It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with France, that was against all their political interests.  The Whigs wished to maintain it as a safeguard against reaction in favour of the Pretender.  In the peace negotiations nobody was so active as Secretary St. John.  On one occasion, without consulting his colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of Ormond, who commanded the English army in the Netherlands:  “Her Majesty, my lord, has reason to believe that we shall come to an agreement on the great article of the union of the two monarchies as soon as a courier sent from Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen’s positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege or hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty.  I am at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen would have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her Majesty thinks you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so as to answer her ends without owning that which might at present have an ill effect if publicly known.”  He added as a postscript:  “I had almost forgot to tell your grace that communication is given of this order to the Court of France.”  The peace was right, but the way of making it was mean in more ways than one, and the friction between Harley and St. John steadily increased.  St. John used his majority in the House for the expulsion of his rival Walpole and Walpole’s imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of corruption.  In 1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of Oxford, St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke, in the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct.  His ill-will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank of Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of Commons, where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four, as Viscount Bolingbroke and Baron St. John.  His father’s congratulation on the peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism:  “Well, Harry, I said you would be hanged, but now I see you’ll be beheaded.”

The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish Succession, was signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713.  Queen Anne died on the 1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe for the reaction that Bolingbroke had hoped to see.  His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us to understand that in Queen Anne’s reign the possible succession of James II.’s son, the Chevalier de St. George, had never been out of his mind.

The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne.  The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined.  He was dismissed from office before the end of the month.  On the 26th of March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French messenger La Vigne.  A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was Walpole’s impeachment of Bolingbroke.  He was, in September, 1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased from the roll of peers.  His own account of his policy will be found in this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the only weak feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke’s resentment against Harley.