Note 194 — Chapter VII

Lord Egmont gave me the following instances. Lord Bolingbroke gave the Prince a scheme for vesting the Revenue in the Crown for every six years, without a Civil List, and for having Parliaments holden every five or six years. The Court he paid to the Prince was to a degree of adoration. One day that he dined with Lord Egmont, the Prince came in as they were drinking coffee, and bad them not mind him. Lord Egmont, who knew that to obey was to respect, gave Lord Bolingbroke a dish; but he, who thought that to disobey from respect was more respectful (and who perhaps knew, that though the Prince seemed to encourage familiarity, he never forgave it), started and cried, “Good God! my Lord, what are you doing? Do you consider who is present?” One of his views was to be an Earl; and, knowing that the Prince had had an inclination for his sister, Lady St. John, he took her son into his own house, under pretence of educating him and making him his heir, as an inducement to the Prince to promise him the Earldom. The Prince often sent his first Minister, Dr. Lee, to him; and one day said to Lord Egmont of Lord Bolingbroke, “That man is at fourscore just what he was at forty! I know how he flatters Lee to his face, and yet he is always teasing me to discard him, and telling him that he is not fit to hold a candle to an Administration.”

A few years after this note was written, I met with the following words in the eleventh letter of the Dissertation on Parties, p. 151, of the quarto edition: “Should a King obtain, for many years at once, the supplies and powers which used to be granted annually to him, this would be deemed, I presume, even in the present age, an unjustifiable measure, and an intolerable grievance; for this plain reason, because it would alter our constitution in the fundamental article, that requires frequent assemblies of the whole legislature, in order to assist, and control too, the executive power, which is entrusted with one part of it.” What must be the heart of that man, who, merely to load an envied Minister, could suppose instances of wicked administration, which had not entered into the head of any other man; and who could afterwards adopt those suppositions himself, and try to recommend himself to a Prince by those individual bad measures, the creatures of his own brain: and this at past seventy years old! hazarding, for a very few years of unenjoyable power, to entail so calamitous a system on his country!