Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/168

142 stated his opinion in the following paper, which he handed to the Minister:

"Too sure of the sincerity of your intentions to retire, yet I cannot see how it is possible that you should leave the Ministry this year. But you bid me suppose that you was dead. I choose to write this paper on a supposition that you will stay. If you were to die the King would do well to execute this plan or something like it, putting into your place some person apparently a stop-gap, until he had that experience of some men, which to gain is the foundation of this paper. For it seems to me that it were eligible to put most, if not all of the great and efficient offices which give daily access to the King, into other hands. Whilst you stay to control them it is another thing; but your going will open to them views which they are, some of them, weak enough to be looking for already; and whilst they are struggling for power, such intrigues, cabals, and bad arts would subsist as it would be miserable to His Majesty to live amongst, and as must be very prejudicial to his affairs. I would find honest and proper men for these places, nor is it surely impossible to find them. Yet I would not be so sure I had found them as to pronounce them such till His Majesty should be able by experience to know them. The persons I would put into great places now, and give access to His Majesty that he might observe and know them, are Lord Gower, Lord Shelburne, and, I think, Lord Waldegrave. Your Lordship will add to these such as occur to you. These are men of honour and veracity. The first is of a humour and nature the most practicable, and if any man could do the office of Southern Secretary without either quarrelling with Charles Townshend, or letting down the dignity of his own office, he would. His being in such a station is the thing (and perhaps the only thing) that would fix that capricious being, the Duke of Bedford, whose present intention is to resign and take no other employment. If that should be the case he would dine a fifth Duke at Devonshire House within this twelvemonth.