met on the 18th, there was a general feeling of uneasiness attested by the falling of the stocks, which had been affected by rumours of every kind; so that it was thought expedient for the queen, when she had sufficiently recovered, to address a letter to the lord mayor, intended to calm the apprehensions of the public. Among the incidents which had excited fears had been a movement of French troops to the coast, very innocently explained by the French government.
Immediately after the meeting of parliament the whigs found an opportunity for reviving the suspicions against the queen excited by the announcement of her debts in the previous session. When it was discovered that a quarter of the profits of the South Sea Company were to be reserved to assignees of her majesty, the question who these assignees were came to be so pertinaciously asked that the ministers ultimately had to abandon the proposal as to the quarter-share itself (Wyon, ii. 480; cf. Wentworth Papers, 396 sqq.). On 2 March 1713–14, when parliament reassembled after an adjournment, the queen was carried in a chair to the House of Lords. About this time she seemed again in better health, and though soon afterwards she had a ‘fit of shivering’ at Windsor, she appeared to be very well in April (Wentworth Papers, 359, 360, 375). The injunctions of the royal speech had little effect upon the whigs, who seized the occasion of the ratification of the treaties with Spain to take up the cause of the shamefully deserted Catalans, and afterwards in the lords to condemn the commercial treaty (July). But the question of the succession remained the really disquieting element in the political atmosphere. In her answer to an address from the lords, Queen Anne alluded with very little obscurity to a proposed ‘diminution of the royal dignity’ which had by this time become the favourite item in the whig programme. The queen had throughout continued on terms of civility with the electress dowager Sophia and her son; and just before the opening of parliament she had furnished Thomas Harley with a letter to the elector promising her assent to any further securities which the electoral family might desire. But even then she had referred to proposals from other quarters inconsistent with her own dignity and security which she felt herself bound to oppose. What the whigs had in view was to bring over to England a member of the Hanoverian family—if possible the elector; if not, his son the electoral prince. At a meeting of the whig leaders held about the end of April it was resolved to carry into effect this design, which had been for some time cherished. A debate on the state of the nation had just ended in the lords, which had been characterised by extraordinary violence. After losing by a small majority a proposal to declare the protestant succession in danger, the whigs had carried an address to the queen to renew her endeavours for the expulsion of the Pretender from Lorraine; and to this a clause had been added, on the motion of Wharton, asking the queen to proclaim a reward for the apprehension of the Pretender, dead or alive. The address had been in some measure softened down after an adjournment; but even so the queen's answer had not disguised her just resentment (Somerville, 555). It was then that the whigs thought of taking advantage of the circumstance that as Duke of Cambridge the electoral prince was a peer of the realm, in order to obtain for him the usual writ of summons and thus bring him over to England. The Hanoverian envoy, Baron Schütz, accordingly applied for the writ to the chancellor (Harcourt), who referred the matter to the queen. So indignant was Anne at the attempt to force her hand that she forbade Schütz her presence. Never, Oxford told him, had he seen the queen in a greater passion (Original Papers, ii. 598). At a cabinet it was indeed resolved to issue the writ, which could not be refused, and which Schütz accordingly carried to Hanover. The electoral family were advised by Strafford to disavow the proceedings of their envoy, and he sought to convey to the queen the assurance that there had been no desire on their part to disoblige her (Wentworth Papers, 31–32). But before long, a memorial, dated 7 May, from the electress dowager and the elector reached the queen, which suggested as necessary securities for the succession the removal of the Pretender from Lorraine, and the presence in Great Britain of a prince of the electoral family. In answer to this memorial, Queen Anne on 30 May wrote the two memorable letters to the Electress Sophia and to the electoral prince, which, accompanied by a third from Oxford to the elector, left no room for doubt as to the queen's mind being made up on the subject. The letters are in truth what they were called by the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom they were forwarded by the electress—‘very extraordinary;’ and possibly the rumour was true that ‘the queen's letter touched the old electress so much that it hastened her death,’ which took place on the day after that on which it had reached her (8 June; see Letters of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 1875, 110, and cf. Molyneux's letter from Hanover in Coxe, iii. 574.
