powerful statesman who ruled England without the formal and
acknowledged help of party. Since then the "party in power" has
always, through its chief member, the Prime Minister, and his Cabinet,
been the actual ruler in the State.

At the beginning of Anne's reign the Whigs were leading in matters of
state, but presently Rochester and Nottingham, the former a very
strong Tory, came into power. Later on, in 1703, the former was
replaced by a more moderate Tory, Harley, and in the following year
St. John succeeded Nottingham. The truth was, Marlborough, beginning
to see that he was more likely to receive support in his great wars
from the Whig side, was working gradually towards the placing of their
party in office, though he himself had all along been a Tory. Thus it
was that he tried to rule with a coalition, or a mixture of Whigs and
Tories. This was in the year 1705, a little after the time to which
this story has as yet been carried. But Marlborough and his Duchess
were still the real power in the land.

We may rejoin George Fairburn, some three weeks after the day when he
had been picked up by the Dutch transport. With others he had been
landed in the Tagus, and at once drafted into one of the regiments
under the Earl of Galway, a Frenchman by birth, but now, having been
driven out of France by the persecutions he and the rest of the
Protestants had had to endure, a general in the English army. George
learned that Portugal had joined the Grand Alliance, in consequence of
the Methuen Treaty between her and England, by which Portuguese wines
were to be admitted into English ports at a lower customs duty than
those of other countries. This step on the part of Portugal had
greatly enraged the French King, and he had poured his troops into
Spain. The Allies, therefore, were preparing to attack Spain from the
eastern and the western sides of the Peninsula at the same time. So
George and his comrades began their march eastward, while the gallant
admiral Sir George Rooke was attacking Barcelona on the opposite
coast.

It was a new life for the English lad, and the heavy marches in a hot
climate tried him. But he was growing into a stout youth, and was not
afraid of a bit of hard work.

"Besides," he would say to himself, when disposed to grumble, "am I
not a soldier? And isn't that what I've always wanted to be? And I
might have been chained up in a French prison still! A thousand times
better be here, even in this s