Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/116

90 same time that you think saying something else, or saying nothing would be the better way.

"I know your honesty and your friendship to me. Say what you please for me; I'll make it good, or say nothing of me if you think that best, as perhaps it is at present."

Shelburne now proposed that Fox should give a general support to the Ministry, receiving at the same time the assurance which Bute was willing to give, that a peerage should at an early date be conferred on Lady Caroline. "I have written," he tells Bute, "to Mr. Fox, simply stated what has happened, what I have promised and taken upon me in his name in the strongest manner, and desired him to call on me as soon as he comes. I can see nothing for my life in Mr. Pitt's character, which can be called a sine quâ non, but am astonished to find other people upon various pretences of that opinion; no one person feared but him, and now he is out of place, every one playing a little game for themselves, temporizing and still thinking they can come about. So that if this is not stopped, or the least given into, I conceive it may have the strongest consequences, and may make a thing of no consequence very material. Your Lordship being assured of my motives will excuse my troubling you with what occurs to me. The employment of a Secretary of State is itself of no great consequence in a Ministry. The person who appears to have the principal management in the House of Commons must be, according to former custom at least, either Secretary of State, First Lord of the Treasury, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. Even as to the appearance the Ministry must have out of doors, it cannot well be otherwise. What Mr. Pitt cryed at, at the beginning of the last Opposition, was a cabal of nobles, &c., and it took most with the people. Both as to the House of Commons and the effect the present fixing of the Ministry must have in the opinion of the nation, I should conceive it most prudent taking up a commoner. Mr. Legge, whatever opinion your Lordship, I, or some others may have of him, is a Gold Box. One Box is out and another put in his place.