his offices, and soon afterwards Ormonde, besides being appointed colonel of the first regiment of foot guards, was appointed to succeed him in the post of captain-general and in the conduct of the campaign in Flanders, for which he took his departure in April 1712. Burnet declares that he was ‘well satisfied both with his instructions and his appointments; for he had the same allowances that had been voted criminal in the Duke of Marlborough.’ His instructions were to inform the States-General and Prince Eugene that the queen intended vigorously to push the war. The coldness of the reception, however, which he met with from Pensionary Heinsius, was speedily justified by the conduct of the government, which had selected an honourable man for the performance of a more than dubious task. Within a fortnight of his landing he was warned by St. John to be extremely cautious about engaging in any action, and at the end of May, just after he and Prince Eugene had reviewed the allied forces near Douai, arrived the orders, which were afterwards notorious as the restraining orders, but which he was instructed to keep secret, forbidding his joining in any siege or engaging in any action without further commands. The allies crossed the Scheldt, while Villars, whose position had seemed nearly desperate, at once found a pretext for entering into communications with Ormonde. They greatly embarrassed the British general, who, in reply to a pressing invitation from Prince Eugene, felt himself constrained to avow that he could not join in any operation before receiving further instructions from home. The true nature of his position was now an open secret, and as such was hotly discussed both at the Hague and in the houses of parliament at Westminster. When in June Prince Eugene gave orders for the siege of Quesnoy, Ormonde, in accordance with the declaration of ministers in parliament that such an operation was within his powers, consented to cover the siege in conjunction with the imperialist commander; but no sooner had the fall of the place become imminent than he informed Prince Eugene (25 June) that he was instructed to proclaim a cessation of arms for two months. Quesnoy, however, capitulated (10 July), and Ormonde failed to induce the commanders of the German troops in the queen's pay, headed by the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Cassel, to follow him to Dunkirk, which Louis XIV had agreed provisionally to give up to Great Britain. Instead of half the allied army, only the native British troops, 12,000 in number, now obeyed Ormonde's orders. Having proclaimed a cessation of arms, he withdrew at the head of these troops (16 July) and marched upon Ghent and Bruges, which were already in British occupation, and which nearly alone among the places in Flanders opened their gates to our forces. Here and hereabouts they spent the winter, while Dunkirk was also nominally in British occupation. When the spring came, peace had been made.
Humiliating as Ormonde's experiences had been during his command—for his own officers and soldiers had expressed their share in the indignation excited by the policy which he was doomed to carry out—it does not seem as if his personal credit had permanently suffered from these proceedings. A general impression, more complimentary to his integrity than to his intelligence, prevailed that he had been employed because he did not at first penetrate the motives of his employers. The government rewarded him for his services by conferring on him the wardenship and admiralty of the Cinque Ports and the constableship of Dover Castle, together with a pension of 5,000l. a year upon the Irish revenues, this last in compensation of the recent restoration to the crown of some royalties in Tipperary which had formerly been for a time in his family. Inasmuch as he still held both the lord-lieutenancy and the captain-generalship, he was during the last part of Queen Anne's reign one of the most important personages in the state, and one on whom a large share of responsibility rested as to the conduct and policy of its government. As lord-lieutenant he at least found occasion for an act creditable both to his sense of justice and to his moral courage; for it was to ‘his brother’ Ormonde, in whose gift the preferment lay, that Swift primarily owed his appointment to the deanery of St. Patrick by an arrangement concerted, as he relates, between the queen, the duke, and the lord treasurer Oxford (Journal to Stella, 18 April 1713). It is less easy to determine the more important question, to what extent Ormonde was prepared to further the Jacobite designs rife in the last years of the reign. He was not a man usually capable of acting for himself, and he seems to have followed the lead of Bolingbroke rather than that of the more cautious Oxford, though the former afterwards explicitly denied having been at any time ‘in his secret’ (Letter to Windham). As captain-general he co-operated in the purification of the army from the leaven of Marlborough; and though as lord warden of the Cinque Ports he was specially responsible for the safety of the south coast, he was actually engaged in correspondence
