On the 9th of April the queen opened parliament, though she was obliged to be carried thither and back in a chair in consequence of her corpulence and gout. She congratulated the country on this great event, declared her firm adherence to the protestant succession, advised them to take measures for reducing the scandalous licentiousness of the press, and to prevent duelling, in allusion to the tragic issue of that betwixt Hamilton and Mohun. She finally exhorted them to cultivate peace amongst themselves, to endeavour to allay party rage, and as to what forces should be necessary by land and the sea, she added, "Make yourselves safe, I shall be satisfied. Next to the protection of Divine Providence, I depend on the loyalty and affection of my people; I want no other guarantee."
On the 4th of May the proclamation of peace took place. It was exactly eleven years since the commencement of the war. The conditions finally arrived at were those which we have stated, except that it was concluded to confer Sicily on the duke of Savoy for his great services in the war; on the elector of Bavaria, as some equivalent for the loss of Bavaria itself, Sardinia, with the title of king; and that, should Philip of Spain leave no issue, the crown of Spain should also pass to him. We have fully expressed our opinion of the disgraceful motives which guided the ministry in making this peace, the equally disgraceful manner in which it was effected, and the advantages which were recklessly sacrificed in it. It was not that peace was made, but that it was made without regard to the national honour or the interests of Europe at large. In confirmation of our own opinions, we will here quote those of two of our most distinguished historians, lord Mahon, now earl Stanhope, and Mr. Hallam.
Lord Mahon says:—"To our enemies I would willingly leave the task of recounting the disgraceful transactions of that period. Let them relate the bedchamber influence of Mrs. Masham with her sovereign, and the treacherous cabals of Harley with his colleagues; by what unworthy means the great administration of Godolphin was sapped and overthrown; how his successors surrendered the public interests to serve their own; how subserviency to France became our leading principle of policy; how the Dutch were forsaken, and the Catalonians betrayed, until at length this career of wickedness and weakness received its consummation in the shameful peace of Utrecht. It used to be observed, several centuries ago, that, as the English always had the better of the French in battle, so the French always had the better in treaties; but here it was a sin against light—not the ignorance which is deluded, but the falsehood which deludes. We may admit that it might be expedient to depart from the strict letter of the grand alliance—to consent to some slight dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy—to purchase the resignation of Philip, or allow an equivalent for the elector of Bavaria by the cession of Sicily and Sardinia, or, perhaps, of Naples. So many hands had grasped at the royal mantle of Spain, that it could scarcely be otherwise than rent in the struggle. But how can the friends of Bolingbroke and Oxford possibly explain or excuse that they should offer far better terms at Utrecht in 1712 than the French had been willing to accept at Gertruydenberg in 1709? Or, if the dismissal of the duke of Marlborough had so far raised the spirits of our enemies and impaired the chances of the war, how is that dismissal itself to be defended?"
Hallam's remarks are equally cogent:—"That an English minister should have thrown himself into the arms of his enemy at the first overture of negotiation; that he should have renounced advantages on which he might have insisted; that he should have restored Lille, and almost attempted to procure the sacrifice of Tournay; that, throughout the whole correspondence, and in all personal interviews with De Torcy, he should have shown the triumphant queen of Great Britain more eager for peace than his vanquished adversary; that the two courts should have been virtually conspiring against those allies without whom we had bound ourselves to enter on no treaty; that we should have withdrawn our troops in the midst of a campaign, and even seized upon the towns of our confederates, while we left them exposed to be overwhelmed by a superior force; that we should have thus deceived those confederates by the most direct falsehood in denying our clandestine treaty, and then dictated to them its acceptance—are facts so disgraceful to Bolingbroke, and in somewhat a less degree to Oxford, that they can hardly be palliated by establishing the expediency of the treaty itself."
The treaty of peace, discreditable as it was, received the sanction of the parliament; not so the treaty of commerce. By this treaty it was provided that a free trade should be established according to the tariff of 1664, except as it related to certain commodities which were subjected to new regulations in 1669. This went to abolish all the restrictions on the importation of goods from France since that period, and that within two months a law should be passed that no higher duties should be levied on goods brought from France than on the like goods from any other country in Europe. Commissioners were appointed to meet in London to carry these propositions into effect; but there immediately appeared a violent opposition to these regulations, which were contained in the eighth and ninth articles of the treaty of commerce. It was declared that these articles violated the treaty of Methuen, according to which the duties on Portuguese wines were always to be lower by one-third than the duties on the French wines. Out of doors the merchants attacked the treaty in a paper started by Sir Charles Cooke, Sir Theodore Janson, and others, in which they contended that a free trade with France would be more serious to England than the fire of London had been; that if the wines of France were introduced on equal terms with those of Portugal, we should immediately lose the trade with Portugal for our woollen manufactures, by which we netted a sum of six hundred thousand pounds yearly. The French wines were far more to the taste of the English than the Portuguese; and such had been the longing for them during the war, that the English voluptuaries would, if they could have had their will, have made peace at any time with France in order to get them cheap and plentifully. The same opinions were loudly proclaimed in the house by the whig members, and by tories, too, connected with trade. On the side opposed to the treaty were Sir Nathaniel Gould, formerly governor of the bank of England, Mr. Lechmere, an eminent lawyer, Sir Peter King, Sir Thomas Hanmer, and general
