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 all exercise, and very low-spirited. At the beginning of November the king urged him to return from Houghton to London, being desirous of consulting him on the state of affairs before the opening of parliament. But his complaint was so acute that he could not bear the motion of travelling. On 19 Nov. he was sufficiently recovered to leave Houghton, but the excruciating agonies which he suffered protracted the journey to four days. In December he began taking Dr. Jurin's [see ] medicine for the stone, in spite of his son Horace's common-sense expostulation with his physicians (Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, 24 Dec. 1744 and 14 Jan. 1745) [see ]. The consequence was a laceration of his bladder such as his son had predicted, and his torment became so acute that he was drenched with opium and for six weeks was in a state of stupefaction. When not under narcotics he would converse with full possession of his faculties and his natural vivacity and cheerfulness. He died of exhaustion on 18 March 1745 at the age of sixty-eight, and was buried on the 25th at Houghton.

The policy of Walpole may be summarised in two phrases—in domestic affairs, ‘quieta non movere’ (, Letters, viii. 336); abroad, ‘the French alliance.’ By the latter he revolutionised the whig tradition, and the dissentient whigs joined with the tories in denouncing it as ‘Sir Robert's new system of politics’ (Marchmont Papers, ii. 119–20; cf. the Lords' Protest of 13 Feb. 1741). Its justification was seen in 1745 when, with French assistance, the young pretender landed, fulfilling the prediction often made by Walpole that a breach with France would be followed by a struggle for the English crown upon English soil (, Memoirs, ii. 40). The limitations of the French alliance prescribed themselves. National traditions and the doctrine of the ‘balance of power,’ which was constantly invoked against it, concurred in forbidding it to be anything but a ‘connection to be formed upon the principle of preserving the peace,’ or, as he said, ‘preventive and defensive’ (Newcastle Letters, p. 114). It implied a practice of non-intervention, distasteful at once to the king and to the inheritors of the political traditions of William III and Anne. To this he made it his aim to educate his party. To this he sacrificed Carteret and Townshend, and its abandonment under pressure led to his fall. After his death his opponents confessed that he had been in the right. ‘He was the best minister,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘this country ever had, as if we would have let him he would have kept the country in perpetual peace’ (G. B. HILL, Johnsonian Miscellanies, ii. 309). Behind the French alliance lay the security of the protestant succession. In face of the difficulty of maintaining this paramount object, Macaulay's criticism that his ministry was not an era of great reforms falls flat. The reforms which might have been undertaken would have yielded results small in importance compared with the reversal of the foreign policy of the country, and its reconciliation to the new dynasty, which Walpole actually accomplished. There was always present to his mind the peril of strengthening the prevalent disaffection, or of exciting it in fresh quarters. In 1739, when sounded by Lord Chesterfield as to a project for the taxation of America, he replied, ‘I have old England set against me, and do you think I will have new England likewise?’ But he vindicated his refusal also on the higher ground that the true policy was one of the development, not the exploitation, of colonial prosperity (Annual Register, 1765, p. [25]). It has been alleged against him that he overlooked the military resources to be found in the enrolment of the highland clans in the king's service. The proposal was made in 1738, recommended by Lord Islay, and a tentative experiment approved by Walpole (Culloden Papers, p. xxxi). His caution was justified. In 1743 a highland regiment mutinied against embarkation for foreign service, and a highland soldier was synonymous with rebel (Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, 19 May 1743, Letters, i. 246).

The classes disaffected to the Hanoverian dynasty were the country gentlemen, the clergy, and, from time to time, the mob. Of these the squires, who controlled the county representation, were the most influential. Walpole entered upon his political career in full sympathy with their grievances, and as one of the most considerable of their class. To gratify them he reduced the land-tax from 4s. in the pound, at which it stood after the revolution, to 1s. in 1731 and 1732. With the same object he renounced one of his favourite fiscal principles—the abolition of taxes upon the necessaries of life—and in 1732 reimposed the salt-tax. The support of the clergy he could never expect to win, unless by the sacrifice of the firmest friends of the Hanoverian family, the dissenters. But the clergy were the only class who were capable of finding arguments for disaffection, and the Sacheverell trial had warned him of the danger of offering them gratuitous provocation. All he could do was to place them under the control of an episcopal bench, carefully selected for the soundness of its whig