Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (78 page)

Throughout the summer, Harley worked to refashion the ministry. If he had ever entertained the idea that it would be possible to form a partnership with Godolphin (which is unlikely) he soon concluded it to
be impracticable. Although Godolphin declared he would not automatically oppose proposals from Shrewsbury and Harley, he set himself against a dissolution of Parliament. In late June he informed the Queen that it would cause ‘present ruin and distraction and therefore it was never possible for [him] to consent to it’. Knowing that a dissolution could not be ruled out, Anne merely responded stiffly, ‘It was a matter which required to be very well considered’. On 3 July Harley noted he planned to advise the Queen: ‘You must preserve your character and spirit and speak to Lord Treasurer. Get quit of him’. Soon afterwards a letter of dismissal was apparently drawn up, but the Queen could not yet bring herself to send it.
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Harley was, however, keen to retain some prominent Whigs in government. He had meetings with Lord Somers, and appears to have led him to believe that he might succeed Godolphin at the Treasury. Knowing that the Queen respected him, Somers accepted these offers as genuine, and he had no objection to Godolphin losing office. During July, Harley was also negotiating with another Junto member, Lord Halifax. He probably hoped that this would lead to Lords Cowper and Orford remaining in place, and that Secretary Boyle would do likewise. However, his plans ran into trouble with the breakdown of peace talks with France.

In March 1710, discussions had opened with France at Geertrudenberg in the United Provinces. The Queen reportedly told Marlborough before he left England that ‘the nation wanted a peace and that it behoved him to make no delays in it’.
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Anne was ready to grant French demands that if Philip V renounced his throne he would receive the crown of Sicily, but unfortunately the Emperor and the Duke of Savoy vetoed the proposal. The French needed peace so badly they then dropped their insistence that Philip V must be compensated, but this meant they had no leverage to persuade him to leave Spain. Louis XIV withdrew his own army from Spain and promised that if the allies went on fighting to oust Philip, he would subsidise their forces. He still drew the line, however, at making war on his own grandson, as the allies continued to insist. Godolphin, for one, believed that Parliament would not vote for peace unless this condition was imposed.

