X. 1714. 52. of Louis It was just permitted to the monarch whose guilty CHAP. ambition had lighted this terrible conflagration to witness its extinction. Louis XIV. Louis XIV. expired on the 1st September 1715, at the very time when the Jacobite Last years insurrection in Scotland was apparently opening the XIV. way for the restoration of the Stuarts, whom he had so nobly sheltered in their misfortune, to the throne. His advanced age-for he was seventy-seven-rendered a prolonged life neither probable nor desirable; but his latter years had been clouded by misfortunes, both national and domestic, which formed a mournful contrast to the brilliancy of his earlier career. Independent of the public calamities which had signalised the latter years of the war, he had been severely stricken by misfortune in private life. In 1711, his son, the Duke of Burgundy, his daughter-in-law, the Duchess, and their son, the heir of the monarchy, were carried off by the small-pox within a few days of each other. A single funeral service, at which the aged monarch assisted, was performed for the father, mother, and son. Though Louis bore this grievous calamity with his wonted firmness, the bereavement sunk deep into his heart, and all the efforts of the courtiers were unable to divert his settled melancholy. In vain the splendid halls of Versailles were arrayed, after the peace, with more than their wonted splendour; in vain forty of the most charming women in France, elegantly dressed, every day adorned his repasts; in vain magnificent balls assembled every week all the nobility and beauty of the metropolis in his saloons: nothing could distract his gloom, nothing restore the joyousness of his youth. His Biographie strength was daily and visibly declining; his limbs were 197, 198. swollen, his visage haggard, and, instead of dancing with Capefigue, Louis XIV. Hist. de vi. 419-424. Univ. xxv. X. CHAP. the youngest and fairest at his court, he was drawn painfully in a little carriage through the splendid halls and marbled parterres of Versailles. 1714. 53. At length the closing hour arrived; and the monarch His death, whose insatiable ambition had sent so many innocent Sept. 1. 1715. souls prematurely out of the world was himself called to his dread account. He met the approach of death with calmness and equanimity; but he was much disquieted by remorse of conscience, particularly for the share he had had in the most flagrant iniquity of his reign-the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Apprehensive of the extinction of the male line of the Bourbons, he, by an edict of 15th May 1715, called his natural sons, now legitimised, the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse, to the throne, failing his grandson Louis XV. When death was visibly approaching, the aged monarch ordered his infant heir, afterwards Louis XV., to be brought to his bedside, and, placing his lean and withered hands on his head, said, with a firm voice, "My child, you are about to become a great king; but your happiness will depend on your submission to God, and on the care which you take of your subjects. To attain that, you must avoid as much as you can engaging in wars, which are the ruin of the people; do not follow, in that respect, the bad example which I have given you. I have often engaged in wars from levity, and continued in them from vanity; do not imitate me, but become a pacific prince; profit vi. 456-460 by the good education which Madame de Ventadour is xxv. 198, giving you, and obey and follow the good sentiments which she inspires." He then tenderly thanked that Français, accomplished lady for her kindness to her youthful charge, and prepared himself for death.1 Madame de 1 Capefigue, Biog. Univ. 199. Sismondi, Hist. des xxvii. 215217. Maintenon was indefatigable, night and day, at his bed side. "What consoles me," said the dying monarch, "is, that we shall soon be reunited." He breathed his last at five in the morning, on the 1st September. "The king is dead, gentlemen!" cried the chamberlain, when the feather no longer moved before his lips; the sumptuous doors of the apartment were thrown open, and an infant of five years old, adorned by the cordon bleu, thrown over a violet velvet dress, advanced into the chamber of death, amidst cries of "Vive le Roi Louis XV., nôtre seigneur et maître!" CHAP. X. 1714. 