cannot but lament with you our public and private loss. I am very sorry that I have not been able to wait upon you this summer at Hayes, as I fully intended. I desired my Lord Lincoln to acquaint you with the cause of it; namely, the ill state of the poor Duchess of Newcastle's health. The many great losses, both public and private, which we have had this summer, have very greatly affected her; and the last of all, which happened on Monday, of her old friend and companion of above forty-five years, poor Mrs. Spence ('), has added much to the melancholy situation in which she was before. She desires me to make her best compliments to you and Lady Chatham, to whom I beg you would also present mine. I have the honour to be, with the greatest truth and respect, Dear Sir, Your most affectionate, and obedient humble servant, HOLLES NEWCASTLE. Lord Hertford, "but five and forty, with forty thousand pounds a year, and happiness wherever he turned him! My reflection is, that it is folly to be unhappy at any thing, when felicity itself is such a phantom!" (1) She was related to the Rev. Joseph Spence, the friend of Pope, and author of "Polymetis," "Anecdotes," &c.; who had been travelling tutor to Henry Earl of Lincoln, afterwards second Duke of Newcastle. In writing to Lord Hertford, on the 3d of November, Horace Walpole says, "Hogarth is dead, and so is Mrs. Spence, who lived with the Duchess of Newcastle. She had saved twenty thousand pounds, which she leaves to her sister, and after her, to Tommy Pelham;"-afterwards third Duke of Newcastle, and father of the present Duke. MR. PITT TO THE DUKE OF NEWCASTLE. [From a draught in Lady Chatham's handwriting.] MY LORD, October 1764. I AM not able to begin my answer to the letter your Grace has honoured me with, by any thing but sincere condolences upon your domestic loss of poor Mrs. Spence, and the continuance of the Duchess of Newcastle's illness, and by expressing how sensibly and deeply I feel the great public loss of the Duke of Devonshire; whose composition and virtues must have endeared him in any times, and which, in my judgment, render the loss irreparable in the present. As to the letters which your Grace has done me the honour to transmit to me, and which I herewith return inclosed, I can only present my best acknowledgments for the favourable sentiments which moved your Grace to make to me such a communication. As for the matter itself (which I perceive was not intended for my consideration), I must entreat your Grace to excuse me from offering any opinion whatever, as to the steps which you may think proper to take relating thereto. Of that your Grace, who has to consider the various personal attachments which follow you, can be only fit judge. As for my single self, I purpose to continue acting through life upon the best convictions I am able to form, and under the obligation of principles, not by the force of any particular bargains. I I presume not to judge for those, who think they see daylight to serve their country by such means; but shall continue myself, as often as I think it worth the while to go to the House, to go there free from stipulations, about every question under consideration, as well as to come out of the House as free as I entered it. I have some right to hope that your Grace will not attribute this reserve to want of confidence, having declared most explicitly, on all occasions, that whatever I think it my duty to oppose, or to promote, I shall do it independent of the sentiments of others. Continuing, then, unalterable in the way of thinking your Grace was no stranger to, not to mix myself, nor to suffer others to mix me, in any bargains or stipulations whatever, I could much have wished your Grace had not done me the great honour to ask my advice upon the matter proposed to your Grace; and I humbly and earnestly entreat, that, for the future, the consideration of me may not weigh at all, in any answer your Grace may have to make to propositions of a political nature. Having seen the close of last session, and the system of that great war, in which my share of the ministry was so largely arraigned, given up by silence in a full House, I have little thoughts of beginning the world again upon a new centre of union. Your Grace will not, I trust, wonder, if after so recent and so strange a phenomenon in politics, I have no disposition to quit the free condition of a man standing single, and daring to appeal to his country at large, upon the soundness of his principles and the rectitude of his conduct. Lady Chatham joins with me, in desiring to assure the Duchess of Newcastle of respectful compliments and sincere wishes for her Grace's speedy and entire recovery. I have been ailing some days, though not confined. The young tribe are infinitely honoured by your Grace's kind remembrance of them, and are all, thank God, well. I have the honour to remain, with perfect respect, yours &c., W. PITT. (1) (1) In the following month, the office of master of the rolls was given to Sir Thomas Sewell, and Mr. Charles Yorke received a patent of precedency, by which he took place at the bar, next to the attorney-general. The several changes, at this time in agitation, are detailed in the following letter from the Right Hon. William Gerard Hamilton to Mr. Calcraft; being the first of the series referred to in the advertisement to the present volume. For a brief notice of Mr. Hamilton, who, from the extraordinary impression made by his first and almost only speech in parliament, obtained the appellation of Single Speech Hamilton, see vol. i., p. 126. He was, at this time, chancellor of the exchequer of Ireland. "THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM GERARD HAMILTON TO JOHN CALCRAFT, ESQ. "St. James's Street, December 1, 1764. "DEAR CALCRAFT, "I WRITE to you, not because I have any thing to say, but lest you should suspect me of being, what you will never find me, inattentive to your commands. The appointment to the rolls, you knew before you left London. After all that had passed, it surprised every one exceedingly, and I am told no one more than Sewell himself, who had never applied for it, and who had no idea that he was in the contemplation of government, till the acceptance of the office was proposed to him by the chancellor and Lord Mansfield jointly. Many of his friends, however, wonder that he did not decline it, as he was in full business at the chancery bar, by which he was supposed to have made between three and four thousand pounds per THE REV. PAUL SHENTON TO MR. PITT. HONOURED SIR, Hartlipp, near Chatham. I AM a clergyman, and a sincere well-wisher to the glorious society in Albemarle-street, and to all annum, and as he takes the rolls without any additional salary, by which it is narrowed to a mere two thousand five hundred per annum; his predecessor in that office* having constantly kept the leases under him filled up every year, so that none of them will expire for twenty-one years to come. I perceive it is the language of administration to commend highly Norton's behaviour, during the course of this transaction. They pretend to say, that he was so pliant as to offer to accommodate government in any way they pleased; that he did not wish for the rolls, but would accept of them, if they desired it; and that he was so prodigiously delicate, as to declare he could think of no addition that was personal, and to himself, but that before he submitted to take it, it must be annexed to the office. "Mr. Yorke's patent of precedency, by himself and his friends, is stated as a piece of very disinterested conduct; but is considered, by all the rest of the world in a very different light. His having a promise of being chancellor is asserted, and denied, exactly as people are differently affected to him; but the opinion of his being to succeed his brother as teller of the exchequer gains credit. Sandwich, it is said, is very tenacious as to the stewardship of Cambridge. I profess I have no idea of Norton's declining any offer of solid advantage, or of Sandwich's avidity in the pursuit of unprofitable and barren honour. I should suspect that he would make the same answer that Bell Boyle+ did, when it was proposed to him to be a privy-councillor, 'That he had determined never to accept of an honour, while * Sir Thomas Clarke. Many years chancellor of the Irish exchequer. In 1756, he was created Earl of Shannon, and died in 1764. |