elf to be
forced into any position in which his public influence must be
diminished or destroyed. As regarded his personal interests and his
fame, Pulteney must have had every motive to induce him to remain in
the House where his eloquence and his debating power had won him such a
place. It is impossible to believe that he could have been allured
just then, at the height of his position and his renown, by the bauble
of a coronet which he had twice before refused--contemptuously refused.
Probably the real explanation may be found in the fact that Pulteney,
for all his fighting capacity, was not a strong but a weak man.
Probably he was, like Goethe's Egmont, brilliant in battle but weak in
council. All unknown to himself, four men, each man possessed of an
overmastering power of will, were combined against him for a single
purpose--to drive him into the House of Lords--that is, to drive him
out of the {194} House of Commons. His enemies prevailed against him.
As Lord Chesterfield put it, he "shrank into insignificance and an
earldom." We are far from saying that a man might not be a good
minister and a statesman of influence after having accepted a seat in
the House of Lords. But it was beginning to be found, even in
Pulteney's time, that the place of a great Prime-minister is in the
House of Commons; and certainly the place of a tribune of the people
can hardly be the House of Lords. Pulteney was born for the House of
Commons: transplantation meant death to a genius like his. When the
news of his "promotion" became public, a wild outcry of anger and
despair broke from his population of admirers. He was denounced as
having committed an act of perfidy and of treason. He had accepted a
peerage, it was said, as a bribe to induce him to consent to let Robert
Walpole go unimpeached and unpunished. The outcry was quite unjust,
but was certainly not unnatural. People wanted some sort of
explanation of an act which no ordinary reasoning could possibly
explain. Pulteney's conduct bitterly disappointed the Tory section of
the Opposition as well as the populace of his former adorers
out-of-doors. Bolingbroke, who had hurried back to England, found that
all his dreams of a genuine Coalition Ministry, representing fairly
both wings of the forces of Opposition, had vanished with the morning
light. Except for the removal of Walpole, hardly any change was made
in the composition of recent English administration. The Tories