He found the Bedford clan ready, as usual, for office, but wanting to come in a whole legion; the poor weak Duke of Newcastle was equally prepared, shedding tears in his facile way, hugging and kissing people in his trouble, and wondering why his "dear old friend" had thus abandoned him. Pitt passed on, and chose Lord Camden as Lord Chancellor; Northington as President of the Council; Lord Granby as Commander-in-Chief; Shelburne and Conway as Secretaries of State; the Duke of Grafton as First Lord of the Treasury; Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer; with Lord North, James Grenville, brother of Temple, Colonel Barr, and others, in secondary posts. Mr. Stewart Mackenzie, Bute's brother, was restored to his former office, but without any control over Scottish affairs. It was clear that Pitt had selected his colleagues without regard to party, but with an eye to the ability of the respective persons. It was a mode of acting particularly after the fancy of the king, who had always been, according to his own words to Pitt on the occasion, "zealously ready to give his aid towards destroying all party distinctions, and restoring that subordination to government, which can alone preserve that inestimable blessing, liberty, from degenerating into licentiousness." "I venture," said Burke, "to say, it did so happen that persons had a single office divided between them, who had never spoken to each other in their lives, until they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, heads and points, in the same truckle bed."The new Administration arranged itself as follows:The Duke of Portland, First Lord of the Treasury; Lord North, Home Secretary; Fox, Secretary for Foreign Affairs; the Earl of Carlisle, Privy Seal; Lord John Cavendish, again Chancellor of the Exchequer; Admiral Lord Keppel, the head of the Admiralty again; Lord Stormont, President of the Council; the great stumbling block, Thurlow, removed from the Woolsack, and the Great Seal put into commission; Burke again Paymaster of the Forces, and his brother Richard as Secretary to the Treasury in conjunction with Sheridan. Such was this strange and medley association, well deserving Burke's own description of a former Administration, as of a strange assemblage of creatures, "all pigging together in one truckle-bed." Those who formed exclusively the Cabinet were Portland, North, Fox, Cavendish, Carlisle, Keppel, and Stormont, so that the great Whigs had taken care again to shut out Burke, who was only a man of genius. Such an incongruous company could not long hold together. The king did not conceal his indignation at seeing Fox in office; the whole Court openly expressed its loathing of the anomalous union; the country had no confidence in it; Fox felt that he had wounded his popularity by his sudden and violent change.Searching the hangar
ONE:The report was agreed to, the impeachment was voted, and Burke, attended by the majority of the House, on the 10th of May, carried it up to the Lords. On the motion of Burke, Warren Hastings was then taken into custody, and delivered over to the Lords, who bound him to appear to take his trial, when called upon, in a bond of twenty thousand pounds himself, and Messrs. Sullivan and Sumner as his sureties in ten thousand pounds each.
TWO:Whilst Clive had been reducing our enemies in Bengal and Oude, a more powerful antagonist than any whom we had yet encountered in India was every day growing more formidable in Mysore, and combining several of the petty chiefs of the different States of Madras as his allies against us. He was now far more considerable than when he had appeared against us as the ally of the French general, Lally, in the neighbourhood of Pondicherry. Hyder Ali was a self-made man. He was originally the grandson of a wandering fakir; then the captain of banditti; then at the head of an army composed of freebooters; continually growing in the number of his followers, and in the wealth procured by plunder, he at length became Commander-in-Chief of the Rajah of Mysore. Soon rising in his ambition, he seized the Rajah, his master, pensioned him off with three lacs of rupees, and declared himself the real Rajah. In 1761 he was become firmly established on the throne of Mysore, but this distinction did not satisfy him. He determined to be the founder of Mysore as a great kingdom, and extended his power to near the banks of the Kistnah. There he was met and repulsed by the Peishwa of the Mahrattas, who crossed the Kistnah, defeated him repeatedly, seized some of his newly-acquired territory, and levied on him thirty-two lacs of rupees. Hyder returned to Seringapatam, which he had made his capital, and had strongly fortified, and he thence conducted an expedition against Malabar, which he conquered, and put the chiefs to death to make his hold of it the more secure. It is unnecessary to go minutely into the history of the next few years. Hyder organised an army of 100,000 men, officered by Frenchmen, and sometimes in confederation with the Nizam of the Deccan, sometimes in conjunction with the Mahrattas of the Western Ghauts, waged perpetual war on the English. In 1769 Indian Stock fell sixty per cent. The resources of the Company were fast becoming exhausted, when Hyder Ali, by an artful feint, drew the English army, in the spring of 1769, a hundred and forty miles to the south of Madras. Then, by a rapid march, he suddenly appeared, with a body of five thousand horse, on the heights of St. Thomas, overlooking Madras. The whole of the city and vicinity, except the port of St. George itself, lay at his mercy. The terrified Council, in all haste, offered most advantageous terms of peace, which it was the very object of Hyder to accept, and that, too, before the English commander,[321] Colonel Smith, could arrive and intercept his retreat. Hyder gladly consented to the terms, which were those of mutual restitution, and of alliance and mutual defence: the last, a condition which, with Hyder's disposition to aggrandisement, was sure to bring the English into fresh trouble.
The South Sea Company had immediately on the passing of the Bill proposed a subscription of one million, and this was so eagerly seized on that, instead of one, two millions were subscribed. To stimulate this already too feverish spirit in the public, the Company adopted the most false and unjustifiable means. They had eight millions and a half to pay over to Government as a douceur for granting them the management of the Funds; and, therefore, to bring this in rapidly, they propagated the most lying rumours. It was industriously circulated that Lord Stanhope had received overtures at Paris to exchange Gibraltar and Port Mahon for invaluable gold lands in Peru! The South Sea trade was vaunted as a source of boundless wealth in itself. In August the stock had risen from the one hundred and thirty of the last winter to one thousand! Men sold houses and land to become shareholders; merchants of eminence neglected their affairs and crippled their resources to reap imaginary profits. The Company flattered the delusion to the utmost. They opened a third, and even a fourth subscription, larger than the former, and passed a resolution that from next Christmas their yearly dividend should not be less than fifty per cent.! In labouring to increase the public delusion they seem to have caught the contagion themselves, for they began to act, not like men who were blowing a bubble which they knew must speedily burst, but like persons who had mounted permanently into the very highest seat of prosperous power. They assumed the most arrogant and overbearing manner, even towards men of the highest station and influence. "We have made them kings," said a member of Parliament, "and they deal with everybody as such."
