ely
from vanity as much as affection took the side of his family.

Almost the whole of the clergy of the country and more than a half of the
nation were on this side. Ours is the most loyal people in the world
surely; we admire our kings, and are faithful to them long after they have
ceased to be true to us. 'Tis a wonder to any one who looks back at the
history of the Stuart family to think how they kicked their crowns away
from them; how they flung away chances after chances; what treasures of
loyalty they dissipated, and how fatally they were bent on consummating
their own ruin. If ever men had fidelity, 'twas they; if ever men
squandered opportunity, 'twas they; and, of all the enemies they had, they
themselves were the most fatal.(8)

When the Princess Anne succeeded, the wearied nation was glad enough to
cry a truce from all these wars, controversies, and conspiracies, and to
accept in the person of a princess of the blood royal a compromise between
the parties into which the country was divided. The Tories could serve
under her with easy consciences; though a Tory herself, she represented
the triumph of the Whig opinion. The people of England, always liking that
their princes should be attached to their own families, were pleased to
think the princess was faithful to hers; and up to the very last day and
hour of her reign, and but for that fatality which he inherited from his
fathers along with their claims to the English crown, King James the Third
might have worn it. But he neither knew how to wait an opportunity, nor to
use it when he had it; he was venturesome when he ought to have been
cautious, and cautious when he ought to have dared everything. 'Tis with a
sort of rage at his inaptitude that one thinks of his melancholy story. Do
the Fates deal more specially with kings than with common men? One is apt
to imagine so, in considering the history of that royal race, in whose
behalf so much fidelity, so much valour, so much blood were desperately
and bootlessly expended.

The king dead then, the Princess Anne (ugly Anne Hyde's daughter, our
dowager at Chelsey called her) was proclaimed by trumpeting heralds all
over the town from Westminster to Ludgate Hill, amidst immense jubilations
of the people.

Next week my Lord Marlborough was promoted to the Garter, and to be
captain-general of her Majesty's forces at home and abroad. This
appointment only inflamed the dowager's rage, or, as she thought it, her
fi