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perfections, though his neck should be as long, his body as slender, yet his voice may not be as sonorous, his action may not be as just."

The Craftsman, duly defending Pitt, pointed out how much Athens would have lost if Demosthenes had been discouraged in his youth by similar strict

ures.

The quarrel between King and Prince was at its height in the summer of 1737, as in this year the Prince removed the Princess from Hampton Court immediately before her confinement, an act intended as an insult to his father. Expelled from Court, the Prince of Wales set up a separate household, and appointed Pitt and Lyttleton his groom of the bedchamber and private secretary. The intimacy between Pitt and the Prince at this time is illustrated by a story told by Charles Butler in his Reminis

cences.

"The Prince of Wales and Mr. Pitt were walking in the gardens of Stowe apart from the general company, who followed them at some distance. They were engaged in earnest conversation, when Lord Cobham expressed his apprehension to one of his guests that Mr. Pitt would draw the Prince into some measures of which his Lordship disapproved. The gentleman observed that the tête-à-tête could not be of long duration. 'Sir,' said Lord Cobham, with eagerness, 'you don't know Mr. Pitt's talent of insinuation; in a very short quarter of an hour he can persuade any man of anything.'"

The year did not end before a serious blow had fallen on Walpole by the death of the Queen.

No

more remarkable woman appeared in royal circles throughout the eighteenth century. She had devoted herself to the King, enduring slights to her pride and agonies of body rather than miss one opportunity of influence; a wise counsellor, an astute diplomatist, she was full of intelligence, and, recognising Walpole's worth, had been unbrokenly loyal to her alliance with him. Thus the Minister was deprived of his truest friend at the moment when a crisis in foreign affairs was impending.

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CHAPTER II.

WALPOLE, CARTERET, AND PELHAM.

1738-1754.

DETAILED examination of Pitt's early ca

reer in Parliament would be of little value.

It presented those features of extravagance and inconsistency which are rarely absent from the records of those who are compelled to force their own passage to the front. The main interest of these years, spent in winning the force and prestige essential for the attainment of power, is in the attitude Pitt adopted towards Walpole, Carteret, and Pelham and their differing policies. In considering that attitude we shall find, in the midst of declamation and invective, hints and foreshadowings of the national policy in which Pitt believed from first to last, which he himself in later years carried to a triumphant issue.

The first great question that came before Parliament in Pitt's time was the rivalry between England and Spain for the commerce of the New World. It was this which brought to an issue the long disputes on Walpole's foreign policy, and finally

accomplished the great Peace Minister's fall. The keynote of his policy had been friendship with France, and this had been practicable so long as France and Spain were divided. In 1733, however, the natural union between the two Bourbon Crowns had been renewed by a Family Compact; this treaty of the Escurial was the true origin of the war of the Polish succession, which had been in effect a Bourbon invasion of Italy, and Walpole had only avoided intervention in that war by the greatest exertions. When, in 1738, the commercial rivalry between England and Spain became acute, Walpole, seeing in the background the great family alliance against British interests, desired to avoid war. Here, how. ever, he was dealing with a matter on which the English people could not be restrained. They saw "their trade restricted and their Empire threatened, and if they had known, as Walpole knew, the terms of the Family Compact, they would have been only the more eager for war. France had agreed to assist Spain with all her force by land or sea, if Spain should suspend England's enjoyment of commerce and her other advantages. The privileges which England enjoyed under the Treaty of Utrecht were the monopoly of the slave-trade between Africa. and Spanish-America, and the right to send one merchant ship to the annual fair of the Spanish settlements. The one legal ship was accompanied by many others, and a large smuggling-trade was carried on. Spain retaliated by a violent use of her right of free search, and many stories of cruelty and torture practised on English sailors were brought

home. The Opposition eagerly adopted these stories, and encouraged the demand for war. Walpole at first minimised the English grievances, and then tried to frighten Spain into submission, but in the end he was compelled to declare war.

Pitt had been among the most vehement of the Opposition, and his speeches won him fame. The Family Compact, which was renewed in 1743 and 1761, had reaffirmed those Spanish ambitions in the New World against which England fought in this war. This agreement is of the greatest importance in the understanding of Pitt's career. It was the fulfilment of those prospective dangers against which William III. and Marlborough fought. Walpole fell because he either regarded it too little or dreaded it too much, but from Pitt's mind it was. never absent. It appears in his first important speech and in the last sentence he spoke in Parliament. He attempted to nullify it when he first obtained power by making large offers to Spain; he disarmed it of its terrors by crushing France, and resigned because at the moment of its renewal, in 1761, he was not allowed to crush Spain also. His instinctive perception of the fact that extensive empire for England could only be won by defeat of the Bourbons made him the greatest of War Ministers, and his conviction that the Bourbons would seek and obtain their revenge, when the Empire was hazarded by civil war, made him the true adviser of his country in that hour of perilous unwisdom. Those who demanded war in 1739 have often been denounced, and it cannot be pretended that

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