Versailles to Madrid can return; it is, therefore, the Queen's
positive command to your grace, that you avoid engaging in any siege
or hazarding a battle till you have further orders from her Majesty.
I am at the same time directed to let your grace know that the Queen
would have you disguise the receipt of this order; and that her
Majesty thinks you cannot want pretences for conducting yourself so
as to answer her ends without owning that which might at present
have an ill effect if publicly known." He added as a postscript:
"I had almost forgot to tell your grace that communication is given
of this order to the Court of France." The peace was right, but the
way of making it was mean in more ways than one, and the friction
between Harley and St. John steadily increased. St. John used his
majority in the House for the expulsion of his rival Walpole and
Walpole's imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of corruption. In
1712, when Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of Oxford,
St. John wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke, in
the elder branch of his family, had lately become extinct. His ill-
will to Harley was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank
of Viscount was conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of
Commons, where his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four,
as Viscount Bolingbroke and Baron St. John. His father's
congratulation on the peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism:
"Well, Harry, I said you would be hanged, but now I see you'll be
beheaded."

The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish
Succession, was signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713.
Queen Anne died on the 1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe
for the reaction that Bolingbroke had hoped to see. His Letter to
Windham frankly leaves us to understand that in Queen Anne's reign