turn principally upon the fact of
disunion, and I have little doubt that Rice and Lansdowne will
declare that they had no intention of quitting. So much depends upon
verbal niceties, and the bounds between truth and falsehood are so
narrow, the partition so thin, that they will, I expect, try to back
up their party without any absolute breach of veracity.) When the
King was reading the papers to him (the Duke), and telling him all
that had passed, _he was in a great fright_ lest the Duke should
think he had acted imprudently, and should decline to accept the
Government. Then the Duke said, 'Sir, I see at once how it all is.
Your Majesty has not been left by your Ministers, but something very
like it;' and His Majesty was rejoiced when the Duke at once
acquiesced in taking office.

[2] [Mr. Algernon Greville, brother of Mr. Charles
Greville, was private secretary to the Duke of
Wellington both in and out of office.]

[3] [This statement has certainly not been confirmed by the
subsequent publication of papers or by the narrative of
the King himself. It is very extraordinary that the
Duke of Wellington should have been led to believe it;
but this is only another proof of the extreme
difficulty of arriving at an exact knowledge of what
passes in conversation between two persons, even when
both of them are acting in perfect good faith.]

The Duke said he had received very satisfactory letters from all
(or many) of the Peers to whom he had written--from the Duke of
Newcastle and Lord Mansfield, the most violent of the Tories. I
said, 'Are they ready to place themselves in your hands, and
agree to whatever you may think it necessary to do?' He said, 'I
think they are; I think they will do anything.' He told me that
affairs were left in a wretched state in the Treasury, that the
late Ministers were no men of business, and minutes had been
proposed to him finding fault with various things; but he had
refused to do any such thing, and he would repair any error he
could without casting any blame on others. On the whole he
thought everything looked well, and that he should, when Peel
arrived, put the concern into his hands in a satisfactory state.

It is perfectly clear, in the midst of assertion on one side and
contradiction on the other, that in the first instance there was
neither plot nor plan on the part of the King or