FOOTNOTES:
[110] Philip Yorke. He had married the granddaughter and heiress of the Duke of Kent.
[111] Eldest son of the Lord Barnard, was made Vice-Treasurer of Ireland by Lord Bath, on the change of the Ministry, in 1742, from which place he was removed on the coalition, but not long after placed in the Treasury; and was afterwards created Earl of Darlington. He died March 6th, 1758.
[112] William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, had been persuaded by Sir Robert Walpole to apply himself to politics, in which, soon making a figure, he was appointed Secretary at War, when the Whigs came into power in the late King’s reign; but towards the end of it he went into Opposition, at the head of which he continued till the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. That Minister persuaded the King, when he took leave of him, to comply with none of Mr. Pulteney’s demands, unless he would quit the House of Commons and accept a Peerage, which he imprudently promising to do, though not without great reluctance, before the patent was passed, and raising his creatures,—Sandys, Sir John Rushout, Gybbon, Harry Vane, and Harry Furnese,—who were men of the meanest capacities, to the chief places, in preference to all the rest of the Opposition who had acted with him, they refused to follow him in his politics, and persecuted him in Parliament, and with innumerable libels and satires. On the death of Lord Wilmington, he asked for the Treasury, to which Mr. Pelham was preferred, but to which he was named in the Ministry of three days. From that time he made no figure; he was immensely rich, from great parsimony and great successions, and had endeavoured to add another to them: the Duchess of Buckingham, natural daughter to King James II., designing to take a journey to Rome, to promote some Jacobite measures, and apprehending the consequence, made over her estate to Lord Bath, by a deed which he afterwards sunk, and pretended to have lost. On this, the Duchess, after forcing a release from him, struck him out of her will as one of her Executors; and many years afterwards, on marrying her grandson to Lord Hervey’s daughter, she appointed Sir Robert Walpole one of her Executors. This happening soon after that Minister’s fall, he said to Lord Oxford in the House of Lords, “So, my Lord, I find I have got my Lord Bath’s place before he has got mine.”
[113] After the revolution of three days, Lord Bath was going to print a Diary which he had kept, in order to show all the falsehoods, treacheries, and breaches of promise of the Duke of Newcastle and Mr. Pelham, he having minuted down their conversations with him on the fall of Sir Robert Walpole.
[114] William, Lord Talbot, was eldest son of Charles Talbot, Lord Chancellor.
[115] Sir Dudley Ryder.
[116] He resigned the beneficial place of Treasurer of the Navy just after Sir Robert Walpole’s removal, because the Opposition said that his attachment to the Court arose from interest; yet that Minister always thought the Speaker not enough attached to him, and treated him very roughly, especially on his first visit after his disgrace. However, when the votes for the two last members of the secret committee were equal on the ballot for two of Sir Robert’s friends and two of his enemies, the Speaker decided in favour of the former.
[117] As was the case in 1746, when the King refused to make W. Pitt Secretary at War, and the whole Ministry resigned upon it.
[118] The different ways of reckoning the Council, as to be composed of nine, ten, or fourteen persons, arose from including, or not including the Duke, or the four to be named by the King’s will.—Vide the Act.
[119] Richard Grenville, Lord Cobham, and since Earl Temple.
[120] Grenville, a Lord of the Treasury.
[121] Grenville, Deputy Paymaster, and one of the Lords of Trade.
[122] It is remarkable that, in the next reign, Martin became a distinguished tool of the Princess’s minion, Lord Bute.
[123] Brother to Sir Robert Walpole, had been secretary to Earl Stanhope in Spain, was afterwards made Secretary to the Treasury, and Auditor of the Plantations, and was several times Ambassador in Holland and France, then made Cofferer of the Household, and lastly one of the Tellers of the Exchequer, and was created a Baron in 1756, and died February 5, 1757, aged 79.
[124] He paid the greatest court immediately to Lord Wilmington, and the instant the secret committee was voted, he set out for his house in the country, to burn, as he said in the House of Commons, dangerous papers; after which he professed himself very easy for what might happen.
[125] This was so much his foible that, when W. Pitt wanted to reconcile himself to the Whigs, he used to flatter H. Walpole in his speeches in the grossest manner; and when he was ambitious of being Secretary of State, he proposed H. Walpole for it as the only proper person, knowing that would be impossible to be effected, and hoping it would then come by rebound to himself.
[126] The decency of this censure from Lord Limerick may be gathered from the long time he had been in Opposition himself, and from his being the person who made the famous motion for removing Sir Robert Walpole, as the supposed author of all the calamities of the present reign.
[127] Eldest son of the Earl of Oxford.
[128] A second instance of the same kind of complaisance from the Bishops appeared in May, 1753. Lord Bath had brought in a Bill to prevent clandestine marriages, which being very exceptionable, a new one was ordered to be brought in by the Judges, and was accordingly drawn up and warmly patronized by the Chancellor, and as warmly, though ineffectually, opposed by the Duke of Bedford; the whole Episcopal Bench consenting to the Act, though there were several clauses which enjoined dissolution of marriage for temporal reasons. In the House of Commons it was opposed by Fox and Nugent; on the other hand, the Attorney-General, who had been bred a Presbyterian, supported it, and applauded the conduct of the Bishops, who, he said, had at last reduced Christianity to common sense. This sentence occasioning great astonishment, he softened it by adding, that he only meant that the Bishops had at last consented to remove a superstructure, raised on the foundation of the Gospel, which Christ and the Apostles had never projected, it being only intended by the New Testament that marriages contracted under the laws of the country should be indissoluble; and that it was nowhere said that even the intervention of a priest was essential to the validity of matrimony.
[129] Dr. Conyers Middleton, author of the Life of Cicero, of the Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, of an Examination of the Bishop of London’s Letters on the Use and Intent of Prophecy, and of several other celebrated works. Much was written against him—nothing well; yet the University of Oxford bestowed the degree of Doctor on two of his opponents. He died July 28, 1750; and it was obvious how much personal prejudice had influenced his antagonists, for after his death some tracts, which he had held too offensive for publication, and much stronger against Christianity than any of those he had published, were printed—and nobody wrote against them!
[130] Dr. Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury. He died March 13, 1757.
[131] He died, after an illness of two hours, at his palace in Chelsea, April 17, 1761. What is here said of his being superannuated relates to the infirmities of his body, not of his mind, he retaining his senses perfectly to the last.
[132] Dr. Butler, author of the Divine Analogy, &c. He died in June, 1752.
[133] William Murray, brother to Lord Stormont, and to the titular Earl of Dunbar, the Pretender’s first Minister. Pope’s Imitation of Nil Admirari is addressed to him. He was made Solicitor-General soon after Sir Robert Walpole’s resignation.