robert harley and the ministerial revolution of 1710 (edited by w.a. speck)

Robert Harley and the Ministerial Revolution of 1710*parh_209 275..307

G E O F F R E Y H O L M E S( e d i t e d b y W. A . S P E C K )

The ministerial revolution of 1710 transformed a predominantly whig administration in Aprilto a tory-dominated ministry by September. Historians have generally attributed this trans-formation to the political objectives and skills of Robert Harley. But such a conclusion makesthe methodological error of deducing his intentions from the outcome. On close examinationHarley did not intend to make such drastic changes initially. On the contrary, he wished tolimit them to the removal of the earl of Sunderland from his secretaryship of state and theearl of Godolphin from the lord treasurership, and to curtail, if not eliminate, the influence ofthe duke of Marlborough and his duchess in affairs of state. Other whigs, especially theso-called junto, he hoped to retain in power.This would have necessitated the retention of theexisting parliament which did not have to be dissolved under the Triennial Act until 1711.These plans came unstuck. The junto, though prepared to take Harley seriously, eventuallyrefused to deal with him and resigned their offices. Harley was also obliged to take in moretories than he wanted.The main reason for the failure of his original plan was the influenceof Queen Anne, which has been overlooked or underestimated in previous accounts.

Keywords: Robert Harley; Queen Anne; tories; whigs; junto; cabinet; ministry; parliament

The first step in the destruction of the Godolphin ministry was taken in the middle ofApril 1710. It was almost four months later that Harley himself took office, and a furthersix weeks after that before the Harley ministry, as such, emerged. In all, then, thetransition from the old administration to the new occupied over five months, from earlyspring to early autumn; and even then the political kaleidoscope was still shifting, for yetanother month went by before the bulk of the election results were declared and thecomposition of the new parliament could be determined accurately.

The main course of events can be summarized quite briefly. About a week after theprorogation of parliament, while Godolphin was sulking at Newmarket composingreproachful letters to the queen, Anne had an interview with that tepid whig, themarquess of Kent, who had been lord chamberlain since Sarah had foisted him on theministry in 1704. The wholly unsuspecting Kent was asked politely but firmly to

* This is an edited version of chapters one and two of ‘The Great Ministry’ by the late Geoffrey Holmes,published to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the formation of the ministry in 1710. See my ‘Postscript’to D.W. Hayton, ‘In No One’s Shadow: British Politics in the Age of Anne and the Writing of the History of theHouse of Commons’, Parliamentary History, xxvii (2009), 12–14, for an account of the circumstances in whichthe chapters were written, why they were never published, and how they are available in two typescript copiesof ‘The Great Ministry’ with a complete scholarly apparatus, which is curtailed in this edition. I wish to thankElla Holmes for agreeing to its publication and Alasdair Hawkyard and Tim Wales for helping to update someof the footnote manuscript references.

Parliamentary History, Vol. 29, pt. 3 (2010), pp. 275–307

© The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 2010

relinquish his office, and though ‘extreamly nettled’ had no alternative but to accept thedukedom offered him in compensation, and retire as gracefully as he could.1 Into hisplace on 14 April came the duke of Shrewsbury, and with him the conspirators madetheir first inroad on the cabinet. Shrewsbury, well primed by Harley, played his part wellin the days that followed. He plied both Godolphin and the junto with frequent,if nebulous, professions of goodwill and of loyalty to his old political principles, sothat their first alarmed reaction to his appointment soon changed to one of growingoptimism.The queen’s assurances that she brought Shrewsbury into the government ‘asa Whigg, & one that will live well with them all, if they will let him’, began to seemalmost convincing.2

This sanguine mood persisted, more strongly in some quarters than in others, until thesecond half of May, when in shrewd contrast to the surprise tactics adopted overShrewsbury’s appointment, Harley and his friends began to disseminate rumours that amore decisive change was impending.This next step, the dismissal of the senior secretaryof state, Lord Sunderland, was not taken until 14 June, with the appointment of LordDartmouth, a moderate church tory, as his successor, following immediately afterwards.Yet the tantalising delay in making the new change proved every bit as effective asthe shock tactics of April in inhibiting any preventive measures by the colleagues of thedoomed minister. The threatened retirement of Marlborough from his command, thefeasibility of a joint resignation of Godolphin and the leading whigs, the use of the Bankof England as a deterrent weapon – all these possible counter-strokes were canvassed; butnone was put into effect by a demoralised government, still incapable of united anddecisive action. Although four directors of the Bank, including the governor, Sir GilbertHeathcote, did secure an audience with the queen just after the secretary’s dismissal, andrepresented the dangers to public credit and confidence of any further ministerialchanges, the vague assurances they received were poor compensation for the loss ofSunderland.

The whig leaders, meanwhile, had been able to extract some grains of comfort fromthe fact that with them, if not with Godolphin and Marlborough, Harley and hisassociates had shown some inclination to bargain. But the inability of the juntilla (as thecore of the anti-ministerial party was now being called) to give satisfaction on the keypoint of whether the queen intended to retain the existing parliament, had prevented anyconcrete result emerging from these negotiations by the time that Harley was ready toplay his next trump card, the removal of the lord treasurer. Godolphin fell on 8 August,and Harley and his friend Earl Poulet were the two leading figures on the treasurycommission of five which replaced him. For the next six weeks, while Harley manœu-vred among the politicians in an effort to ensure that the ministerial changes still to bemade would be agreeable both to himself and to the queen, a strange balance of powerexisted (at least on paper) in the cabinet between the whig survivors of the Godolphinministry and their rivals. But it was a purely artificial equilibrium, and one that wasconclusively destroyed by a whole crop of resignations, dismissals and withdrawals

1 The Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Henry L. Snyder (3 vols, Oxford, 1975), iii, 1464: Godolphinto Marlborough, 17 Apr. 1710.

2 BL, Add. MS 61460: Arthur Mainwaring to the duchess of Marlborough, ‘Tuesday afternoon near four aclock’ [18 Apr. 1710].

276 Geoffrey Holmes


between 20 and 23 September which heralded the dissolution of parliament. Theseremoved from the ministry the remaining junto lords in high office, Somers, Orford andWharton, together with their closest associates in the government, Cowper and Devon-shire, and the ‘lord treasurer’s whig’, Henry Boyle; and they were decisive enough toensure that the all-important ‘image’ conveyed to the electorate as it began choosing anew house of commons at the beginning of October would be that of a predominantlytory cabinet, though by no means yet of a thoroughly tory administration at all levels.In fact, only two survivors of the old ministry still remained in the cabinet by earlyOctober: the whig duke of Newcastle, and the Scottish secretary, Queensberry, who hadin the past supported Godolphin’s centre group of ministers against the junto and theScottish Squadrone. Somerset, by now estranged from his fellow-conspirators in thejuntilla, had withdrawn in protest at the recent concessions to the tories; and whilethe toryism of the cabinet’s other members – Shrewsbury, Harley, Poulet, St John,Dartmouth, Rochester and Buckingham – was admittedly of very mixed vintage, onlythe first could remotely be described as a whig. At the beginning of October Harley’scabinet contained, in the persons of Rochester and Buckingham, only two ‘rigids’, i.e.,high church tories of the old school. By this time Anglesey had died after a sudden andunexpected illness, and the strength of the ‘old’ right wing was only raised to a meagrethree when the duke of Ormonde was appointed to the vacant lieutenancy of Irelandlater in the month. By the last week in October the cabinet had assumed its final shapewith the promotion of the Harleyite, Sir Simon Harcourt, to the office of lord keeper.

1

The fundamental problem in interpreting this sequence of events from April to October1710 is to measure what was finally accomplished against what was originally intended.Harley’s juntilla, however various the motives which inspired its members, clearly existedfor the purpose of engineering a change of ministry. But historians have been far fromunanimous as to what ‘the great scheme’ really involved.They have disagreed about theextent, and even about the nature, of the change that was designed. And this need notsurprise us, for Harley’s own intentions presented just as many problems to most of hiscontemporaries as they have created for historians. Whatever his real plans were, therewere obvious tactical advantages to be derived in the complex situation of 1710 fromcamouflaging them, and Harley’s naturally secretive and tortuous mind was hardly likelyto overlook these. As a result, while some of his correspondents in the summer of 1710remained confident throughout that a party ministry to gladden tory hearts would beproduced at length out of the melting-pot, others, like Orrery, ‘could hardly think’ thatit was Harley’s purpose ‘to fling more power into my Lord Roc[hester]’s hands than wasabsolutely necessary’.3 There were tories who nervously anticipated a ‘patch worke’administration, and there were other tories who gloomily predicted a sell-out to thewhigs, completing ‘that measure of iniquity for which the new managers [were] to

3 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 603: Orrery to [Harley], 29 Sept. 1710.

277Robert Harley and the Ministerial Revolution of 1710


answer’.4 The whigs were no more certain than their opponents of Harley’s intentions.Only a minority can have genuinely shared the confidence of Robert Monckton – thatthere was ‘one man amongst the schemists [i.e., Harley himself] who tho’ he has beenpersecuted by the Whigs yet is supposed to have that diffidence of the Torys that he willdo his utmost to keep up a ballance of the honest side’;5 to the majority of whigsHarley’s purposes were as obscure as the language he habitually and consciously used inhis dealings with their leaders.

Largely as a result of the shroud of mystery which was deliberately thrown over theproceedings at the time, contemporaries were led to base their varying diagnoses onpremises that were, in some vital respects at least, unsound. So even while the events of1710 were still unfolding, a Harleian mythology was being built up, in which truth,half-truth and fiction, fact, rumour and innuendo, were all hopelessly entangled. Andnaturally enough the historian does not find it easy to break clear of this mythology.Above all, it is difficult to rid ourselves of some of the presuppositions on whichcontemporary judgments were too often founded.

The most misleading aspect of this Harleian mythology is the notion that Harleyremained firmly in control of events throughout the period from April to September1710, and that each of the various stages by which the fall of Godolphin and the whigswas accomplished, with the possible exception of the last, represented either a stage inthe working-out of some pre-arranged pattern or plan, or at least a development in fullaccord with Harley’s general strategy.The reputation which Harley so evidently enjoyedin his own day as an arch-schemer of diabolical cunning makes it tempting to credit himwith having either devised or foreseen most of the steps by which the change of ministryproceeded. But the impression of the calculating politician, manipulating friends andopponents alike as though they were so many pawns in his game, is surprisingly at oddswith the evidence. For one thing the implication that all or even the greater part of theappointments to major office made by October 1710 were entirely to Robert Harley’sliking and according to plan, is quite unacceptable. It has never been seriously contendedthat he budgeted for Rochester as lord president of the council, or for Ormonde as lordlieutenant of Ireland; only Buckingham, in fact, of the three high tory peers in the newcabinet had any place at all in Harley’s early calculations. But these were far from beingthe limit of the concessions he had to make.The long dispute early in the summer overwho should succeed Sunderland as secretary of state delayed the latter’s dismissal by atleast a month, and illustrates very well Harley’s inability at times to impose his ownscheme of things either on his fellow-conspirators or, more important still, on the queen.There are hints that his first inclination was to press the claims of the earl of Anglesey,an able young tory peer whose cause was espoused by several of the juntilla and who wasnaturally popular with most of the church tories. Right through the summer Harleyremained convinced that striking a partnership with Anglesey was the best means ofconciliating the church party. But Anne, it seems, was not enthusiastic. She was moreimpressed by the objections made against Anglesey by the duke of Somerset, very much

4 BL, Add. MS 70260:Viscount Weymouth to Harley, 18 Aug. 1710; Levens Hall, Cumbria, Levens MSS:William Bromley to James Grahme, 16 July 1710. Bromley is not expressing his own opinion but that of amutual friend, identified only by his code-name ‘Hannibal’.

5 Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies [hereafter cited as HALS], Panshanger MSS, D/EP/F55, ff.113–4: R. Monckton [MP Pontefract and commissioner of trade] to Lord Cowper, 28 Aug. 1710.

