No more of Pitt's speeches are recorded during the session, which, with the enviable ease of those days, having opened on November 16, 1742, closed on April 21, 1743. In the interval before the ensuing session an event occurred, not in itself memorable, but notable for the contest that followed. In July 1743 occurred the long-expected death of Wilmington, the nominal head of the Government. In itself this departure would not have caused a ripple on the surface of politics, but it opened a critical succession. Pulteney, now Earl of Bath, at once laid claim to it; and his pretensions were warmly supported by Carteret, who was the minister in attendance on the King in Germany. Henry Pelham, supported by his brother Newcastle, also applied for the vacant post. As between these two groups it seemed certain that Bath, through Carteret, who was on the ground, would have the preference. Pelham, indeed, at the instance of Walpole, had, before the King left England, applied to his Majesty for the reversion of the moribund Minister's place, and had, if Coxe may be trusted, received a definite promise. It seems difficult to credit this, for George was a man of his word, yet the Pelham brothers were unfeignedly astonished when the reversion was given them; so that had Pelham indeed received such a pledge, he must have expected that the King would break it. Six weeks of dire suspense followed the death of Wilmington; an interval which was probably caused by the anxiety of the Sovereign to consult Walpole, while he intimated to Pelham that his decision would be conveyed to the Ministry by Carteret. This seemed a deathblow to the chances of Pelham, though the King's aversion to Bath was notorious. But a letter at length arrived from Carteret, in which he announced, with unaffected regret but with a generous promise of support, that the prize had fallen to Pelham. The brothers were elated, if such an expression can ever be applied to the timid and cautious Pelham. Newcastle was transported by the 'agreeable but most surprising news;' so much so, as to acknowledge that Carteret's letter was 'manly.'

Walpole, in writing his congratulations, looked warily to the future. 'Recruits,' he advised, should now be sought 'from the Cobham squadron.... Pitt is thought able and formidable, try him or show him.... Whig it with all opponents that will parley, but 'ware Tory.' Newcastle, on reading this letter to his brother, wrote back: 'I am afraid, one part of it, viz. the taking in of the Cobham party and the Whigs in opposition, without a mixture of Tories, is absolutely impracticable; and, therefore, the only question is whether, in order to get the Cobham party, etc., you will bring in three or four Tories, at least, with them, for, without that, they will not come, and this is what I have the greatest difficulty to bring myself to.' Orford's advice was not followed, and Pelham's appointments were few and narrow. Two of Lord Bath's followers, a friend of the Prince of Wales, and a friend of his own, the only surviving name of the four, Henry Fox, were gratified, and that was all. And even this limited arrangement was not completed before Parliament met.

The opening of the new session was anticipated with keen interest, as the Ministry was known to be rent with divisions, and hatred of the Hanoverians had immeasurably swollen in consequence of rumours of the favour that the King had shown to his electoral subjects. He had been surrounded by Hanoverian Guards to the exclusion of the English Guards; he had worn at Dettingen a yellow sash, which it appears was a Hanoverian symbol of authority; the Hanoverians had refused to obey the orders of Lord Stair, and so forth. We can easily imagine the buzz of angry legend and comment; for national antipathies have no difficulty in obtaining substantial affidavits in their support. Of this wild but not unreasonable intemperance Pitt, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the mouthpiece. In the debate on the Address he spoke with his accustomed violence. He called Carteret 'an execrable or sole minister, who had renounced the British nation, and seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fictions which made men forget their country.'[151] So far as this tirade concerned Carteret's authority, nothing could be more absurd or wide of the truth. He could indeed scarcely have chosen a more unfortunate epithet than 'sole.' So far from being a sole minister, Carteret, as we have seen, had just received a crushing defeat in the elevation of Henry Pelham to the first place in the Ministry, and the rejection of his own candidate; though he had strained all his influence in the cause.

