The swing of the pendulum of historical opinion about Peterborough is in less violent oscillation than formerly, and is tending to become stationary at a middle point. The original belief that he both took Barcelona in 1705 and relieved it in 1706, and much else besides, based on Freind's and Carleton's contemporary eulogies, still held the field when Macaulay wrote his essay on the War of Succession in Spain, in the intervals of speech-making at his Leeds election of 1832. The reaction culminated in the refusal to believe that Carleton's memoirs were written by Carleton at all, or that Peterborough either took or relieved Barcelona; these later views found their extreme expression in Colonel Parnell's War of the Succession in Spain (1888), a work both learned and able, but very far from judicial.