they remained to drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Godolphin, it is true, wrote a very singular letter of frank and even angry remonstrance to the Queen. Your Majesty,' he said, is suffering yourself to be guided to your own ruin and destruction as fast as it is possible for them to compass it to whom you seem so much to hearken;' and he proceeded to expatiate upon the new appointment, in terms which few ministers would have employed towards their sovereign. But this letter had no result. In the following month Marlborough was compelled to bestow the command of two regiments upon Colonel Hill, the brother of Mrs. Masham, who had displaced his wife in the favour of the Queen. In June, Sunderland, the Secretary of State and son-in-law of Marlborough, was summarily dismissed, and the seals were bestowed upon Lord Dartmouth, one of the most violent of Tories. In August a still bolder step was taken. Godolphin himself was dismissed. The treasury was placed in commission, Harley being one of the commissioners, and that statesman became at the same time Chancellor of the Exchequer and virtually Prime Minister. In September, the remaining ministers were dismissed. Parliament was dissolved. An election took place, which was one of the most turbulent ever known in England, and the defeat of the Whigs was so crushing that the ascendancy of their opponents during the remaining years of the reign was undisputed.

The immense power displayed by the Church in this struggle was not soon forgotten by statesmen. The utter ruin of a 'ministry supported by all the military achievements of Marlborough and by all the financial skill of Godolphin was beyond question mainly due to the exertions of the clergy. It furnished a striking proof that when fairly roused no other body in the country could command so large an amount of political enthusiasm, and it was also true that except under very peculiar and abnormal circumstances no other body had so firm and steady a hold on the affections of the people. The

See this curious letter in Boyer, pp. 470-471.

fact is the more remarkable when we consider the very singular intellectual and political activity of the time. If we measure the age of Anne by its highest intellectual achievements, a period that was adorned among other names by those of Newton, Pope, Swift, Addison, Steele, Defoe, Bolingbroke, and Prior, can hardly find a rival in English history between the age of Shakespeare and Bacon and the age of Byron and Scott. If we measure it less by its highest achievements than by its efforts to enlarge the circle of intellectual interests it will appear scarcely less eminent. It was in the reign of Anne that Defoe created the realistic novel, that Steele originated, and Addison brought to perfection, the periodical essay which for about three-quarters of a century was the most popular form of English literature, that the first daily newspaper was published in England, that the first English law was enacted for the protection of literary property. A passion for physical science had spread widely through the nation. Except in the University of Leyden, where it was taught by an eminent professor named 's Gravesande, the great discovery of Newton had scarcely found an adherent on the Continent till it was popularised by Voltaire in 1728, but in England it had already acquired an ascendancy. Bentley, Whiston, and Clarke enthusiastically adopted it. Gregory and Keill made it popular at Oxford, and Desaguliers, who gave lectures in London in 1713, says that he found the Newtonian philosophy generally received among persons of all ranks and professions, and even among the ladies, by the help of experiments. Never before had so large an amount of literary ability been enlisted in politics. Swift, Bolingbroke, Atterbury, Arbuthnot, and Prior were prominent among the Tories; Addison, Steele, and Defoe among the Whigs. Side by side with the 'Tatler,' the 'Spectator,' the 'Guardian,' and the Englishman,' in which the political was in a great degree subordinate to the literary element, there arose a multitude of purely political newspapers and periodicals.

1 See Whewell's Hist. of Inductive Philosophy, ii. 145–155.

The Observator' of Tutchin, the Review' of Defoe, the Rehearsal' of Leslie, the Examiner' of Swift, Fog's Journal,' 'Dyer's News Letter,' the 'Medley,' the Mercurius Rusticus,' the 'Postman,' the 'Flying Post,' the English Post,' the' Athenian Mercury,' and many others contributed largely to the formation of public opinion. The licentiousness of the press was made a matter of formal complaint in an address by the Lower House of Convocation in 1703, and in a Queen's Speech in 1714, and the Tory Ministry endeavoured to repress it by the Stamp Act of 1712, and by a long series of prosecutions. There is scarcely any man in England,' said a great Whig writer a few {years later, of what denomination soever that is not a free thinker in politics, and hath not some particular notions of his own by which he distinguishes himself from the rest of the community. Our island, which was formerly called a nation of saints, may now be called a nation of statesmen.' The extraordinary multiplication of pamphlets published at a very low price, and industriously dispersed in the streets, was especially noticed, and political writings which happened to strike the popular taste acquired in the beginning of the eighteenth century a circulation perhaps greater in proportion to the population than any even of our own time. The True-born Englishman' of Defoe, which was published in 1700-1 in order to check the clamour against William as a foreigner, went through nine editions on good paper in about four years, was printed in the same period twelve times without the concurrence of the author, and no less than 80,000 copies of the cheap editions are said to have been disposed of in the streets of London.3 About 40,000 copies of the famous sermon of Sacheverell were sold in a few days. More than 60,000 copies of a now forgotten Whig pamphlet, by an author named Benson, published in answer to the Tory addresses to the Queen after the impeachment

