Portland's embassy—His life in Paris—The question of the Spanish Succession—The First Partition Treaty—General election and meeting of the new Parliament—Its temper—Opposition to William's military policy—Reduction of the army.
One of William's first steps after the conclusion of the peace was to appoint a strong ambassador to Versailles. Portland was selected, partly, as it is said, in consequence of his jealousy of the growing ascendency of his youthful rival Keppel in the favour of William, but much more, one may suppose, because of his force of character and intimate acquaintance with European politics. The Ambassador Extraordinary was intended, as he understood his mission, to hold his head high at the Court of Louis, and he undoubtedly did so. His retinue and equipage was of remarkable splendour, and his bearing, especially towards those who showed any sign of disputing his just pretensions, was marked by an unflinching dignity.[17] He protested bluntly against the presence of the would-be assassins of William at a Court at which he was William's representative. He pressed for the removal of James and his adherents from St. Germains; and on both these matters Louis, while firmly maintaining the position which he had taken up at the Brabant negotiation, showed, nevertheless, unmistakable anxiety to conciliate the resolute ambassador. It was not, however, to deal with points of this kind that Portland had been sent to Versailles. Another matter of the greatest European moment was beginning to press, and it was to endeavour to effect an adjustment of the various conflicting interests involved in it that William had despatched his carefully-selected emissary to the French Court. Charles II., King of Spain and the Indies, and last of the male line of the Emperor Charles V., was known to be near his end, and at his death the whole of his vast empire in the two hemispheres would pass to one or other of two powerful reigning Houses, to neither of which its transfer would be regarded with indifference by Europe at large. The rightful heir of Charles II., if blood alone had had to be considered, was the Dauphin of France, the son of his sister, who had married Louis XIV. With the consent of her husband she had at the time of her marriage renounced for herself and her posterity all pretensions to the Spanish crown, and her renunciation was duly recorded in a European Treaty. Failing this line it would be necessary to go back another generation, and the Emperor Leopold, as the son of Charles's aunt, stood next in succession. His claim was barred by no renunciation; but it was no more likely that Louis would quietly allow him to succeed than that he would submit to the succession of a Bourbon. It was not to the interests of Europe that either House should acquire such an enormous accession of territory and power. To William it appeared at any rate intolerable that the House of Bourbon should do so, and in order to avert this calamity, as he regarded it, he took one of the most keenly canvassed steps of his political life in the negotiation and conclusion of the famous Partition Treaty. There is no likelihood that posterity will ever arrive at accord upon the policy of this famous transaction, but before even attempting to consider the unfavourable criticisms passed upon it, it is absolutely necessary to note one cardinal characteristic of its nature. To William it was avowedly and essentially an expedient adopted, to use Aristotle's expression, ?at? t?? de?te??? p????. It was never regarded or represented by him as more than the "second-best" thing to be done in a case where the actual best had been rendered impracticable by circumstances beyond his own control. He knew that Louis's moderation in the settlement of the terms of Ryswick had been merely politic; that its main object was to put an end to the war, and so to break up the forces of a coalition which both he and his rival knew that it would be a hard matter to get together again; and that the peace once concluded, Louis would have it in his power to recruit his military strength, and prepare to take advantage of the almost daily expected death of Charles II. of Spain to carry out his long cherished design upon that kingdom. There were two ways of dealing with this situation, and two only. Either England must be kept under arms, or the King of England must "transact" with the King of France. The former of these two courses was denied him by the jealousy of his English subjects, and he was accordingly forced upon the latter. In writing to the Pensionary Heinsius he deplores the fact that he cannot "remain armed," and declares that little reliance as could be placed upon engagement with France, it was absolutely necessary that such should be concluded; since otherwise, he writes, "I do not see a possibility of preventing France from putting herself in immediate possession of the monarchy of Spain in case the King should happen to die soon." Obviously, therefore, it would be unfair to judge of the First Partition Treaty as though the arrangement of it had been deliberately selected by William from a variety of more or less eligible expedients. The only mode in which it can be logically or reasonably attacked is by contending either that the object of the Treaty, the exclusion of the grandson of Louis from the throne of Spain, was not a political end of such importance as to be worth bargaining for at all, or else that the particular bargain to which William agreed was in itself an improvident one.