Nor had this 'sole minister' any parliamentary following; his only strength lay with the King, where it had just been found signally inadequate. The supreme minister in the last resort, and behind the scenes, was, in truth, Walpole. It was his decision and his alone that had turned the scale against Carteret and Pulteney. Carteret was congenial to the King, for he worked with his Sovereign in matters of foreign policy; and, as we have seen, he could talk politics to the Sovereign in the King's own language. But, while the King tried to carry out his own views in Continental affairs, in domestic politics he looked to Walpole alone. Still, invective must necessarily have an object, and, by aiming at the King's confidential Foreign Minister, Pitt was able to wound the King as well. It is hinted by Yorke, the parliamentary chronicler, that Pitt's acrimony was dictated by jealousy of Carteret's influence with the Prince of Wales.[152] As to this there is no proof, and conjecture is idle. Carteret and Frederick had indeed been long connected, but this would scarcely impel one of the Prince's court to attack one of the Prince's friends. Moreover, were this the motive, Pitt's attacks would have been of a different and milder character, enough to damage Carteret, but not enough to embroil Pitt with the Prince, who was not merely his master, but the head of his political connection. It is clear that Pitt's sole object was to destroy Carteret as minister, not for the ignominious purpose of subverting him in a court camarilla, but to show his own power by demolishing the conspicuous man, the vizier of the King who proscribed himself. The mere fact that Carteret represented the King's Continental policy, and that Pitt had apparently determined, in the jargon of that day, to storm the Closet, seems sufficient reason for Pitt's bitterness. He denounced Carteret as he denounced Hanover, as darling accessories of a monarch whom he was determined to harass in every way until his attacks should produce compliance or surrender. But it was the fate of Pitt to have to recant his abuse of Carteret, as solemnly and as publicly as he recanted his abuse of Walpole. 'His abilities,' said Pitt in 1770 of Carteret, 'did honour to this House and to this nation. In the upper departments of Government he had not his equal. And I feel a pride in declaring that to his patronage, to his friendship, and instruction, I owe whatever I am.'[153] It was a generous, almost an extravagant statement. But it shows how little importance should be attached to the early philippics of Pitt, as of other aspiring and brilliant young men. Invectives are one of the least subtle and most piquant forms of advertisement, but they do not facilitate the task of biographers.

The Sovereign he attacked openly and unsparingly. It was proposed, in the Address to the Throne, to congratulate the King on his escape from the dangers of the battle of Dettingen. This Pitt deprecated. 'Suppose, Sir,' he asked, 'it should appear that His Majesty was exposed to few or no dangers abroad, but those to which he is daily liable at home, such as the overturning of his coach or the stumbling of his horse, would not the address proposed, instead of being a compliment, be an affront and insult to the Sovereign?' No affront or insult could at any rate be more stinging or more unfounded than his wanton insinuation. George II. had the courage of his race, and had displayed it at Dettingen. At first his runaway horse had almost carried him into the French lines, so he dismounted and fought on foot for the rest of the day; not leaving the field until he had created a number of knights banneret; the last British king to take the field, and the last bannerets to be so created.[154]

It was vile then to disparage the King's courage, but political life in those days had no scruple and little shame. The sneers at Hanover with which this speech was sprinkled were better founded and deserved. But a serious and reasonable argument, not yet obsolete, pervaded Pitt's violent rhetoric on this occasion. It was that though the balance of power concerned all states, it concerned our island state least and last of all. Moreover, he attacked our recent policy on other grounds. On our attitude to Austria, then fighting for its integrity under Maria Theresa, he heaped scorn from another point of view. We had promised her abundant assistance when she was fighting Prussia alone; when France intervened we shrank back and left her in the lurch. That, he declared, was not our only discredit. When Prussia attacked the Queen of Hungary, and Spain, Poland, and Bavaria laid claim to her father's succession, we should have known that the preservation of the whole was impossible, and advised her to yield the part claimed by Frederick. But the words from the Throne and the speeches of the courtiers had persuaded the Austrian Government that Great Britain was determined to support her. So great was the determination, that even Hanover added near one-third to her army at her own cost, the first extraordinary expense, it was believed, that Hanover had borne for her purposes since her fortunate conjunction with England! But then the French intervened. Hanover was in danger, and so we promptly retired. We gave some money, indeed, but that was because our ministers contrived to make a job of every parliamentary grant. The Queen, seeing that she was deserted, came to terms with Frederick, but much worse terms than he had originally offered. Then was the time for us to have insisted on her making peace with France and the phantom Emperor. But we had advised her against this, for no conceivable reason except apparently that we wished to go on paying the 16,000 Hanoverians whom we were employing. As regards the battle of Dettingen, he declared that we had no idea of fighting, but that the French had caught us in a trap. The ardour of our troops was restrained by the cowardice of the Hanoverians; we ran away in the night, leaving our dead and wounded behind us. Never would he consent to call the battle a victory, it was only a fortunate escape.