278 Geoffrey Holmes


in her favour at this time, by a few prominent high tories like the veteran Leeds, betterknown by his former title of earl of Danby, and Buckingham, and even by some of herwhig ministers. At the same time Anne’s prejudice against her former secretary of state,Nottingham, put him firmly out of the reckoning, even supposing (as is most unlikely)Harley had been prepared to work with his old enemy. Harley’s next suggestion was thatthe office should be offered either to his friend Earl Poulet or to Newcastle, already inthe ministry as lord privy seal; but Poulet turned down the job, and strong oppositionfrom the rest of the juntilla forced Harley to drop the idea of Newcastle.The man whowas eventually appointed, Lord Dartmouth, was, on his own admission, the queen’scompromise choice for the post, after it had become clear that no stronger candidatewould be acceptable to all her official and unofficial advisers. Dartmouth observed of hisappointment that, though he was ‘looked upon as a tory’ he was ‘known to be no zealousparty man’.6

Shaping the new administration precisely to his own mould proved, in fact, a taskbeyond even Harley’s political acumen and powers of persuasion. Even the treasurycommission which replaced Godolphin eight weeks after Sunderland’s fall, thoughconsisting mainly of loyal Harleyites, was in Harley’s own view no more than a secondbest. Most striking of all is the evidence that he began with no intention of procuringhigh office for two of his leading disciples, Sir Simon Harcourt and Henry St John, andonly conceded such office (in St John’s case most unwillingly) after his initial plans hadfailed to materialise. Harcourt was designed all along for his old post of attorney general,outside the cabinet (a post with which, incidentally, he professed himself quite satisfied);indeed, he was deliberately appointed to it a week before the main crop of ministerialchanges in September to remove any apprehensions which the then lord chancellor(Cowper) might have about Harley’s designs on his office. Only Cowper’s refusal toaccept the olive branch made Harcourt’s continued exclusion impracticable. As for StJohn, it is clear that when the original division of spoils was being discussed betweenHarley and Shrewsbury early in March 1710, Harley’s most able and ambitious followerwas earmarked for nothing more elevated than a return to the war office, another postwhich carried no cabinet status. We know this because St John registered an eloquentprotest at the time at what he obviously considered the shabbiest treatment: ‘I amindifferent what employment is reserved for me [he wrote to Harley], but I must ownthat to succeed Mr Cardonnel, upon the same foot as Mr Cardonnel was, is not cominginto the service a second time with so good a grace as I came in the first; & keepingone’s present situation is a good deal better than sinking whilst one affects to rise.’7

Needless to say, St John’s professed ‘indifference’ to his future office was puresthumbug.There can be little doubt that from the start he had his eyes firmly fixed on thesecretaryship he eventually got; and it is equally certain that Harley was aware of hisambition and fully determined to scotch it. This determination persisted at least untilwell into August, as St John implies in a bitter remark to his old patron, Sir WilliamTrumbull: ‘I am not certain that they intend to dispose of me as you kindly imagine;. . . Was it possible in a letter to paint the character of some persons, to describe the

6 Gilbert Burnet, History of my Own Time (6 vols, 1833), vi, 9 n.7 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 536: 8 Mar. 1710. Adam de Cardonnel, Marlborough’s secretary, had been

appointed secretary-at-war in Jan. 1710 on Walpole’s promotion to the treasurership of the navy.



present temper of partys, and to give the narrative of a few incidents latelyhappen’d . . . I am confident you would think that to be a candidate for a countyelection is still a better thing than to be a Secretary of State.’8

And indeed it was not until the second week in September, after a lengthy but finallyunsuccessful attempt to persuade the existing senior secretary, Henry Boyle, to stay inoffice, that Harley at last conceded that St John’s promotion was unavoidable. Notwithout reason did the queen describe the appointment to her doctor as a measure of‘necessity’, adding that ‘Mr Boyle’s going out was his own doing’.9

There is a further respect in which the myth of Harley as the Machiavellian master-schemer in the crisis of 1710 cries out to be exploded. For the myth rests not just onthe character of the political changes made but on the peculiar manner of making them.Above all, the long intervals which punctuated the changes, especially the early ones,have so often been interpreted as a piece of conscious stage-management on Harley’spart – deliberate delaying tactics by means of which he kept his opponents continuallyon tenterhooks, playing on their hopes and fears with uncanny skill, and in the endmaking them the unwitting instruments of their own downfall. The truth is, however,that much of the delay, certainly the delay in breaking the power of ‘the family’, wasunintentional and unavoidable. We have Lord Dartmouth’s authority for thinking thathad Harley succeeded with his original plans for replacing Sunderland, Marlborough’sson-in-law would have been dismissed in mid-May rather than mid-June.And even afterthe interested parties had finally agreed on the choice of Dartmouth, the juntilla had tosuffer a further infuriating delay before the appointment could be announced, thanksto a demand from the Scottish secretary, Queensberry, for a redivision of secretarialresponsibilities.

In the case of Godolphin, the next major victim, there is even less evidence of acalculated delay prompted by political tactics. Admittedly, for much of the long intervalof almost eight weeks which separated Sunderland’s fall from that of the treasurer,Harley’s negotiations with the junto had entered their most intensive phase, and therewere conceivable political advantages to be gained from keeping the whig lords insuspense. But it scarcely seems justifiable to attach much importance to this coincidence.The most plausible explanation that has been suggested for the long postponement ofGodolphin’s fall is that it was not indeed deliberate, but that Harley was restrained forso long mainly by fear of a financial collapse in the City. Shrewd observers, both foreignand domestic, were undoubtedly convinced that ‘if the Treasurer were dismissed, thecredit which is the real basis of the wealth of the country at this moment, would simplycollapse’.10 What is more, Godolphin himself shared their convictions, as his letters toMarlborough throughout the summer show. The special value of the lord treasurer’sfriendships and connections among the Bank directors and the London moneyed interestat large naturally raised in acute form the question of who was to take over his dutiesif, or when, he departed; and there are strong indications that Harley was reluctant totake on his own shoulders too heavy a burden of financial responsibility.

8 BL, Add. MS 72489: 31 Aug. 1710.9 Diary of Sir David Hamilton, ed. Philip Roberts (Oxford, 1975), 16–17: 21 Sept. 1710.10 Onno Klopp, Der Fall des Hauses Stuart und die Succession des Hauses Hannover (14 vols, Vienna, 1875–88),

xiii, 437–8: Hoffmann to Vienna, 24 June 1710.

280 Geoffrey Holmes


Yet whatever apprehensions Harley may have had about the financial consequences ofGodolphin’s dismissal there is simply no concrete evidence that they prompted himto recommend procrastination. Such evidence as there is, in fact, points very muchthe other way. On 3 July, less than three weeks after Sunderland’s fall, Harley drew upone of the most important of the many brief memoranda which were his customarypreparation for interviews with the queen.Three of his jottings on this day together tellan eloquent story: first the note ‘Ld Coningsby tomorrow’ – almost certainly a reminderto the queen that she should proceed without delay with the removal of one of the mostactive of the ‘treasurer’s whigs’, the particular friends of Marlborough and Godolphin;then ‘Mr Cressets instructions to be hastned’ – an indication that Harley was frettingfor the prompt dispatch of the queen’s official envoy to Hanover, whose main task waswidely believed to be to offer Marlborough’s supreme command of the army to theelector of Hanover; and lastly, most graphic of all, ‘You must preserve yr character &spirit & speak to Ld Treasurer. get quit of him’.11 The singularly urgent tone of this finalplea surely suggests that it had been made before, and perhaps more than once, in theweeks since Sunderland’s fall.This time, however, it appears to have had limited success.Auditor Harley, Robert Harley’s brother, was to testify some years later that a letter fromthe queen dismissing the treasurer was actually drafted in the early days of July, and itscarcely seems fanciful to assume that this letter was prepared as a consequence ofHarley’s repeated pressure. Yet it was not delivered. For a further month the sentence onGodolphin continued to be suspended. And, once again, it is hard to escape theconclusion that the real stumbling block was the attitude of the queen. Sir DavidHamilton, the queen’s physician, whose careful record of his frequent conversations withAnne affords a remarkable insight at times into the workings of her mind, was alwaysconvinced that she retained a higher regard for Godolphin than for the rest of ‘thefamily’, and that up to the early summer, at least, she was quite unreconciled to theprospect of losing his services. In fact she went so far in mid-May as to employ Hamiltonhimself as a private emissary ‘to see if it was possible to bring my Lord Godolphin offfrom the Duchess; for that would be one of the happiest things imaginable’.The missionfailed. ‘I acquainted her Majesty’, Hamilton writes, ‘that my Lord Godolphin said, it wasimpossible their Relation being so near, and their Circumstances so united, for him tobreak off from the Duchess, but that there was nothing in his Power he coud Act for herService, but he woud do it.’12 But it is interesting that shortly before this approach wasmade Godolphin himself had admitted that the idea of his dismissal was ‘perhaps . . . notyett in her intentions or thoughts, but what she may bee brought to in time by aperpetuall course of ill offices and lyes from 199 [Harley] & his friends’.13

But although Anne’s personal regard for her old servant cooled noticeably after thefailure of Hamilton’s mission, she became, if anything, more nervous about the possibleconsequences of removing his guiding hand from the treasury – especially after herinterview with the Bank directors in the middle of June, an incident which merelyangered Harley, whereas it plainly alarmed the queen. Moreover, there can be little doubtthat these apprehensions persisted, despite the efforts of Harley and Shrewsbury to allay

11 BL, Add. MS 70333 (emphasis added).12 Diary of Sir David Hamilton, ed. Roberts, 9: 15, 16 May 1710.13 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1482: Godolphin to Marlborough, 5 May 1710.



them, for several weeks after she had been prodded into drafting a letter of dismissal inearly July.As late as the 20th of this month Shrewsbury admitted to Halifax that she wasstill ‘resolved to make 38 [Godolphin] & 199 [Harley] agree’, this in spite of the fact thatshe had already sounded the treasurer on his response to a ‘moderating system’ theprevious week, and had received little encouragement.14 Indeed, there are good groundsfor believing that it was not until Godolphin himself, in the last days of his ministry,began to meet with unexpected difficulty in screwing urgent loans out of the Bank (itsconfidence now badly disturbed by the prevailing political uncertainty), that his fate wasfinally sealed. At all events, after the dramatic failure of his last appeal to the court ofdirectors on 4 August even Anne must have been convinced that his only remainingraison d’être had disappeared.

It does seem, then, that quite apart from all the specific evidence that the change ofministry did not take the course which Harley had envisaged, there is one basic generalflaw in the premise that he was able to play out his own game with substantial, if notunqualified, success: and this is simply that it leaves one crucial factor – the queen – outof account.Why the significance of her independent role in the 1710 crisis should havebeen so consistently underrated is by no means easy to understand. For although manyof the details of the part Anne played rest on evidence only recently available, the generalpointers have always been there. Why, one wonders, has so little attention been paid tothe evidence of Swift, who invariably laid heavy stress on the problem of managing thequeen? After all, he knew as much of Harley’s motives as anyone, and had a keenerappreciation of his difficulties than most. In his Considerations upon . . . the death of theQueen Swift took the view that ‘Lover of gentle Measures and inclined to Procrastina-tion’ as Harley was, he was nevertheless much embarrassed by Anne’s evident reluctanceto go as far or as fast as he himself wished, especially ‘when she had got rid of those whohad as she thought given her the most uneasyness’. Harley’s embarrassment was thegreater because he always felt, according to Swift, ‘he could not with any decency pressthe Queen too much against her Nature, because it would be like running upon theRock where his Predecessors had Split’.15

In this last remark, especially, Swift put his finger unerringly on one of the key factorsin the political situation in 1710, and on a factor that was to remain of great significancethroughout the last four years of Anne’s reign: and this was Harley’s conviction that thefree employment by the queen of her lawful prerogatives was both constitutionally rightand politically wise; the belief that with gentle guidance Anne could safely be entrustedwith the exercise of power.‘Act by her own judgmt’, he wrote in a private memorandumbefore one of his talks with the Queen, ‘& I wil be ready to obey & promote it’; andat the end of the summer he could still assure Newcastle with apparent sincerity that ‘assoon as the Queen has shewn strength and ability to give the law to both sides, then willmoderation be truly shewn in the exercise of power without regard to parties only’.16 Ifthis second statement is accepted at face value it is a remarkable testimony to Harley’sfaith in his sovereign, for much had happened in the previous four months to disturb his

14 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1575: Godolphin to Marlborough, 21 July 1710;Dorothy H. Somerville, The King of Hearts (1962), 266–7; cf. HMC, Bath MSS, i, 198: Shrewsbury to Harley,22 July 1710.

15 The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (14 vols, Oxford, 1941–68), viii, 103.16 BL, Add. MS 70333: memorandum of 20 May 1710; HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 219: 14 Sept. 1710.

282 Geoffrey Holmes


confidence. In the early months of 1710 it had been politically convenient to encourageAnne to assert herself, to bolster her self-confidence in preparation for the break withthe Marlboroughs. Thereafter, however, the necessity of remaining true to his ownprecepts tied Harley’s hands most inconveniently on more than one occasion. Therecould be no question of bullying the queen, or of trying too blatantly to force her hand.And this meant, for one thing, that she could not be presented with a blueprint ofcarefully-phased changes, either at the outset or indeed at any stage. She had to begradually prepared for each new change as it was projected, and delicately coaxed ifpossible into accepting it. It also meant that whenever Harley found that his own ideasand objectives were out of tune with those of the queen, his freedom of action wasinevitably circumscribed. How this affected the replacement of Sunderland and delayedthe removal of Godolphin has already been indicated. But this was only part of the story.Much more basic in shaping the course of events in 1710 was the extent to whichHarley’s general attitude towards both political parties was conditioned by the need toaccommodate the queen’s feelings; for with regard to the whigs, especially,Anne and herchief advisor were by no means in complete harmony.

