Читать книгу History of England (1688-1815) - E. M. Wrong - Страница 4

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With the Revolution England entered a period of her history more sober and continuous, if less inspiring, than the two centuries past. It was an age of foreign, no longer of civil, war; for over sixty years in the next century and a quarter France and England fought for ascendancy in Europe and for dominion beyond the sea. England generally had Continental allies, but at times she battled alone; of coalitions she was the surest member and the pivot. In the struggle she doubled the Empire begun by the Stuarts and Cromwell, lost most of her early gains, and on the ruins built a second empire wider than the first. The Industrial Revolution slowly gathered force after the foundation of a national bank to meet war-time needs, and by the year of Waterloo was changing the face and mind of the country far faster than its political sense could realise or regulate. In thought the age between James's flight and the downfall of Napoleon was more a time of digestion than of new ideas. The conflicts whose roots lie in the Reformation found at last, so far as political expression was concerned, a national settlement, and the fury and brilliance that had made England the most unstable of European countries faded gradually into the cold light of accepted compromise. The Constitution, once the principles of the Revolution had been worked out, saw no cataclysms, but many adjustments. The ascendancy of Parliament became clearer as the financial and military necessities of the government grew; Scotland, and a century later, Ireland, were brought into this Parliament. There the most ambitious and eloquent members of a well-educated aristocracy fought for mastery: they shared the prejudices of their class, but their views differed widely in detail, and represented more closely than is often allowed the conscious political desires of the nation, even when they ignored its unspoken wants. Law and tradition grew in force, until unconstitutional methods lost nearly all their appeal. We begin the age with an England embarked on a limited revolution meant to conserve, not to destroy, but doubtful of its own mind, feeling herself menaced by a centralised and far stronger neighbour in France, threatened at home by parties still without the restraint that was to make them a fairly efficient means of government. We end it with a United Kingdom that is the firmest state in Europe, burdened with taxes and mutinous, yet nearer to being the arbiter of Europe than ever before or since.

1688 is small fry as revolutions go, but it marked a change in the political character of England. She had gained an unsavoury reputation for swinging between violent extremes, from Tudor despotism based on popular consent to the autocracy of Charles I., thence to presbyterian dominance of the House of Commons, from that to the rule of the sword, and back through a restoration of the monarchy made by Calvinistic parliamentarians to the twin supremacy in Church and State of parson and squire. Recently the pendulum had oscillated still more rapidly, from Whig to Tory reigns of terror. Every party aimed at the destruction of its enemies, or at least at their permanent exclusion from Office. There were few events of the last half-century in which all could take pride, for victories had been won either over part of the nation or while part was proscribed. Must the pendulum swing again through a shortening arc? Temporary unity against the Catholic-absolutist policy of James had brought William to London, but alliances easy to weld in Opposition break down when something constructive must be done. Who was to rule and on what conditions? Even if England, a proud and quarrelsome nation, set the crown on William's head, could she keep it there, accept a king whom many must regard as a conqueror, who came from a nation that she had fought thrice in the last forty years?

The immediate need was for some government. James's second flight eased the problem: it deprived the Tories, who had mainly acquiesced in rather than favoured William's adventure, of the keystone of their creed and the natural head of their party. It made slightly plausible the idea that he had resigned his rights, not been deprived of them. The day after James landed in France, William, at the request of an impromptu assembly, assumed the government. A convention to settle Crown and Constitution was called for January; it was to be in every respect a parliament save that no king bade it meet.

When the Convention gathered on January 22 it showed at once that the apparent unanimity of the autumn had gone. Few wanted James back in power, but the Church party, led by Nottingham and the bishops, hoped to keep him as titular King, vesting the government in Mary or William as regent, and half the Lords upheld this view. Danby proclaimed Mary's right to be full queen; Halifax and the Whigs argued for William—Halifax because he thought this the most practical course, many Whigs hoping by omitting the children of James to slay hereditary right. The Commons swiftly agreed to a portmanteau resolution that James had violated the original contract between King and people (an inaccurate popular version of Whig political theory), had broken the nation's fundamental laws, and finally had abdicated, so that the throne was vacant: "abdication" conciliated some Tories who disputed the nation's right to depose its prince. The Lords debated this resolution, and the next, who should rule, for a week; barely rejected a regency, denied a vacancy in the Crown, and finally, when William let it be known that he would be neither regent nor prince consort, agreed with the Commons. William and Mary were nominated as joint rulers, but the government was given to William alone.