Were we to continue fighting? he asked. We ourselves had nothing to gain by it, though Hanover, no doubt, would continue to receive four or five hundred thousand pounds a year from us if we did. But we should consider, even the Hanoverians should consider, that we could not carry on a long war as in the reign of Queen Anne. We were not far from a national bankruptcy, and should soon have to disband our army. What, then, if the Pretender should land at the head of a French force?

This outline is given to show the singular but forcible mixture of shrewd argument, wayward extravagance, and bitter scoffs, which at this time constituted Pitt's parliamentary armament.

He followed this speech up by another on December 6, of which little remains; but his vehemence brought him into collision with the Speaker. He urged contemptuously that if we must have German troops we should rather hire those of Cologne and Saxony than those of Hanover. The King was surrounded by German officers, and by one English Minister without an English heart. The little finger of one man, he declared, had lain heavier upon the nation than an administration which had continued twenty years. Murray, however, the Solicitor-General, afterwards Lord Mansfield, delivered a consummate speech against the motion, which carried so much conviction that Pitt with some of the other Cobhamites struck out the words relating to the exhausted and impoverished state of the kingdom. But the amended motion was rejected by a majority of seventy-seven.

And now there occurred a significant fissure in the Opposition. Pitt and Lyttelton were inclined to support the maintenance of the British force in Flanders. But Cobham, the chief of the little party, was uncompromising: he resigned his commission 'as captain of the troop of horse grenadiers' and his seat in the Cabinet. A formula had to be framed to unite the two sections, and so George Grenville brought forward a motion praying his Majesty 'in consideration of the exhausted and impoverished state of the Kingdom not to proceed in this war without the concurrence of the Dutch.' Pitt concurred in this motion, and promised that if it were rejected he would join in opposing the continued employment of the British as well as the Hanoverian troops in Flanders.

This revision by a little group is not without significance; as the Opposition, we are told, at the beginning of the session, entrusted the direction of the party to a committee of six, consisting of Dodington, Pitt, Sir John Cotton, Sir Watkin Wynn, Waller, and Lyttelton. The putting of political leadership into commission has never been successful in Parliament, and the device seems finally to have broken down when it was last attempted, by the Protectionist party, after the fall of Peel. Nor does it appear to have been more happy on this occasion. Pitt and Lyttelton, who, in spite of their engagement, still desired to support the continued employment of the British troops in the Low Countries, at a general meeting of the Opposition found themselves alone, and so agreed to give a silent vote with their associates.

It is probable that this incident produced alienation as it certainly wrought friction between Pitt and Cobham. In the ensuing year we find Cobham describing Pitt as a young man of fine parts, but narrow, ignorant of the world, and dogmatical.[155] Two years afterwards Cobham went further, and described him as a wrong-headed fellow, whom he had had no regard for.[156] So we may well conjecture that from this time there was but little confidence between Pitt and the patron of the cousinhood; a great emancipation, though not wholly a gain for Pitt.

On the vote of 393,773l. to maintain the 16,000 Hanoverians during the coming year, there was no need for the restraint of silence, so Pitt railed with his customary bitterness against Carteret, who was the Hanover-troop minister, a flagitious taskmaster, with a party only composed of the 16,000 Hanoverians; and he ended his denunciation by wishing that Carteret were in the House, for then he would say ten times more. His speech was passionate and rhetorical, incomparably good of its kind. But the Government prevailed in the division by 271 to 226. This majority of forty-five was larger than had been anticipated, and was due to the incessant exertions of Walpole. He sustained the flagging spirits of the Ministry, who were on the point of abandoning the proposal. Newcastle, indeed, had blenched before the storm, and openly took part against the Hanoverians. But Walpole restored the fortune of the field. He stemmed the gathering retreat, put heart into the waverers, and used his personal credit with his old friends. Never in his own administration had he laboured any point with more zeal. 'The whole world,' writes his son Horace, 'nay, the Prince himself, allows that if Lord Orford had not come to town, the Hanover troops had been lost. They were, in effect, given up by all but Carteret.'[157]