While in opposition from 1708 to 1710 Harley had seemed, more often than not, toregard the whole Godolphin ministry – whigs and Churchillites alike – as tarred withthe same brush. In these years his two most important lieutenants, Harcourt and St John,had shed their former middle-of-the-road philosophy, and in making his peace withBromley Harley had, formally at least, adopted a comparable attitude, though withcertain reservations. Clearly he had no reason to feel kindly disposed towards the junto.He had doggedly opposed their break-in to the cabinet after 1705, and no whig raiseda finger to save him when he fell foul of his former allies, Godolphin and Marlborough,at the beginning of 1708: on the contrary, the party had exulted in his discomfiture.At the same time he was not a man to allow old antipathies or a desire for revenge todominate his political attitudes; and, in fact, one of his main difficulties throughout thespring and summer of 1710 was to be that most of his fellow-conspirators – Argyll,Peterborough, Rivers and, above all, the queen – saw their politics in so much simplerand more personal terms than did he himself.

As far as Anne is concerned, Swift puts the point with characteristic clarity andemphasis: ‘It is most certain, that when the Queen first began to change her Servants, itwas not from a Dislike of Things but of Persons, and those Persons were a very smallNumber.’17 Just how small a number has not always been realized.With the Marlboroughs,their son-in-law, Sunderland, and to a much lesser degree, Godolphin, Anne’s significantpersonal antipathies began and ended. Most curious of all were her feelings towards thelords of the junto. For so long the ‘tyrannizing lords’ had been her special bogey. She hadfought with all her native stubbornness to keep them out of office between 1706 and1709. Yet once they were in she had found them, with one striking exception, far morecongenial than she had feared. By the spring of 1710 only Sunderland remainedrepugnant to her, as he had been all along. Somers had quickly managed to bring herunder the spell of his personal charm, and having spiked the guns of Marlborough whenthe latter made his bid to be captain-general for life he earned (so Dartmouth assures us)

17 Jonathan Swift, ‘Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry’, in Prose Works, ed. Davis, viii,142 (emphasis added).



her particular gratitude; so much so that even at the end of this disastrous summer forthe whigs he was still ‘thought to have a great personal interest in her Majesty’ thoughby then, as Addison ruefully reported to Wharton, it was ‘not sufficient to support hisparty’.18 Wharton himself was another who appears to have improved his standing withthe queen since taking office in 1708.The man whose reputation both as a rake and asa republican had once curdled her blood behaved himself with unexpected decorum atCourt and at the cabinet table (and also had the good sense to relieve his sovereign ofhis presence for half the year by returning to his government in Ireland). By 1710 hisinterest with the queen was second only to that of Somers among his junto colleagues– one reason why whig sympathisers deplored his absence during the most criticalmonths of this year. Of the other members of the junto, Halifax, though not in thecabinet, was a practiced courtier who knew how to flatter and to please; and the fact thathe was on bad terms with Marlborough and Godolphin was hardly likely to damage hisstanding with the queen; while as for Orford, Anne may have been indifferent to him asa person, but she developed a healthy respect for his ability as a naval administrator. Lastlythere was Cowper, the lord chancellor, whose close association with the junto in recentyears had done little to dim Anne’s undisguised regard and admiration for him. So farwas she, in fact, from feeling any general animosity to the whig leaders as a body thatGodolphin believed she could never have been induced to embark on the change ofministry, but for ‘a fear industriously wrought up, of 38 [me] and 39 [the duke ofMarlborough], and that 256 [Abigail Masham] was never to expect any quarter fromeither of them’.19

The fact that Anne started out apparently with no thought of making a clean breakwith the junto, and that Harley was inhibited by his own carefully-cultivated attitude ofdeference from overriding or disregarding her opinions, must clearly remove the lastshred of credibility from the myth of his unchallenged control over the political situationin 1710.

2

It was Harley’s task, as he well knew, to produce an acceptable and workable alternativeto the Godolphin ministry, not just a theoretically-desirable one; the prospect that theresult might not entirely accord with his own political principles was less important thanthat it should satisfy three practical conditions. First, it had to be a ministry to thequeen’s satisfaction, constituted at each stage with her free consent. Second, it had to bea ministry capable of commanding a majority in parliament, and also of handling andcontrolling that majority.There was no point in constructing a utopian balance of power,if the politicians of the centre who held the balance could not, among them, musteradequate parliamentary support.And here the sheer practical limitations of a governmentof moderates, given the material at Harley’s disposal in 1710, provide, perhaps, the mostconvincing of all the arguments that can be mustered against this view of his objectives.

18 Burnet, Own Time, v, 416 n; Addison Letters, ed.W. Graham (Oxford, 1941), 233: Addison to Wharton [25Aug. 1710].

19 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1603: Godolphin to Marlborough, 14 Aug. 1710.

284 Geoffrey Holmes


There was bound to be a heavy question mark against almost any centre coalition on thescore of parliamentary management, since few of its possible members, apart from Harleyhimself, could have supplied the necessary combination of electoral and family influencealong with parliamentary stature. The plain truth was (and Harley had been in politicslong enough to appreciate it) that most of the heavy guns, when it came to thecommand of large political clans and parliamentary ability, were on the partisan flanks ofthe two parties, and not in the indeterminate centre. And third, in addition to a capacityfor parliamentary management, Harley also had to have a ministry whose memberscommanded the requisite administrative talent, and a fair measure, at least, of adminis-trative experience.

The real crux of Harley’s problem was that, from the point of view of its partycomplexion, no ministry he could feasibly have constructed in the circumstances of 1710would have met fully all these three conditions. On the one hand, deference to thewishes and prejudices of the queen involved, at least at the outset, keeping changes ofpersonnel to the minimum, and encouraged a disposition in favour of existing whigministers as long as they had no firm connections with ‘the family’. It is important tograsp that, despite all the emotional outbursts of tory loyalty at the time of theSacheverell trial, and despite the subsequent attempts of the high tory old guard –notably Rochester and Nottingham – to establish some degree of rapport with the dukeof Shrewsbury after Anne had brought him into the cabinet, she was by no meansanxious to readmit to high office the men who had caused her so much trouble in thefirst two years of her reign. So Harley had to base his original calculations, at least, onthe presumption that if it came to a choice between the junto and the two veteranhigh-flyers, the queen would continue to favour the former, unless, and until, she couldbe persuaded that their continued service was impracticable. For that matter Harleyhimself was well aware that the readmission to the ministry of Rochester and Notting-ham would be the likeliest way to jeopardise his own supremacy in any new politicalscheme.

On the other hand it must have been only too plain that the second condition – theneed to build an administration capable of managing parliament – would best be satisfiedby a government that was preponderately, if not overwhelmingly, tory. The committedwings of both parties each had the experience and political equipment to handle aparliament that was basically well-disposed; but Harley’s special problem was to find agovernment with the power not simply to carry through the routine business of thecrown, but to carry through the highly-controversial peace policy on which he andShrewsbury were utterly determined, and for which the queen’s support was assured.And from this point of view a ministry of recognizably tory character seemed much thebest solution, provided the change was accompanied by a dissolution of the old parlia-ment, with its strong whig majority in the house of commons.

But could such a ministry combine its parliamentary influence with the provision ofa reasonable fund of administrative ability, the third great pre-requisite? There were somewho were distinctly doubtful whether it could. Harley’s dilemma was completed, in fact,by the knowledge that in terms of administrative experience the tories were at a cleardisadvantage compared with their rivals. This was particularly so if Rochester andNottingham, with their closest adherents, had to be left out from one motive or another.It is true there was an able nucleus of Harleyites in the persons of Harley himself, St John



and Harcourt. But Harley had his own good reasons, as we have seen, for wishing toexclude the two latter from really high office. As for the younger representatives of thetory right – Bromley, Hanmer, George Granville,Wyndham and Anglesey, for example –most were untried in office; while on past record the older figures of some experience,independent of the major tory clans – men like Buckingham, Pembroke, Jersey andDartmouth – could scarcely be expected to achieve more than conscientious application,if that. Nor could Harley’s fellow-conspirators, Shrewsbury excepted, be looked upon tomake up the deficiency. Except for Somerset, who had an inflated idea of his owncapacity which no one else shared, they were nearly all military men without experienceof civil administration and, Peterborough possibly apart, without much appetite for it.

By contrast, the whigs were exceptionally well-stocked with ability, both proved andpotential, and with administrative experience; and this was true not just of men ofcabinet status but of the younger men at present in lesser office, like Townshend and,above all, Walpole, who as Harley himself was prepared to admit was ‘worth half hisparty’.20 This aspect of Harley’s problem was not lost on contemporaries:

It was generally reported and believed [wrote Oldmixon] that Mr Harley, knowingwhat a small number of men there was in his party, who had heads fit for business,was desirous to have had the Lord-Chancellor still kept in his station, and even theLord Wharton in the Lieutenancy of Ireland; nay that most of the Whigs who wereemploy’d in the administration should have continued in it, and the Duke ofMarlborough in command of the army; provided he, and those that were engag’dwith him in the cabal against the ministry, were taken in upon their own terms.21

No special weight attaches to John Oldmixon as an authority; he was a politicalpropagandist with no exceptional sources of information, and here he is doing no morethan follow one of a number of avenues of current speculation about Harley’s aims; butas an indication of what Harley originally believed would be the best way out of hisdifficulties, Oldmixon’s view ought not to be too readily discarded. Since Harley’s hopesof reconciling all his conflicting needs were never bright, the best he could do was tochoose what promised to be the least unpalatable of several dubious alternatives.What ismore, his private memoranda contain at least one startling indication of his readiness,right from the start, to jettison past political ideas in the interest of present politicalrealities. ‘Govern by one party or other but not by both’ – such was the uncharacteristicadvice he was prepared to give the queen (and presumably did give her) in May 1710.22

Coming from the foremost apostle of non-party administration, it demonstrates, asclearly as anything could, his real anxiety about the practical problem of replacing theGodolphin ministry with one that could both govern and manage parliament as effi-ciently as its predecessor. But is Oldmixon right in assuming that the ‘one party’ Harleyplumped for to begin with was, in fact, the whig party?

Among the contemporary or near-contemporary opinions which broadly agree withOldmixon’s diagnosis one of the most interesting comes from Arthur Onslow, later to beSpeaker of the house of commons. Again, it must be conceded, no exceptional value

20 W. Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (3 vols, 1798), i, 32.21 John Oldmixon, History of England during the reigns of . . . Queen Anne, etc (1735), 450.22 BL, Add. MS 70333: miscellaneous memoranda for interviews with Anne, 20, 21 May 1710.

286 Geoffrey Holmes


need be placed on Onslow’s judgment. The nephew of Sir Richard Onslow (a leading‘country whig’ and himself Speaker in the parliament of 1708–10), Arthur was a youngman of only 19 years, reading law at the Inner Temple, when the events of 1710 weretaking place; but his information, as he tells us quite plainly, came from later talks withthe junto lawyer, Sir Joseph Jekyll, ‘who had it very likely, and I think he said so too, fromLord Somers, to whom he was brother-in-law’. At best Onslow’s interpretation onlyrepeats what some leading whigs thought Harley was after; yet all the same it deservesrather more attention than it has received:23

Harley did not design this [‘so sudden and entire a change of the Ministry’] at first.He meant only the removal of the treasurer and his immediate dependants, with somefew others, to make room for his own friends, and then to have gone on with the restof the Whigs, and to have continued the parliament and the war, with the duke ofMalborough in command of it.

Onslow was at one with Oldmixon, then, in thinking that Harley did not intend thechanges to stop abruptly with the dismissal of Sunderland and Godolphin, and a fewjunior henchmen of the Churchills. In Oldmixon’s phrase, ‘most of the Whigs’ were tobe reprieved, but not all.Where Onslow goes one stage further is in asserting that Harleywas, to begin with, opposed to a dissolution. And here, of course, he raises the issue onwhich the credibility of the whole explanation really depends.

