did. To us now, viewing the poverty of his following and the useful

abilities of Fox, it would seem that he made a palpable mistake. Fox would have taken the second place; as a matter of fact he was content to subside into the gilded subordination of the Paymastership. His talents as a debater were second only to Pitt's with the possible exception of Charles Townshend's; but Townshend was only a shooting star, and did not, like Fox, represent the important influence of Cumberland. Fox would have fought stolidly for the side he espoused; he had a leaning to Pitt, and shared Pitt's detestation of Newcastle, who was the common enemy. But Pitt evidently had determined that he must sever himself entirely from Newcastle and Newcastle's Minister in the House of Commons. On both these rested the taint of corruption and national disaster. He must, if he was to keep the confidence of the country, cut himself clear from these personalities and their traditions. He could estimate the weight of odium which rested upon them, which we cannot. He had all the facts of the case before him, which we have not. He knew, what we do not know for certain but cannot doubt, that Leicester House made the exclusion of Fox or of Cumberland in any form a condition of cordial support. He realised the weakness of his own parliamentary position, he well understood the value of Fox's co-operation, but he also knew the temper of the nation, and so we cannot doubt that he came to the right decision.

In any case Fox was not to blame. He offered, and we think cordially offered, to co-operate with Pitt, and, indeed, serve under Pitt. Public spirit perhaps was not his main motive. He did not, he confessed, feel equal to the principal place. He had written in July: 'Though I see how fatally things are going, as I don't know how to mend them, I am not unreasonable enough to wish for what I could not conduct.'[359] And things were much worse now. Moreover, he saw, as others saw, that it was only the combination of himself with Pitt that could keep out Newcastle. But in public affairs the best and fairest course is not to analyse motives. He made the offer, he made it sincerely, and must have the credit of it.

But Pitt was inflexible. Those who had made him feel the weight of their proscription should feel the weight of his. Fox would have liked to be Paymaster. In that subordinate but opulent post he would have been content to give support. But Pitt would have none of him. He refused him this slight favour on the mysterious ground that it 'would be too like Mr. Pelham in 1742.'[360] He would not touch Fox or Newcastle.

The day after Fox's conversation with Pitt at the levee, the King sent for Devonshire, and bade him form a Ministry. This Duke was now Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Fox's closest friend. The King probably hoped in this way to bring about the union between Pitt and Fox, which almost every one desired, save Pitt himself. Pitt himself had nominated Devonshire, but without consulting him, in the interviews with Hardwicke. Devonshire had written to Fox in approval of the resignation as soon as he had heard of it. Five days afterwards he wrote again: 'If my friendship or assistance can be of any use you can command me,' and went on to say, 'Nothing has hurt Mr. Pitt so much as his having shown the world that in order to gratify his resentment and satisfy his ambition he did not value the confusion or distress that he might throw this country into. This I own has in some degree altered the good opinion I had of him.'[361] Devonshire therefore did not seem a propitious Prime Minister for Pitt. But dukes counted for much in those days. No one can read the history of those times without seeing the vast importance attributed to forgotten princes like Marlborough, Bedford, and Devonshire.

Fox soon quarrelled with Devonshire. He considered that Devonshire had abandoned him. The Duke had been his confidential friend, and had left him to help Pitt, and act as Pitt's figurehead. At first he affected to approve. But his wrath only smouldered. On one of the eternal questions of patronage it broke out. Fox wrote to him a note of real dignity and pathos. 'The Duke of Bedford has just now told me that Mr. John Pitt is to kiss hands to-morrow for Mr. Phillipson's place;' (promised, according to Fox, to his friend Hamilton). 'Consider, my Lord, everything that has pass'd, and do not drive me from you. I neither mean to do you harm, nor can do you harm if you think. But Your Grace's own reflections will not please you when you have done so.'[362] Devonshire was a weak man, but he was unconscious of blame and was deeply hurt. Political friendships, when paths diverge, are more difficult to maintain than men themselves realise at the moment of separation.

[Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1756.]

Devonshire was now sent to Pitt in the country,[363] but found that his terms were such as the King could not be brought to accept. He positively declined association with Fox in any shape, but deigned to apologise to the Duke for having nominated him without previous consultation. It was necessary, he said, to place some great lord there to whom the Whigs would look up, and his partiality had made him presume to suggest his Grace.[364]

Then the King, refusing Pitt's terms, and aware that he had been misinformed as to Fox's language about Bute, sent for Fox and offered him the government. 'I was never dishonest, rash, or mad enough for half an hour to think of undertaking it,' says Fox.[365] And again, 'I am not capable of it,' and goes on to give the reason. 'Richelieu, were he alive, could not guide the councils of a nation, if (which would be my case) he could not from November to April have above two hours in the four-and-twenty to think of anything but the House of Commons.'[366] If that were Fox's need in 1756, it is difficult to imagine the kind of physical and intellectual combination that he would have thought adequate to the stress of affairs in the twentieth century. But in spite of Fox's private opinion thus expressed, his friend Walpole records that he offered at the worst to take the Treasury and go to the Tower if it would save his Sovereign from having 'his head shaved.' 'Ah!' replied the King with his usual shrewdness, 'if you go to the Tower I shall not be long behind you.'[367]

Then the distracted monarch, at the instigation of Fox, tried the fatal expedient of an Assembly of Notables, and summoned all the leading nobles and commoners who were at hand to meet at Devonshire House.[368] But this meeting never took place, for Devonshire postponed or got rid of it. It was to have recommended that Devonshire should have the Treasury, Fox the Exchequer, and Legge be content with a peerage. Pitt himself was to have the seals, with _carte blanche_ for his other friends and dependents. Temple was to be First Lord of the Admiralty.[369]

Fox declares that Devonshire put an end to this plan by positively refusing the Treasury.[370] Holdernesse sent word to Newcastle that _les Renardins_ (the followers of Fox) were less sanguine.[371] And indeed, on November 4, the day after that fixed for the assembly, Devonshire went in to the King and came out from his audience having accepted the Treasury. Bubb says that he stipulated for Fox as Chancellor of the Exchequer.[372] This is at least doubtful. 'This question,' Fox afterwards wrote, 'I beg may be asked: whether at the time his Grace did take it with Legge I was not pressing him strongly to another thing, viz., to offer to take it with me. I pressed this even to ill-humour at his own house with Grenville at night. He refused absolutely, and the next morning what he would not take with me he took with Legge.'[373] This would seem conclusive, were it not that Bubb evidently had his information from Fox at the time; but politicians are prone to illusions on the subject of office. In any case, Devonshire left the Closet First Lord of the Treasury with Legge as Chancellor of the Exchequer; the man with whom two days before he had refused under any circumstances to serve,[374] and whom the King had absolutely refused to take. Fox and Bedford were in the anteroom as he came out, and were thunderstruck. Bedford broke into passionate expostulation; Fox scented an intrigue. However, the deed was done.[375]

Fox says that Devonshire offered him, and he refused, the Pay Office.[376] This is difficult to believe, and does not accord with his other statements that he had offered to serve in a subordinate capacity and been refused. Moreover, it was the office for which he always hankered, with its vast profits and safe obscurity, as compared with the Spartan frugality and dangerous prominence of the Secretaryship of State.[377]

As to the intrigue, Fox's instinct did not deceive him. The fact was that Horace Walpole, having heard of the scheme of the Notables, saw at once that it must put an end to the new arrangement, as it was one that Pitt could not accept. Walpole feared no doubt that, in case of failure, Newcastle, the object of his special detestation, might return to office. So he sent his cousin Conway to alarm the Duke of Devonshire, who consequently suppressed the meeting, and who went himself, as we have seen, to the King to accept office.[378] Horace might well pique himself on his powers of intrigue or duplicity, for a week before he had spontaneously written to Fox to say that he heard that the King and Lady Yarmouth were persuaded that Fox would not take the Treasury, but he hoped they were wrong.[379]

