The King came over: but though the brothers were resolved to disagree with their associates in the Ministry, they could not resolve to remove them; none of the great offices were filled up but the Lieutenancy of Ireland, from which Lord Harrington[21] was removed in the most unworthy manner. He had raised himself from a younger brother’s fortune to the first posts in the Government, without either the talent of speaking in Parliament, or any interest there. He had steered through all the difficulties of the Court and changes of Ministry, with great dexterity, till, in the year 1746, notwithstanding all his personal obligations to the King, he was the first man who broke into his closet at the head of those insulting and disloyal resignations that were calculated and set on foot by the Pelhams, in the very heat of the rebellion, to force their master, by a general desertion of his servants, to abandon Lord Granville, whom he was recalling into the Ministry. The King had brooded over this ingratitude, not with much hope of revenging it, but as he sometimes resented such indignities enough to mention them, the Pelhams sacrificed Lord Harrington to their master, astonished at their complaisance, in order to bargain for other victims on his part, which they would have forced, not purchased, if there had been any price necessary but their own ingratitude. Lord Harrington was removed, and the Lieutenancy of Ireland again heaped on the Duke of Dorset, then President of the Council.
January 10.—The South Sea Company having consented to receive the hundred thousand pounds on the new treaty with Spain in lieu of all their demands, thought they had a title to some favour with the King, and accordingly came to a resolution to address him, to be pleased to continue their Governor, and to take into his consideration the state of the Company. To this message they received an answer in general terms. They addressed again for one more particular: they were told in very harsh phrase, that the King had obtained for them from the Crown of Spain all that was possible to be obtained.
This was the conclusion of the Spanish war; fomented (to overturn Sir Robert Walpole) by Lord Granville, who had neglected it for a French war; by Lord Sandwich, who made a peace that stipulated for no one of the conditions for which it was undertaken; by Pitt, who ridiculed and condemned his own orations for it, and who declared for a peace on any terms; and by the Duke of Newcastle, who betrayed all the claims of the merchants and the South Sea Company, when he had got power, to get more power by sacrificing them to the interests of Germany and the Electorate. As there never was a greater bloom of virtue and patriotism than at that period, if posterity should again see as fair a show, it will be taught to expect as little fruit.
17th.—The Parliament met. The King acquainted the Houses with the new treaties concluded with Spain for terminating our differences, and with Bavaria for securing the peace of the Empire (by the meditated election of the Archduke Joseph for King of the Romans, was understood). The Address was moved in the House of Lords by the Earl of Northumberland[22] and the Lord Archer; and in the Commons by Horace Walpole[23] (son of the late Earl of Orford) and Mr. Probyn. Lord Egmont opposed the Address, on the approbation it gave to the treaties, and the subsidies it promised to pay, and proposed leaving out many of the paragraphs. The House sat till near eight; the speakers against the Address were Mr. Henley, Mr. Bathurst, Sir John Cotton, Mr. Vyner, Mr. Martin, Mr. Doddington, Mr. Potter, and Dr. Lee; for it, Mr. W. Pitt, Mr. Pelham, Sir J. Barnard, General Oglethorpe, Horace Walpole senior, and Mr. Fox. Mr. William Pitt recanted his having seconded the famous question for the no search in the last Parliament; said it was a mad and foolish motion, and that he was since grown ten years older and wiser: made a great panegyric on the Duke of Newcastle’s German Negotiations of this summer, and said he was himself so far from wishing to lessen the House of Commons, that whatever little existence he had in this country, it was owing to the House of Commons. These recantations of his former conduct were almost all he had left to make. On his first promotion he had declared against secret committees, and offered profuse incense to the manes and friends of Sir Robert Walpole. He now exploded his own conduct in contributing to kindle the Spanish war, and hymned that Hanoverian adulation in the Duke of Newcastle, which he had so stigmatized in Lord Granville. Indeed, the Duke of Newcastle had no sooner conquered his apprehensions of crossing the sea, than he adopted all Lord Granville’s intrepidity in negotiation. The Address was carried by 203 to 74.
The morning the Parliament met, great numbers of treasonable papers were dispersed by the Penny Post, and by being dropped into the areas of houses, called “Constitutional Queries,”[24] levelled chiefly at the Duke, whom they compared to Richard III. As it was the great measure of the Prince’s Opposition to attack his brother, the Jacobites bore but half the suspicion of being authors of this libel.
On the 22nd the Duke of Marlborough[25] moved in the House of Lords to have the Queries burnt by the hangman, which was agreed to, and they communicated their resolution to the Commons at a conference in the Painted Chamber. Sir John Strange, Master of the Rolls, in a lamentable discussion, seconded by the Attorney-General, Rider, moved to concur with the Lords. Sir Francis Dashwood, after much disclaiming of Jacobitism, objected to the word false in the resolution, as he thought some of the charges in the Queries not ungrounded, particularly in the complaint against alarm-posts, and the dismission of old officers, an instance of which he quoted in the person of his uncle, the Earl of Westmoreland, who had been removed seventeen years before, and under the administration of Sir Robert Walpole. General Handasyde, a blundering commander on the Prince’s side, spoke strongly against the Queries; and Colonel Richard Lyttelton, with a greater command of absurdity, spoke to the same points as Sir Francis Dashwood; like him, disclaimed Jacobitism, and wished that “even a worse punishment than burning could be found out for the paper;” told a long story of Colonel George Townshend’s having been refused leave to stay in Norfolk, “though he was cultivating the Whig interest;” and an alarming history of the Duke’s having placed two Sentinels to guard the ruins of Haddock’s Bagnio and the Rummer Tavern at Charing-cross, which had been burnt down; and then ran into a detail of the abuse on the King about the Hanover troops in the year 1744, when his own relations and friends had been at the head of the Opposition.
Mr. Pelham answered in a very fine speech, and said, he had a new reason for condemning this paper, as he saw it already had had part of its intended effects, in catching honest minds. Lord Egmont made an extremely fine and artful speech, “That in general he disliked such methods of proceeding against libels, for two reasons; that he did not approve of Parliament taking the business of the law upon them, and because such notice only tended to spread the libel more; but that the present was of so evil a nature, that no censure could be too severe, especially as it was calculated to sow division between two brothers of the Blood Royal, where he was persuaded and hoped there was no such thing: that if there were any grounds for the accusations in the paper, he should choose a more proper day to inquire into them, and would; that as to the case of the Hanover troops,[26] he did not know why, as the same Ministry continued, that satire was left so unpunished, this so condemned; or why the author of this was so sought after, the authors of the other so promoted.” The resolution was agreed to, nemine contradicente, and an Address presented to the King, to desire him to take effectual means to discover the author, printers, and publishers of the Queries, which were burnt on the 22nd.