The decision on whether or not to dissolve parliament was easily the most vitaldecision which Harley and the queen had to make in 1710, and it would assuredly bethe key to the stability of any preponderantly whig administration. Even among thewhigs themselves, few serious observers in the spring of 1710 doubted for a moment thata general election held then, in the fevered atmosphere generated by the Sacheverellaffair, would destroy their party’s majority in the lower House; and the experience ofWilliam III’s reign after 1697 had proved that even the most able whig ministers werehelpless in the face of a hostile parliamentary majority. Any evidence of an earlycommitment to dissolution on the part of the new ‘managers’, therefore, would obvi-ously undermine the notion that Harley ever contemplated ‘governing by the Whigs’.But no such evidence seems to exist.There are, it is true, indications that all along Harleybelieved the election of a new house of commons, all things being equal, to be the onlysure way of getting a peace treaty – or at least a peace without Spain – sanctioned byparliament. But during the spring and early summer, especially, there remained powerfuldeterrents to a dissolution.The queen appears to have shown, for a long time, a curiousreluctance to part with the old parliament, or at any rate a reluctance to make up hermind one way or the other. Godolphin was still hopeful in mid-June that ‘though theycan make 42 [the queen] leap over a stick yett there is so many difficultys and so muchhazard in that thing, that with industry and application, I yett hope it might behindred’.24 One of the ‘difficultys’ was the constant opposition to dissolution maintainedby a number of those whose advice Anne always valued, including Somerset andNewcastle, and for a while, perhaps Shrewsbury. A still more important consideration,

23 Burnet, Own Time, vi, 13.24 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1552: Godolphin to Marlborough, 16 June 1710.



with Harley himself as well as with the queen, was the knowledge that high tory capacityfor making mischief would be immeasurably increased by the election of a new houseof commons. Against the obvious advantages of having a chamber enthusiastic for peacehad to be weighed all the disadvantages of a too-rampant tory majority, unamenable tocontrol by the Court and unsympathetic or downright hostile to Harley himself. Manyhigh-flyers and jacobites, indeed, did not hide their eager anticipation that new electionswould enable them to wrest the control of events out of Harley’s hands and entrust itto those whom they considered their natural leaders.

If, as seems likely, Harley’s first instinct in these circumstances was to risk the con-tinuance of the parliament elected in 1708, then we surely have here the clue to theidentity of the ‘some few others’ whose removal, Onslow tells us, he intended. If he hadto meet the old parliament again the only possible way in which it could be persuadedto acquiesce in the making of peace on more lenient terms than those so far proffered tothe French was by somehow driving a wedge right through the junto following in bothHouses. Harley must have known that it would be neither practicable nor desirable toallow the leaders of the strongest organised connection in the existing parliament toremain wholly entrenched at Court, as the queen was at first content to allow. But theprospect of splitting the united front of the main whig leadership, and the possibility ofseeing such a fissure run right through the senior lieutenants of the faction to their mostjunior clients in the house of commons – this was an alluring one indeed. By sacrificingthe least amenable, conciliating the rest, and bestowing the vacant offices on a limitednumber of tories, carefully chosen to appease the right wing, was there not just a chancethat Harley might achieve, even in the old parliament, his pious hope – to ‘graft theWhiggs on the bulk of the Church Party’?25

Had such an attempt to split the junto come off it would certainly have been the mostspectacular political coup since the revolution. The odds against success were naturallyheavy; yet at the start they were not impossibly so. In post-revolution politics it wascommon experience with partisan groups on both sides for a spell in office to cause atemporary weakening of the links previously forged in opposition. Since 1709 the juntoand its associates had suffered from an understandable reaction following their long haulback to favour and power, and their unity was already suspect when they were called onto face the ministerial crisis provoked by the promotion of Shrewsbury.Thus at the timeHarley first established formal contact with whig ministers in May, Halifax, for one, wasknown to be on distinctly cool terms with his former allies, and there seems little doubtthat his resumed correspondence with Harley was prompted at first by hopes ofacquiring from the new favourites the high office which he, alone of his junto col-leagues, had failed to secure from the old. At this stage, anyway, he was a palpably weaklink in the chain of whig resistance; and so, too, was Orford, never the most loyal ofcolleagues, and now superseded in importance in the inner councils of the whigs by bothCowper and Devonshire. Orford’s political interest was now focused increasingly onaccumulating the status symbols of power, and throughout April and May 1710 hisdisgust and resentment at his failure to secure the Garter were indulged to the exclusionof all party considerations, prompting him to threaten resignation and to seek thesupport of Shrewsbury. Even Somers, flattered by his growing personal influence with

25 BL, Add. MS 70333: memorandum, 20 May 1710.

288 Geoffrey Holmes


the queen, was showing more concern with furthering his private vendetta againstGodolphin – from whose impending fall he, no doubt, hoped to profit – than withmaintaining ministerial solidarity against Harley’s juntilla. Finally, there was reason forHarley to believe that Lord Chancellor Cowper, too, might prove vulnerable – notthrough any personal piques that could be exploited, but through his known differenceswith his cabinet colleagues over policy; for he was openly sceptical about the wisdom ofa policy of ‘No peace without Spain’.

Godolphin could hardly be blamed, then, for regarding the whigs as ‘so many uneasyill humour’d people’ in the spring of 1710.26 With Sunderland already isolated, to someextent, by his lone stand over the projected Masham address and by rumours of hisapproaching fall, and with Wharton, the most resilient of the junto lords in adversity,temporarily deprived of much of his influence by his duties in Ireland, it cannot haveseemed out of the question to Harley that Sunderland and Wharton, along with theobdurate Devonshire and some junior ministers associated with them, might be aban-doned by their colleagues as part of any ‘accommodation’ arrived at.Two things at leastcan be said: as a calculated risk the plan was feasible; and the most credible explanationof the known course of events from May to June 1710 is provided by the hypothesis thatRobert Harley decided such a risk was worth taking.

3

The logical first step in carrying out the plan was to complete the isolation ofSunderland from his junto allies. And this, as we have seen already, was one of the mainconsequences of the early ‘conferences’ with Halifax and Newcastle, from late May tomid-June.Without a doubt, until he ran into difficulties over the choice of Sunderland’ssuccessor Harley engineered the secretary’s fall with considerable skill.Weeks beforehandhe deliberately ‘leaked’ the news that Sunderland’s role as a sacrificial victim waspre-ordained, insinuating that it was his connection with ‘the family’ and not with thejunto which had sealed his fate, and persistently hinting that all efforts to save him wouldbe unavailing. All the same, the almost incredible ease with which the junto wasmesmerised into making the sacrifice – ‘by none endeavoured to be saved’ was Walpole’sepitaph on Sunderland – can only have astonished Harley, and it must have made himoptimistic that what had been done once could be done again, now that the chinks inthe junto armour had been shown to be so vulnerable.27

Another significant hint of the general direction of Harley’s policy in May and Junewas the recognition of the key position of Somers. If the lord president of the council,still the doyen of the whigs, could once have been induced to crack, Harley would havebeen more than half-way to success. For all his high-mindedness Somers was notimmune from consulting self-interest at times of party crisis. On the very eve ofSunderland’s fall, for instance, he was busy extracting from Godolphin promise of afurther payment of £1,000 from secret service funds, the receipt for which is ironically

26 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1475: Godolphin to Marlborough, 28 Apr. 1710.27 Coxe, Walpole, ii, 25: Walpole to Marlborough, 6 June 1710.



dated 14 June.28 This, of course, Harley could not have known; but there was somethingseemingly calculated, all the same, about the way he took a few of the leading whigs,most notably Somers, rather ostentatiously into his confidence in the consultations aboutSunderland’s successor, leaving others deliberately in the cold along with Godolphin.What is more, Harley let it appear that their objections to the promotion of LordAnglesey were given more weight by him and the queen than the powerful advocacy ofAnglesey’s claims from the tory side; and when, at last, Dartmouth was proposed, thequeen made a point of sending for Somers (presumably on Harley’s prompting) to soundhim out as to whether the whigs could ‘live easily’ with the intended secretary. Somersassured her that they could; and in a list of prospective members of a new ministry whichHarley compiled soon afterwards29 the name of the junto leader is solemnly recordedalongside those of good tories like Weymouth, Bromley and Hanmer.

The deliberate encouragement of a sauve qui peut attitude in selected quarters of theministry is thus implicit in a series of manœuvres from late May to the middle of June.In the next few weeks came new moves, plainly designed by Harley and Shrewsbury toexploit their early successes. For one thing the ‘official’ negotiations with the ministerswere continued. Up to mid-July, in fact, they seem to have been intensified; and after onemeeting on 14 July there was even widespread talk among whig MPs still in town that‘a compromise’ had actually been reached, based on agreement that ‘the p[arliamen]t isnot to be dissolved’.30 But at this stage the most significant pressure was probably alreadybeing applied privately, on the individuals considered most susceptible to it.

It was some time in the early summer – exactly when is not known, but probably justbefore or after the dismissal of the secretary – that the new managers first ‘offered terms’secretly to the first lord of the admiralty, Lord Orford, through the medium of EarlRivers, and possibly to Cowper too.31 There were lesser targets also in sight at this stage,like Newcastle’s brother-in-law, Lord Pelham (who stood much nearer to the junto thandid the duke), and Pelham’s Sussex ally, Sir Harry Peachy; but Orford was the big prizeHarley hoped to capture.The reasons are fairly obvious: though a truculent partisan anda difficult colleague, the earl was an experienced specialist administrator in a post forwhich there was no suitable replacement either among the tories or the malcontentwhigs; and as Robert Walcott has made clear, he still commanded a useful parliamentaryfollowing among sailors and naval administrators in the house of commons.32 There canbe little doubt that when Orford eventually escaped his net, Harley’s disappointment wasperfectly genuine.33 As with Orford, so with Halifax he was prepared to buy experience.Halifax’s financial grasp and City connections alike would have been invaluable to agovernment whose most urgent problem was likely to be to establish its credit and

28 W.S. Churchill, Marlborough, his Life and Times (2 vols, 1947), ii, 715, referring to TNA,T48 (Secret ServiceAccts).

29 BL, Add. MS 70331: undated paper in Harley’s hand, apparently compiled between the time ofSunderland’s fall on 14 June and the dismissal of Coningsby on 8 July.

30 Nottingham University Library, Hollis MSS, Pw2/139: W. Jessop to Newcastle, 18 July 1710.31 HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 214.32 Among men like Philip Papillon and Matthew Aylmer for instance; see Robert Walcott, English Politics in

the Early Eighteenth Century (1956), Appendix iii, 203–4.33 He hinted quite plainly to Newcastle, 23 Sept. 1710, that he was sorry to see Orford persuaded by his

friends to ‘give up’; and it is significant that Halifax claimed (26 September) to have done ‘all I could topersuade Lord Chancellor and Lord Orford to remain in their posts’: HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 220–1.

290 Geoffrey Holmes


inspire confidence in the creditor class. Not content with flattering Halifax’s vanity byusing him as the main channel of communication with the old ministry, and by playingon his sense of indispensability,34 Harley meant to bind him more tangibly to the neworder.Towards the end of June he offered to use his influence with the queen to makeHalifax joint plenipotentiary, along with Townshend, at the Hague, and so give him adirect influence on the peace negotiations that were still nominally in progress inHolland. And when Halifax accepted the offer at the beginning of July it must haveseemed to Harley another major step towards bringing off his great coup.

Up to the beginning of July, in fact, little had happened to disappoint his hopes.Thechange which came over the whole situation in the course of the next month was quiteremarkable. By the beginning of August contacts between the juntilla and the whig leadershad ‘insensibly dwindled to nothing’.35 The prospect of achieving a permanent split in thejunto was rapidly disappearing; and Harley had already begun to modify radically hiswhole concept of the kind of administration he could reasonably hope to construct.

The breakdown of negotiations, ‘official’ and private, with the lords of the juntofollowed almost inevitably on two new and important developments: one was a suddenstiffening of morale and resistance on the whig side; the second a quite decisive changein Harley’s own attitude towards basing his ‘great scheme’ on whig support.The first wasreflected in the almost complete lack of progress Harley made in July towards firmconquests in the junto ranks. Orford was a case in point. In May and June he had seemedripe for plucking. It is very noticeable that such positive action as the whigs did take intheir own defence at this stage (e.g., pressure on the Hague to make representations tothe queen) was usually initiated without his participation, as well as without that ofHalifax. Wharton fumed against ‘the barbarity that hee hath been guilty of ’ and scath-ingly wrote from Dublin that he ‘ought to hide his head in the Cellar’.36 Yet throughoutJuly Orford never grasped really firmly the olive-branch offered by Rivers, and the factthat he ‘spoke heartily’ at a cabinet meeting on the 30th against any attempt to dissolvethe old parliament appeared to offer little promise of pliability in the near future.37

Cowper, too, though conciliatory and indicating that he had not entirely given up hopeof salvaging his office, confined his responses (whether to Harley’s wheedling or veiledthreats) to vague generalities.38 Most important of all, Somers’s resolution in July showedclear signs of stiffening. At the cabinet which met to consider the breakdown of theGertruydenberg talks, probably on the 23rd, the lord president put on a bolder and morepositive front than for many weeks, aiming his attack against Somerset and Shrewsburyin a bid to bring them back to their old allegiances. His theme was that the French had

34 Extracts from a rough draft of a letter, found among Harley’s memoranda for the summer of 1710, andalmost certainly, from the contents, designed for Halifax, illustrate his technique: e.g., ‘Blind or Asleep: I havebeen only vigilant to serve you . . . with greif I have observd the zealots of both sides malyne yr Lsp &therefore I would have such as might depend upon you and encrease the numbers of such’ etc.: BL, Add. MS 70333.

