This and many other symptoms of the same kind irritated the ministers.  They had still in store for their sovereign an insult which would have provoked his grandfather to kick them out of the room.  Grenville and Bedford demanded an audience of him, and read him a remonstrance of many pages, which they had drawn up with great care.  His Majesty was accused of breaking his word, and of treating his advisers with gross unfairness.  The Princess was mentioned in language by no means eulogistic.  Hints were thrown out that Bute’s head was in danger.  The King was plainly told that he must not continue to show, as he had done, that he disliked the situation in which he was placed, that he must frown upon the Opposition, that he must carry it fair towards his ministers in public.  He several times interrupted the reading, by declaring that he had ceased to hold any communication with Bute.  But the ministers, disregarding his denial, went on; and the King listened in silence, almost choked by rage.  When they ceased to read, he merely made a gesture expressive of his wish to be left alone.  He afterwards owned that he thought he should have gone into a fit.

Driven to despair, he again had recourse to the Duke of Cumberland; and the Duke of Cumberland again had recourse to Pitt.  Pitt was really desirous to undertake the direction of affairs, and owned, with many dutiful expressions, that the terms offered by the King were all that any subject could desire.  But Temple was impracticable; and Pitt, with great regret, declared that he could not, without the concurrence of his brother-in-law, undertake the administration.

The Duke now saw only one way of delivering his nephew.  An administration must be formed of the Whigs in opposition, without Pitt’s help.  The difficulties seemed almost insuperable.  Death and desertion had grievously thinned the ranks of the party lately supreme in the State.  Those among whom the Duke’s choice lay might be divided into two classes, men too old for important offices, and men who had never been in any important office before.  The Cabinet must be composed of broken invalids or of raw recruits.

This was an evil, yet not an unmixed evil.  If the new Whig statesmen had little experience in business and debate, they were, on the other hand, pure from the taint of that political immorality which had deeply infected their predecessors.  Long prosperity had corrupted that great party which had expelled the Stuarts, limited the prerogatives of the Crown, and curbed the intolerance of the Hierarchy.  Adversity had already produced a salutary effect.  On the day of the accession of George the Third, the ascendency of the Whig party terminated; and on that day the purification of the Whig party began.  The rising chiefs of that party were men of a very different sort from Sandys and Winnington, from Sir William Yonge and Henry Fox.  They were men worthy to have charged by the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or