Meanwhile the Commons had drawn up a declaration that condemned various acts of James, and denied the Crown's power to suspend laws or to keep an army without Parliamentary consent. On February 13, 1689, William and Mary accepted this, and were proclaimed. The Convention declared itself a parliament, and turned to settle the nation's problems. But this attempt to legalise revolution did not make it secure. War with France was certain: Ireland was aflame for Catholicism and James: none could say how Scotland would go. In England the Anglican clergy, who since 1660 had preached the duty of non-resistance to Government in a crescendo, doubted that they could accept a monarchy based on rebellion. The Whigs hoped to revenge the last seven years on the Tories, and the Tories, normally the larger party, might abandon a settlement based on Whig principles.

Nor was William's character a source of political strength. It was easier to admire than to love him; he was in thought and tastes a foreigner, who found little in England to his liking. He treated the frequent disloyalty of English ministers with a cold magnanimity that sprang more from policy than from kindliness. He was often peevish if seldom cruel, and it was only to a few friends or in battle that his manners became frank. His dislike of court gossip, joined to asthma unbearable in London smoke, made him shut himself off from society at Hampton Court or in Kensington fields, and alienated those who liked to flutter in Whitehall. He was the best diplomatist of his time, but never understood English political ideas. He wished to retain for the Crown all the powers of Charles II. save those forfeited in the Declaration of Right. But the Whigs, his natural allies, aimed at more than a change of king; they wanted to define unsettled constitutional points in a parliamentary sense and to make William a channel for their exercise of patronage. Tories, though better friends of monarchy, were reluctant to see him use powers they would have left unquestioned to a Stuart. The new King had been created in men's sight by man, not by God, and coronation without birthright could make him at best a candle that tried to replace a sun. Moreover, the Tories were very English, and everything Dutch about William jarred them into opposition; they were soon fighting harder than the Whigs for an English parliament's supremacy. William felt criticism as a slight, could not see that constitutional change was in the nature of things, and thought each new limit on his power another piece of ingratitude to the nation's liberator. But he had a saving sense of reality that kept him from resisting to the end: he gave way where Charles I. would have tried evasion, James II. force.

The most critical time came swiftly. In March, 1689, James landed in Ireland; on the same day two Scottish regiments mutinied at Ipswich; five days later Dundee fled from the Presbyterian Convention at Edinburgh to raise the Highlands for James. In April James was before Londonderry, the only place in Ireland save Enniskillen that resisted his authority. A Grand Alliance of Austria, Spain, Holland, England and Savoy took arms against the threat of French ascendancy, and a struggle began that was to last, with a short interlude, for twenty-four years. Prospects were so uncertain that Danby, who had rallied the north and many Tories to William, and Halifax who had helped to crown him, thought the odds were against his triumph.

Protestant dissent needed attention, for James had made the Church bid for its support, and the Clarendon code was no longer enforceable. The Lords agreed to widen the establishment and to comprehend in it moderate Nonconformists. The Commons feared the suggestion, and chloroformed it by leaving Convocation to take the first step. That body met in November, and its lower house, more conservative than the bishops and less political, refused to consider the plan. It was too late or too early for such a measure: the extreme Dissenters must have been omitted, and feared that comprehension would strengthen a persecuting Church; the moderates clung to independence, the clergy to their monopoly of endowments and authority. But toleration could not be shelved, and a bill legalising Nonconformist worship under narrow limitations passed unopposed. It was the only part of James's policy that the Revolution adopted, though he had offered dissent a share in government, not bare tolerance only. Its importance lay in the future, for, narrow as it was, it reversed the policy of twenty-five years, recognised that uniformity was unattainable, and moved towards the separation of Church and State.