35 HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 213.36 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1520: Godolphin to Marlborough, 8 June 1710; BL,

Add. MS 61633: Wharton to Sunderland, 23 May 1710.37 Ironically the first firm response from Orford came on 10 August, when Harley was already committed

to a change of plan: HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 212, 214.38 See his exchange of letters with Harley, 2–6 Aug. 1710, in HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 554–8 passim; also

HALS, Panshanger MSS, D/EP F152, f. 5: Cowper to Harley [draft] 6 Aug. 1710; D/EP F60, f. 31: Harley toCowper, 6 Aug. 1710.



clearly been encouraged in their intransigence by recent ‘intrigues’ in England, and thatthis should be ‘resented and inquired into’; and though his pleas to the renegade whigsfell on deaf ears (Somerset and Shrewsbury, we are told, sat mute and unresponsivethrough the meeting) their significance was not lost on Harley. Nor was the fact that onthis same occasion Somers ‘gave his opinion very strongly for the continuance of thewar, till the restitution of Spain and the West Indies’.39

One may well ask, what occurred in this month of July 1710 to put new backboneinto a hitherto flaccid frame – to such an extent that even Halifax, who by the end ofJune had seemed almost ready to sell himself to Harley, grew ultra-cautious as he saw thathe might soon find himself out on a limb? Somers’s brother-in-law, Sir Joseph Jekyll,who was one of the main junto champions in the Commons, later told Arthur Onslowthat Wharton’s was the decisive influence in checking the disastrous slide of at least threeof his old allies into an accommodation with the new managers.The lord lieutenant ofIreland, in the weeks preceding Sunderland’s fall, had fretted sorely at his own inabilityto influence events, and at the failure of his colleagues in England even to keep himproperly informed. ‘I wish, not only for my owne sake, but for the publick service’, hecomplained to Sunderland, ‘that yr Lspp would direct that I might sometimes have a hintof wt passes, wch I would endeavour to make the best use of I could’.40 It would seem,however, that gradually Wharton’s character began to make itself felt, even by corre-spondence. An isolated letter which has survived from Somers to Wharton, written inJuly, suggests that the former had by then begun to absorb a little of his correspondent’sebullient optimism and uncompromising spirit.41 It must have been by letter, andpresumably not long afterwards, that Wharton delivered the celebrated philippic which,according to Jekyll, finally brought his fellow-whigs to their political senses.42 Theyshould have nothing to do with Harley, he told them, not only because his overtureswere insincere but because he was not worth dealing with: ‘he could do no business’,Wharton is said to have assured them, ‘would soon break his neck, and . . . all thingswould be in such confusion, as to force the queen back again into the hands of theWhigs . . . ; this was the situation of power they ought to be in, and not to have it in amotley ministry with such a r[at?] as Harley at the head of it’. The lord lieutenant’sdiagnosis was not, of course, strictly correct, nor his prophecies very accurate; but hisparty zeal and political judgment both told him that there was only one sane path thewhigs could take if they were to have any future as a party, at least in the sense in whichhe – the most unrepentant of partisans – understood the word.

As it happened,Wharton’s case for the breaking off of all negotiations with the juntillawas very much reinforced by the limitations which Harley’s own peculiarly trickyposition imposed on his bargaining power. It is hardly surprising that he found whigresponses progressively cooling, in view of his own inability to give the junto satisfaction,either individually or collectively, on the two crucial points which caused its leaders mostanxiety. On the one hand there was his determination to bring at least some toryauxiliaries into the ministry.The whigs had stomached Dartmouth as secretary, ‘after the

39 See Hardwicke’s note to Burnet, Own Time, vi, 7.40 BL, Add. MS 61633: Dublin, 21 May 1710.41 BL, Add. MS 4223, f. 215.42 Onslow’s note to Burnet, Own Time, vi, 13.

292 Geoffrey Holmes


alarm Lord Anglesea had given them’;43 but when early in July they found Angleseybrought into the government through a side door, as vice-treasurer of Ireland, theynaturally suspected a double-cross, the more so as he was soon, surprisingly, promoted tothe cabinet. Yet they could extract no guarantee from Harley that similar incursionswould not take place again, for the whole success of his plan depended on his chancesof pacifying the warmer tories by a few shrewdly-calculated concessions. Even Halifaxwas alarmed, to judge by Harley’s efforts to reassure him: ‘I have endeavord to justify theWhigs’, Harley pleaded in his own defence.‘I would not have them have any jealosie thatanyone would rival them in Places; but where is the hurt to add to their numbers?’ andagain, ‘I have no partiality to one side more than another – if it be to any it is to thosewho have last offered to serve [i.e., the whigs]. I desire to get as many to help them asI can. I would not depreciate their merit; nor would I have them over turned by wantof numbers.’44 But in using such arguments to justify employing high churchmen likeAnglesey, Harley was pleading a lost cause. Weeks before, Arthur Mainwaring hadprophesied ‘that whenever they oblig’d one man of the Tories they wou’d loose twentyWhiggs by it’, and the events of July proved him substantially right.45

There was, however, a second and even more important guarantee which the juntolords required of Harley, and which he was in no position to give them: a guarantee thatthere would be no dissolution of parliament.The retention of the old parliament was asine qua non on the whig side from the start; rightly they saw it as their one sure hopeof extricating themselves from their present difficulties. To Harley, by contrast, it was adisagreeable necessity which he might eventually have to accept, but to which he wouldavoid committing himself for as long as possible in the hope of changing circumstances.As long as he still looked for substantial whig support, and as long as new electionsseemed certain to produce the kind of house of commons which a whiggish ministrycould not hope to manage, such elections would be politically foolish. Yet an opendeclaration by Harley in the early summer in favour of the existing parliament wouldcertainly have lost him his precarious hold over the tories, few of whom would thenhave been prepared to enlist in his service. On the other hand the situation which hadexisted from April to June, when as Harley later put it ‘a gen[era]l ferment united theChurch against the ministry’ and ‘a foolish tryal & dangerous attempt alarmd all’ wouldsurely not last indefinitely.46 Was he not justified in hoping that, if the fever abated, aparliament chosen in a different atmosphere would contain more evenly-balanced forces,amenable to the Court but also favourable to peace in a way the existing house ofcommons was unlikely to emulate? At any rate, Harley was simply not prepared to giveup his freedom of manœuvre by a firm guarantee,47 and the whig negotiators naturallysaw each successive piece of evasion on the question of a dissolution as fresh ground fordoubting his sincerity.

43 Burnet, Own Time, vi, 9 n.44 BL, Add. MS 70333: draft in Harley’s hand [summer 1710].45 BL, Add. MS 61634: to the duchess, ‘Friday night’ [end May 1710].46 BL, Add. MS 70331: memorandum, 4 July 1714. The ‘dangerous attempt’ was against Abigail Masham.47 It should be remembered that as well as playing for time Harley was able to use the prevailing uncertainty

about the fate of parliament as one of his chief weapons in weakening Godolphin’s position. He once admittedto Newcastle that the whole question of a dissolution would become ‘more treatable’ once the treasurer wasout (HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 213).



As things turned out, however, Harley had good reason to congratulate himself on hiscaution. For in the course of July the general situation changed so significantly that, fromhis point of view, the case for prolonging the life of the existing parliament lost most ofis validity. And it was this, even more than the growing inflexibility on the whig side,which accounts for his breaking off ‘the conferences’ at the beginning of August, andreshaping his whole strategy. Harley’s decision was certainly made easier by a noticeablehardening of Anne’s attitude towards the whigs, in evidence from the very beginning ofthe month. The immediate cause of this was apparently her resentment at receiving astrong representation from the States General against further ministerial changes, forwhich she believed (rightly as far as one can judge) the junto to be indirectly respon-sible.48 Nothing provoked Anne more, or made her more self-conscious about her regaldignity and prerogatives, than foreign interference; and at a cabinet meeting on 2 Julythere was a rare show of spirit from the queen which warmed the heart of Bromleywhen the news reached him at his Warwickshire home: ‘the answer that was returned,. . . as I am told, was worthy of Q. Eliz. It was given in the Cabinet without consultationupon it, & in such a manner that there was not a word offered agst it’.49

Sensitive as Harley was to the queen’s feelings, however, it would be wrong to deducetoo much from this incident. The really vital factors which brought him to a firmdecision on the question of a dissolution were clearly more far-reaching. One wasessentially external. The breakdown of the Gertruydenberg peace talks in mid-July, andthe growing self-confidence on the part of the French which had led them to wreck thetalks, had an effect on Harley’s calculations which has never been fully appreciated. Itsmost obvious consequence, admittedly, had little direct bearing on the fate of parliament.More than any other single factor, the failure of the peace negotiations earned theduke of Marlborough his reprieve. Up to July the replacement of the duke as com-mander of the army in Flanders, if possible by the elector of Hanover, appears to havebeen an intrinsic feature of Harley’s ‘great scheme’; and it had remained so even whenMarlborough had declined to solve the problem himself by resigning in protest atSunderland’s removal. By the end of July and early August this resolution had becomevisibly weakened, though not yet discarded, and while Cresset’s death on the eve of hissailing (25 July) certainly contributed to the change of attitude, the governing considera-tion was the need to continue the war and avoid the risks (and unpopularity) that wouldbe involved in weakening the army in mid-campaign.

But the news from Gertruydenberg had other, and equally important implications forHarley. He now had to face the fact that the chances of having even the draftpreliminaries of a settlement ready to lay before parliament in the course of its nextsession (which in the case of the old parliament would be its last under the terms of theTriennial Act) were minimal. And since the peace, when at length it was negotiated,

48 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1520, 1531–2: Godolphin to Marlborough, 8, 16 June1710, suggest that British pressure on the Hague certainly lay behind the Vryberg memorial and that thispressure came initially from the whigs – especially from Somers and Devonshire, via Townshend – thoughGodolphin endorsed the policy later.

49 Levens Hall, Levens MSS:William Bromley to James Grahme, 16 July 1710; see also Huntington Library,San Marino, CA, Stowe MS 57: Brydges to Stair, 3 July 1710 (printed in Huntington Library Quarterly, iii(1939–40), 230–1); and Staffordshire RO, Dartmouth MSS, D(W) 1778/VI/188: cabinet minutes, 2 July 1710,for the tart reply which Secretary Boyle was instructed to give to the States, warning them off the queen’sdomestic preserves.

294 Geoffrey Holmes


would almost certainly need the sanction of a new parliament anyway, it seemed onlysensible to hold the election in 1710, so that the Court could at least draw some profitfrom current pro-peace feeling in the country. Adding to the force of this argument wasall the recent evidence that the whig concept of a ‘just and honourable peace’ was stillbasically as rigid as ever. Yet it was most probably a shift in the internal, rather than theexternal, situation which, in the final reckoning, made up Harley’s mind.As July drew toits close, the pressure on the new managers from the tories, strong ever since Sacheverell’strial, had become insistent and increasingly difficult to contain. Even Harleyites and othermoderates had grown restive during the long period of apparent inactivity whichfollowed Sunderland’s fall. But still more important was the fact that the high tories hadsecured, during July, the bridgehead at Court which so far had been denied them; alsothat they had achieved this less through any official recognition – though Anglesey’sappointment was naturally welcome to them – than through the unofficial appearanceon the scene of the earl of Rochester.

It is easy enough to understand the alarm felt by the high tories at the persistentrumours of Harley’s dealings with the junto. After all, his own followers were patentlyuneasy, especially St John who did not attempt to hide his disappointment with the waythe change was being handled. Back in April, even, he had protested ‘in a rant, that hewould go into the country and stay there’, and later, when the negotiations with thewhigs had long been under way, he betrayed open scepticism and told his friends he was‘not let into the secret’ of them.50 Harcourt, too, was alarmed, as he made clear enoughto Harley himself: ‘the Duke of Newcastle’s friends have made such an impression as isnot to be wiped off, but become daily more necessary’.51 ‘I have great troble with friendsas well as enemies’52 was Harley’s wry comment in mid-July; but he knew well enoughthat it was his old antagonists on the tory right of whom he had most reason to feelnervous. Here the evidence of his contacts with the ministerial whigs had revived manyof the old suspicions.The disquieting reflection that their fortunes were in the dubioushands of ‘Robin the Trickster’ had already tempted a few of the right-wing zealots tomake an approach to the arch-enemy, Godolphin himself. This they had done throughthe medium of James Grahme, member for Westmorland, promising the treasurer ‘that ifhe would leave my Lord Marlborough, and come into the Queen’s measures, they wouldrather take him for their head than Harley, who had made the same offer to them’.53 Thedismissal of Sunderland had brought content for a while, and that of Coningsby restoredit; but self-congratulation soon gave way once more to restiveness as the tories foundthemselves again relegated for a long spell to the role of anxious spectators rather thanof active participants.There were, it is true, a few sanguine spirits among them. Bromley

50 BL, Add. MS 61460: Mainwaring to the duchess, ‘Wednesday night’ [Apr. 1710] (part of this letter isprinted in Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (2 vols, 1838), i, 314, where wrongly dated ‘May1710’); Huntington Library, Stowe MS 58: St John to Brydges, 1 Aug. 1710 (printed in Huntington LibraryBulletin, viii (1935), 168).

