accused of guilty
complicity with it did not induce any one to believe that the Minister of
State had any share in the guilt. Yet Stanhope was one of the first
victims of the crisis. The Duke of Wharton, son of the late Minister,
had just come of age. He was already renowned as a brilliant, audacious
profligate. He was president of the Hell-fire Club; he and some of his
comrades were the nightly terror of London streets. Wharton thought fit
to make himself the champion of public purity in the debates on the South
Sea Company's ruin. He attacked the Ministers fiercely; he attacked
Stanhope in especial. Stanhope replied to him with far greater warmth
than the weight of any attack from Wharton would seem to have called for.
Excited beyond measure, Stanhope burst a blood-vessel in his {199} anger.
He was carried home, and he died the next day--February 5, 1721. His
life had been pure and noble. He was a sincere lover of his country; a
brave and often a successful soldier; a statesman of high purpose if not
of the most commanding talents. His career as a soldier was brought to a
close when he had to capitulate to that master of war and profligacy, the
Duke de Vendome; an encounter of a different kind with another brilliant
profligate robbed him of his life.

The House of Commons promptly passed a series of resolutions declaring
"John Aislabie, Esquire, a Member of this House, then Chancellor of the
Exchequer and one of the Commissioners of his Majesty's Treasury," guilty
of "most notorious, dangerous, and infamous corruption," and ordering his
expulsion from the House and his committal as a prisoner to the Tower.
This resolution was carried without a dissentient word. The House of
Commons went on next to consider that part of the report which applied to
Lord Sunderland, and a motion was made declaring that "after the
proposals of the South Sea Company were accepted by this House, and a
bill ordered to be brought in thereupon, and before such bill passed,
50,000 pounds of the capital stock of the South Sea Company was taken in
by Robert Knight, late cashier of the said Company, for the use and upon
the account of diaries, Earl of Sunderland, a Lord of Parliament and
First Commissioner of the Treasury, without any valuable consideration
paid, or sufficient security given, for payment for or acceptance of the
same."

Sunderland had too many friends, however, and too much influence to be
dealt with as if he were Aisl