So far as the House of Commons was concerned, this ended the hostilities against the Hanoverian troops, though the House of Lords continued the controversy with a debate in which Chesterfield, who outdid Pitt in violence, delivered a speech which was greatly admired. But a subsidy of 200,000l. had to be voted to the King of Sardinia under the treaty of Worms. This treaty, negotiated by the King and Carteret in Germany independently of the Home Government, was little relished by that Government, and offered a tempting target to the warriors of theJan. 1744. Opposition. On a first motion for papers, Pitt was again prominent, though little of his speech survives. Alluding, however, to a secret convention attached to the treaty, which Carteret had signed but which Ministers had refused to ratify, he declared, 'I only wanted the sight of a convention, tacked to the treaty which that audacious hand had signed, to furnish matter for immediate impeachment.' On the actual vote the Government had only a majority of 62. Subsequent unreported debates furnished Pitt with opportunities of denouncing the Pelham brethren as subservient tools of Carteret. But the Government waxed stronger in proportion to the heat of opposition. On a vote of censure they had a majority of 114. Through these discussions Pitt passes like a phantom, foremost by all consent in debate, but without leaving any footprint of speech behind.

From these broils Parliament was now distracted by startling intelligence. By message to the House on February 15 (1744) the King apprised his faithful lieges that a French fleet was prowling in the Channel, and that the young Stuart Prince, Charles Edward, had arrived in France to join it. One of our vessels had met this squadron of seventeen men-of-war and four frigates so long ago as January 27, 'half seas over' between Brest and the Land's End, prowling apparently northwards. There was something of a panic: men remembered how the Dutch in 1667 had sailed up the Thames, and apprehended a repetition of that disgrace. The Jacobites began to raise their head, but stocks did not fall. The King's message announced that the 'eldest son of the Pretender to his Crown is arrived in France; and that preparations are making there to invade this kingdom in concert with disaffected persons here.' A loyal address was at once prepared, to which the Opposition moved an addition, promising an inquiry into the state of the Navy. The amendment was, of course, supported by Pitt, and, of course, defeated. But Pitt, as stout an anti-Jacobite as his grandfather, promised his adhesion to the address whether the amendment voted or not; and a few days later, on the presentation of papers, he supported the Government so warmly as to receive the public thanks of Pelham. But for once the interest was not in the Commons but the Lords. Newcastle had laid the papers before the House, and with his usual blundering ineptitude had allowed the House to pass to private business. Then Orford rose, and broke his long silence. With dignity and emotion he confessed that he had vowed to refrain from speech in that House, but that abstinence now would be a crime. He had heard the King's message, and had observed with amazement that that House was to be so wanting in respect as to leave it unanswered. Was our language so barren as to be unable to find words to the King at such a crisis; 'a time of distraction and confusion, a time when the greatest power in Europe is setting up a Pretender to his throne?'

'I have indeed particular reason to express my astonishment and my uneasiness on this occasion; I feel my breast fired with the warmest gratitude to a gracious and royal master whom I have so long served; my heart overflows with zeal for his honour, and ardour for the lasting security of his illustrious house. But, my lords, the danger is common, and an invasion equally involves all our happiness, all our hopes, and all our fortunes.'

In these passionate words the wary and unemotional Orford allowed his apprehension to overflow. He saw the work of his life, the keeping out of the Stuarts, compromised and endangered by the unpopularity of the throne, and the blunders of jobbing mediocrity. He perceived the danger which he had so long warded off now instant and imminent. The House was deeply moved. Newcastle with obvious mortification acknowledged his lapse, and the Chancellor hurriedly drafted an address. Even the Prince of Wales, whose hatred of Walpole was perhaps the deepest feeling of which his shallow nature was capable, was so stirred, that he rose and shook hands with the veteran Minister. Nay, as we are told by a chronicler blissfully unconscious of bathos, 'he revoked the prohibition which prevented the family of Lord Orford from attending his levee.' It was a dramatic occasion, worthy of being the last public appearance of Orford. The hard-bitten old statesman who had been baited for near a quarter of a century, and had always given his opponents as good as he had got, disappeared from the stage with a burst of passionate patriotism.

The end is so near that we may follow him thither. This speech was on the last day of February, and he was soon afterwards seized with a painful and mortal complaint; but in July he could not resist returning to Houghton for a final visit. There he remained till November, beset by anxious solicitations both from the King and from the Ministry, for he was the guide and stay of both. At last, though tortured with the stone, he consented to return to London at the urgent solicitation of his sovereign, then engaged in a desperate struggle to retain Carteret as Secretary of State. Even Carteret, his old enemy, in the stress of self-preservation sought his aid. Orford set out on November 19, and in four slow days of an agony which wrung even the practised nerves of Ranby, the surgeon (and it is difficult even now to read Ranby's narrative without emotion), he reached London. The crisis then was over, for he had put an end to it on his journey. A message despatched by the Pelhams had met him on the road and placed him in possession of the facts of the situation. He had at once written to advise the King to part with Carteret, and the King had instantly submitted.