So much premised, let us proceed to examine the provisions of this memorable instrument. Roughly speaking they would have effected a division of the heritage of the Spanish king between the Electoral Prince of Bavaria and the Dauphin of France. The former was to have the kingdom of Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Spanish possessions in the New World; to the latter were to pass the two Sicilies and Sardinia, certain places on and off the coast of Tuscany, and the Cis-PyrenÆan portion of the Province of Guipuzcoa. Milan was to go to the Archduke Charles, the second son of the Emperor Leopold. Such was the arrangement, and whether its terms were to be deemed good or bad for England, it is at least certain that they were only obtained from the French king after long and obstinate diplomatic haggling, first between Portland, William's Ambassador-Extraordinary at Versailles, and the French Ministers, and afterwards between the Count de Tallard, Louis XIV.'s ambassador to England, and William himself. The French king was extremely anxious to secure the Spanish kingdom for his grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, and was ready to undertake that the Dauphin and Philip's elder brother should waive their rights, so as to guard against the possibility of the French and Spanish monarchies being united under one sceptre. As to the danger lest a Bourbon, once established at Madrid, might hand over the Spanish Netherlands to the head of the family, Louis was willing to protect England and Holland against that danger by consenting that those provinces should be ceded to the Elector of Bavaria. William met this proposal, not by a direct negative, but by raising his terms of assent to it. Not only, he insisted, must the Spanish Netherlands pass to the Elector of Bavaria, but Louis must give up some fortified towns on his Flemish frontier, for the better self-protection of the United Provinces, while England was "compensated" on the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico. Louis protested on his own behalf against the former of these proposals, and declared that the Spaniards would never consent to the latter. At last, unable to obtain his way with regard to the elevation of one of his grandsons to the Spanish throne, he assented to the only alternative arrangement which would prevent Spain from passing to his rival the Emperor, and signified his willingness to accept the Electoral Prince of Bavaria as the heir to the Peninsula. The obstinacy with which the points of this treaty were contested may be measured by the fact that the first interview between Pomponne and Portland, in which the matter of the Spanish succession was broached, took place on the 15th of March, and it was not till the 4th of September that the treaty was signed. It cannot therefore be contended that William spared pains to obtain what he considered the best terms from Louis, and having regard to the fact that the King of Spain was not expected to live out the year, it is plain enough that on one assumption—that, namely, of the paramount necessity of preventing the accession of a grandson of Louis to the Spanish throne—the negotiations could not with safety have been protracted much longer. The latter, in short, of the two questions which were propounded at the outset of the examination may be said to depend for its answer upon the former. Supposing that the exclusion of the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry from the throne of Spain was a political object worth bargaining for at all, William cannot, I think, be charged with having paid an improvident price for it. Nor does it appear to me reasonably arguable that the object in question was not worth bargaining to obtain. It has been urged by some critics of this transaction that the apprehensions roused in those days at the prospect of a Bourbon prince succeeding to the throne of Charles were exaggerated; that experience has shown the fallacy of supposing that ties of kindred count for much in determining the policy of monarchs, and that it would certainly have been better that the Spanish throne should pass to the descendant of a French king than that the two Sicilies and other points of vantage on the Mediterranean should pass to a future French king himself. But those who so argue rely too much upon general principles and pay too little attention to the facts of the particular case. One might readily admit that ties of kindred count for little in determining the policy of monarchs, and at the same time retain the full conviction that the subsistence of the relation of grandfather and grandson between the then King of France—the man and the circumstances being what they were—and the King of Spain would have been fraught with the most disastrous consequences for all Europe. There could be no serious doubt that the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry would be a mere puppet with his strings pulled from beyond the Pyrenees, and that the whole resources of his kingdom would at once have been drawn upon by Louis to enable him to resume the war. Had the French crown rested upon another head, or even had there been any probability that the new occupant of the Spanish throne would have time allowed him to outgrow the regni novitas and strike out a policy of his own, the case would have been different. But we must judge of the situation by the light of the facts as they were. It is beside the point to argue that because a grandson of Louis after all succeeded the Spanish king, and after a desolating war for his dethronement continued to reign over Spain, and his children after him, without Europe being "a penny the worse"—it is beside the point, I say, to argue that an arrangement which operated not amiss for Europe from 1712 onwards would have been tolerable in 1698. Philip V. was well enough as a king of Spain, after his grandfather's power had been brought low by a dozen more years of European war, but Philip of Anjou, the nominee and instrument of Louis XIV., at the close of the previous century, would have been a weapon pointed at the breast of free and Protestant Europe. You cannot judge of the strength or keenness of a dagger by merely estimating its power in the grasp of a failing hand.
