The success of this measure
broke Harley's plans by creating a bitterer division between Tory and
Whig than ever, while it humiliated him by the failure of his opposition
to it. But its effects went far beyond Bolingbroke's intentions. The
Whigs regarded the Bill as the first step in a Jacobite restoration, and
warned the Electress Sophia that she must look for a struggle against
her accession to the throne. Sophia was herself alarmed, and the more so
that Anne's health was visibly breaking. In April 1714 therefore the
Hanoverian ambassador demanded for the son of the Elector, the future
George the Second, who had been created Duke of Cambridge, a writ of
summons as peer to the coming Parliament. The aim of the demand was
simply that a Hanoverian prince might be present on the spot to maintain
the right of his House in case of the Queen's death. But to Anne it
seemed to furnish at once a head to the Whig opposition which would
render a Tory government impossible; and her anger, fanned by
Bolingbroke, broke out in a letter to the aged Electress which warned
her that "such conduct may imperil the succession itself."

[Sidenote: Death of Anne.]

To Sophia the letter was a sentence of death; two days after she read
it, as she was walking in the garden at Herrenhausen, she fell in a
dying swoon to the ground. The correspondence was at once published, and
necessarily quickened the alarm not only of the Whigs, but of the more
moderate section of the Tories themselves. But Bolingbroke used the
breach which now declared itself between himself and his rival with
unscrupulous skill. Though Anne had shown her confidence in Harley by
conferring on him the earldom of Oxford, her resentment at the conduct
of the Hanoverian Court was so skilfully played upon that she was
brought in July to dismiss the Earl, as a partisan of the House of
Hanover, and to construct a strong and united Tory Ministry which would
back the Queen in her resistance to the Elector's demand. As the crisis
grew nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of
1714 the Whigs had made ready for a rising on the Queen's death; and
invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his
name would rally the army to their cause. Bolingbroke, on the other
hand, made the Duke of Ormond, whose sympathies were known to be in
favour of the Pretender's succession, Warden of the Cinque Ports, the
district in which either claimant of the crown mus