rty government, and the
union of parties to which he had clung ever since his severance from
the extreme Tories became every day more impossible as the growing
opposition of the Tories to the war threw the Duke more and more on the
support of the Whigs.

[Sidenote: Triumph of the Whigs.]

The Whigs sold their support dearly. Sunderland's violent and imperious
temper differed widely from the supple and unscrupulous nature which had
carried his father, the Lord Sunderland of the Restoration, unhurt
through the violent changes of his day. But he had inherited his
father's conceptions of party government. He was resolved to restore a
strict party administration on a purely Whig basis, and to drive the
moderate Tories from office in spite of Marlborough's desire to retain
them. The Duke wrote hotly home at the news of the pressure which the
Whigs were putting on him. "England," he said, "will not be ruined
because a few men are not pleased." Nor was Marlborough alone in his
resentment. Harley foresaw the danger of his expulsion from office, and
even as early as 1706 began to intrigue at court, through Mrs. Masham, a
bedchamber woman of the Queen, who was supplanting the Duchess in Anne's
favour, against the Whigs and against Marlborough, whom he looked upon
as in the hands of the Whigs. St. John, though bound by ties of
gratitude to the Duke, to whose favour he owed his early promotion to
office, was driven by the same fear to share Harley's schemes.
Marlborough strove to win both of them back, but the growing opposition
of the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only
party that steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with
their opponents, though it roused the Duke to a burst of unusual passion
in Parliament, effected its end by convincing him of the impossibility
of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed was stubborn
and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old trust in Marlborough
died with his submission to the Whig demands. It was only by the threat
of resignation that he had forced her to admit Sunderland to office; and
the violent outbreak of temper with which the Duchess enforced her
husband's will changed the Queen's friendship for her into a bitter
resentment. Marlborough was forced to increase this resentment by fresh
compliances with the conditions which the Whigs imposed on him, by
removing Peterborough from his command as a Tory general, and by
wresting fro