"In consequence of these intrigues, the King agreed to send for Lord Wilmington, and to place him at the head of the ministry. It is remarkable that this man, who was a mere cipher, should have been again had recourse to, after his failure in making a government at the very commencement of the reign of George the Second, when his manifest incapacity, and the influence of Queen Caroline, had occasioned the remaining of his opponent Sir Robert Walpole in power. With Lord Wilmington came in Lord Harrington, as president of the council; Lord Gower, as privy seal; Lord Winchilsea, as first lord of the admiralty; Lord Carteret as secretary of state; the other secretary being the Duke of Newcastle, who had been so under Walpole; Lord Hardwicke continued chancellor; and Samuel Sandys was made chancellor of the exchequer. Several of the creatures of Pulteney obtained minor offices: but he himself, hampered by his abandonment of many of his former friends, took no place; but Only obtained a promise of an earldom, whenever he might wish for it.
"These arrangements produced, as was natural, a great schism in the different parties, which broke out at a meeting at the Fountain Tavern, on the 12th of February, where the Duke of Argyll declared himself in opposition to the new government, upon the ground of the unjust exclusion of the Tories. The Duke of Argyll subsequently relented, and kissed hands for the master-generalship of the ordnance, upon the understanding, that Sir John Hinde Cotton, a notorious Jacobite, was to have a place. This the King refused; upon which the Duke finally subsided into Opposition. Lord Stair had the ordnance, and Lord Cobham was made a field-marshal and commander of the forces in England. This latter event happened at the end of the session of 1742, when Lord Gower and Lord Bathurst, and one or two other Jacobites, were promoted. It was at this period (July, 1742), that the King, by the advice of Sir Robert Walpole, who saw that such a step would complete the degradation Of Pulteney, insisted upon his taking out the patent for his earldom and quitting the House of Commons; which he did with the greatest unwillingness.
"On the death of Lord Wilmington, in July 1743, Mr. Pelham was made first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer (from which office Sandys was dismissed), by the advice of Sir Robert Walpole, and instead of Lord Bath, who now found that his adversary had really turned the key upon him, (3) and that the door of the cabinet was never to be unlocked to him. The ministry was at this time, besides its natural feebleness, rent by internal dissensions; for Lord Carteret, who, as secretary of state, had accompanied the King abroad in 1743, had acquired great influence over his royal master,-and trusting to this, and to the superiority of his talents over his colleagues, his insolence to them became unbounded. The timid and time-serving Pelhams were quite ready to humble themselves before him; but Lord Carteret was not content with this: he was not content, unless he showed them, and made them feel, all the contempt he entertained for them. In addition to these difficulties, Lord Gower resigned the privy-seal in December 1743, upon the plea that no more Tories were taken into office; but probably more from perceiving that the administration could not go on. Lord Cobham also resigned, and went again into opposition.
"Finally, in November 1744, the greater part of the cabinet having previously made their arrangements with the Opposition) joined in a remonstrance to the King against Lord Carteret, and offered, if he was not dismissed, their own resignations. After some resistance, the King, again by the advice of Lord Orford, yielded. Lord Carteret and his adherents, and those of Lord Bath, were dismissed, and a mixed government of Whigs and Tories was formed. Mr. Pelham continued first minister; the Duke of Dorset was made president of the council; Lord Gower again took the privy-seal, which had been held for a few months by Lord Cholmondeley; the Duke of Bedford became first lord of' the admiralty; Lord Harrincton secretary of state; Lord Chesterfield, Lord Sandwich, George Grenville, Doddington, and Lyttelton, and Sir John Hinde Cotton, Sir John Philipps, and some other Tories, had places. But though the King had dismissed Lord Carteret (now become Earl of Granville) from his councils, he had not from his confidence. He treated his new ministers with coldness and incivility, and consulted Lord Granville secretly upon all important points.
