ABSTRACT
Robert Harley was once so misguided as to affirm a Hanoverian's right to come to England and take his seat in the House of Lords. But while making the country "constitutional," while giving it a "modern impetus," while fighting for English political and religious liberty, they made England hideously oligarchic and philistine. The war, which to the Tories and the nation at large was a defensive war, was for the more knowing of the Whigs a great profiteering expedition. The capitalist egg, laid in Tudor times, was hatched in England under Queen Anne. The very men who wrote letters of extravagant praise to Marlborough were plotting his overthrow; the very men who drank together stopped just short of poisoning one another's wine. An instinct to play safe — unless it was an incorrigible instinct to plot — led the self-seeking to swear fealty to Hanover while they connived with Saint-Germains.