Although the collapse of peace talks arguably owed much to Whig intractability, others put the blame elsewhere. Marlborough believed that the French were resisting allied demands because they anticipated that Britain would soon have a new government that would be prepared to offer them better terms. He mused, ‘If these new schemers are fond of a peace they are not very dextrous, for most certainly what is doing in
England will be a great encouragement to France for the continuing the war’. In June he bluntly told the Queen, ‘Your new councillors … have done a good deal towards hindering the peace this year’.
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After Louis XIV published a letter on 9/20 July announcing that allied intransigence had forced him to withdraw from peace negotiations, Lord Somers also took the line that recent developments in England were responsible for French defiance. Having made this plain in Cabinet, he ‘gave his opinion very strongly for the continuance of the war’. Since peace formed an essential part of Harley’s programme, this clearly made a working relationship between them more difficult. Harley’s hopes of inveigling prominent Whigs into serving alongside him received another setback when Lord Wharton expressed ‘a detestation of having anything to do with Harley’ and advised colleagues who had shown interest in his overtures that, provided they stayed aloof, ‘all things would be in such confusion as to force the Queen back again into the hands of the Whigs’. Furthermore, even those Whigs who were dealing with Harley made their support conditional on Parliament being retained. On several occasions in July and early August the question of whether Parliament should be dismissed was debated in Cabinet, and Marlborough was delighted to hear that several lords ‘spoke their mind freely and honestly’ on the subject. Yet it remained unclear how Harley could secure Commons majorities for his measures in the current Parliament, and when he raised the matter with Lords Cowper and Halifax, it proved ‘impossible to bring [them] out of general terms to particulars’. This made the Queen unwilling to listen to Whig lectures on the importance of keeping on this Parliament. On 30 July Lord Orford spoke in Cabinet against a dissolution, but Anne ‘interrupted him and broke off the debate, saying they were not then upon that business’.
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Harley reasoned that if Godolphin was dismissed, the other ministers might become ‘more treatable’, but the Queen remained reluctant to sack the Lord Treasurer. On 20 July she told Shrewsbury that she was determined to make Godolphin and Harley agree, although next day, perhaps realising the magnitude of the task, she appeared to reconsider. By 22 July Shrewsbury believed that she now accepted that it would be impossible to retain Godolphin, but since he himself flatly refused to take on ‘an employment I do not in the least understand and have not a head turned for’ by becoming Treasurer himself, this caused further delays.
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In the end it was Godolphin’s discourtesy to her that resolved Anne to part with him. In June he had told Sarah proudly that he habitually talked to the Queen ‘so plainly and in such a manner as … will not be
said by anybody else in the world to her’, but he now carried this too far. At the end of July he had a row with Shrewsbury in Cabinet, accusing him of favouring ‘French counsels’. When Anne defended Shrewsbury, the Lord Treasurer rounded on her, and though it is unclear what he said, she was mortally offended. On 5 August Harley reported cheerfully that it was plainly ‘impracticable that [Anne and Godolphin] can live together. He every day grows sourer and indeed ruder to [her], which is unaccountable, and will hear of no accommodation, so that it is impossible that he can continue many days’.
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Somehow Harley managed to convince Anne that dismissing Godolphin would not result in economic ruin, although the financial situation was undeniably dire. At the end of July the banker in charge of remitting money to troops abroad had ordered his agents in Amsterdam to accept no further bills from the Paymaster General, because payment had not been made on £152,000 previously furnished. Soldiers had started to desert for lack of pay, and the Bank of England had recently turned down an appeal from Godolphin for a new loan. On 7 August he told the Queen that no more money would be forthcoming from them until she guaranteed that there would be no more ministerial changes or a dissolution of Parliament, but Anne was beyond being intimidated by such threats. When her doctor expressed concern that the Bank would stop lending, she answered scornfully, ‘They only frighted people to put a stop to what was doing’.
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But though the Queen had made up her mind, she lacked the courage to be honest with Godolphin. On 7 August the Lord Treasurer had a meeting with her that lasted more than two hours. After ‘representing … all those dangers into which he then foresaw her running’, he asked her if she wished him to go on serving her, ‘to which she answered very readily, “Yes”’. He emerged from the audience ‘with an air of cheerfulness and content that had not been seen for some time in his countenance’, delightedly telling a Dutch diplomat that ‘he had gained his point’.
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Next morning the Queen sent him a letter of dismissal.

In Sunderland’s case, Anne had taken care that his sacking was handled tactfully, but with Godolphin she showed no regard for niceties. Her letter was delivered by a groom and was brutally worded, making plain her personal displeasure. Severely she told him,

The uneasiness which you have showed for some time has given me very much trouble, though I have borne it; and had your behaviour continued the same it was for a few years after my coming to the crown, I could
have no dispute with myself what to do. But the many unkind returns I have received since, especially what you said to me personally before the Lords, makes it impossible for me to continue you any longer in my service.

Instead of granting him a final interview she asked him to break his staff of office, ‘which I believe will be easier to us both’. Godolphin obeyed and ‘flung the pieces in the chimney’, but he did not allow her strictures to pass without comment. He wrote protesting that he was ‘not conscious of the least undutiful act or of one undutiful word to your Majesty in my whole life’, and that he believed those who had witnessed the incident in Cabinet would support him on this.
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Most discreditably of all, the Queen offered him a pension of £4,000 a year, and then never paid it. Within months Godolphin was in such financial straits that it appeared the Marlboroughs would have to support him, and the situation would have been still worse if his elder brother had not died and left him his estate. Rather curiously, despite her shabby treatment of him, the Queen did not sever all contact. There were a couple of occasions when she communicated with him, such as in December 1710, when she asked his advice on the war in Spain. Godolphin responded dutifully, as became one who, according to Sarah, never in his life spoke disrespectfully of the Queen, ‘any more than he would of God Almighty’. When Godolphin died in September 1712, Anne was visibly upset, telling Lord Dartmouth, ‘She could not help being so, for she had a long acquaintance with him’. Upon Dartmouth informing her that Godolphin was reputed to have died poor, ‘the Queen said she was sorry he had suffered so much in her service’.
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Since she was partly to blame for his penury, this was disingenuous.