"At length, in the midst of the Rebellion, in August 1746, the ministry went to the King, and gave him the option of taking Pitt into office, which he had previously refused, or receiving their resignations. After again endeavouring in vain to form an administration through the means of Lord Granville and Lord Bath, the King was obliged to consent to the demands of his ministers-and here may be said to commence the leaden rule of the Pelhams, which continued to influence the councils of this country, more or less, for so many years. Pitt took the inferior, but lucrative office of paymaster; and from this time no material change took place till the death of Mr. Pelham, in March 1754, unless we except the admission of Lord Granville to the cabinet in 1751, as president of the council; an office which he contrived, with an interested prudence very unlike his former conduct, to retain during all succeeding ministries-and the getting rid of the Duke of Bedford and Lord Sandwich, of whom the Pelhams had become jealous.
The death of Pelham called into evidence the latent divisions and hatreds of public Men, who had been hitherto acting in concert. Fox and Pitt were obviously the two persons, upon one of whom the power of Pelham must eventually fall. But the intriguing Duke of Newcastle hated, and was jealous of both. He, therefore, placed Sir Thomas Robinson in the House of Commons, as secretary of state and leader, and made Henry Bilson Legge chancellor of the exchequer, while he himself took the treasury-leaving Fox (4) and Pitt in the subordinate situations they had hitherto held. The incapacity of Sir Thomas Robinson became, however, soon so apparent, that a change was inevitable. This was hastened by a temporary coalition between Fox and Pitt, which was occasioned, naturally enough, by the ill-treatment they had both received from the Duke of Newcastle.
"At length the latter reluctantly consented to admit Fox into the cabinet, in 1755. Upon this, Pitt again broke with Fox, and went with his friends into opposition, with the exception of Sir George Lyttelton, who became chancellor of the exchequer. The new government, however, lasted but one session of parliament-its own dissensions, the talents of its opponents, and the dissatisfaction of the King, who had been thwarted in his German subsidiary treaties, aiding in its downfall.
"The Duke of Devonshire, who had been very active in the previous political negotiations, was now commissioned, in 1756, by the King to form a government. The Duke of Newcastle and Fox were turned out, and Pitt became lord of the ascendant. But the King's aversion to his new ministers was even greater than it had been to his old; and in February 1757, he commissioned Lord Waldegrave to endeavour to form a government, with the assistance of Newcastle and Fox. In this undertaking he failed, very mainly through the irresolutions and jealousies of Newcastle. Thus circumstanced, the King, however unwillingly, was obliged to deliver himself up into the hands of Pitt, Who (in June, 1757) succeeded in forming that administration, which was destined to be one of the most glorious ones England has ever seen. He placed himself at the head of it, holding the situation of secretary of state and leader of the House of Commons, leaving the Duke of Newcastle at the head of the treasury, and placing Legge again in the exchequer. This administration lasted till the reign of the succeeding sovereign."
To his edition of the Letters to Sir Horace Mann, Lord Dover appended illustrative notes, which are retained in the present. Of the manner in which his lordship executed the office of editor and annotator, the Edinburgh Review thus speaks, in a brilliant article on those Letters, which appeared in the number of that work for January 1834:-"The editing of these volumes was the last of the useful and modest services rendered to literature by a nobleman of amiable manners, of untarnished public and private character, and of cultivated mind. On this, as on other occasions, Lord Dover performed his part diligently, judiciously, and without the slightest ostentation. He had two merits, both of which are rarely found together in a commentator: he was content to be merely a commentator,-to keep in the background, and to leave the foreground to the author whom he had undertaken to illustrate. yet, though willing to be an attendant, he was by no means a slave; nor did he consider it as part of his editorial duty to see no faults in the writer to whom he faithfully and assiduously rendered the humblest literary offices."
It remains only to add, that the original notes of Horace Walpole are throughout retained, undistinguished by any signature; whereas, those of the various editors are indicated by a characteristic initial, which is explained in the progress of the work.