51 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 546: Harcourt to Harley, 21 June 1710 [the reference to the ‘friends’ is to theBank directors].

52 BL, Add. MS 70419: Harley to Edward Stratford, 17 July 1710.53 Lord Coningsby’s ‘Historie of Parties’, presented to George I, two transcripts of which are in BL,

Lansdowne MS 885. Coningsby was a close political associate of Godolphin, and claimed to have been involvedhimself in Grahme’s negotiations. So despite the many curious features of his ‘Historie’, there seems no obviousreason to doubt this particular story.



found ‘those among our friends that have been the greatest Infidels now think they willgo right at last’.54 But the general impression is of anxiety and misgiving behind thebrave front of loyal addresses with which the church party still peppered the Court.Thetory news-writer, John Dyer, did his best to sustain the morale of his many readers, incountry houses up and down the country, by recounting these addresses in detail, alongwith stirring tidings of election preparations; but with ‘all things . . . kept very privateand the Secret lodged but in a few Breasts’ he could offer no tangible evidence that thepromised land was in sight.55

In these circumstances the reaction of the three main high church leaders is of greatinterest. Nottingham remained deliberately aloof, preferring to keep a suspicious eye onevents from the country, to which he had retired soon after the prorogation. Bromley,much more ready than the others to believe in Harley’s good intentions, also kept awayfrom London: partly because of his wife’s health, but mostly, one suspects, from incli-nation. But Rochester was by now simply not prepared to remain a mere spectator onthe sidelines. Prior to Sunderland’s dismissal, while other tories like Leeds and Buck-ingham were tendering advice to the queen about a successor, Rochester ‘was fierceand stood off’. He had dissociated himself so strongly from events at Court thatGodolphin believed he ‘wou’d never piece with 199 [Harley]’.56 Nor was he amongthe joyful tory host who flocked to Kensington to celebrate the secretary’s fall. Earlyin July, however, he seems to have decided on a change of tactics. He appeared atCourt – tory reports had it that he had been ‘sent for’ – and was well enough receivedfor rumours to circulate within a few days that his son, Lord Hyde, would shortly bemade cofferer of the household.57 It was the most significant happening of an eventfulmonth. Whatever his past political indiscretions, Rochester still had some claim on thequeen’s notice and affection, even if only the claim of an uncle over a niece; and oncehe had decided to use what advantages he had to infiltrate, so to speak, through theback door, Harley and Shrewsbury could neither prevent his informal access to Anne,nor hope to ignore indefinitely his claim to a say in the shaping of events. It is true,the queen still showed no enthusiasm for actually employing Rochester, or, indeed, anyof the old tory right; and Rochester himself still claimed ‘that he never was nor everwoud be concernd’ with Harley.58 But the prospect of excluding the old guard alto-gether from the new ministry was obviously fading; and Harley had to recognize thatonce they were admitted, however sparsely, the case for a new parliament becamevirtually unanswerable.

4

In Harley’s own mind, if not yet in that of the queen, the fate of the old parliamentwas almost certainly sealed by the beginning of August, when his formal contacts with

54 Levens Hall, Levens MSS: Bromley to Grahme, 16 July 1710. Bromley himself was surprisingly optimistic:‘I think they have gone so far they must necessarily go farther’, he told Grahme on the 28th.

55 BL, Add. MS 70421: Dyer’s newsletters, 27 July 1710 and passim.56 BL, Add. MS 61461: Mainwaring to the duchess, ‘Friday night’.57 Levens Hall, Levens MSS: Bromley to Grahme, 16 July 1710.58 BL, Add. MS 72491, p. 23: John Bridges to Sir William Trumbull, 28 July 1710.

296 Geoffrey Holmes


the junto were broken off. For at least a fortnight before this the whig negotiators hadnoted a hardening of his attitude on ‘the great point of the dissolution’ and had begunto draw their rueful conclusions.59 What slender hopes they still cherished by the endof the month were based mainly on evidence of Anne’s continued indecision: whichwas one reason, no doubt, why the whigs raised the question of the dissolutionformally in the queen’s presence at the cabinet meeting on 30 July.60 But Harley,having finally succeeded after weeks of pressure in persuading Anne that Godolphinmust go, cannot really have doubted that in the end she would see the logic of partingwith parliament too.

A new parliament, however, meant inevitably a new plan of campaign; and theevidence suggests that even before Godolphin fell on 8 August, and he himself becamechancellor of the exchequer, a lord of the treasury and ‘premier Minister’ on the 9th,61

Harley had already changed both his tactics and his whole objective. The prospect ofa general election in the autumn, and the near-certainty that it would produce a torymajority in the Commons, meant that from now on he simply had to entrust his ownfortunes and the success of his future policies primarily to the support of the toryparty. No amount of brave talk about having ‘no partiality to one side more thananother’ could disguise the harsh practical realities of the present situation; and it doesless than justice to Harley’s political judgment to suppose that he still tried to ignorethem. During August some of his friends on the tory right found him much lessmysterious and equivocal about his real intentions than he had, of necessity, beenbefore. ‘The scene being opened [i.e., since Godolphin’s dismissal] I have had repeatedassurances that no interest will be considered but the Church’s’, wrote Bromley to themember for Westmorland. ‘They are willing to make their Bottom as wide as theycan, and to receive those who are of Distinction, & have no Blemish, provided theycome in on the same Interest. Some who have been very instrumental in bringingabout this great work must be taken care of, & we must not grudge & envy themany advantage, such as E[arl] R[ivers], Arg[yle] & his Brother. This is the language tome.’62

Not that Harley’s recognition of political realities signified any sudden accession ofsympathy for toryism as such – or at least for toryism as most tories understood it.Therewas, on his part, no growing sense of common interest with the great mass of those whocalled themselves tories, such as some of his followers – Harcourt, Mansel, above all St

59 HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 212. Only Halifax’s optimism survived into August. Cf. his letters to Newcastleof 1 and 17 August with those of Somers, 8 and 19 August: HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 212–17.

60 HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 212. Halifax thought it encouraging that she did not challenge the whig case onthis occasion.

61 The phrase ‘premier Minister’ was used by James Brydges, writing to John Drummond, 24 Aug. 1710:Huntington Library, Stowe MS 58 (printed in Huntington Library Quarterly, iii (1939–40), 235–9). Cf. DanielDefoe’s claim (An Account of the Conduct of Robert, Earl of Oxford [1715], 42) that Harley preferred to think ofhimself as ‘delivering the Government from the grievance of a Prime Minister’. For a fuller discussion of theuse of this term, see G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne, Appendix C, 440–2.

62 Levens Hall, Levens MSS: Bromley to Grahme, 1 Sept. 1710. Harley corresponded regularly with Bromleyduring the summer and autumn of 1710, sometimes using his friend Edward Stratford as a go-between in theinterests of security. See e.g., BL,Add. MS 70333: memoranda of 30 May and 8 July 1710; BL,Add. MS 70419:Harley to Stratford, 16 Sept., 22 Oct. 1710; HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 563, 570: Bromley’s replies to Harley, 12Aug., 21 Aug. 1710.



John – increasingly experienced.63 Harley needed the tories; but as ‘the queen’s servant’he viewed the prospect of commitment to them almost as cold-bloodedly as he hadviewed dependence on the whigs. He chose them as his crew because, after July 1710,he had no reasonable alternative; but the crew must not dictate his course, still less takeover the bridge. On the eve of Godolphin’s dismissal there still seemed two ways bywhich this could be prevented: two ways by which Harley could limit his commitmentto the tories, retain his own influence, and preserve the ideal of ‘moderation’ in thepolicies, if not the personnel, of the new government. One was by maintaining at leastsome vital links with the whigs; the other was by preserving the harmony which he hadestablished with the queen.The second was, perhaps, the more basic need, for as long ashe held his special position vis-à-vis the queen, so long would the tories’ need for himequal his for them.

What did Harley’s change of approach signify in terms of the composition of a newministry? Clearly it still demanded, even in the cabinet, some element of balance, or atleast of counterpoise – just as the original plan had done. Tactical considerations apart,Harley was idealistically, and perhaps temperamentally, incapable of thinking in straightparty terms. All the same, he needed now to include enough tories (and among themenough representatives of the high church party) to guarantee that the main conditionsof effective and acceptable government were met.

The criteria of selection, in the case of the tories, appear to have remained much thesame as before, though now Harley had to be prepared to apply them less rigidly.Personal loyalty and friendship to himself were obviously the strongest recommendationsstill. Mansel and Poulet, St John and Harcourt were sure of some reward for their pastfidelity; and from early August Harcourt, as well as Poulet, was seemingly earmarked forthe cabinet, though not yet St John. Other friends of the chief minister, less obviously‘moderate’ in the past, now came in for consideration, among them Charles Caesar, theimpetuous MP for Hertford. Elsewhere in the party, independence of the two great hightory chieftains remained the likeliest passport to Harley’s favour. Addison noted adisposition ‘in the present scheme . . . to take in a great many that have not yet beenupon the stage’.64 Though Harley was prepared to make some surprising exceptions atlower levels, as with an old ally of William’s reign like Frank Gwyn (‘Ld Rotchesterguine as they call him’65), the type of high churchman he favoured for the cabinet postswhich Somers, Devonshire and Wharton, at least, now seemed sure to lose was one ofthe calibre of the duke of Buckingham: independent, friendly with Shrewsbury, but aman with no personal following whom, as Poulet said: ‘You may always turn . . . out,without offence to either party.’ He had been ingratiating himself with the new managers

63 St John told Sir William Trumbull in June that he was determined ‘to neglect nothing in my power wchmay contribute towards making the Church interest the prevailing one in our country’; and by August wasclaiming that, whatever ‘the appearance of things’, he had ‘never deviated’ from his original tory principles: BL,Add. MS 72489: 2 June, 31 Aug. 1710. See also Harcourt’s letter to Harley, 21 June 1710 (HMC, Portland MSS,iv, 546) which, with its fervent emphasis on doing ‘something . . . ere long . . . to show the Queen’s favourtowards the Church of England’, could easily have been written by Bromley.

64 Addison Letters, ed. Graham, 235–6, 1 Sept. 1710.65 Wentworth Papers 1705–1739 . . . , ed. J.J. Cartwright (1883), 163: Peter Wentworth to Raby, [c.12 Dec.

1710]. Francis Gwyn (MP Christchurch), like Bromley, had been, to some extent at least, in Harley’sconfidence during the summer. See BL, Add. MS 70331: memoranda of 30 May, 8 July 1710; BL, Add. MS70294: Gwyn to Harley, 12 Aug. 1710.

298 Geoffrey Holmes


since the spring, and was possibly intended for Devonshire’s lord stewardship or for theprivy seal from a fairly early date.The ability and connections which Buckingham lackedcould be supplied by Anglesey, whose summons to the cabinet along with Harley himselfand Poulet on 13 August is the surest proof we have of Harley’s continued resolve toappease the church party while resisting as long as he could the claims of Rochester andNottingham. Anglesey’s promotion was a logical stage in a consistent policy of buildingup a vigorous young tory, of great potential value to any ministry,66 into a leader of rivalstature to the two chieftains, both in the house of lords and in the country. And thereis no doubt whatever that Anglesey was designed, even more now than earlier in thesummer, to be a pledge of Harley’s good faith towards the church party as a whole.Threeyears later one of the queen’s chaplains, Dr Gooch, assured the dean of Peterborough,White Kennet, that on Anglesey’s admission to the cabinet:

the Ld Treas. Harley had agreed wth him, that leaving the Civil affaires chiefly tohimself, the Ld Treas, he the Ld Anglesey should take charge of Church affaires, andrecommend to all eccles. preferments, and by vertue of this compromise, he Ld Angl.made the list of new Chapl. and the Dr had seen a copy of it in his Ldships own hand,wherein the names of Dr Lancy Master of Pembr and Dr Gooch were inserted, andthey the only two names that were alter’d in it.67

Little wonder that one of Nottingham’s correspondents wrote with some urgency at theend of August:

I’m sure I every day wish yr Ldp here for many reasons, & among the rest, that MrHarley brags that both you & my uncle Guernsey are now so pleas’d that my LdAnglesey & my Ld Dartmouth are employ’d, that you both must do journey manswork under them, or ells keep out of the way of opposeing; that ’twas never to bethought of, to bring in the Leaders or high torys, such as yr self & my Ld Rochester,into the administration.68

In Nottingham’s case, the queen’s continued hostility, if nothing else, seemed likely to doHarley’s work for him.With Rochester he was still prepared to dispute the ground inchby inch, even if in the end he had to yield.

