? These great Tory
borough-mongering Lords have no taste for opposition. Arbuthnot
told my father that this was his feeling, and when I told Mrs.
Arbuthnot what a bad moral effect the Duke's lenity had, she
said, 'Oh, you hear that from the Opposition.' Last night in his
speech, when he said he had the cordial support of his Majesty,
he turned round with energy to the Duke of Cumberland. Several
Peers upon one pretext or another have withdrawn the support they
had intended to give to the Duke's Bill. Fourteen Irish bishops
are coming over in a body to petition the King against this Bill,
and most foolish they. The English bishops may by possibility be
sincere and disinterested in their opposition (not that I believe
they are), but nobody will ever believe that the Irish think of
anything but their scandalous revenues. The thing must go; the
only question is when and how. The Kent petition to the King is
to be presented, I believe, by Lords Winchelsea and Bexley; they
would not entrust it to Peel. Lord W. wanted to march down to
Windsor at the head of 25,000 men.

March 14th, 1829 {p.188}

Arbuthnot told the Duke what was said about not turning out the
refractory members, and he replied, 'I have undertaken this
business, and I am determined to go through with it. Nobody knows
the difficulties I have in dealing with my royal master, and
nobody knows him so well as I do. I will succeed, but I am as in
a field of battle, and I must fight it out my own way.' This
would be very well if there were not other motives mixed up with
this--jealousy of the Whigs and a desire to keep clear of them,
and quarrel with them again when this is over. Herries told Hyde
Villiers that _their_ policy was conservative, that of the Whigs
subversive, and that they never could act together. All false,
for nobody's policy is subversive who has much to lose, and the
Whigs comprise the great mass of property and a great body of the
aristocracy of the country. Nobody seems to doubt that the Bill
will pass. The day before yesterday the Duke of Newcastle went to
Windsor and had an audience. Lord Bathurst told me that they had
reason to believe his Grace had told the King his own sentiments
on the Catholic question, but that the King had made no answer.
But as nobody was present they could not depend on the truth of
this (which they had from his Majesty himself, of course), and he
begged me to find out what account the Duke gave of it.

March 1