litics. The battle is over
and the rival leaders have both fallen. One monument might suffice for
both, like that for Wolfe and Montcalm at Quebec. Pulteney was offered
a peerage, an offer which he had contemptuously rejected twice before.
He accepted it now. It will probably never be fully and certainly
known why he committed this act of political suicide. Walpole appears
to have been under the impression that it was by his cleverness the
King had been prevailed upon to drive Pulteney into the House of Lords.
Walpole, indeed, very probably made the suggestion to the King, and no
doubt had as his sole motive in making it the desire to consign
Pulteney to obscurity; but it does not seem as if his was the influence
which accomplished the object. Lord Carteret and the Duke of Newcastle
both hated Pulteney, who as cordially hated them. Newcastle was
jealous of Pulteney because of his immense influence in the House of
Commons, which he fancied must be in some sort of way an injury to
himself and his brother; and, stupid as he was, he felt certain that if
Pulteney consented to enter the House of Lords the popularity and the
influence would vanish. Carteret's was a more reasonable if not a more
noble jealousy. He was determined to come {193} to the head of affairs
himself--to be Prime-minister in fact if not in name; and he feared
that he never could be this so long as Pulteney remained, what some one
had called him, the Tribune of the Commons. Once get him into the
House of Lords and there was an end to the tribune and the tribune's
career. As for himself, Carteret, he would then be able to domineer
over both Houses by his commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of
such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with
the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney--had never forgiven him
his championship of the Prince of Wales--and would be delighted to see
him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if
it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret,
and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that
removal to the House of Lords would mean political extinction for
Pulteney, how is it that no thought of the kind seems to have entered
into the mind of Pulteney himself? Even as a question of the purest
patriotism, such a man as Pulteney, believing his own policy to be for
the public good, ought to have sternly refused to allow hims