22. Death of William. 1702.-Early in 1702 William was looking forward to taking the command in the war which was beginning. On February 20 his horse stumbled over a mole-hill in Hampton Park. He fell, and broke his collar bone. He lingered for some days, and, on March 8, he died. His work, if not accomplished, was at least in a fair way of being accomplished. His main object in life had been to prevent Louis from domineering in Europe, whilst the maintenance of the constitutional liberties of England had been with him only a secondary object. That he succeeded in what he undertook against Louis was owing, primarily, to the self-sufficiency and obstinacy, first of Louis himself and then of James II.; but all the blunders of his adversaries would have availed him little if he had not himself been possessed of invincible patience and of the tact which perceives the line which divides the practicable from the impracticable. That he was a Continental statesman with Continental aims stood in the way of his popularity in England. His merit was that, being aware how necessary English support was to him on the Continent, he recognised that his only hope of securing the help of England lay in persistent devotion to her domestic interests and her constitutional liberties; and that devotion, in spite of some blunders and some weaknesses, he uninterruptedly gave to her during the whole course of his reign.

1. Marlborough and the Tories. 1702.-Anne was a goodhearted woman of no great ability, warmly attached to the Church of England, and ready to support it in its claims against the

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Dissenters. She therefore preferred the Tories to the Whigs, and filled all the ministerial offices with Tories. Marlborough, who, through his wife, had boundless influence over the Queen, found it expedient to declare himself a Tory, though he had little sympathy

with the extravagances of the extreme members of that party, and wanted merely to have a firm Government which would support him in his military enterprises. His chief ally was Lord Godolphin, to whose son one of his daughters was married. Godolphin was

Lord Treasurer, and, being an excellent financier, was likely to be able to find the money needed for a great war. He was also a fitting man to keep the ministers from quarrelling with one another. He had frequently been in office, and he liked official work better than party strife. "Little Sidney Godolphin," Charles II. had once said of him, "is never in the way, and never out of the way," and this character he retained to the end.

2. Louis XIV. and Marlborough. 1702. As far as the war and foreign affairs were concerned, Marlborough was the true successor of William III. The difficulties with which he had to contend were, indeed, enormous. Louis XIV., at the opening of the war, had a fine military position. His flanks were guarded by the possession of the Spanish Netherlands on the left and of Spain itself on the right, whilst an alliance which he formed with the Elector of Bavaria gave him military command of a tract of land accessible without much difficulty from his own territory. This tract, on the one hand, enabled a French army to make an easy attack on the Austrian dominions beyond the Inn, whilst on the other hand it divided the forces of the allies into two parts, cutting off the Austrian army in Italy, under Prince Eugene, from the English and Dutch armies in the Netherlands, both of which were under the command of Marlborough. Louis was, moreover, the sole master of all his armies, and could easily secure obedience to his orders. Marlborough had the more difficult task of securing obedience, not only from the English and Dutch armies, but from the numerous contingents sent by the German princes, most of whom now joined the Grand Alliance. The most important of these princes was Frederick I., the Elector of Brandenburg, who had been made by the Emperor king of Prussia, in order to induce him to join the allies. To the difficult task of guiding this heterogeneous following, Marlborough brought not only a consummate military genius far transcending that of William, but a temper as imperturbable as William's own.

3. Marlborough's First Campaign in the Netherlands. 17021703.—Marlborough's aim was to break Louis's power in South Germany, but he knew better than to attempt this at once. The French held the fortresses of the Spanish Netherlands and of the Rhine-country, covering the roads by which the Dutch territory could be assailed with advantage on its eastern and south-eastern sides; and, as long as this was the case, it was certain that the Dutch would not allow their army to go far from home. Marlborough therefore devoted the two campaigns of 1702 and 1703 to

The first Eddystone Lighthouse, erected in 1697; destroyed in 1703

freeing the Dutch from this danger. In these two years he took Kaiserswerth and Bonn, on the Rhine, and Roermonde, Liège and Huy on the Meuse. The roads by which a French army could approach the Dutch frontier were thus barred against attack.

4. The Occasional Conformity Bill. 1702-1703.—At the close of the campaign of 1702 Marlborough was created a duke. He spent the winter in England, where he found Parliament busy with an Occasional Conformity Bill, the object of which was to inflict penalties upon Dissenters who, having received the sacrament in church in order to qualify themselves for office, attended their own chapels during the tenure of the office thus obtained. The queen, the High Tories, and most of the clergy were eager to prevent such an evasion of the Test Act, especially as the Dissenters who occasionally conformed were Whigs to a man. The Bill passed the Commons, where the Tories were a majority. It failed to satisfy the House of Lords, in which the majority was Whig. In the next session, at the end of 1703, the Bill again passed the Commons, but was rejected by the Lords. Though Marlborough and Godolphin voted for it to please the queen, they disliked the measure, as causing ill-will between parties which they wished to unite against the common enemy.

5. Progress of the War in Italy, Spain and Germany. 17021703. In 1702 and 1703, whilst Marlborough was fighting in the Netherlands, Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Austrian commander, and a general of the highest order, had been struggling against the French in Italy. In 1703 he won over the Duke of Savoy from his alliance with Louis, but he could not prevent a great part of the Duke's territory from being overrun by French troops. In the same year Portugal deserted France and joined the allies. By the Methuen Treaty now formed, England attached Portugal to her by community of interests, engaging that the duty on Portuguese wines should be at least one-third less than that on French, whilst Portugal admitted English woollen goods to her market. During the first two years of the war, however, little of military importance took place in any part of the Peninsula. By the end of 1703 the combined forces of the French and Bavarians had gained considerable successes in Germany, and, by the capture of Augsburg, Old Breisach and Landau, had secured the communications between France and Bavaria.

6. Ministerial Changes. 1703 1704. Before Marlborough could assail Louis' position in Germany he had to make sure of his own position at home. The High Tories weakened him not only by