ever succeed: that the Duke of Portland was equally
concerned with the former appeared clearly from his letters....

The King, then, looked on the whole affair as a Whig plot; and Pitt,
whatever his feelings were at first, finally frowned upon the proposal.
Doubtless, in an official sense, there was justification for his remark
to the Duke of Leeds, that the coalition had never been in
contemplation; for the matter seems never to have come before the
Cabinet. But as a statement between man and man it leaves something to
be desired on the score of accuracy. Annoyance at the very exalted
position marked out for the Duke, whose capacity Pitt rated decidedly
low, may have led him to belittle the whole affair; for signs of
constraint and annoyance are obvious in his other answers to his late
colleague. There, then, we must leave this question, involved in
something of mystery.[54] We shall not be far wrong in concluding that
Pitt wished for the formation of a national Ministry, and that the plan
failed, partly from the resolve of Fox never to play second to Pitt; and
still more from the personal way in which the King regarded the
suggestion.

The King meanwhile had marked his sense of the value of Pitt's services
by pressing on him the honourable position of Warden of the Cinque
Ports, with a stipend of L3,000 a year, intimating at the same time that
he would not hear of his declining it (6th August).[55] It is a proof of
the spotless purity of Pitt's reputation that not a single libel or gibe
appeared in the Press on his acceptance of this almost honorary
post.[56]

One brilliant recruit to the Whig ranks was now won over to the national
cause, of which Pitt was seen to be the incarnation. Already at Eton and
Oxford George Canning had shown the versatility of his genius and the
precocious maturity of his eloquence. When his Oxford friend, Jenkinson
(the future Earl of Liverpool) made a sensational _debut_ in the House
on the Tory side, Sheridan remarked that the Whigs would soon provide an
antidote in the person of young Canning. Great, then, was their
annoyance when the prodigy showed signs of breaking away from the
society of the Crewes and Sheridan, in order to ally himself with Pitt.
So little is known respecting the youth of Canning that the motives
which prompted his breach with Sheridan are involved in uncertainty. It
is clear, however, from his own confession that, after some discussion
with Orde, he himself