Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr Pope | Page 8

by nothing but the necessity, and hardly by that. In the
House of Commons his credit was low and my reputation very high.
You know the nature of that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of
the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are used to
be encouraged. The thread of the negotiations, which could not stand
still a moment without going back, was in my hands, and before
another man could have made himself master of the business much
time would have been lost, and great inconveniences would have
followed. Some, who opposed the Court soon after, began to waver

then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I should have wanted no
help to do mischief. I knew the way of quitting my employments and of
retiring from Court when the service of my party required it; but I
could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the consequence of it
must have been the breaking my party and the distress of the public
affairs. I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the sense of that duty
which I owed her came in aid of other considerations, and prevailed
over my resentment. These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of
fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a bubble
in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true
motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the
troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under
the utmost satisfaction. I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the
friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford. I
was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means
which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin
me in the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else. I saw, however,
that he had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me,
instead of having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured
to acquire, an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of
his jealousy and a reason for undermining me. In this temper of mind I
went on till the great work of the peace was consummated and the
treaty signed at Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene
for the party, as well as for me, opened itself.
I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to
them, exempt from faults. Many were made no doubt in both by those
who were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many
were owing purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their
progress. I never look back on this great event, passed as it is, without a
secret emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the
undertaking and the importance of its success, with the means
employed to bring it about, and with those which were employed to
traverse it. To adjust the pretensions and to settle the interests of so
many princes and states as were engaged in the late war would appear,
when considered simply and without any adventitious difficulty, a work
of prodigious extent. But this was not all. Each of our Allies thought
himself entitled to raise his demands to the most extravagant height.

They had been encouraged to this, first, by the engagements which we
had entered into with several of them, with some to draw them into the
war, with others to prevail on them to continue it; and, secondly, by the
manner in which we had treated with France in 1709 and 1710. Those
who intended to tie the knot of the war as hard, and to render the
coming at a peace as impracticable as they could, had found no method
so effectual as that of leaving everyone at liberty to insist on all he
could think of, and leaving themselves at liberty, even if these
concessions should be made, to break the treaty by ulterior demands.
That this was the secret I can make no doubt after the confession of one
of the plenipotentiaries who transacted these matters, and who
communicated to me and to two others of the Queen's Ministers an
instance of the Duke of Marlborough's management at a critical
moment, when the French Ministers at Gertrudenberg seemed
inclinable to come into an expedient for explaining the thirty-seventh
article of the preliminaries, which could not have been refused. Certain
it is that the King of France was at that time in earnest to execute the
article of Philip's abdication, and therefore the expedients for adjusting
what related to this article would easily enough have been