Hardly had he thus been ennobled when we find him signalising his new rank by a filthy trick more suited to a barge than a court. At a reception in his own house, presided over by his charming and accomplished wife, Lord Cobham, as he was now styled, spat into the hat which Lord Hervey held in his hand. This feat Cobham had betted a guinea that he would accomplish. Hervey behaved with temper and coolness. Cobham took the hat and wiped it with profuse excuses, trying to pass the matter off as a joke; but after some days of humiliation he had to write an explicit apology with a recital of all his previous efforts to appease Hervey's resentment.[99] Such diversions, Lady Hester Stanhope declares, were common at Stowe. She narrates one scarcely less nauseous.[100]
Having obtained the earldom, his next object was the Garter. George II. detested him, and refused the request with asperity. So Pitt had to be brought in. Pitt was then all-powerful, for this was the autumn of 1759. He wrote a note full of sombre menace to Newcastle, and demanded the Garter for Temple as a reward for his own services; but still the King refused. Then the last reserves were brought into play. Temple resigned the Privy Seal on the ground that the Garter was denied. Pitt had at the same time a peremptory interview with Newcastle. The King had to yield, but could not repress his anger. He threw the ribbon to Temple as a bone is thrown to a dog. But delicacy, as we have seen, did not trouble Temple in matters of substance, and he was satisfied.
Having obtained these two objects of ambition, he now played for a dukedom. This ambition, suspected presumably in Cobham, had been the subject of epigram so early as 1742.[101] It was avowed, according to Walpole, in 1767, and, indeed, no other explanation seems adapted to his various proceedings at critical junctures. Thus, when in June 1765, George III. and his uncle Cumberland tried to form a Pitt ministry, but found that an absolute condition of such a ministry was that Temple should be First Lord of the Treasury, Temple refused on various flimsy pretexts. When these were surmounted, he declared that 'he had tender and delicate reasons' which he did not explain to the King, or, apparently, to Pitt.[102] That this unwonted delicacy and tenderness were concentrated on the superior coronet appears from the negotiation carried on by Horace Walpole in 1767, when Lord Hertford assured him of the fact that Lord Temple's ambition was now a dukedom.[103] It is not doubtful that this had now become the central preoccupation of his life, and the hereditary object of the family combination. At first sight it would seem improbable that Pitt was aware of it, for the simple reason that he would probably have made efforts to obtain it from the King. On the other hand, it is unlikely that Temple, in the affair of the Garter, having found the inestimable value of Pitt's pressure on George II., could have foregone the effort to exercise it on George III. On the whole, the most plausible conjecture appears to be that Pitt was unsuccessfully sounded by his brother-in-law. All that we know is, that when Pitt finally determined to undertake the ministry without Temple, they had a heated interview, which seems to have left deep marks on Pitt's nerves and health, but whether it turned on Temple's particular ambition or not can now only be matter for surmise.