54. lingbroke at the Preten Bolingbroke did not long profit by his double treachery to his sovereign and his country; he soon found that, Fall of Bothough kings sometimes approve of treason, they seldom the court of like the traitor. He had been made Secretary of State der. for Foreign Affairs to the exiled monarch, immediately after he fled from England, in 1714; but he only held the office for one year, being suddenly dismissed in November 1715. He fell a victim to the same intrigues and jealousy by which he himself had effected the downfall of Marlborough at the court of London. He immediately renounced all connection with the Jacobite party, and made overtures to Lord Stair, the English ambassador at Paris, which led to his ultimate restoration to the country which his genius had illustrated and his ambition endangered. Of the infatuation which led the Stuart family thus to deprive themselves of the counsels of the only man who was capable of directing them, at the most momentous crisis of their affairs, there cannot be better proof imagined than is furnished by the impartial testimony of the Duke of Berwick, the only man of capacity in the family. "One must have lost his reason," says he, "not to see the enormous mistake committed by King James in dismissing the only English CHAP. X. man he had capable of managing his affairs; for, whatever may be said by some persons of more passion than 1714. judgment, it is admitted by all England that there have been few greater ministers than Bolingbroke. He was born with splendid talents, which had raised him, at an early age, to the very highest employments; he exerted great influence over the Tory party, and was, in fact, its soul. Could there, then, be a more lamentable weakness than to dismiss such a man, at the very time when he was most wanted, and when it was most essential not to make new enemies? I was in part a witness how Bolingbroke acted for King James while he managed his affairs; and I owe him the justice to say, that he Mem. 261, left nothing undone that he could do: he moved heaven and earth to obtain supplies, but was always put off by the court of France." 1 1 Berwick's 262-edit. Petitot. 55. acquittal of Oxford did not gain in the end more than BolingTrial and broke, by the desertions of his duty to his Queen and Oxford. country. Having, as already mentioned, boldly stayed at home and set his accusers at defiance, he was arrested on a charge of high treason, and high crimes and misdemeanours, and by a most flagrant and culpable delay of justice was detained two years in prison before he was brought to trial. The Whigs, at first in a body, cordially and unanimously supported the impeachment; but time having produced the usual amount of schism in that party after their triumph, following on the accession of the Hanoverian family, some of his keenest enemies in the outset were converted, before the trial came on in the House of Peers, into secret friends. Walpole and Townsend, who had been removed from office, were the leaders of these malcontent Whigs, who combined with the Tories and Jacobites to obstruct the prosecution. X. 1714. The charges of high treason were negatived in the outset CHAP. unanimously, no prosecutor having appeared to insist on these charges; but it was determined, by a majority of a hundred and six to thirty-eight, to proceed with the trial of the "other crimes and misdemeanours." The thirty-eight absented themselves, and he was unanimously acquitted, to the great disappointment of the Whigs, who took a very warm interest in the prosecution. It was said in after times that Marlborough joined with the malcontents among the Whigs to obstruct the prosecution, from a dread of Oxford revealing his correspondence in early life with King James after the Revolution. But this is disproved, by the fact of his having voted in every stage for the prosecution; and by the still more decisive fact, that when the Pretender landed in Scotland, and published list of the persons who were to be included in the c. 17; and proffered amnesty, Marlborough was specially exempted 350-352. from it.1 1 Coxe's a Mem. of Walpole, C. Marlb. vi. 56. the Coun Bridge Countess of But the evil days were approaching for Marlborough also; and he was destined to afford another example of Deaths of the truth of the saying of Solon, that no one can be tess of deemed really happy till the day of his death. It was water and through his family he was first pierced to the heart, on Sunderland. the 22d March 1714. His third daughter, the Countess of Bridgewater, was cut off after a short illness; and hardly had he recovered from this domestic shock when his second daughter, the Countess of Sunderland, also died, on the 15th April in the same year, of a fever and inflammation in the lungs. Her loss was severely felt by both her parents, to whom she had long been endeared, not only by her beauty and fascination of manner, but by a rare union of those brilliant qualities |