faction, flushed with its more than forty years' debauch of power,
insolent in the sense of its own omnipotence. George was resolute to
show that the claim to omnipotence was a sham, and, to do him justice,
he succeeded in his resolve.

At the head of the Whig party in the House of Lords was the Duke of
Newcastle. At its head in the House of Commons was William Pitt.
These two ministers seemed fixed and irremovable in their supreme
authority. While Newcastle lavished the money of the state in that
spacious system of bribery which welded the party into so formidable a
mass, it was the proud privilege of Pitt to illuminate its policy by
his splendid eloquence at home and by the splendor of his enterprises
abroad. Both the ministers were an enormous expense to the country.
Newcastle never counted the cost so long as there was a county member
to be bought or a placeman to be satisfied. Pitt never counted the
cost so long as he could add another trophy of victory to the walls of
Westminster Abbey and inscribe another triumph on England's roll of
battles. The sordid skill of Newcastle and the dazzling genius of Pitt
seemed between them to make the Whig party invulnerable and
irresistible. There was no opposition in Upper or Lower House; there
had been for many years no hint of royal opposition. Everything
promised a long continuance of the undisputed Whig sway when suddenly
the secret determination of a young King and the secret instigations of
a Scotch peer dissipated the stately fabric that had endured so long.

{26}

The fixed purpose of Lord Bute was to get rid of Pitt. The fixed
purpose of Lord Bute created the fixed purpose of the King, and the
hours of Pitt's administration were numbered. After a season of rare
glory, of resplendent triumph, Pitt found himself face to face with a
formidable coalition of interests against him, a coalition of interests
none the less formidable because it was headed by a man for whose
attainments, opinions, and ability Pitt must have felt, and scarcely
concealed, the greatest contempt. Pitt had not made himself an object
of personal affection to those with whom he was brought into immediate
contact. In the time of his supremacy he had carried himself with a
haughty arrogance, with an austere disdain which had set the smaller
men about him raging in secret antagonism. The King, driven on by his
own dreams of personal authority, disliked the great minister. Bute,
drunk wit