see the full effect of his promises and of his determination.

Flushed with his great victory, Nottingham lost no time in introducing his dearly cherished bantling, the Occasional Conformity Bill, with only some very slight modifications to satisfy, in show at least, his new allies. It enacted that if any officer civil or military, or any magistrate of a Corporation, obliged by the Acts of Charles the Second to receive the Sacrament, should during his continuance in office attend any Conventicle, or religious meeting of Dissenters, such person should forfeit 40l. to be recovered by the prosecutor; and every person so convicted should be disabled to hold his office and incapable of any employment in England. This intolerant Bill, carried through the House of Lords by the active assistance of the Whigs, was received with enthusiasm by the Tory majority in the House of Commons, and was quickly passed into law, continuing as such for more than seven years.

In another transaction of this time the same reckless spirit appeared. The Whigs, as then possessing the ascendant in the House of Lords, viewed with much jealousy the possible admission through British peerage patents of more Scottish Peers-a class of men whom they regarded, and not without some reason at that period, as wholly subservient to the Crown. It came to an issue by the recent creation of the Duke of Hamilton to be Duke of Brandon in England. The question being p. —and a consultation of the Judges first refused-whether Scottish Peers created Peers of Great Britain have a right to sit in the House, it was carried in the negative by the narrow majority of 57 against 52. Even at the time of this decision by the Lords the Duke of Queensberry was sitting among

them by virtue of a British peerage granted since the Union; and there was scarce even a shred of law to cover the manifest party-object of the vote. It remained in force however for upwards of seventy years. At length in 1782, the question of the disability of Scottish Peers to receive patents of peerage in Great Britain being raised anew on a petition from the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, was referred to the Judges, who decided unanimously that no such disability had been created by the Act of Union. The Lords thereupon revoked their former decision.9

On the 22nd of December the House of Commons adjourned for the Christmas holidays until the 14th of January. But the newly-formed majority in the Lords were so eager in controlling the hostile Ministry, that they would scarce allow themselves any holiday at all, adjourning only from the same day in December till January the 2nd. Before they separated they gave other tokens of their power. To gratify the House of Hanover the Duke of Devonshire brought in a Bill giving to the Electoral Prince as Duke of Cambridge the precedence of all Peers. To embarrass the negotiations at Utrecht Lord Nottingham carried an Address that Her Majesty might instruct her plenipotentiaries to consult with the Ministers of the other Allies in Holland, and concert the necessary measures to preserve a strict union amongst them all. In vain did the Lord Treasurer assert that this had been done. Nottingham persevered with his Address, and the Ministers.

See a passage in Sir Thomas | George the Third, vol. i. p. 239. May's interesting and valuable Also the Lords Journals, June 6, work, Constitutional History of 1782.

England since the Accession of

only prevailed so far as to insert in it the words, “ in case Her Majesty had not already given such orders."

While these things passed in Parliament since the first vote on the 7th of December, the Ministers had been most anxiously reviewing their position and determining their course. They soon found that there was not, as at first they feared, any change of purpose in the Queen. As St. John wrote to Strafford on the 15th, "the only difficulty she laboured under, besides a little natural slowness, was the habit which she has with the Duchess of Somerset, and the apprehension of not finding somebody to fill a place so near her person whom she could like." In fact there was now the same difficulty about the Duchess of Somerset as in former days there had been about the Duchess of Marlborough. But in politics the Queen had no doubts. She was willing to support the Church party, as she deemed it, by even the most violent stretch of her prerogative. On this knowledge the Ministers acted.

Their first step was to strike down Marlborough. For this purpose they used a weapon which had been for some time in their hands, and which it might be in their power to withhold or draw forth as they pleased. The Commission of Public Accounts as appointed by themselves, consisted of some ardent Tories with Lockhart of Carnwath as its Chairman; and among the documents laid before it there was one that bore hard on the Great Duke. It was the deposition of Sir Solomon Medina, a wealthy Jew and the contractor for bread to the army in Flanders. Sir Solomon stated that from 1707 to 1711 he had paid to the Duke of Marlborough for his Grace's own use on the several contracts for the army a sum of 332,000 guilders—that on each contract he had presented Mr. Cardonnel, secretary

to the Duke, with a gratuity of 500 ducats—and that moreover he had paid to Mr. Sweet, deputy paymaster at Amsterdam, the farther allowance of one per cent. on all the monies he received. As regards the payments to the Duke it further appeared that the same had been made by the previous contractor M. Machado. From these facts the Commissioners computed that in ten years the Duke of Marlborough had received from the breadcontractors, and applied to his own use, a sum equivalent in English money to upwards of 63,000l. It was probably to the substance or main facts of Medina's deposition that St. John desired to refer so far back as the January preceding, when writing in confidence to Drummond he says of the Duke, "We shall do what we can to support him in the command of the army without betraying our Mistress; and unless he is infatuated he will help us in this design, for you must know that the moment he leaves the service and loses the protection of the Court, such scenes will open as no victories can varnish over." In November, Marlborough being then at the Hague, the Commissioners had sent. him this deposition in a private form. Writing in reply the Duke admitted that he had received the sums in question, but observed first, that in receiving them he had followed the precedent of every former General or Commander in Chief in the Low Countries, both before the Revolution and since; and secondly, that he had applied the money so received to public uses in obtaining secret intelligence of the enemy's designs. The Commissioners however did not deem this answer satisfactory. In the Report which they now proceeded to draw up they denied that the sums of which Marl

1 Bolingbroke's Correspondence, vol. i. p. 50.

borough had acknowledged the receipts were either legal or warrantable perquisites; and they asserted that on the strictest inquiry they could not find proof that any English General, either in the Low Countries or elsewhere, had ever received the like.

But the Commissioners did not stop here. They brought into account also a deduction of two and a half per cent. from the pay of the foreign troops subsidised by England, which sum was paid to Marlborough under a warrant from the Queen in the first year of her reign, and designed, as the warrant states, for "extraordinary contingent expences." Lockhart and his colleagues—I had almost said accomplices-took little heed of that warrant or those services. They reckoned that, even excluding from the calculation the foreign auxiliaries employed in Spain, Portugal, or Italy, Marlborough must have received and applied to his own use the sum of 177,000l.; which sum they declared to be public money, for which the Duke as receiver was accountable.

The Report of the Commissioners was presented to the House of Commons on the 21st of December, but the deposition of Sir Solomon was deferred till the 22nd, the very day of the adjournment, so that in Parliament at least no present answer could be made. Thus the popular impression was increased. On the 30th Swift notes in his journal, "The Duke of Marlborough was at Court to-day and nobody hardly took notice of him." The courtiers showed that admirable prescience which has been observed of certain other creatures, and which enables them in sufficient time to leave a falling house. In this case the fall was not long delayed. On the 31st the Queen appeared at the Council, and ordered this entry to be made in the Council-books: "Being informed that an information against the Duke of Marlborough