allies a loss of double that number. Horror at
such a "deluge of blood" increased the general distaste for the war; and
the rejection of fresh French offers in 1710, a rejection unjustly
attributed to Marlborough's desire for the lengthening out of a contest
which brought him profit and power, fired at last the smouldering
discontent into flame. A storm of popular passion burst suddenly on the
Whigs. Its occasion was a dull and silly sermon in which a High Church
divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non-resistance at
St. Paul's. His boldness challenged prosecution; but in spite of the
warning of Marlborough and of Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his
impeachment before the Lords, and the trial at once widened into a great
party struggle. An outburst of popular enthusiasm in Sacheverell's
favour showed what a storm of hatred had gathered against the Whigs and
the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen stood by his side at the
bar, crowds escorted him to the court and back again, while the streets
rang with cries of "The Church and Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of
the peers found the preacher guilty, but the light sentence they
inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and bonfires and illuminations
over the whole country welcomed it as a Tory triumph.

[Sidenote: Dismissal of the Whigs.]

The turn of popular feeling at once roused to new life the party whom
the Whigs had striven to crush. The expulsion of Harley and St. John
from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more subtle and
vigorous stamp than the High Churchmen who had quitted office in the
first years of the war; and St. John brought into play a new engine of
political attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the
_Examiner_, and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed
in its train, the humour of the poet Prior, the bitter irony of Swift,
an Irish writer who was now forcing his way into fame, as well as St.
John's own brilliant sophistry, spent themselves on the abuse of the war
and of its general. "Six millions of supplies and almost fifty millions
of debt!" Swift wrote bitterly; "the High Allies have been the ruin of
us!" Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, even his courage was called
in question; he was charged with insolence, with cruelty and ambition,
with corruption and greed. The virulence of the abuse would have
defeated its aim had not the general sense of the people condemned the
maintena