accepting the inevitable, he took the oaths to him as he had done to James. When he found that to speak English was a bar to promotion under William, he plotted very openly to shake off the Dutch rule as he had plotted to shake off the Irish. In both cases he did things which cannot be defended; in both his motives were mixed; in both he acted as the representative of English feeling. If without him such a man as Monmouth might have been king, if without him the Revolution would not have been attempted, but instead a religious and military tyranny would have been established, then, whatever the stains on his career, the debt that we owe to him is enormous. King-makers are rarely saints, and Marlborough was none. But the malignity with which his actions were traduced is rather a tribute to his influence than a proof of his wickedness.

Lord Wolseley's biography has already made its mark and established its place in literature. It is written with the fire of a soldier who, while he has no wish to slur over the errors of one whom he regards as the very greatest of English soldiers, yet feels intensely that the grossest injustice has been done to him, that the services which apart from his victorious campaigns he did for England have been ignored, and that the miserable lies invented by jealous enemies have been accepted as truth and recorded as history.

ART.