William was as well inclined to toleration as his father-in-law, and asked Parliament to modify the Test Act so as not to exclude any Protestant from the royal service. He found few supporters, and indeed such a change would have set half the nation's pulpits thundering denunciation, but the Whigs retaliated on the victorious Church by enacting that all beneficed clergy and officials must take an oath of allegiance by August, 1689, on pain of suspension for six months and deprivation after if they were still recalcitrant. The great majority swore, though not all happily; but about four hundred, including Archbishop Sancroft and seven bishops, refused and were eventually ejected. Thus began the Non-juring schism, which lasted for over a hundred years. Most of those turned out would have done no mischief, and neither preached nor intrigued against William, but they would not vow obedience to an order based on a right of resistance that they denied.

The war, William's chief care, went badly at first. France devastated the Rhine palatinate; a French squadron repulsed an English in Bantry Bay and landed troops in Ireland, where a Parliament that contained only fifteen Protestants in both houses was busy undoing the Cromwellian land settlement, attainting some 2500 persons, and declaring full independence. Kirke failed in June to relieve Derry; Dundee had swept such clans as hated the Campbells into an army that could not last, but might overrun half Scotland. Prospects brightened in July. At Killiecrankie Dundee smashed Mackay's force but fell in victory, and four weeks later his army dispersed. Derry was relieved in the same week, and an allied victory eased French pressure in Flanders.

William found Parliament increasingly troublesome as the year wore on. It voted him supplies, but not, as was the custom, for life; this was natural, since the Commons wished to ensure frequent sessions, but William thought it showed unjustified distrust. In fact, there was no danger of an attack on Parliament's life; two securities had unwittingly been created. The Mutiny Act, passed after the Ipswich mutiny had been crushed by Dutch troops, was one, for it legalised a standing army for seven months only, and if it expired military law must cease and soldiers become liable only to a civil court and for civil offences. The second was the war, certain to make annual votes necessary whatever permanent supplies were given to the king: the expense of government was steadily rising, and even peace would not make the monarchy independent.

Parliament turned the Declaration into the Bill of Rights, but most of its time went in disputes between the Houses and in party struggles of increasing bitterness. A Tory reaction had begun. This might seem a reason for Whig moderation, but the instinct then was to meet rising opposition by hastening the pace. The nation wanted an indemnity for those who had connived at James's arbitrary acts; none wanted it more than William, who wished to be king over both parties, not to see one harrying the other into extremes. The Whigs admitted that indemnity there must be, but lingered over exceptions till the bill became a proscription as well as a pardon. At length to a measure restoring the corporations packed by James, they added, while Tory members kept Christmas holiday, a clause making all concerned in the late surrender of charters incapable of corporation office for seven years. This would drive all prominent Tories from local councils, making these, and the seats in Parliament they filled, Whig preserves. The Tories mustered and removed the clause; the Whigs delayed indemnity still longer. William dissolved Parliament, and increased the Tory element in his ministry.

The House of Commons elected in March, 1690, was less Whig than the Convention; it accepted from the Crown an Act of Grace pardoning all save a few supporters of James. This Parliament lasted till October, 1695, and during its life the Tory party accepted the Revolution, and came to represent closely the ideas, prejudices and fears of an insular countryside. Dislike of moneyed and manufacturing interests and of dissent, suspicion of the Court's power to bribe members of Parliament with office, hatred of a standing army, the belief that all wealth came from the land, love for the Church, fondness for country sports and rustic paternalism—these were the chief articles in the Tory creed, at bottom more social than political. In many it was based mainly on fear and dislike, but in some it rose to genuine passion for England's past and a love of the ancient order; it was instinctive more than philosophical. Naturally such a party frequently disobeyed its leaders.

