The first trial of strength was in the Upper House.  A resolution was moved there to the effect that the Lords would gladly concur in any plan that could be suggested for retaining the services of the Dutch brigade.  The motion was carried by fifty-four votes to thirty-eight.  But a protest was entered, and was signed by all the minority.  It is remarkable that Devonshire was, and that Marlborough was not, one of the Dissentients.  Marlborough had formerly made himself conspicuous by the keenness and pertinacity with which he had attacked the Dutch.  But he had now made his peace with the Court, and was in the receipt of a large salary from the civil list.  He was in the House on that day; and therefore, if he voted, must have voted with the majority.  The Cavendishes had generally been strenuous supporters of the King and the junto.  But on the subject of the foreign troops Hartington in one House and his father in the other were intractable.

This vote of the Lords caused much murmuring among the Commons.  It was said to be most unparliamentary to pass a bill one week, and the next week to pass a resolution condemning that bill.  It was true that the bill had been passed before the death of the Electoral Prince was known in London.  But that unhappy event, though it might be a good reason for increasing the English army, could be no reason for departing from the principle that the English army should consist of Englishmen.  A gentleman who despised the vulgar clamour against professional soldiers, who held the doctrine of Somers’s Balancing Letter, and who was prepared to vote for twenty or even thirty thousand men, might yet well ask why any of those men should be foreigners.  Were our countrymen naturally inferior to men of other races in any of the qualities which, under proper training, make excellent soldiers?  That assuredly was not the opinion of the Prince who had, at the head of Ormond’s Life Guards, driven the French household troops, till, then invincible, back over the ruins of Neerwinden, and whose eagle eye and applauding voice had followed Cutts’s grenadiers up the glacis of Namur.  Bitter spirited malecontents muttered that, since there was no honourable service which could not be as well performed by the natives of the realm as by alien mercenaries, it might well be suspected that the King wanted his alien mercenaries for some service not honourable.  If it were necessary to repel a French invasion or to put down an Irish insurrection, the Blues and the Buffs would stand by him to the death.  But, if his object were to govern in defiance of the votes of his Parliament and of the cry of his people, he might well apprehend that English swords and muskets would, at the crisis, fail him, as they had failed his father in law, and might well wish to surround himself with men who were not of our blood, who had no reverence for our laws, and no sympathy with our feelings.  Such imputations could find credit with no body superior in intelligence to those