Chapter XXXIII. Queen Anne War Of The Spanish Succession (1702-1714). "The master workman was dead," says Burke, "but his work had been conceived according to the true principles of art, and it had been executed in his mind." William of Orange was dead; after a reign incessantly contested, unpopular and stormy, scarcely had he breathed his last, when all he had done, and desired, was attacked, censured and disputed on every side. The edifice, however, was too firmly constructed, was founded upon moral principles too true, and based upon political necessities too serious, for the storms of party passion to overthrow. The coalition of Europe was to survive the loss of its chief; the liberties of England were forever delivered from the yoke of the Stuarts. {94} Queen Anne was proclaimed without opposition, and but few even of the Jacobites affected any astonishment at seeing her ascend the unoccupied throne. Their prince was still a child, and the last act to which William III. had put his hand was a bill of attainder against the Pretender, as King James III. of the Court of St. Germain began to be called in England. The queen had successively lost her seventeen children; the hope of the Jacobites changed its nature, and henceforth they confidently awaited the future. Anne was thirty-seven years old, her health was poor and her intelligence limited; she was honest, and sincerely attached to the Church of England. Although naturally good and universally popular, grand views or great political and moral considerations were foreign to her; she never comprehended them, and allowed herself constantly to be controlled by some favorite that she frequently changed for frivolous reasons or caprices of management. These favorites were of both parties, but she showed a marked predilection for the Tories. The Whigs long governed during her reign, and to them belongs the honor of having continued the work begun by William III. Queen Anne, however, always regarded them with aversion and distrust. In the depths of her soul she had remained attached to the house of her father; her Protestant faith alone separated her from that brother whose birth she had stigmatized. She was timid, yet at the same time obstinate, indolent, and passionately attached to her royal prerogatives; unable to strike a great blow against public sentiment, but henceforth the mistress of England by the preponderant action of the House of Commons. Her favorites, all powerful while they were around her, had to learn the limit of their influence; their personal faults, and the grave errors of their conduct, were not the only reasons that led to the fall of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Soon constrained to rely upon the Whigs, as they alone seriously desired the war, Marlborough, but recently Tory and half Jacobite, was to fall with them. [Image] Queen Anne. {95}