Doubtless, however, the complaints both contemporary and subsequent of the provisions of the Partition Treaty were to some extent stimulated by the circumstances of its arrangement. It is well known that William, acting as his own Foreign Minister, carried his official independence so far as to conduct the whole of the negotiations with Louis from beginning to end without any reference to, or at least any effective consultation of, a single English Minister. Somers, it is true, had been told before the King's departure for Loo that Lord Portland had been sounded by Louis with reference to an agreement with England concerning the Spanish succession; but it was not till the terms were actually arranged that William wrote to Somers for his opinion upon them, "leaving it to his judgment to whom else he might think it proper to impart them," and adding "if it be fit that this negotiation be carried on there is no time to be lost, and you will send me the full powers under the Great Seal, with the names in blank, to treat with Count Tallard." Portland at the same time communicated directly with Vernon, the then Secretary of State, whose consent was necessary to the imprint of the Great Seal; and Somers himself confided the affair to several other Ministers. But it is clear, not only from Somers's own reply to William, but generally on the face of the whole transaction, that even if the King's English Ministers had been competent to revise the agreement, their suggestions would have come too late. Somers's criticisms, though sensible in themselves, were of the most tentative character; he excuses himself indeed that his thoughts were so ill put together, and pleaded the known effect of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, where he then was, in "discomposing and disturbing the head so as almost totally to disable one from writing"; but in fact he writes with the extreme diffidence natural to the "layman" conscious of his incapacity to advise the expert. The commission of plenipotentiaries was then drawn out by Secretary Vernon with the names left in blank, and the Chancellor requested the Secretary for his warrant before affixing the Great Seal. This, however, Vernon refused to give, and Somers thereupon sealed the powers with his own hand, taking care, however, to keep the King's letter as a justification or an excuse for the act. That the whole proceeding was unconstitutional, according to the fully developed theory of the constitution, is of course obvious, and it is only a partial and not a complete defence of William's share in it that the theory in question was nothing like so fully developed or so firmly established as it is at the present day. It is all very well to say that "William was his own Foreign Minister,"—a statement which is repeated by Whig writers, as though it sufficed to explain any conceivable irregularity,—but the mere fact of his being unable to complete the legal execution of a treaty without calling in the assistance of a Minister (or rather, as it really should have been, if the Chancellor had not taken upon him to dispense with the Secretary's co-operation, of two Ministers), must have been a sufficient indication to the King of the even then constitutional limits of his prerogative. The form, in short, was eloquent of the fact. It would have been plainly irrational to suppose that the royal treaty-making power would have been made exercisable only under the authority of an instrument validated by an act which none but a Minister or Ministers could perform, unless it were intended that such Minister or Ministers should be as fully responsible for the doings of the executive in foreign as in domestic affairs. And assuredly it cannot be regarded as more than a colourable recognition of this responsibility to procure the merely mechanical assent of Ministers to the results of an international agreement, in the negotiations for which they have not been permitted to take any part. It seems difficult therefore to contend that William was not in this matter knowingly over-riding constitutional restrictions, under the conviction probably that the pressing nature of the emergency, and the danger of delaying the Spanish settlement by deliberations with the English Ministers, sufficiently justified the irregularity.
There was that, too, in Somers's letter which would have confirmed him in the belief that he had done well in agreeing betimes with his adversary. The Chancellor spoke of the "deadness and want of spirit" universally prevailing in the nation. None, he said, were disposed to the thought of entering on a new war; but all seemed to be tired out with taxes, to a degree beyond what was discerned till it appeared upon the occasion of the late elections. And, indeed, the lesson of these elections was too significant to be missed. A great change had passed over the mind of the country since the return of the Parliament of 1695, and the overthrow of the Tory ascendency by an electorate thoroughly roused to a sense of the duty of prosecuting the war, and to that end supporting the war party. In 1698, although the Tory ranks were not very largely recruited, nor those of the non-Ministerial Whigs materially reduced, it is certain that many candidates on both sides had been compelled to pledge themselves to a policy of peace and retrenchment. The new Parliament was opened by the King on the 6th of December, and the temper of the House of Commons was not long in declaring itself. The Ministerial party succeeded in carrying the election of their Speaker, Sir Thomas Littleton, but they were utterly powerless to sustain their master's military policy against the mass of opposition which it had to encounter. A resolution was adopted cutting down the army to 7000 men, "and these to consist of his Majesty's natural-born subjects." To William, whose Ministers had held out hopes to him that a force of at least 10,000 men would be sanctioned by Parliament, and who personally held that anything less than double that number would be insufficient, a resolution which would not only have inexcusably weakened, in his opinion, the defences of England, but have deprived him even of the services of those Dutch Guards who had fought with such signal bravery for the liberties of that country, caused natural and bitter chagrin. He gave the royal assent to the Bill founded upon this resolution, but he gave it in a speech through the dignified composure of which his grave concern and disappointment perceptibly struggle. A later attempt to save his Dutch Guards, almost pathetic in its character,[18] proved unsuccessful; and, when, in reply to this appeal, the Commons reminded him that he had promised in 1688 to "send all foreign troops that came over with him back again," so narrow and ungenerous an insistence on the strict letter of his pledge must no doubt have added to his mortification.