The new First Lord of the Treasury may have resisted having Legge as his Chancellor of the Exchequer, but was easily overborne. What is more difficult to understand is the King's nominating Legge, whom he detested. It was a rude shock for Fox, who had planned the meeting of Notables and framed the scheme it was to advise. Henceforth he controlled himself no more, and became the sleepless enemy of the new administration, which can be no matter of surprise. Pitt had made his total exclusion as absolute a condition as that of Newcastle, and Fox after his warm offers of co-operation and assistance could not but be bitterly mortified. He believed, perhaps justly, that the proscription laid on him proceeded from Leicester House.[380] Henceforth during the short life of the new government he plotted and planned against it, inspiring 'The Test,' a new paper under an old designation, with venomous articles, and ready to form alternative administrations at a moment's notice.[381]

One great difficulty, the King's repugnance to Legge, had been surmounted one does not know how; but there were still minor obstacles. The whole arrangement was odious to the Sovereign: he could not bear even to turn the first page of Devonshire's appointments. Pitt, who was to succeed Newcastle in the Southern department, wished to exchange this for the Northern. The King objected, for the Northern department included Hanover, and Pitt eventually yielded. The new Secretary, as we have seen, wished for Sir Thomas Robinson, his old butt, as a colleague, on the singular ground that he knew nothing of the office he was undertaking, and required Sir Thomas's guidance.[382] Pitt had compared Robinson to a jack-boot; but personal opinions vary according to points of view; Sir Thomas might be contemptible as a leader, but useful as a dry-nurse. Holdernesse however remained. Then over every petty office, coffererships, masterships of the Wardrobe, keeperships of the jewels, treasurerships of the Household, there was snarling and struggling as of dogs over bones. Bedford was secured as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, mainly, it would appear, through the agency of Fox, who wished to secure as many ministerial posts as possible for his friends, and who was in hopes that the Duke would traverse Pitt. Bedford cared little for office; perhaps not much for Fox. His political passions were inspired by his personal hatreds, of Newcastle now, as later of Pitt.[383] But Fox, aided by the Duchess's ambition, prevailed. Amid these changes one provokes a smile; Bubb was as usual dismissed.

But the greatest and most grotesque disability lay with Pitt himself. After all his struggles to be in the position of forming a Ministry, he had no Ministry to produce. He could not fill a fraction of the offices. His personal followers, all told, hardly exceeded a dozen. When he had provided for the Grenvilles, Potter, and Legge, he had scarcely any one to name. So this Ministry was doomed from the beginning. Pamphleteers could not fail to observe Pitt's predicament. One lampoon, in the form of a royal degree, 'Given at our imperial seat at Hayes,' and countersigned 'John Thistle,' (a premature allusion to Bute), sets forth: 'We will that you give lucrative employments to all Our Brethren, uncles, cousins, relations and namesakes.'[384] Outside this category Pitt's subordinates were mostly the friends of Newcastle or Fox, and so his secret enemies, or waiters upon Providence who were not sufficiently sure of his stability to call themselves his friends. Holdernesse, Pitt's colleague in the Secretaryship of State, and Barrington, Secretary for War, kept Newcastle fully informed of all that went on in the administration and of all that they knew. Holdernesse also sent abstracts of the despatches that came from abroad.[385] So that Pitt was betrayed from the first. Ministries formed by one man seldom last long under another. But Ministries which pass between two declared enemies have not from the beginning any chance of life. This one was stillborn.

