The House of Commons in session in 1710, just before the dissolution
Queen Anne had to master politics: Tories and Whigs both were trying to win her over and to defeat each other. The polemics of the wine bottle, which raised many a gentleman’s temper during election campaigns, received new spice in December 1703. Lord Methuen, a Whig, successfully negotiated his commercial treaty with the Portuguese. Under its terms Queen Anne agreed that the port wine which came from the Douro – and had long been extolled by those of Whig persuasion – would never be subjected to excise duty at more than two-thirds of the level imposed on the claret of Bordeaux, which was so much preferred by Tories and those who supported the claims of the house of Stuart.
In May 1708, the first elections for the Parliament of Great Britain, comprising England, Scotland and Wales, resulted in a sweeping victory for the Whigs. The statesman Charles Spencer, the earl of Sunderland, hailed this as “the most Whig parliament there has been since the revolution.” The explanation for the Whig’s success sprang partly from the abortive invasion by James Stuart in March. He failed to keep a planned rendezvous with Jacobite supporters on shore. Still shadowed by Admiral Byng’s superior fleet, James’s French-led convoy abandoned its efforts to help him to regain the throne. Queen Anne was mightily relieved, as were the Whigs. Tory gained about in England and Wales, while the majority of the 45 new Scottish members voted with the Whigs.
In December 1709, a high-church Oxford cleric, Dr Henry Sacheverel, faced impeachment for a “malicious, scandalous libel”. The Commons voted to proceed against him for a sermon that he gave in St Paul’s Cathedral in November. This sermon revealed him to be a “concealed Jacobite”. He attacked both the “glorious revolution” of 1688 and religious liberation of dissenters. His arguments went to the roots of the division between the political parties. Sacheverel asked whether civil government was to be religious or secular, and whether the Church of England could be secure in the age of religious dissent. The tenor of his remarks – denouncing the threat to church and state from dissent and reasserting the doctrine of passive obedience to the crown – was familiar. But his onslaught against the political principles of the Whig “Junto” was the cause of great offence. A reference to the “crafty insidiousness of such wily Volpones [foxes]” was intended for Sidney, lord Godolphin.
In March 1710, at the end of his three-week trial in the House of Lords, Dr Henry Sacheverel, “the ranting parson”, was found guilty and sentenced . His impeachment and trial rocked the nation and provoked mob riots in London.
Queen Anne, attended by her ladies, sat through every session. Many great names, including Sara Churchill, the duchess of Marlborough, were observed at dawn engaged in an undignified scramble for seats in Westminster Hall. The Queen feared the depth of feelings aroused in both Whigs and Tories by Sacheverel’s sermon, so it was a relief that his sentence was light. Despite being found guilty by 69 votes to 52, he received just three years’ suspension from the pulpit.
In September 1710, in a remarkable reversal of Whig fortunes Queen Anne dissolved Parliament and called a general election. The Queen’s “backstairs adviser”, Robert Harley, a leading Tory, engineered the changes, exploiting pro-Tory public opinion after the Sacheverel; impeachment. The Whigs were now out of favour with Anne, who shared her subjects’ apprehension about dangers to the Church of England and their alarm at high casualties among British forces led by the Whig duke of Marlborough in the continuing war over the Spanish succession. The Whig ministry fell. Several weeks saw the dismissal of, among others, Charles Spencer, the earl of Sunderland, replaced as Secretary of State for the south by the Tory George Legge, Lord Dartmouth. Lord Godolphin, another Whig, was dismissed as Lord Treasurer – against the wishes of the Bank of England.
The general election taking place in November, left the House of Commons with a landslide majority of 151 Tory members. Voters thus backed the Tory policies of supporting Dr Sacheverel and ending the war on the continent. Whig electoral casualties included John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough. Tory leaders promised a restoration of harmony and co-operation between an honest, frugal administration and a “country” majority in the Commons. The talk was of integration of church and state, an end to the war, the renewed stabilisation of Britain’s finances.
Robert Harley, a short man whose slovenly speech belied his political skill, headed the new government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He manipulated the changes leading to the dissolution of Parliament two months before in a masterly way that impressed Queen Anne but would not have surprised anyone who knew him. In political circles the 48-year-old Harley was known as “Robin the Trickster” a nickname earned by his love of intrigue and the use of backstairs manoeuvres.
The most critical problem his administration faced was how to create peace with France and Spain. The mounting debt from war taxation and borrowing had to be ended. Bankers were nervous, meanwhile, of the impact of the dissolution of Parliament and the change in party majority.
By April 1711, the Bell Tavern in King Street, in Westminster, became the home of the October Club, a group comprised of some 150 radical young Tories. Buoyed by their November election success and convinced that the future belonged to them, these new members demanded a clean sweep of all Whigs from central and local government.
