Nothing had done more to diminish the influence of Montague in the House of Commons than a step which he had taken a few weeks before the meeting of the Parliament.  It would seem that the result of the general election had made him uneasy, and that he had looked anxiously round him for some harbour in which he might take refuge from the storms which seemed to be gathering.  While his thoughts were thus employed, he learned that the Auditorship of the Exchequer had suddenly become vacant.  The Auditorship was held for life.  The duties were formal and easy.  The gains were uncertain; for they rose and fell with the public expenditure; but they could hardly, in time of peace, and under the most economical administration, be less than four thousand pounds a year, and were likely, in time of war, to be more than double of that sum.  Montague marked this great office for his own.  He could not indeed take it, while he continued to be in charge of the public purse.  For it would have been indecent, and perhaps illegal, that he should audit his own accounts.  He therefore selected his brother Christopher, whom he had lately made a Commissioner of the Excise, to keep the place for him.  There was, as may easily be supposed, no want of powerful and noble competitors for such a prize.  Leeds had, more than twenty years before, obtained from Charles the Second a patent granting the reversion to Caermarthen.  Godolphin, it was said, pleaded a promise made by William.  But Montague maintained, and was, it seems, right in maintaining, that both the patent of Charles and the promise of William had been given under a mistake, and that the right of appointing the Auditor belonged, not to the Crown, but to the Board of Treasury.  He carried his point with characteristic audacity and celerity.  The news of the vacancy reached London on a Sunday.  On the Tuesday the new Auditor was sworn in.  The ministers were amazed.  Even the Chancellor, with whom Montague was on terms of intimate friendship, had not been consulted.  Godolphin devoured his ill temper.  Caermarthen ordered out his wonderful yacht, and hastened to complain to the King, who was then at Loo.  But what had been done could not be undone.

This bold stroke placed Montague’s fortune, in the lower sense of the word, out of hazard, but increased the animosity of his enemies and cooled the zeal of his adherents.  In a letter written by one of his colleagues, Secretary Vernon, on the day after the appointment, the Auditorship is described as at once a safe and lucrative place.  “But I thought,” Vernon proceeds, “Mr. Montague was too aspiring to stoop to any thing below the height he was in, and that he least considered profit.”  This feeling was no doubt shared by many of the friends of the ministry.  It was plain that Montague was preparing a retreat for himself.  This flinching of the captain, just on the eve of a perilous campaign, naturally disheartened the whole army.  It deserves to be remarked that, more than eighty years later,