It was natural that Pitt and Grenville, being such as they were, should take very different views of the situation of affairs.  Pitt could see nothing but the trophies; Grenville could see nothing but the bill.  Pitt boasted that England was victorious at once in America, in India, and in Germany, the umpire of the Continent, the mistress of the sea.  Grenville cast up the subsidies, sighed over the army extraordinaries, and groaned in spirit to think that the nation had borrowed eight millions in one year.

With a ministry thus divided it was not difficult for Bute to deal.  Legge was the first who fell.  He had given offence to the young King in the late reign, by refusing to support a creature of Bute at a Hampshire election.  He was now not only turned out, but in the closet, when he delivered up his seal of office, was treated with gross incivility.

Pitt, who did not love Legge, saw this event with indifference.  But the danger was now fast approaching himself.  Charles the Third of Spain had early conceived a deadly hatred of England.  Twenty years before, when he was King of the Two Sicilies, he had been eager to join the coalition against Maria Theresa.  But an English fleet had suddenly appeared in the Bay of Naples.  An English Captain had landed, and proceeded to the palace, had laid a watch on the table, and had told his majesty that, within an hour, a treaty of neutrality must be signed, or a bombardment would commence.  The treaty was signed; the squadron sailed out of the bay twenty-four hours after it had sailed in; and from that day the ruling passion of the humbled Prince was aversion to the English name.  He was at length in a situation in which he might hope to gratify that passion.  He had recently become King of Spain and the Indies.  He saw, with envy and apprehension, the triumphs of our navy, and the rapid extension of our colonial Empire.  He was a Bourbon, and sympathised with the distress of the house from which he sprang.  He was a Spaniard; and no Spaniard could bear to see Gibraltar and Minorca in the possession of a foreign power.  Impelled by such feelings, Charles concluded a secret treaty with France.  By this treaty, known as the Family Compact, the two powers bound themselves, not in express words, but by the clearest implication, to make war on England in common.  Spain postponed the declaration of hostilities only till her fleet, laden with the treasures of America, should have arrived.

The existence of the treaty could not be kept a secret from Pitt.  He acted as a man of his capacity and energy might be expected to act.  He at once proposed to declare war against Spain, and to intercept the American fleet.  He had determined, it is said, to attack without delay both Havanna and the Philippines.

His wise and resolute counsel was rejected.  Bute was foremost in opposing it, and was supported by almost the whole Cabinet.  Some of the ministers doubted, or affected to doubt, the correctness of Pitt’s intelligence; some shrank from the responsibility of advising a course so bold and decided as that which he proposed; some were weary of his ascendency, and were glad to be rid of him on any pretext.  One only of his colleagues agreed with him, his brother-in-law, Earl Temple.