Whig Satirizes Queen Anne’s Creation of Peers and Dismissal of Marlborough

“Our Ancestors As Wise As We: or Ancient Precedents for Modern Facts”, in Answer to a Letter from a Noble Lord.

Author: Thomas Burnet
London: A. Baldwin, 1712
34pp
5.25″ x 8.5″.

Some foxing: ex-library copy from Harvard College Library, removed as duplicate. In library cardstock binding.
Private ownership embossing on title page.
Condition: Very Good.

This brief volume in support of the Whigs takes the form of a response to a fictional lord who asks the author to search his books for “Precedents of what has been done of late; see whether in them you can meet with Instances of such a Number of Peers being poured into the House; and pray don’t fail of letting me know your Opinion on that Subject. See whether in them you can find any Generals that, after such great and eminent Services, after so many Victories and such Successes, were first turned out by their Prince, and then affronted by every paultry Scribbler.”

Burnet refers to two controversies prominent in Great Britain in 1712. That year, Queen Anne (1665-1714) created 12 Tory peers in one day in order to pass a government measure over the Whig majority in the House of Lords. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) had not created that many peers during her entire forty-five-year reign, but the Stuart kings and queens created more than 250 peers during their century of rule, even with the interruption of the English Civil War.

The second controversy was the dismissal of the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) as Captain-General. The Duke had been one of the heroes of the War of the Spanish Succession, leading British and allied forces to several victories. Two of the Queen’s ministers charged Marlborough with corruption and profiting from the armies he led, and the Queen released her Captain-General on December 29, 1711, before the charges had been examined. When his successor, the Duke of Ormonde, left London for The Hague to take command, Thomas Burnet noted that he went with “the same allowances that had been lately voted criminal in the Duke of Marlborough.”

Thomas Burnet (1694-1753) was born in England and studied at Merton College, Oxford, and the University of Leyden. He entered the Middle Temple in 1709. In 1712 and 1713, he wrote several pamphlets in favor of the Whigs and against the Tory administration of the last years of Queen Anne’s reign. For one of these works, he was taken into custody in January 1713. He served as the king’s consul at Lisbon from 1719 to 1728. When he returned to England, he was called to the bar in 1729, and in 1741 was appointed one of the judges of the court of common pleas. He was knighted in 1745. He also wrote a two-volume biography of his father, Bishop Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715).

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Item #1036