Auditor belonged, not to the Crown, but to the
Board of Treasury. He carried his point with characteristic audacity
and celerity. The news of the vacancy reached London on a Sunday. On the
Tuesday the new Auditor was sworn in. The ministers were amazed. Even
the Chancellor, with whom Montague was on terms of intimate friendship,
had not been consulted. Godolphin devoured his ill temper. Caermarthen
ordered out his wonderful yacht, and hastened to complain to the King,
who was then at Loo. But what had been done could not be undone.

This bold stroke placed Montague's fortune, in the lower sense of the
word, out of hazard, but increased the animosity of his enemies and
cooled the zeal of his adherents. In a letter written by one of his
colleagues, Secretary Vernon, on the day after the appointment, the
Auditorship is described as at once a safe and lucrative place. "But I
thought," Vernon proceeds, "Mr. Montague was too aspiring to stoop
to any thing below the height he was in, and that he least considered
profit." This feeling was no doubt shared by many of the friends of
the ministry. It was plain that Montague was preparing a retreat for
himself. This flinching of the captain, just on the eve of a perilous
campaign, naturally disheartened the whole army. It deserves to be
remarked that, more than eighty years later, another great parliamentary
leader was placed in a very similar situation. The younger William Pitt
held in 1784 the same offices which Montague had held in 1698. Pitt was
pressed in 1784 by political difficulties not less than those with which
Montague had contended in 1698. Pitt was also in 1784 a much poorer man
than Montague in 1698. Pitt, in 1784, like Montage in 1698, had at his
own absolute disposal a lucrative sinecure place in the Exchequer. Pitt
gave away the office which would have made him an opulent man, and gave
it away in such a manner as at once to reward unfortunate merit, and
to relieve the country from a burden. For this disinterestedness he was
repaid by the enthusiastic applause of his followers, by the enforced
respect of his opponents, and by the confidence which, through all the
vicissitudes of a chequered and at length disastrous career, the great
body of Englishmen reposed in his public spirit and in his personal
integrity. In the intellectual qualities of a statesman Montague was
probably not inferior to Pitt. But the magnanimity, the dauntless
courage, the contempt for riches an