Note 162 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
Sir Francis Dashwood, afterwards fifteenth Baron le Despencer (1708-1781).
Dashwood was under no misapprehension as to his unsuitability for the post. "People will point at me in the streets and cry, 'There goes the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer that ever appeared,'" he said; and he wrote to Sir Andrew Mitchell on March 23, 1761: "The same strange fortune which made me Secretary-at-war five years and a half ago, has made me Chancellor of the Exchequer. It may, perhaps, at last make me Pope. I think I am equally fit to be the head of the Church as of the Exchequer."