Sometimes, in spite of all his caution, he found that measures which he had hoped to carry through quietly had caused great agitation.  When this was the case he generally modified or withdrew them.  It was thus that he cancelled Wood’s patent in compliance with the absurd outcry of the Irish.  It was thus that he frittered away the Porteous Bill to nothing, for fear of exasperating the Scotch.  It was thus that he abandoned the Excise Bill, as soon as he found that it was offensive to all the great towns of England.  The language which he held about that measure in a subsequent session is strikingly characteristic.  Pulteney had insinuated that the scheme would be again brought forward.  “As to the wicked scheme,” said Walpole, “as the gentleman is pleased to call it, which he would persuade gentlemen is not yet laid aside, I for my part assure this House I am not so mad as ever again to engage in anything that looks like an Excise; though, in my private opinion, I still think it was a scheme that would have tended very much to the interest of the nation.”

The conduct of Walpole with regard to the Spanish war is the great blemish of his public life.  Archdeacon Coxe imagined that he had discovered one grand principle of action to which the whole public conduct of his hero ought to be referred.

“Did the administration of Walpole,” says the biographer, “present any uniform principle which may be traced in every part, and which gave combination and consistency to the whole?  Yes, and that principle was, the love of peace.”  It would be difficult, we think, to bestow a higher eulogium on any statesman.  But the eulogium is far too high for the merits of Walpole.  The great ruling principle of his public conduct was indeed a love of peace, but not in the sense in which Archdeacon Coxe uses the phrase.  The peace which Walpole sought was not the peace of the country, but the peace of his own administration.  During the greater part of his public life, indeed, the two objects were inseparably connected.  At length he was reduced to the necessity of choosing between them, of plunging the State into hostilities for which there was no just ground, and by which nothing was to be got, or of facing a violent opposition in the country, in Parliament, and even in the royal closet.  No person was more thoroughly convinced than he of the absurdity of the cry against Spain.  But his darling power was at stake, and his choice was soon made.  He preferred an unjust war to a stormy session.  It is impossible to say of a Minister who acted thus that the love of peace was the one grand principle to which all his conduct is to be referred.  The governing principle of his conduct was neither love of peace nor love of war, but love of power.