As for the members of the old administration, though the field of choice was nowmuch narrower than it had seemed back in June, there were a few cabinet ministers ofwhom he still had hopes – Somerset, of course, Newcastle, Queensberry and Boyle; andsince the queen’s regard for Cowper was as warm as ever he could not quite rule outthe possibility of an accommodation here. There were also some in junior office, likeWalpole, whose services he valued too highly to part with willingly. But for the most

66 ‘In my opinion for quickness of parts, solidity of judgment & all the improvements reading could givehim . . . inferior to none in the Nation’ was the verdict of James Brydges on Anglesey: Huntington Library,Stowe MS 57: James Brydges to Drummond, 21 Sept. 1710 (printed in Huntington Library Quarterly, iii(1939–40), 240).Another advantage of Anglesey, from Harley’s point of view, was that he was on friendly termswith the Hydes and the Finches without being a client of either.

67 BL, Lansdowne MS 1024, f. 427: White Kennet’s journal, 11 Nov. 1713.68 Leicestershire RO, Finch MSS, Box VI, bundle 23, f. 208: Lady Roxburghe to Nottingham, 31 Aug.

[1710].



part he concentrated his efforts, from August onwards, on any whig who, from whatevermotive, seemed likely to co-operate. As long as they were content to ‘come in on thesame interest’ – which meant to Harley, to put ‘the queen’s service’ before the service ofparty – he was prepared to recruit, along with existing whig allies like Rivers and Argyll,the born ‘trimmers’ like Robert Monckton, the natural courtiers like Newcastle andCholmondeley, the impecunious or financially embarrassed like Russell Robartes, andthose like Mohun and Hampden who had been passed over by their friends in the oldministry. Finally he could always make what capital he could out of ties of kinship,however distant; for there were plenty of whigs among his own extraordinarily widecircle of politically-active relations.

We can trace quite clearly the future pattern of government that Harley envisaged bythe beginning of August in the nice balance of forces for which he hoped, but eventuallyfailed to create, in the treasury commission which was to replace Godolphin. It was tohave consisted of five members. Apart from Harley himself, two of his closest personalfollowers, Earl Poulet and Sir Thomas Mansel, were offered seats on the board. Thefourth member was to have been Sir Thomas Hanmer, like Anglesey, shrewdly selectedto appease high tory opinion at large without conceding any specific ground to themajor factions; while Harley’s fifth choice was Richard Hampden, a fiery whig, but alsoa cousin of Harley’s, and a man whose financial embarrassments and recent resentmentagainst the junto might (so Harley thought) conceivably bind him to the new interest.In the event neither Hanmer nor Hampden accepted, the latter refusing the queen’s offerafter he had failed to get from her an assurance that there would be no dissolution; andHarley, by persuading Anne to appoint in their places Henry Paget and Robert Benson,two more lukewarm tories who would be drawn almost inevitably into his own orbit,settled as second best for a thoroughly Harleyite body, which gave Anne no qualms butthe high-flyers small cheer. But as if to emphasize that no whig need feel that the doorof preferment was being slammed irrevocably in his face, the appointment of the boardwas accompanied by two further changes, minor in themselves but carefully calculated:Cowper was appointed to the vacant lieutenancy of Hertfordshire and Sir RichardOnslow made a privy councillor.

5

On 1 August, eight days before the members of the new treasury commission werenamed, parliament had been prorogued until 26 September. If a new parliament was tomeet before the winter – and the financial situation made it absolutely essential that itshould – this was the last possible prorogation to which the managers could resort. Sofrom the day (8 August) Lord Treasurer Godolphin received the queen’s curt commandto break his staff, there remained no more than six weeks for Harley to manœuvrebetween the parties, and try as ‘the queen’s servant’ to translate his new objective intoreality. It was little enough time in which to construct a ministry that was intended tobe based on moderate Harleyite toryism, but with calculated concessions both toindependent high churchmen and to every brand of whiggery.

And it was not only time that was against him.The overriding problem facing the newministers during their first three weeks in office was a financial one. Not just since the

300 Geoffrey Holmes


beginning of the ministerial crisis in April but since the beginning of the year, or evenearlier, Queen Anne’s government had been facing a serious credit crisis. Back in January1710 the paymaster of the forces had told General Cadogan: ‘ ’tis as much as the Bankare able to do to keep their heads above water . . . we are almost brought to our laststake’.69 In the last weeks of Godolphin’s administration the problem of providing for thepay and maintenance of the army on the continent had become really critical, and as wesaw, the lord treasurer had failed in his last, dramatic bid to persuade the Bank to see himthrough his immediate difficulties. When the new treasury board met for the first timeon 12 August, therefore, it inherited this urgent problem, in the knowledge thatdesertions from Marlborough’s army in Flanders were already increasing because of lackof pay, and with the daunting news (according to Auditor Harley) that ‘the Exchequer[was] almost empty, nothing left for the subsistence of the Army, but some tallies uponthe third general mortgage of the customs’.70 Two particular hurdles simply had to becleared away in a matter of a few weeks, even in a matter of days, if the Harley ministrywas not to collapse ignominiously at the very outset: one was the question of theremittances – and particularly the refusal of Sir Henry Furnese, whig MP for Sandwichand a leading London broker, to continue remitting bills of exchange to the paymastersabroad until the treasury had settled his outstanding account; the other was the unwill-ingness of the Bank directors to make the government a loan that would relieve theimmediate pressure upon it.

Naturally this situation affected Harley’s approach towards his new political objectives.More than anything, it accounts for the fact that for three weeks after Godolphin’s fallhe made no attempt whatever to give further satisfaction to the tories. Until he couldsee some way out of his financial troubles it would have been folly to arouse fresh alarmor antagonism among the City whigs. For that matter even the tory business interest, ledby Sir Francis Child, was counselling political caution at this stage.There was, however,another good reason for procrastination. Harley needed to be more sure of the responsehe could expect from the individual whigs in whom he was interested before he knewthe full extent of the concessions he must make to the tories, or even the particular jobsthat would have to be filled by tories. He may also have still had in mind the possibilityof a general resignation of whig ministers before his plans were complete, though, in fact,no such danger existed. The junto had tacitly agreed among themselves, and withcolleagues like Cowper and Devonshire, that they would not resign until the dissolutionof parliament was actually announced.71

This whig response, at least at the top level, proved most disappointing. By earlySeptember Harley had to acknowledge that the two most desirable prizes, Lord Chan-cellor Cowper and Henry Boyle, the senior secretary of state, had eluded him, thoughwith Cowper, at the queen’s urging, he persisted to the bitter end. Almost as disap-pointing, in view of the difficulty of finding adequate tory replacements in the admiralty,was the failure of Orford to go beyond a tentative expression of willingness to come to

69 Huntington Library, Stowe MS 57, p. 140.70 BL,Add. MS 72499:Thos. Bateman to Sir W.Trumbull, 14 Aug. 1710; HMC, Portland MSS, v, 650: Edward

Harley’s memoirs.71 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, ed. Snyder, iii, 1587, 1603–4, 1632: Godolphin’s letters to Marlbor-

ough of 31 July 1710 (see also William Coxe, Memoirs of the Duke of Marlborough (3 vols, 1847–8), iii, 120), 14Aug., 10 Sept. 1710.



terms in early August. A memorandum of 4 September shows that Harley was alreadymaking plans for the reconstruction of the admiralty board on the assumption thatOrford would go out of office with his junto friends. Halifax continued conciliatory, butthe fact remained that by September only two major captures, Newcastle and Queens-berry, had been made from the ranks of the old administration. Moreover these gainswere largely offset by the alienation in the same period of ‘the proud duke’ of Somerset.Ever since he had begun to intrigue with Rivers, Shrewsbury and Harley at the time ofthe Sacheverell trial, the master of the horse had been a capricious and, at times,embarrassing ally; but in view of the queen’s affection for his wife, and his own electoralinfluence and cabinet status, his support was not to be discounted. Indeed, he had beenof some positive value to the juntilla as a rallying point for other whig malcontents likeRichard Hampden. Also he had seemed to revel in the new importance which, in hisown eyes at least, he had acquired, and he had entered into the conspiracy withundisguised relish, savouring to the full the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of his clan-destine meetings and correspondence with Harley. The turning point came withGodolphin’s removal.Thereafter Somerset’s allies very soon found, as Swift said later, that‘he had already satiated his resentments, which were not against things, but persons’.72 Inthe middle of August he quarrelled with Shrewsbury and began to stay away from theCourt and the cabinet; and during the next fortnight, as Bromley was told, ‘all means’were ‘tried to make him easy’.73 But every effort at reconciliation foundered on the rockof the intended dissolution, the necessity for which Somerset flatly refused to accept.

At the various levels below that of the cabinet Harley’s harvest among the supportersof the old ministry was slightly more rewarding. Certainly he had some notabledisappointments even here, especially with Hampden and Robert Walpole. On the otherhand he also had quite a few minor successes to console him. Swift was able to informhis friend Archbishop King on 9 September that ‘my Lord Cholmondeley [treasurer ofthe household] is gone over to the new interest, with great indignation of his friends’.74

Russell Robartes succumbed to the pressure of the purse and was rewarded in Octoberwith a teller’s place in the exchequer, where he joined another and more prominentbackslider in John Smith, Godolphin’s chancellor of the exchequer. With RobertMonckton, too, the pull of £1,000 a year as a commissioner of trade proved strongerthan party ties: ‘tho’ he served them as long as he cou’d’, he told his whig friends, ‘hewou’d not fly in the Queen’s face for them’.75 Spencer Compton agreed to stay in,possibly at the queen’s request, as paymaster of the queen’s pensioners; but in some waysHarley’s most important capture was James Brydges, paymaster-general of the forcesabroad and a man of many contacts in business circles, both at home and on thecontinent – contacts which were to prove of great value to the new ministers innegotiating their early financial difficulties. Not that Brydges put up much sales resis-tance.Though he had made his fortune in the train of Marlborough and Godolphin, he

72 ‘Four Last Years of the Queen’, in Prose Works, ed. Davis, vii, 14. Cf. Addison Letters, ed. Graham, 233:Addison to Wharton, 25 Aug. 1710.

73 Marlborough-Godolphin Correspondence, iii, 1613: Godolphin to Marlborough, 22 Aug. 1710; Levens Hall,Levens MSS: Bromley to Grahme, 1 Sept. 1710.

74 The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (5 vols, Oxford, 1963), i, 174.75 Wentworth Papers, ed. Cartwright, 142.

302 Geoffrey Holmes


was the classic courtier type of politician, and showed no compunction about changinghis allegiance when not only Harley but Shrewsbury and Poulet too, hastened afterGodolphin’s fall to assure him of the queen’s continued confidence in him.

What of the tories, meanwhile, while Harley had been busy angling in whig waters,or otherwise preoccupied with his concerns at the treasury? During the last three weeksin August he had managed to shrug off their growing pressure with remarkable coolness.The letters from his high tory correspondents immediately after the treasurer’s fall wereall jubilation and brash confidence. Horatio Walpole, Robert’s tory uncle in Norfolk,took it for granted that ‘the Treasurer being dismissed the rest of the gang will follow, andthen a new parliament’.76 If the rest of England followed the pattern of Cumberland andWestmorland in the elections, claimed the jacobite, Tom Conyers, the tories ‘cannotfail to a good Parliament, Mr Bromley Speaker and Dr Sacheverell chaplain. Amen!’77

Harley knew full well that many tories still did not trust him, even though they mightgrudgingly admit his crafty management. He cannot have been at all surprised whenanother northern correspondent reported how ‘a Tory, on the mention of your name,said that they had you on your Good Behaviour’.78 Nor did he show any signs of beingdisturbed, as long as he felt he was holding his own at Court.

But once again his bête noire proved to be Rochester. He, for one, did not share theenthusiasm of many tories in the provinces. For one thing, he was on the spot, and withhis long experience of reading the signs at Court he clearly did not like what he saw.‘My Lord Rochester is certainly highly disgusted against Mr Harley’, reported PeterWentworth as early as 18 August, ‘& there goes a currant about for his, as that before thewinter is over he did not question but he shou’d see the Duke of Shrewsbury go sickinto the country, & Harley glad to get over to France in a cock boat’.79 In his newanxiety about the course events seemed to be taking, or at least about his own and hisfamily’s prospects in the new ‘scheme’, it seemed to Rochester inadequate merely topersist in using his influence back-stage with the queen.The only sure way left of forcingHarley’s hand was, if possible, to gate-crash the inner councils of the juntilla; and this theearl deliberately set out to do. It was almost the end of August before he succeeded, butonce he had achieved his break-in he set his face resolutely against all compromise withthe whigs, lending new weight to the cause for which St John and Harcourt had longbeen pleading.

