“WINDSOR FOREST” AND “THE PAX ROMANA”

Given this revulsion to ancient slaughter, early eighteenth-century Britain must have been a gentle world of purling streams, feathered choristers, and the fleecy kind donating its outer garment to sturdy swains. Smiling carters would haul the woolly wealth to tidy urban centers where polite warehousemen, sailors, and other humble but brave and pacific free men loaded nature's bounty on to man's maritime art for the common good. Happy wife, strong husband, and well-fed children were as one in a benevolent, interdependent universe. Perhaps even the horses were rational. History did not sit for this portrait.

The main phase of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) included four major, and many other “minor,” set pieces: Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplacquet (1709). The total casualties were at least 131,000, with deaths, at a very rough guess, of at least 50,000, or enough to gladden the most furious Achilles. As Joseph Trapp said in his Peace. A Poem (1713), “roll'd in Heaps th' expiring Victors lay.” Though Achilles and Caesar were excoriated, John Churchill was ennobled. The explanation for this apparent paradigm of hypocrisy lay in the professions of peace that surrounded the wars of William and Anne, and was lacking from the wars of Greece or Rome. The British heroes and monarchs were blessed with a recognizable villain and clear and present danger. As every good British subject knew, the surrogate pope Louis XIV was a monster who must be opposed. Francis Brerewood puts the commonplace this way in 1716.