Pitt himself lay ill with the gout at Hayes; so he had to leave his affairs to be managed by a little clique in London, of which Temple of course was the chief, and which was in close communion with Leicester House. For every day Leicester House waxed and Kensington Palace waned in importance, as the King advanced in years. Nothing in the history of those days is more difficult to trace and yet nothing is more significant than this invisible Court of the Heir-Apparent, which was felt rather than seen, but towards which courtiers kept one anxious eye during their dutiful attendance on the King. All felt that the centre of power was shifting thither, and the uneasiness of those who wished to be well with both Courts was manifest and irrepressible. The constant anxiety of Fox to be Paymaster was largely due to his desire to be sheltered from the hatred of the young Court in the reign that seemed imminent. All this could not but increase the jealousy and irritability of the old Sovereign, at a time when he was undergoing a new Ministry most repulsive to him. Distasteful as it was in almost every respect, what was perhaps most abhorrent was the consciousness that it was imposed upon him by his daughter-in-law and her favourite, that it rested on their support, and was indeed the Ministry of George III. rather than of George II.

Bute was the object of the King's chief detestation, a righteous aversion if his suspicions were well founded; and Bute was now undisguisedly prominent in the negotiations for the new Government. The King treated Temple and his friends so ill at the levee, that the injured nobleman went to Devonshire to say that he feared he could not proceed a step further in the negotiations. On this mission he was accompanied by Bute, for the purpose, apparently, of making the world realise that Leicester House and all its influence were behind Pitt. And Bute availed himself of this opportunity to make use of 'expressions so transcendently obliging to us,' writes Temple, 'and so decisive of the determined purposes of Leicester House towards us in the present or any future day, that your lively imagination cannot suggest to you a wish beyond them.' By Temple, too, he sent word to Pitt that he could not advise, that he left all to Pitt, determined to support and approve whatever Pitt decided.[386] This was the one element of strength to the new Government, besides Pitt himself. And yet, so elusive was this mysterious Court, that in September the town had been ringing with the coolness of Pitt's reception at Leicester House, more especially by Bute.[387] The fact is that there had evidently been a coldness, but that the fall of Newcastle had brought the two together again.[388]

[Sidenote: Dec. 4, 1756.]

After Devonshire had kissed hands on November 4 there were however few difficulties. Temple's cold reception at Court, on the very day of Newcastle's resignation, which had made him declare with his usual arrogance to Devonshire that all was over, was only a passing incident, due to the fact that the King could not abide the very sight of Temple. Pitt no doubt counselled moderation from Hayes, not desiring to lose the fruit of so many years for a slight to his relative. And so, a week after Temple's fiery declaration to Devonshire, the new Board of Admiralty was gazetted with Temple at its head. Three days before, the Board of Treasury had been declared with Devonshire and Legge as its chiefs. One Grenville was included in this. For George Grenville and Potter treasurerships and paymasterships were found. There were indeed but few traces of Pitt's small connection in the Government. He, still an invalid, received his seals a little later. He had also to change his seat. He could not condescend to be re-elected for Newcastle's borough of Aldborough; indeed, he had held it too long. Nor indeed would Newcastle nominate him.[389] So now he accepted an olive branch from Lyttelton, who shared the control of Okehampton with the Duke of Bedford, and generously named his old friend and recent foe.[390] It may have been that Pitt was desirous of cutting the last link with Newcastle before entering upon office, and had deferred receiving the seals till he was independent. Be that as it may, he was only to hold them four months. During most of that time he was ill, during all of it he was surrounded by conspiracies, and he was soon intrigued out of office, though he never actually vacated it. But his short term had taught him one priceless lesson; that genius and public spirit were not enough, that a practical and even sordid leaven was required, and that if he would not do the necessary work of political adjustment himself, he must find somebody to do it for him, or give up all idea of being a powerful Minister.

It has been thought well to narrate at length the circumstances of the final breakdown of the King's veto on Pitt's accession to office and the struggle which preceded it; partly because some of the documents are new, partly because it is a curious picture of character and intrigue, partly because it is the fifth and culminating act of this long drama.