As far as one can tell – and the evidence at this point is not quite complete enoughto make it absolutely certain – the effect of Rochester’s forcing tactics was to compelHarley, about the beginning of September, to make a final assessment of high tory claimson office: a rather more realistic assessment than he had made a month earlier. It may,of course, have been simply the case that a welcome relief of the government’simmediate financial worries in the last days of August made such a reassessment possible,whereas previously it had been out of the question. If so, Rochester and his friendsironically owed a far bigger debt than they realized to two of their political opponents:to the junto Lord Halifax and to the fallen treasurer, Godolphin. The latter, especially,

76 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 561.77 HMC, Portland MSS, iv, 575.78 BL, Add. MS 70242: Serjeant J. Hooke to Harley, 12 Aug. 1710.79 Wentworth Papers, ed. Cartwright, 136.



strove manfully to maintain government credit through his friends in the business world,still conscious, as he had been all summer, of the plight of his friend Marlborough andthe army in Flanders. On 17 August the ‘Gentlemen of the Bank’,80 attending thetreasury board for the second time since Godolphin’s fall, promised in principle to ‘assistall remitters, & . . . do the best they can for the governmt’, and five days later thecommissioners accepted the Bank’s offer of a loan of £50,000 in gold – less than theyhad asked for, but infinitely better than nothing.81 Better still, a group of rival financiers,well-disposed to Harley, accepted the treasury’s offer to transfer to them forthwith thewhole of Sir Henry Furnese’s valuable remittance business.82 By the beginning ofSeptember there was, again, a healthy demand for English stock on the Amsterdammarket and Marlborough was assured that his army would not lack subsistance in thenear future.

In these circumstances Harley was in a position to make the concessions to the torieswhich for the past three weeks he had prudently postponed; and as far as we can tell, theeffect of Rochester’s pressure in the meantime, and of his own failure to make more than ahandful of notable captures from the whigs, was to persuade him to readjust his sights forthe last time. The result may be gauged by comparing the list of prospective admiraltycommissioners which Harley prepared on 4 September, in anticipation of Orford’sresignation, with the composition of the treasury commission as he had originally plannedit a month earlier.Of the 15 now noted for consideration,83 six were high tories (the earl ofJersey and five MPs),84 one a moderate tory,85 one a Scottish tory,86 four were naval officerswho were either moderate tories or plain Court,87 and only three were whigs.88 Theimplication is that Harley by the beginning of September had come as near to acceptingthe necessity of a one-party administration as he was ever likely to do. ‘If the Queen wilreforme her cabinet’, he wrote on the 12th of this month,‘the rest wil be easier after’;89 andhe was now prepared to admit that from a re-formed cabinet neither Rochester nor StJohn could any longer be excluded. At the same time Harley conceded that the partisantories would need to be given a marked, if not quite a comparable, share of posts of thesecond rank. Of course, by taking on more tory officers than he had originally bargainedfor, Harley was increasing the risk that his ship might run aground before long on theshoals of partisan policies. But the risk was one he now had to take.The steersman wouldhave to set his course along the channel of ‘moderation’, and trust more than ever now tohis own skill, and to the queen’s support, to keep him there.

80 On this occasion, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Nathaniel Gould, Josiah Diston, Sir Theodore Janssen, JohnRudge, Sir William Hodges, John Ward and William Gore (five of them whig MPs).

81 BL, Add. MS 70331: treasury minutes, 17, 22 Aug. 1710; Harley was able to get much better terms thefollowing month: HMC, Portland MSS, ii, 219.

82 This was on 25 Aug. 1710.The government struck an extremely good bargain with the new consortium(BL, Add. MS 72499: Bateman to Trumbull, 28 Aug. 1710).

83 BL, Add. MS 70333: ‘Memdm. Navy. Sept:4:1710’.84 Namely, two Annesleys (a further indication of Harley’s wish to strengthen the Anglesey interest), Ralph

Freeman, Sir William Drake and George Clarke. Three of the five were ex-tackers.85 John Aislabie.86 Earl of Wemyss.87 Sir John Jennings, Sir John Leake, Sir George Wishart and Robert Fairfax.88 Sir George Byng, Paul Methuen and (optimistically) the duke of Somerset.89 BL, Add. MS 70333: paper endorsed ‘Memdm, Sept:12:1710’.

304 Geoffrey Holmes


The superficial impression conveyed by the ministerial changes of September 1710 –an impression of Harley doling out his austerity rations to the tories, making concessionsas sparingly and as grudgingly as he could – is, therefore, a somewhat misleading one, atleast in so far as it gives a false picture of Harley’s own intentions. He himself wasreconciled, from the beginning of September if not before, to the prospect of ‘broadeningthe bottom’ of his great scheme, in favour of the warmer tories. But his great difficultynow, as it had been more than once since the spring, was that in intention he was severalmoves ahead of the queen, so that he had to spend two frustrating weeks waiting for herless agile and pliable mind to catch up with his. For instance, apart from a few changesin lieutenancies at the beginning of the month it was 12 September before the earl ofDerby, the whig chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, could be dismissed (significantly,the first whig unconnected with the Churchills to fall since April); and he was replacednot by the high tory earl of Denbigh, whose claims had for some time been urged byBromley, but by an ultra-mild tory, Berkeley of Stratton. Understandably, then, there wasa note of urgency, even of anxiety, in the two papers which Harley prepared this sameday for the queen’s benefit.90 Phrases like ‘there remaines but few days to do muchbusiness’, ‘consider the method of dissolving’, ‘most of the members of the House ofCommons wch are immediately necessary should be provided for before their election’,are eloquent of his state of mind. He was not, surprisingly, annoyed when undue pressureon the queen and the Court from the tories themselves hampered his patient efforts towean Anne from her earlier prejudices and predispositions; ‘I must say’, he told Stratfordon the 16th, ‘the follys & worse of our friends have done more hurt than all our enemiesefforts’.91

By then, however, he was able to say with profound relief that ‘most difficulties areovercome’. On the 14th the queen’s last lingering doubts about the necessity of adissolution had been set at rest, and she had been coaxed by Harley and Shrewsburytogether into a firm decision to replace Secretary Boyle by St John and Sir JamesMontague (attorney-general) by Harcourt. At the same time, or no more than a day ortwo later, she conceded the necessity of admitting Rochester to the cabinet along withBuckingham. Harley still had to renew the struggle with her conscience before themonth was out over changes in non-cabinet offices; but for the moment his chiefproblem was rather to find properly-qualified tory replacements for three key membersof the old ministry – or, alternatively, to make one last effort to conciliate them. He hadadmitted to Anne on the 12th that ‘present hands are necessary to carry on the affair’.92

Apart from Lord Guernsey (who, as Nottingham’s brother, was not very acceptable tothe queen) there was no obvious tory successor to Cowper as lord chancellor or lordkeeper, once Harcourt had declined the latter post.The difficulties over replacing Orfordat the admiralty had still to be resolved, and new difficulties had just arisen through theserious (in fact, as it soon proved, fatal) illness of the earl of Anglesey, which left noready-made substitute for Wharton in the viceroyalty of Ireland. But time was running

90 BL, Add. MS 70333: memoranda of 12 Sept. 1710.91 BL, Add. MS 70419. Such pressure was an additional embarrassment since he had to justify the delays to

the tories, without feeling able as a loyal minister to impute them to the queen; so that his own sincerity wasnaturally questioned: Staffordshire RO, Dartmouth MSS, D(W) 1778/V/147: Jersey to Dartmouth, 8 Sept.1710.

92 BL, Add. MS 70333: memoranda of 12 Sept. 1710.



out, and apart from a last strenuous effort (supported by Newcastle and Halifax) topersuade Cowper to stay in office, these problems could not be allowed to delay theinevitable any longer.

On 21 September, the day after Boyle’s resignation, the death sentence on the oldministry was finally pronounced. In the morning, Somers and Devonshire were dis-missed.A privy council at Kensington was summoned at deliberately short notice for theearly afternoon, and the proclamation dissolving parliament was duly read in an atmo-sphere of drama – the queen rising in her place to bring the proceedings to an abruptend at the very moment when Lord Cowper was getting up to register the first of aseries of protests which the whigs had planned.The council broke up in some disorder,and ‘this spoiled a great many intended speeches’, as Addison wryly observed.93 By theevening Rochester had been sworn in as lord president and Buckingham as lord steward;but at least the whigs remaining in the cabinet were allowed the consolation of makinga dignified end. On the morning of the 22nd Orford and Wharton went to Anne totender their resignations. She accepted Orford’s, but made some effort to dissuadeWharton, although he frankly told her ‘he could not serve with honour in the newministry, who were takeing measures contrary to those he had always pursued’; andeventually the lord lieutenant agreed to continue to conduct the essential business of hisoffice until a successor was appointed.94 On the 23rd Cowper, too, resigned his office,politely ignoring the pleadings of the queen. So in the end, some honour was salvagedin the passing of the whigs; in fact in the cabinet the only two who could claim no shareof it were Newcastle, who had shirked the issue by staying timorously in Nottingham-shire, and Somerset, who seemed to have ‘pulld down the pillars like Sampson to perishamong those he [had] destroyed’, but who, in the end, confined himself to abusingHarley and Shrewsbury and refusing to attend the cabinet.95

Only eight clear days remained after Cowper’s resignation before the general electionwas due to begin, and the problem of the vacant cabinet posts was in the mean timesimply shelved. A stop-gap admiralty board was constituted, on which four of the oldmembers retained their seats;96 Ireland was left technically in Wharton’s hands, butvirtually in no hands at all; while, after an unsuccessful approach to his friend Sir ThomasTrevor, Harley was content to place the great seal temporarily in commission. In fact,apart from a handful of tories appointed to non-cabinet office at the end of September– all but two of them being men on whom Harley could place some reliance97 – this was

93 Addison Letters, ed. Graham, 240; Diary of Sir David Hamilton, ed. Roberts, 17–18: 23 Sept. 1710.94 Addison Letters, ed. Graham, 240: Addison to Joshua Dawson, 23 Sept. 1710. As Wharton’s secretary,

Addison was in the best position to know the real facts, and he later makes it clear (Addison Letters, ed. Graham,243–5) that the lieutenancy remained in this peculiar situation for the next month.

95 Addison Letters, ed. Graham, 241.96 Namely, Sir John Leake, Sir George Byng, George Doddington and Paul Methuen. Only two tories were

appointed to the board at this stage (28 September), Sir William Drake, MP for Honiton in the old parliament,and John Aislabie, MP for Ripon.

97 George Granville, appointed secretary-at-war vice Cardonnel on 29 September, was a vigorous party manwho was later to succumb to jacobitism, but he was on terms of friendship with both Harley and St John. Hisally and lieutenant in Cornish elections, John Manley, was given office at the same time (surveyor-general viceSamuel Travers). St John’s crony, Arthur Moore, a businessman and go-getter of a very different stamp fromGranville, became a commissioner of trade on 30 September.The only other appointments (except for Drakeand Aislabie, see above, note 96) went to high tories: Lord Hyde (Rochester’s son and heir) and ArthurAnnesley (who had just succeeded his brother as earl of Anglesey) becoming joint vice-treasurers of Ireland.

306 Geoffrey Holmes


as far as the new ministers were able to go until after the elections were over. Up to apoint it would probably be true to say that the shape of the new administration on theeve of the general election still bore the stamp of the queen’s cautious, and sometimesreluctant, concessions rather than of Harley’s own final blueprint. Of the 19 politiciansto whose promotion he had given immediate priority on 12 September, seven were stillunsatisfied at the time of the election, and six of the seven were tories.98 Harley wasclearly anxious to hold the tory advance within bounds, and the main reason for hisanxiety can hardly be doubted. Jonathan Swift, newly arrived in London but with hisfinger already on the political pulse, diagnosed it without hesitation: ‘People weresurprised, when the Court stopped its hands as to farther removals . . . and the higherTories are very angry; but some time ago, at Hampton Court, I picked out the reasonfrom a dozen persons . . . The new Ministry are afraid of too great a majority of theirown side in the House of Commons.’99

Harley would certainly get his majority for peace. But he was destined to meet ahouse of commons more difficult to control than any since 1697–9. Whether he, andthose who shared his ideals, could preserve the ‘blessed moderation’ against the batteringof this tory tide, time alone would show.

98 Namely, Sir John Pakington, the duke of Hamilton, Lords Jersey, Haversham, Abingdon and Winchelsea.The seventh was Peterborough: BL, Add. MS 70333.

99 Swift Correspondence, i, 185: Swift to Archbishop King, 10 Oct. 1710. [Holmes concluded with an accountof the general election of 1710 which has been superseded by that provided in The History of Parliament:TheHouse of Commons 1690–1715, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley and D.W. Hayton (5 vols, Cambridge,2002).]



robert harley and the ministerial revolution of 1710 (edited by w.a. speck)

Documents