Against it stood the Whigs, weaker numerically but better drilled. They saw the world changing, finance growing in importance, they believed in toleration for Nonconformists, since these were amongst their strongest supporters, and they were not so distrustful of a court that they hoped to control. They feared the army less than did the Tories and admitted its necessity. The Tories often forgot Europe, the Whigs England; they seldom allowed for the grievances of a landed interest on whom taxation bore heavily. They disliked democracy, but at rare intervals party war forced them towards it. When at the end of William's reign a Tory House of Commons stood against King and electorate, the Whigs claimed that Parliament was but a trustee of the people's rights. With a Whig majority this idea vanished, but the constitutional programme of each party shows the Whigs nearer than their opponents to modern British ideas of government. The Tories wanted a Place Act, to prevent any member of the Commons holding office under the Crown. This would have diminished Government influence in the Lower House and made more irresponsible the most powerful body in the country; it would have left members of Parliament free to criticise the Ministry without the restraint imposed by the prospect of having to put their views to the test. The Whig demand was for a Triennial Act—no Parliament to last for more than three years. Toryism had more sense of the past than Whiggery, and probably the more genuine religion, but it was blinder to the future. Though one party shaded into its rival through a centre block of fluctuating opinion, each was intolerant of the other and aimed at its destruction, not at temporary victory only. The idea that a country's oscillation between parties would help to keep politics pure and ideals fresh had not arisen. Nearly all men thought their opponents a dangerous faction, and such as belonged to no party held this true of both.

Prominent men were often vague or neutral in their party views. Clarendon and Rochester, Mary's uncles, were more Jacobite than Tory, dissatisfied with the Revolution and distrusted by the Court; Nottingham was industrious and honest, a consistent defender of the Church, loyal to William, whose rights he doubted, a Tory but a Churchman first. Danby, now Marquis of Caermarthen, and soon to be Duke of Leeds, was too deeply committed to the Revolution to draw back, too much hated by the Whigs to leave the Tory party that he had built; he worked himself to the bone when in power, sulked when other advice prevailed, was unscrupulous but true to William. Seymour, a violent Tory, carried great weight with the back-benchers: he was more dangerous in opposition than useful in office. On the Whig side, Somers had emerged, Montague was rising. Somers gave an impression of magnanimity and moderation not wholly deserved; he was a fine lawyer and had few enmities, but often put party above national interest. Montague was adroit in finance, overbearing with success, and bore ill the inevitable reversals of political fortune. These two, with Wharton and Russell, the admiral, were the chiefs of the Whig Junto. Wharton was dissolute and unscrupulous, a political organiser of ability; Russell's personal ethics stood higher, his political consistency not so high, and though his services to the Revolution were great they were amply rewarded and often grudgingly given.

Halifax, the acutest critic of politics in England, was of no party. His tendency to rally to the weaker side and his indecision in office robbed him of the importance that his ability promised. Separated from him and never wholly of any party stood a group of four men, Shrewsbury, Godolphin, Marlborough, Sunderland. Shrewsbury was the most partisan, an accepted Whig, but he hated office, was sensitive to responsibility, and left his party when it began to plunge. Godolphin and Marlborough were nominally Tories, but could work with either side. Godolphin, a skilled financier, proved indispensable to any Ministry. Marlborough, the ablest man in England, was rightly suspected of treachery and was known to be grasping; his serenity and cool judgment were unique, and when the nation's interests and his own coincided his services were invaluable. But for much of the reign he was in disgrace, for his patron Anne waged feud with Mary, and William distrusted him, Sunderland returned from flight abroad in 1690 the best-hated man in England; for he had betrayed every cause in turn. His cynical insight steadily increased his influence with William, and though he held it safer to work behind the scenes, his hand is visible in many temperate readjustments of policy. These four were ever in close contact, almost a third party by themselves.

Most of these men at one time or another assured James that they bewailed the Revolution and were secretly working in his interest. The fact that despite words they seldom or never did anything to restore the exiled king only palliates their treachery by making it double. In truth constant revolutions are fatal to political morality. When system after system falls in ruins every man of note finds almost overwhelming the temptation to insure life and estates by verbal treason. He must have a friend in each camp, else another reversal will mean certain loss of office, probable forfeiture of lands, perhaps the scaffold. Some stability is necessary for honesty in business or honour in politics. The men of this generation had not been bred to heroism; their political lessons had been learnt after the Restoration.