The October Club believed that it had been only corruption and manipulation that kept the Whigs in power. Consequently they were calling for an investigation into Ј35 million allegedly missing from treasury accounts, as well as the introduction of parliamentary bills to end corruption in elections. The Tory leader and chancellor, Robert Harley, was worried that if they succeeded in setting the agenda then his own influence would be reduced.
In January 1712, Robert Walpole, the most aggressive of the young Whigs, was charged with corruption, expelled from the House of Commons and jailed in the Tower. He was widely seen as being another victim of the relentless drive for peace by Queen Anne and her Tory ministers.
The Lords’ Whig majority had been able to block a peace treaty with France. But on New Year’s Eve the Tory leader, the earl of Oxford, who became Lord Treasurer in May, delivered an audacious double attack. He persuaded Queen Anne to create 12 new peers, overturning the Whig majority, and to dismiss the duke of Marlborough as Commander-in-chief of the army on charges of corruption.
There was an immediate outcry. The new lords, branded “Oxford’s packed jury”, were sneeringly asked if they intended to vote individually or by their foreman, while the dismissal of Britain’s finest general was said to follow a “frivolous and groundless complaint”. Yet Oxford, the wiliest of politicians did it again. Old scores were settled, and the British delegation set off for treaty negotiations in Utrecht.
On 15 November 1712, party politics took a deadly turn when a Whig and a Tory lord slew each other in a duel at Hyde Park. A fanatical duellist and a Whig, Charles, Lord Mohun, “who gave the affront and yet sent the challenge” was killed by the Tory James Douglas, the duke of Hamilton, who was then dispatched by his opponents second. Hamilton, Scotland’s premier duke, was due to leave for France the next day as the new ambassador overseeing the peace treaty.
In September 1713, for the second time in two years, the Tories, led by Robert Harley, the earl of Oxford, and his deputy, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, won a crushing victory over their Whig opponents in the general elections. But their rivals gained some ground in Scotland, while the Tories’ deep divisions over the succession were far from healed.
Three years of Tory power saw the successful overcoming, in 1711, of a national financial crisis, and continuing attacks on dissenters through the Occasional Conformity Act (1711). The outstanding success was the negotiation of 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which left Britain in an unprecedentedly powerful position.
Yet for all that, the party was under increasing pressure both from the Whigs and from internal agreements, notably between Oxford and Bolingbroke, whose enmity was all too obvious. Even more divisive was the succession.
In January 1706, Queen Anne and her Parliament skirted around a prickly question of protocol with the Regency Act, by which a regency council was to set up on the Queen’s death. The Act of Succession, passed in 1701 to ensure a Protestant monarch, put the German house of Hanover in line for the English throne. But Anne, although backing the Protestant succession, had no wish to see the members of the Hanoverian family living in England while she was alive. The Regency Act, therefore, bestowed sovereign on a regency council until such time as the Hanoverian successor arrived in England. In addition, the Act of Naturalization gave all Protestant Hanoverians the status of English subjects.
While the Whigs were united in their support of Hanoverians, the Tories were split three ways: some for Electress Sophia of Hanover, others for a return to the Stuarts, while many were simply undecided. The fact that Queen Anne herself grew ever less fond of Oxford only added to Tory problems.
By March 1714, Parliament and government were in crisis over the royal succession. Queen Anne was slowly dying of dropsy in Kensington Palace and was not expected to live much longer. Her Roman Catholic half-brother, James Stuart, and the Protestant Sophia of Brunswick-Luneburg, the electress of Hanover, were the chief claimants to the crown.
The Tory government was split. The Lord Treasurer, the earl of Oxford, was a tepid Jacobite ready to accept the Hanoverians. But Viscount Bolingbroke was plotting to put James on the throne – if he renounced Catholicism. The Whigs were committed to the Hanoverian succession. When the Queen dismissed the Whig government in 1710 and brought in the Tories to make peace with France, she seemed to prefer her half-brother’s claims, but she failed to pack the government with Jacobites.
The country would have never supported a Roman Catholic king, however little enthusiasm there might have been for a German. Meanwhile Bolingbroke sent secret envoys to James Stuart in Paris, to persuade him to change to Anglicanism, but they met with no success. He was also trying to pack the council of regency with pro-Stuart ministers, but he could only succeed if Queen Anne dismissed Oxford and lived long enough to confirm Bolingbroke’s policies.
On 8 June Sophia, the electress of Brunswick-Luneburg, the heir to the British throne, died at the age of 84. Her son George, aged 54, became the heir.
On 1 August Queen Anne died at the age of 49, bringing to an end a reign that saw Britain rise to become the dominant power in Europe. British armies under the duke of Marlborough defeated all the power of King Louis XIV of France in the most spectacular military victories since Agincourt almost 300 years before, and the British navy became the undisputed master of the seas. The political union of England and Scotland was finally enacted in 1707, and constitutional cabinet government was also established during Anne’s reign. At the same time literature, architecture and science all flourished, while Britain also became Europe’s leading commercial nation.