Sandwich, finding himself proscribed by Pitt, made advantage of the moment, and exerting all his invention and industry, of which no man possessed a larger receipt, he set himself to persuade men of all denominations that they had been marked in black letters in the dictator’s catalogue of pains and penalties. He even drew every man’s character to himself, and selecting their faults or deficiencies, ascribed to Mr. Pitt both the recapitulation and imaginary sentence that followed it. Grenville and Lord Halifax caught the righteous flame, and diffused it: Grenville even assembling the Commissioners of the several boards, and assuring them, one and all, that they had been condemned by Mr. Pitt to be cashiered. To Woburn, where the Duke of Bedford was at this anxious moment detained by his royal visitor, the Duke of Cumberland, Lord Sandwich wrote inflammatory letters, telling Bedford that he was proscribed, and his peace to be attacked. The warm little Duke caught fire; but Rigby, to whom Sandwich had made the same report, doubted, and came to town, where he was either duped into, or persuaded to join in the imposition.
Grenville was pressed by the King to remain minister, and did not want to be pressed. The Duke of Bedford, in the hot fit of zeal and resentment, accepted the post of President; and Shelburne, who had shuffled round the compass with so ill success, and lost the favour of Lord Bute, choosing now to adhere to Pitt, and resigning the seals, they were bestowed on the only man who could replace, or excel him, Lord Sandwich. It was fortunate for Grenville and union, that the faction did not wish to place the Duke of Bedford at the head of the Treasury,--but they could not trust his warmth and absurdities. In Ireland he had disgusted everybody, and had gone so far as to tell the Irish themselves that theirs was no Parliament. The Court had wished to have Charles Townshend Secretary of State with Lord Halifax; but he too, for that time, stuck to Mr. Pitt, and refused.
Thus, from a strange concurrence of jarring causes, there sprung up out of great weakness a strong and cemented ministry, who all acquiesced in the predominant power of Grenville. The Favourite hated, had tried to shake him off, and he knew it. How much must his brother Temple have been detested at Court, when, under all these humiliating aspects, it was thought preferable to retain Grenville!