During 1690 and 1691 England achieved the reconquest of Ireland. William risked a French invasion by sweeping England of troops, and in June, 1690, led a powerful force to Ulster. He caught James's smaller army in retreat and broke it at the Boyne. Dublin fell, and he pressed westward, but was repulsed at Limerick and had to leave his victory half won. Marlborough captured Cork and Kinsale in the autumn, cutting from the Irish the best bases for French support. James hoped to return to London at the head of a French army, for the French won a naval victory off Beachy Head, and the Channel was at their mercy, but they wasted a chance that never recurred. Next year Ginkell stamped out Irish resistance; he swept into Connaught, took Athlone, crushed an Irish army at Aghrim, and at Limerick forced a final surrender. The terms were those of fair amnesty, and William strove to honour them, but the restored Irish Protestant Parliament threw moderation overboard. Catholic Ireland lay crushed and powerless but was not won to loyalty.

From 1690 to the peace the war in Flanders moved in a slow rhythm. William went to Holland every spring, and spent the summer on campaign. When the forces had dispersed into winter quarters, he returned to England. Parliamentary sessions were crowded into the winter months; he never suffered one when he was abroad. His military fortunes improved as the war dragged on and France felt the exhaustion of struggle on four fronts—Flanders, the Rhine, Savoy and Spain. In 1691 the French captured Mons, but failed at Liège. In 1692 they won their greatest success in the Netherlands by taking Namur, and followed this by defeating William at Steinkirk. Next year Luxembourg again beat William at Landen, and late in the year took Charleroi. Despite these defeats a balance had been reached; 1694 was a year of stalemate, but with the allies on the offensive. In 1695 William re-captured Namur and it was clear that the tide had turned; French finance was breaking under the strain. The allied advantage was not pressed in 1696 for two reasons: Montague's reform of the English coinage caused a shortage of cash that paralysed the army, and Savoy made a separate peace with Louis, which freed thirty thousand French for service elsewhere. Peace negotiations, desired by all parties save Spain, the most incapable of the allies, began in May, 1697; in July France and England agreed on terms and the others followed in a few weeks.

The ebb and flow of war was less clear outside Flanders. A Jacobite plan for invasion in 1691 was conditional on Louis offering religious toleration in France and on James dismissing his Catholic advisers, and these terms would have wrecked it even had it not been discovered. In 1692 Louis made ready a full-dress expedition, and James launched a declaration that came as near to repentance for his acts as anything he ever penned, but the English and Dutch fleets ruined the French navy off La Hogue. In 1693 the French scattered a huge convoy destined for the Eastern Mediterranean and took part of it. England retaliated in 1694 by effective use of sea-power: she sent her main fleet to the Mediterranean for the first time, and preserved Barcelona from the French. But an attack on Brest was decisively beaten and coastal raids achieved little. The battle fleet remained abroad for nearly two years, maintaining Spanish resistance and holding Savoy to the Alliance. Its pressure stung France in 1696 to an attempted invasion of England, coincident with a Jacobite rising and a plot to murder William, the last so badly framed that men who condemned assassination were brought into the secret, and three of them gave information to the Government.

By the peace of Ryswick of 1697 Louis recognised William as king. It was a temporary settlement only, for Louis had been held, not beaten, and he still hoped to dominate Europe. He had lost his English catspaw in 1688, but a prospect opened of a safer though less vigorous satellite in Spain. Her king, Charles II., was childless, feeble-minded, decrepit; when he died Louis could hope to get part of his empire, perhaps even to seat one of his own family on the empty throne. It had three claimants, Austrian, Bavarian, Bourbon. All Europe saw the danger, and William planned to meet it by agreement with France.