Harley was named as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 9 August. The Treasury was put in commission, with Earl Paulet nominally at its head, but from the start Harley was ‘supposed to preside behind the curtain’. Having just arrived in London from Ireland, Jonathan Swift learned that ‘Mr Harley is looked upon as first minister, and not my Lord Shrewsbury, and his Grace helps on the opinion … upon all occasion professing to stay until he speaks with Mr Harley’. Much of Harley’s first month in office was spent trying to provide a short-term solution to the financial crisis. Whereas Godolphin had relied almost exclusively on the Bank of England for loans, Harley cast his net wider, and found a consortium of financiers who were willing to advance £350,000. The Bank of England
also did not fulfil its threat to cut off credit entirely. The directors came up with a loan of £50,000 which, though less than asked for, kept things afloat.
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It was becoming obvious to Harley that the difficulties he would face if he had to deal with the current Parliament were insurmountable. At the end of June Marlborough had remarked to his wife that, provided Parliament was not dissolved, ‘We will make some of their hearts ache’, and Harley could not expose himself to such risk. However, knowing that their party faced annihilation at the polls, few Whigs were prepared to join the ministry without a guarantee that an election would be postponed. When the Queen had offered Richard Hampden a place on the Treasury commission, he said he could not accept if she contemplated dismissing Parliament. Irritably she replied that ‘though she offered him an employment, yet she did not ask his advice’.
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The Duke of Somerset ‘had the vanity to think he could manage that House of Commons as he pleased’, but Harley doubted his ability to impose his will on Whig backbenchers. Realising he had miscalculated in thinking that Harley would defer to his wishes, Somerset regretted forming an alliance with a man likely to bring the Whig party to its knees. When he objected to the Queen, he found his access to her curtailed. Arthur Maynwaring reported, ‘’tis certain [he] does not now see [her] so many minutes in a day as he used to do hours’.
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Lord Somers was equally disillusioned with Harley. He had been duped into thinking he would succeed Godolphin, but on 5 August Harley saw the Queen, and put an end to ‘the chimerical matter’. As it dawned on Somers that he was not to be chief minister, and that Parliament was unlikely to last long, he grew ‘extremely angry and uneasy’. The Duke of Devonshire was also in a fury, treating the Queen in a ‘peevish and … very distasteful manner’.
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Once it was apparent that few of the current ministers would endorse his policies, Harley had to think of alternatives. He was wary of turning to the Tories, being fearful they would try to control the ministry, but he lamented that the Whigs left him little choice, and ‘strive to drive us into a party’. He now contemplated bringing the Earl of Rochester into government, despite the latter’s reputation as the most diehard of Tories. In July Rochester had started appearing at court, and his niece appeared to have forgiven his past offences. Although Rochester was said to have given out he ‘never was nor ever would be concerned with Harley’, Harley was right in thinking he was not as implacable as this suggested. On 1 September, Rochester was named as Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall in
place of Godolphin. Eleven days later the Dutch Resident in England, l’Hermitage, heard that Rochester had been offered the Presidency of the Council, but was still haggling over conditions.
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There were other Tories, however, with whom Harley was reluctant to become involved. The Queen’s hatred for the Earl of Nottingham made it out of the question for him to be offered a position. Rather more surprisingly, Harley did not want to give an important post to Henry St John, even though the latter had followed him into the wilderness in 1708. Worried that St John was too ambitious to be a loyal subordinate, Harley intended merely to restore him to his former job of Secretary at War, rather than offering him something more substantial. St John made it plain that this was insufficient, and never forgave the insult.