alady when he
was assailed by the insidious disease which, afterwards, but rarely
left him. This caused a depression of spirits which gradually wore
out his body. As a boy he had suffered at intervals from similar
attacks. They increased now in intensity, baffling the physicians who
attended him. He bore up bravely, however, and pushed forward with
his wonted energy the ambitious plans he had formed in the intervals
of quiet and repose.

At the age of thirty-five, with an enormous fortune, great ambition,
and sanguine hopes for the future, Clive trusted that the illness he
suffered from would eventually yield to treatment, and he entered on
his campaign in England with the confidence in himself which had been
one secret of his success in India. He had hoped, on his arrival, to
have been at once raised to the House of Peers. But the honours of
the {143}Crown, long delayed, took the shape only of an Irish
peerage. With this he was forced to be content, and, being debarred
from the Upper House, made all his arrangements to become a member of
the Lower. He speedily obtained a seat in that House.

Possibly he marred his prospects by the line which he took in
politics. In October, 1760, George II had died. The new King, whose
proudest boast was that he had been born an Englishman, made Lord
Bute Secretary of State. Soon after Pitt resigned, because the rest
of the Ministry refused to support him in his policy of going to war
with Spain, the Duke of Newcastle still remaining nominal head of the
Cabinet. In 1762 the Duke resigned, and Lord Bute became Prime
Minister. Sir John Malcolm states that Lord Clive was offered his own
terms if he would support the Bute Ministry. But Clive had given his
mental adhesion in another quarter, and therefore refused his
support, and was, it is stated, treated coldly in consequence.[2]

[Footnote 2: Vide Malcolm's _Clive_, vol. ii. p. 203: also Gleig, p.
134. There would seem to be some mistake as to the reason given by
Mr. Gleig for his statement that Clive refused his support to the
Bute Administration because of his devotion to George Grenville; for
George Grenville held the post of one of the principal Secretaries of
State in Lord Bute's Ministry.]

Though not a supporter of the Bute Administration, Clive did not
refrain from volunteering to it his advice when the preliminaries of
peace between France and England were under discussion. Both Powers
were resolved that the peace should ex