on the very day on
which the bill became law, the King himself mentioned it to Lord Eldon,
the Chancellor, and said that he acquiesced in it from perfect
confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment
and personal attachment of his ministers.

For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration;
but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was
murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and
calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent--who by this time had come
into possession of his full authority--led to his making offers of the
conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as
is somewhat remarkable, being peers. And, though the proposals
eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the
re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its
head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or
generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first,
and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the
complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel's endeavors to form an
administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal
which, in 1827, the Regent--then King George IV.--did himself make to
the Duke of Wellington. It is unnecessary to dwell on the singular
manner in which the Regent first professed to give his confidence to
Lord Wellesley, then transferred it to Lord Moira,[167] and then to a
certain extent included Lord Grey and Lord Grenville in it. Nor would it
be profitable to discuss the correctness or incorrectness of the
suspicion expressed by Mr. Moore, in his "Life of Sheridan"--who was
evidently at this time as fully in the Regent's confidence as any one
else--that "at the bottom of all these evolutions of negotiation there
was anything but a sincere wish, that the object to which they related
should be accomplished."[168] The reason avowed by Lord Grey and Lord
Grenville for refusing a share in the projected administration was the
refusal of Lord Moira, who had been employed by the Prince to treat with
them on the subject, to allow them to make a power of removing the
officers at present filling "the great offices of the household"[169] an
express condition of their acceptance of ministerial office. They
affirmed that a "liberty to make new appointments" to these offices had
usually been given on every change of admin