by his adherents; but a severe punishment on a wretch so insignificant would have been misplaced; and the sentence may be compared to the nominal damages sometimes given in a suit instituted for the trial of a great right. _Revolution in the ministry under Anne._--The shifting combinations of party in the reign of Anne, which affected the original distinctions of whig and tory, though generally known, must be shortly noticed. The queen, whose understanding and fitness for government were below mediocrity, had been attached to the tories, and bore an antipathy to her predecessor. Her first ministry, her first parliament, gave presage of a government to be wholly conducted by that party. But this prejudice was counteracted by the persuasions of that celebrated favourite, the wife of Marlborough, who, probably from some personal resentments, had thrown her influence into the scale of the whigs. The well known records of their conversation and correspondence present a strange picture of good-natured feebleness on one side, and of ungrateful insolence on the other. But the interior of a court will rarely endure daylight. Though Godolphin and Marlborough, in whom the queen reposed her entire confidence, had been thought tories, they became gradually alienated from that party, and communicated their own feelings to the queen. The House of Commons very reasonably declined to make an hereditary grant to the latter out of the revenues of the post-office in 1702, when he had performed no extraordinary services; though they acceded to it without hesitation after the battle of Blenheim.[307] This gave some offence to Anne; and the chief tory leaders in the cabinet, Rochester, Nottingham, and Buckingham, displaying a reluctance to carry on the war with such vigour as Marlborough knew to be necessary, were soon removed from office. Their revengeful attack on the queen, in the address to invite the Princess Sophia, made a return to power hopeless for several years. Anne however entertained a desire very natural to an English sovereign, yet in which none but a weak one will expect to succeed, of excluding chiefs of parties from her councils. Disgusted with the tories, she was loth to admit the whigs; and thus Godolphin's administration, from 1704 to 1708, was rather suddenly supported, sometimes indeed thwarted, by that party. Cowper was made chancellor against the queen's wishes;[308] but the junto, as it was called, of five eminent whig peers, Somers, Halifax, Wharton, Orford, and Sunderland, were kept out through the queen's dislike, and in some measure, no question, through Godolphin's jealousy. They forced themselves into the cabinet about 1708; and effected the dismissal of Harley and St. John, who, though not of the regular tory school in connection or principle, had already gone along with that faction in the late reign, and were now reduced by their dismissal to unite with it.[309] The whig ministry of Queen Anne, so often talked of, cannot in fact be