It was in vain that George II. still strove against the minister, who imposed the national will on him as the favor of heaven. In vain, making use of the royal prerogative against him, did he force him to yield up the seals of office from the beginning of April, and involve in his disgrace Lord Temple, his brother-in-law. In vain did he seek to form a new cabinet, with the insatiable thirst of the Duke of Newcastle for the nominal side of power, and the desire which Fox felt to actually govern. Parliament as well as the people demanded the powerful hand which could guide them through the bursting storm. On the 29th of June, 1757, Pitt was named secretary of state, and rallied around him some illustrious names, but he was the sole efficient master of the government, and was resolved to bear alone the whole burden of it. The most sagacious observers interchanged gloomy forebodings. "England has no longer any course but to cut her cables and set sail towards an unknown ocean," wrote Horace Walpole. "It matters little who may be in power," said Lord Chesterfield; "we are lost at home and abroad--at home by our debts and our growing expenses; abroad by our incapacity and bad luck. ... We are no longer even a nation."
It is sometimes the good fortune and glory of great men, under the hand of God, to baffle the doleful prognostications of their contemporaries. As a constitutional minister, the first William Pitt should occupy a lower position than the noble career of his son. He was overbearing, whimsical, personal, and theatrical. Abroad he could push national pride as far as the most impolitic insolence. He sacrificed his country's interests for the sake of humiliating her enemies. He made England feared, but he isolated her in Europe and in the world by a proud and obdurate policy, for which he was to pay cruelly later. At home he was unbalanced and violent, carried away by opposing and always extreme passions, without limit and without foresight. The greatness of his mind, ability, and character, however, overcame all his defects. He governed his country through a long and difficult war in stormy times which demanded painful sacrifices, making constant appeals to the most noble passions of the human soul by the prestige of eloquence, rectitude, patriotism, and glory. It is his honor to have re-established the fortune of England in the war; it is no less a service to have lifted hearts to the level of fortune in order to sustain a great cause.