The Partition Treaty of September, 1698, promised Spain and the Indies to the Bavarian claimant, Naples and Guipuscoa to the French Dauphin, Milan to the Austrian candidate. Spain heard of it, and to keep her empire united made the Bavarian prince heir to the whole. But he died of smallpox in February 1699, and all was to do again with the claimants reduced to two. A second Partition Treaty in February, 1700, gave Spain, the Indies and the Netherlands to the Austrian Archduke; and to France, Lorraine, Naples, Sicily, Guipuscoa and some Tuscan ports. Austria rejected this, and asked for more. Parliament knew of neither treaty, and would have denounced the second, which promised France a Mediterranean predominance thought perilous to English trade. A dangerous constitutional precedent had been given in the first pact, when Somers, the Lord Chancellor, sent sealed powers in blank to William: if ministerial responsibility meant anything, Somers was responsible for a deed of which he was ignorant. Both treaties were the work of William himself, not of his ministers.

They brought a storm in 1701, but were not its only cause. Relations between Government and Commons were growing more difficult. Parliament was jealous and irresponsible; no man could pledge its action with certainty. The best remedy for the tendency of any assembly to increase its powers is responsibility; the nation holds the Commons to account, and the Commons act through leaders they must follow or replace. But this can work only under certain conditions. It presupposes a confident national sense; rules of fair play binding on all so that a defeated party will not appeal to arms nor a victorious one make its triumph immortal by legislation; as much agreement on means as dispute about ends. The rules that keep party politics from becoming faction had not yet been framed, so when the Commons asserted themselves it was less to control than to hamper the Government.

Charles II. had weakened opposition by patronage. This was now being systematised but was still incomplete, uncodified, and provoked spasmodic assault. Attacks were made on placemen that if successful would have turned the British Constitution into something more like the American. One Place Bill was beaten in the Lords in 1692, a second vetoed by the Crown in 1694. William resisted other less dubious changes. An attempt to make judges independent of the Crown and dismissable only at Parliament's request failed to get his assent in 1691, for he saw in it an attack on his influence. He vetoed a Triennial Bill in March 1693, against the wishes of his ministers. But next year he accepted it, for he wanted Shrewsbury as Secretary of State, and Shrewsbury made this a condition. At the same time the censorship of the press, which hung by a temporary act, expired not so much from belief in free expression, as because no censor pleased both parties. The result was an increase in pamphlet war and the beginning of newspapers.

An election in the autumn of 1695, designed to use the popularity won by William's success at Namur, returned a Parliament less docile than he had hoped. In 1696 lavish grants of Welsh lands to favourites raised a storm: for the first time a king's right to give away Crown property was successfully attacked. Mary had died of smallpox in December, 1694, and her loss was expected to increase friction between court and people. The needs of war and the murder plot of 1696 postponed trouble, but it came on the heels of peace. Parliament wished to cut down drastically forces which had reached nearly 90,000 soldiers and 40,000 seamen. In December, 1697, they fixed the army at about 10,000, with 10,000 sailors, and 3000 marines; this was an issue of country against court on which both parties were agreed. William evaded the full reduction, and kept some 15,000 soldiers in England, with rather more on the Irish establishment. A general election in the summer of 1698 strengthened the opposition. Parliament attacked vigorously, voted an army, besides the Irish establishment (then 12,000 strong), of only 7000 men, none of whom should be foreigners—a direct attack on William's Dutch guards. Partly because he thought peace unstable, partly because, king-like, he resented Parliamentary control of the army, William felt this bitterly, and talked of retiring to Holland. Twice before he had threatened this, soon after the Revolution and when he was indispensable, but now the threat was vain. He asked for his Dutch guards, but his earlier refusal to suggest a moderate establishment had cost him his chance, and he had to yield.

A second storm soon followed. In 1690 William had promised to consult Parliament before he granted away the lands to be forfeited in Ireland once the rebellion was crushed. The war was over, the debt great, and Parliament thought the sale of these lands would reduce taxation, but large tracts had been alienated by the king. By a clause in a money bill which it was impossible to reject the Commons appointed a commission of inquiry, and in 1700 it reported that William had divided a quarter of a million acres between Albemarle (Keppel) and Portland's son (Bentinck), besides making other large gifts. A Bill was drawn up to resume the lands, and the Commons forced it through the Lords by coupling it to the land tax. Another revolution seemed possible, so high did party feeling run; the Whig Junto was forced from office, and the Government became more Tory than it had been since 1688.