This was Walpole's last act of power, but he remained in London to die. For four months he lingered under the hands of the surgeons, sometimes under opium, sometimes suffering tortures with equanimity and good humour. But even so his shrewd and cynical common sense did not desert him. Consulted by the Duke of Cumberland as to a marriage projected for him by the King, but repugnant to the Duke, the dying statesman advised him to consent to the marriage on condition of an ample and immediate establishment. 'Believe me,' he added, 'the marriage will not be pressed.' Walpole's knowledge of mankind left him only with his death.

His constancy, his courage, his temper, his unfailing resource, his love of peace, his gifts of management and debate, his long reign of prosperity will always maintain Walpole in the highest rank of English statesmen. Distinguished even in death, he rests under the bare and rustic pavement of Houghton Church, in face of the palace that he had reared and cherished, without so much as an initial to mark his grave. This is the blank end of so much honour, adulation, power, and renown. For a century and a half unconscious hobnails and pattens have ground the nameless stones above him, while mediocrities in marble have thronged our public haunts. His monument, unvoted, unsubscribed, but supreme, was the void left by his death, the helpless bewilderment of King and Government, the unwilling homage and retractation offered by his foes, the twenty years of peace and plenty represented by his name.

And here another illustrious name cannot but suggest itself, though it may seem difficult to bring into anything like a parallel the two great Sir Roberts, Walpole and Peel. Both were distinguished by the same cautious and pacific sagacity. But they differed by the whole width of human nature in temperament. Walpole belonged to the school of the cold blood, and Peel to that of the warm. This, perhaps, constitutes the most important touchstone in the characters of statesmen, and success usually lies with the colder temperament. Of this principle, Fox, who was warm blooded, presents the most remarkable illustration, and Gladstone, who was not less so, the most signal exception. Peel's conscience, moreover, was as notably sensitive as Walpole's was notoriously the reverse. But though thus essentially apart, there is one capital point which the careers of Walpole and Pitt bear an almost exact resemblance to each other. Neither of them, strangely enough, reached his full height until his fall; neither acquired the full confidence of the country until he had lost that of Parliament; after having exercised almost paramount power as Ministers, neither ever reached his truest supremacy until he had left office for ever. Then, after a great catastrophe which had seemed to demolish them, it was perceived that they had soared above the mist into a higher air, clear of passion and interest; whence, though with scarce a following and without the remotest idea of a return to office, they spoke with an authority which they had never possessed when their word was law to an obedient majority in the Commons; an authority derived from experience and wisdom, without any lingering suspicion of self-interest. They lived in reserve, and only broke their self-imposed silence when the highest interests of the country seemed to forbid them to maintain it. Walpole, it is true, had to do his work mainly behind the scenes, while Peel did it conspicuously in Parliament; but the position was the same. If their eulogist had to choose the supreme period in the lives of both Walpole and Peel, he would select, not the epoch of their party triumphs, but the few exalted judicial years which elapsed between their final resignation and their death. It may seem a strain of language to use the word 'judicial,' for Walpole remained the oracle and stay of Whiggery, while Peel extended his consistent protection to the weak ministry of Lord John Russell. But Peel's protection of Russell was given in defiance of party to secure the Free Trade which he deemed vital, and Walpole's guidance of Whiggery was in disinterested support of men he disliked and despised because he deemed Whiggery, or at least opposition to Jacobitism, not less vital. Free Trade and Whiggery were, in the opinion of the two statesmen, essential to avert the revolutions which the opposite systems would have involved.

This seems a digression, but at this time Pitt and Walpole were not far apart; they secretly acknowledged each other's power and merit. Pitt had already begun to appreciate the solid sagacity of Walpole, and to repent of some random invective. Walpole saw the rhetorical boy developing into the man of the future, and was more and more anxious to enlist him. 'Sir Robert Walpole,' said Pitt in Parliament at a later period, 'thought well of me, and died at peace with me. He was a truly English minister.'[158]