ll endeavour to
give effect to my opinion by the support of all the friends whom
I can collect. My object will be to press to the utmost those
points which I think essential to the public defence, and at the
same time in doing so to make it, if I can, impossible for the
present Government to maintain itself. In this object I have
every reason to believe that I shall have the fullest
concurrence of all those with whom I have the most differed on
former occasions and with whom possibly I may as little agree in
future. With their number added to my own more immediate
friends, and to the few who have acted with Ld Grenville and
Windham, I am persuaded that our division on any favourable
question will probably be such as would be sufficient to shake a
much stronger Government than the present....[672]

On the same day he promised Melville to return to town in the middle of
April, and to make the "principal push" against Addington on 23rd April,
on the subject of Yorke's Bill for suspending the completion of the Army
Reserve. If they failed, he would return to Walmer for another kind of
contest. The joint assault by Fox and Pitt against the Ministry on 23rd
April produced a great sensation, the speech of Pitt being remarkable
for its suppressed sarcasm and thinly veiled charges of inefficiency. As
a call to arms, it stands without a rival. Ministers were utterly beaten
in argument, and escaped defeat only by thirty-seven votes. Addington
became alarmed, and advised the King, who was now convalescent, to
instruct the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, to confer with Pitt, a fact which
refutes the charges of Brougham and Dean Pellew against Eldon.

Finally the King allowed Pitt to make proposals concerning a new
Ministry. Pitt did so fully and courteously in a paper which George III
forthwith described to Eldon as containing "many empty words and little
information." To Pitt himself the King, on 5th May, expressed his deep
regret that he had taken such a dislike to Mr. Addington, after the
praiseworthy services of the latter to our glorious Constitution in
Church and State. He could never forget the wound which Pitt proposed to
deal it, and "the indelicacy (not to call it worse) of wanting His
Majesty to forego his solemn Coronation Oath." He therefore required
Pitt to give a solemn pledge not to propose the least alteration in the
Test Act. As to a proposal to admit Fox to the Cabinet,