Three deaths in a few months altered the situation. In July, 1700, the Duke of Gloucester, last of Anne's seventeen children, and after her the only heir to the throne provided by the Bill of Rights, died of smallpox. In November with Charles II. the Spanish Hapsburgs expired. September, 1701, ended the life of James. Spain had to find an immediate, England an ultimate royal house. Parliament easily decided that future kings of England must be Protestant; this ruled out the Pretender and House of Savoy, and made Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James I., inevitable. She was seventy, wanted the Crown neither herself nor for her children, and only under pressure withdrew her suggestion that the Pretender would make a better ruler than a German prince. Charles II. of Spain was found to have bequeathed his realms to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis, as the one chance of holding them together. Louis accepted the bequest and tore up the Partition Treaty: this meant war with Austria but not necessarily with England, where public opinion preferred a French king for the whole Spanish Empire to such direct aggrandisement of France as the treaty had promised. At this point, with war certain in Europe, William humiliated in England, Parliament was dissolved, and three thousand candidates contested the bitterest election yet known. Victory went to the peace party, the Tories.

French aggressiveness swung the nation back to William. Louis recognised Philip's conditional claim to the French throne, in violation of earlier pledges. In February, 1701, French troops occupied seven of the fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, which William hoped to see garrisoned by the Dutch. France claimed a monopoly of non-Spanish trade with the Spanish colonies, and this threatened English prosperity. War feeling grew through the spring of 1701. Parliament was prepared to stand by Holland, but its investigation of diplomatic events since the peace made it rage at the way England's action had been secretly pledged in the partition treaties, and at the Whigs who had then been in power. Somers, Orford (Russell), Halifax (Montague), and Portland, William's chief agent in foreign affairs, were impeached. At the same time the Act of Settlement, which gave the crown after Anne's death to Hanover, was passed by Tory votes. As far as an Act could it slew the former Tory theory of divine right, by ignoring the nearer Stuarts in favour of a remote Protestant. As a price for this the Act made any dismissal of judges depend on Parliament, banished placemen from the Commons, forbade the monarch to leave England without parliamentary approval, and closed Privy Council and Parliament to all save Englishmen: councillors were individually to sign and be responsible for their decisions.

The Act touched William in several tender places, but he agreed to it since he lost none of his own powers: it was only to come into force on Anne's death. Had it done so unamended the constitution would be different to-day. The Tory theory, as expressed in it, was that ministerial responsibility was individual, not collective, enforceable by prosecution of the minister, not by defeat of his party. Coupled with a prohibition on royal officials being members of the Commons, this would make a Cabinet as we know it impossible. The years of Anne's reign gave time for second thoughts, and these clauses were repealed.

The Commons became bellicose slowly, the nation quicker. A petition from Kent, in May, 1701, criticising Parliament for spending its time on prosecuting ex-ministers instead of preparing for war, was treated as a libel, and its presenters jailed. The Lords stood by the impeached peers and acquitted them all. During the summer William made his last effort for peace, but France rejected his proposals. War began in Lombardy, and in August Marlborough negotiated the Grand Alliance with Austria and Holland: a few days later James II. died, and Louis made one of his worst blunders. He recognised the Pretender, James Edward, as King of England, a flat insult to a country that only a few months before had regulated its succession otherwise, and so made the Tories as ready for war as the Whigs.

William broke off relations with France, dissolved Parliament and obtained a House more amenable than the last. In February, 1702, a fall from his horse broke his collarbone; it was too much for his worn-out body. He sank rapidly; a fortnight after his fall he assented to acts that raised the armed forces of the nation to 80,000 men and attainted the Pretender. Next day, March 8, he died, aged 51, and Marlborough stepped quietly into the direction of affairs. One of William's last wishes had been union with Scotland; that and the defeat of Louis XIV., which had been the chief aim of his life, were to be the greatest achievements of the next reign. France, the most powerful state in Europe, its accepted leader in fashion and thought, seemed likely to become supreme by land, where her chief rival was the disorganised Empire, now an appendage of Austria. But fruitless European struggle was to deflect French energies from sea and colonies, and to leave England dominant in these twin fields.