Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/255

Rh Lord Holland's, and in both these quarters Mr. Pitt and Lord Shelburne are equal favourites. Your visit in Audley Street is thought most sensible, and we shall like to hear the consequence of this transaction. He applauds to the last degree your leaving town. He is hurrying away Lord Temple, and goes himself the moment the doctors will allow it. I suspected at first some little jealousy about Court communications, but explaining your intentions towards him as publick and private men, that not only vanished but he wished it kept sensibly open. Mr. Pitt went into the strongest expressions about your conduct, which he concluded by saying repeatedly, Lord Temple and he agreed you and your friends only had acted a thorough part. I think he has stronger light since Monday from George Grenville's quarter, though they have not met; in some shape or other there seems security. He went into arrangements, is most determined to keep Lord Bute at bay though not altered in sentiments of gentlemanlike conduct towards him or anything reasonable for the great person's friends. The commendation of the Duke nettles and creates doubts of underhand manoeuvres between his Royal Highness and Lord Holland, but the Court is altogether inexplicable. He wishes mystery on our part also, and recommends strongly no post correspondence. His confidence to us being thought, as it really is, unbounded, of this there was no danger I assured him, as he imagined. George Grenville dines at Hayes on Thursday."

But Pitt was unable to come to any agreement with Grenville notwithstanding the "security" of which Calcraft spoke, and this divergence of views had important results, for by the end of June another ministerial crisis had become inevitable. The King personally disliked his present advisers too much to allow their support of his arbitrary measures to atone for their plain-spoken independence on the subject of Bute, nor had Grenville cared to conceal from the King that what he specially wished was not so much like Halifax to increase the power of the