The occasion of this second attempt was an event to be shortly noticed, which might have been thought likely to dispose the Parliament to a more liberal view of military necessities; and William has been censured by his greatest admirer for not having applied to the House for an increase of the English establishment instead of striving to retain a force of his countrymen. It is not a matter for regret, however, that this mistake, if mistake it was, should have been committed; for it enables us pretty accurately to measure the respective proportions of reason and prejudice in the conduct of Parliament. So far as the motive of the House of Commons in these military retrenchments was a purely economical one—so far even as it implied blindness to those European considerations which our insular position no more absolved us from regarding in 1698 than it does to-day—this motive was, if mistaken, respectable. Even that exaggerated dread of a standing army, which, no doubt, had more to do with the decision of the parliamentary majority than any theory, good, bad, or indifferent, of the probable course of European affairs, would not deserve to be severely judged. But it is difficult to attribute the refusal of the House of Commons to sanction William's retention of his body-guard to any worthier motive than mere jealousy of the foreigner. It was a step as unwise from the political point of view, and in its bearing on the relations of sovereign and subject, as on the moral side it was ungracious. One can well understand that the personal affront involved in it may have been harder for the King to bear than even the rejection of his general military demands. Anyhow there seems no doubt that upon learning the decision of the House in the matter of the army William did seriously contemplate retirement to Holland, after abdicating in favour of the Princess Anne, and that nothing but the firmness of Somers prevented him from carrying his resolution into effect. So at least Somers himself believed; and Somers's knowledge of the royal mind, as well as of the royal character, was distinctly superior to that of Burnet, who treated the threat of withdrawal as not seriously meant. And when, having schooled himself to submit with dignity and grace to this rebuff, he found himself churlishly denied the slight personal favour which he subsequently requested, his bitterness of feeling was, we may well believe, extreme.[19] The whole incident is one which no Englishman of the present day, whatever his politics, can look back upon without a sense of shame.
William, it may be imagined, was not sorry to put an end to a parliamentary session so fraught with unpleasant incidents. Nor, after the settlement of the military question, was there much more business to be done. Its despatch, however, was attended by one occurrence which deserves notice here as having prepared the way for one of the gravest political conflicts of the reign. Defeated by the manoeuvre above referred to in their attack upon the Crown grants, the country party brought their forces to bear upon a position at once more limited and more assailable. They demanded a commission of inquiry into the disposal of the Irish forfeitures, and to insure the accomplishment of their object they resorted to the questionable expedient of "tacking" to a money Bill which they were sending to the Upper House a clause authorising the appointment of seven commissioners to carry out the proposed investigation. To this virtual "ouster" of their jurisdiction over the question the Lords very naturally objected. They could not reject the Land Tax Bill, the measure to which this clause had been tacked, without creating national confusion; and rejection without amendment was their only constitutional alternative to accepting it—commissioners' clause, and all. They demurred, but ultimately yielded, under protest; and William, not as it seems without foreboding of future trouble, assented to the Bill with its irrelevant rider.
It was now the month of May, and the Houses, having held uninterrupted session ever since the 1st of January, had fairly earned their recess. On the 4th of the month the King came down to Westminster and bade his Parliament a cold adieu.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] It is with a mixture of amusement and admiration that one reads in Grimblot (i. 220) the account he gives of one of his diplomatic receptions: "The King had sent the Duke d'Aumont, his first gentleman of the bedchamber, to compliment me. After this the Duchess of Burgundy sent the Marquis de Villacerf. They then began to make new pretensions, requiring me to go and meet him half-way down the steps, as I had done the former nobleman, and I refused to receive him except at the door of the antechamber, which is at the top of the stairs. This gave rise to a lengthened dispute, during which he was standing half-way up the steps, and I at the top, while messengers passed backwards and forwards between us. At length I sent him word that, if this did not content him, it would be best for each of us to go our own way, without my having the honour of seeing him, for that undoubtedly I should do no more, after which he came up." Upon this grandee's leaving another difficulty arose. Portland, although he conducted him back to his carriage, did not wait to "see him depart," on which the "conductor of ambassadors" made great complaints. The dispute as to the proper ceremony of reception was renewed by the next arrival, when the conductor of ambassadors behaved impertinently in public, "obliging me," says Portland, "to treat him as became a person who has the honour to represent your Majesty," whereat the conductor of ambassadors was "confounded and irritated."