1 Freeholder, No. 53.

2 See Wilson's Life of Defoe, ii. 29. Leibnitz, a few years before, wrote, 'Les feuilles volantes ont plus d'efficace en Angleterre qu'en tout autre

pays.

Correspondance avec L'Electrice Sophie, tom. ii. p. 224.

Wilson's Life of Defoe, i. 346.
Burnet's Own Times, ii. 538.

of Sacheverell, are said to have been sold in London.1 Bisset's Modern Fanatic,' a scurrilous pamphlet against Sacheverell, ran through at least twelve editions. Of Swift's 'Conduct of the Allies,' which was written to prepare the country for the Peace of Utrecht, 11,000 copies were sold in a single month.2 The Spectator,' as Fleetwood assures us, attained at last a daily circulation of 14,000. The unprecedented multiplication of political clubs, which forms one of the most remarkable social features of the period, attests no less clearly the almost feverish activity of political life. Never was, there a period less characterised by that intellectual torpor which we are accustomed to associate with ecclesiastical domination, yet in very few periods of English history did the English Church manifest so great a power as in the reign of Anne.

Another consideration which adds largely to the impressiveness of this fact is the nature of the doctrine that was mainly at issue. Whatever may be thought of its truth, the opinion that it is unlawful for subjects to resist their sovereign under any circumstances of tyranny and misgovernment does not appear to be well fitted to excite popular enthusiasm. This, however, was the doctrine which, during the whole of the Sacheverell agitation, was placed in the fore-front of the battle both by the Whigs who assailed and by the Tories who maintained it. It is obvious that in its plain meaning it amounted to a condemnation of the Revolution, and it is equally manifest that those who conscientiously held it would eventually gravitate rather to the House of Stuart than to the House of Brunswick. The position of the clergy during the whole of the preceding reign had been a very false one. A small minority had consistently refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new sovereign. A minority, which was probably still smaller, consistently

'Wilson's Life of Defoe, iii. p. 129. The pamphlet was entitled, A Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, by birth a Swede, but naturalised and a Member of the present Parliament, concerning the late Minehead doctrine which was

established by a certain free Parliament of Sweden, to the utter enslaving of that country.

300.

2 Wilson's Life of Defoe, iii. p.

maintained the Whig theory of government. The immense majority, however, held the doctrines of the indefeasible title of hereditary royalty, and of the sinfulness of all resistance to oppression, and they only took the oaths to the Revolutionary Government with much equivocation, and after long and painful misgiving. Much was said about the supposed vacancy of the throne by the abdication of James. Much was said about the suspicions attaching to the birth of the Prince of Wales, though in a few years these appear to have gradually disappeared. Burnet in 1689 had written a pastoral letter, in which he spoke of William as having a legitimate title to the throne of James in right of conquest over him,' and although the House of Commons, resenting the expression, had ordered the letter to be burnt, the theory it advocated was probably adopted by many. Among the clergy, however, who subscribed the oath of allegiance, the usual refuge lay in the distinction between the king de jure and the king de facto. Sherlock and many other divines, who asserted the doctrine of passive obedience, contended that it should be paid to the king who was actually in power. They were not called upon to defend the Revolution. They were quite ready to admit that it was a crime, and that all concerned in it had endangered their salvation, but, as a matter of fact, William was upon the throne, and rebellion being in all cases a sin, they were bound to obey him. As long, therefore, as they were not expected to pronounce any judgment upon his title, they could conscientiously take the oath of allegiance. They believed it to be a sin to resist the actual sovereign, and they could therefore freely swear to obey him. The statesmen of the Revolution at first very judiciously met the scruples of the clergy by omitting from the new oath of allegiance the words 'rightful and lawful king,' which had formed part of the former oath, but in the

1 See Somers' Tracts, xii. 242.

Lathbury's Hist. of the Nonjurors, p. 52-54. A writer in 1696 said with much truth, 'The Shibboleth of the Church now is King William's de facto title, and no

conformity to homilies and rubricks will make you owned by the present Church if you should acknowledge the King to be otherwise so than de facto.'-An Account of the Growth of Deism in England, p. 10.