Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr Pope | Page 9

treated. The Allies imagined that they had a right to obtain at least everything which had been demanded for them respectively, and it was visible that nothing less would content them. These considerations set the vastness of the undertaking in a sufficient light.
The importance of succeeding in the work of the peace was equally great to Europe, to our country, to our party, to our persons, to the present age, and to future generations. But I need not take pains to prove what no man will deny. The means employed to bring it about were in no degree proportionable. A few men, some of whom had never been concerned in business of this kind before, and most of whom put their hands for a long time to it faintly and timorously, were the instruments of it. The Minister who was at their head showed himself every day incapable of that attention, that method, that comprehension of different matters, which the first post in such a Government as ours requires in quiet times. He was the first spring of all our motion by his credit with the Queen, and his concurrence was necessary to everything we did by his rank in the State, and yet this man seemed to be sometimes asleep and sometimes at play. He neglected the thread of business, which was carried on for this reason with less dispatch and less advantage in the proper channels, and he kept none in his own hands. He negotiated, indeed, by fits and starts, by little tools and indirect ways, and thus his activity became as hurtful as his indolence, of which I could produce some remarkable instances. No good effect could flow from such a conduct. In a word, when this great affair was once engaged, the zeal of particular men in their several provinces drove it forward, though they were not backed by the concurrent force of the whole Administration, nor had the common helps of advice till it was too late, till the very end of the negotiations; even in matters, such as that of commerce, which they could not be supposed to understand. That this is a true account of the means used to arrive at the peace, and a true character of that Administration in general, I believe the whole Cabinet Council of that time will bear me witness. Sure I am that most of them have joined with me in lamenting this state of things whilst it subsisted, and all those who were employed as Ministers in the several parts of the treaty felt sufficiently the difficulties which this strange management often reduced them to. I am confident they have not forgotten them.
If the means employed to bring the peace about were feeble, and in one respect contemptible, those employed to break the negotiation were strong and formidable. As soon as the first suspicion of a treaty's being on foot crept abroad in the world the whole alliance united with a powerful party in the nation to obstruct it. From that hour to the moment the Congress of Utrecht finished, no one measure possible to be taken was omitted to traverse every advance that was made in this work, to intimidate, to allure, to embarrass every person concerned in it. This was done without any regard either to decency or good policy, and from hence it soon followed that passion and humour mingled themselves on each side. A great part of what we did for the peace, and of what others did against it, can be accounted for on no other principle. The Allies were broken among themselves before they began to treat with the common enemy. The matter did not mend in the course of the treaty, and France and Spain, but especially the former, profited of this disunion.
Whoever makes the comparison, which I have touched upon, will see the true reasons which rendered the peace less answerable to the success of the war than it might and than it ought to have been. Judgment has been passed in this case as the different passions or interests of men have inspired them. But the real cause lay in the constitution of our Ministry, and much more in the obstinate opposition which we met with from the Whigs and from the Allies. However, sure it is that the defects of the peace did not occasion the desertions from the Tory party which happened about this time, nor those disorders in the Court which immediately followed.
Long before the purport of the treaties could be known, those Whigs who had set out with us in 1710 began to relapse back to their party. They had among us shared the harvest of a new Ministry, and, like prudent persons, they took measures in time to have their share