“I began by telling him that I had done all that was in the power of money and labour, and showed him two bills for money remitted thither, before I went down, one of £1000, one of £500, besides all the money then in my steward’s hands, so that the election would cost me about £2500. In the next place, if this election stood, the borough was for ever in Tory hands; that all this was occasioned by want of proper support from the Court, and from the behaviour of the servants of the Crown.” The truth was that the Court had really defeated Dodington. Lord Poulett, a lord of the bedchamber, “had acted openly against him with all his might;” and this action on the part of the higher powers had carried the Government employees, so that “five out of the Custom-house officers gave single votes for Lord Egmont.” “The next head was--that, in spite of all, I had a fair majority of legal votes, for that the Mayor had admitted eight bad votes for Lord Egmont, and refused fifteen good ones for me; so that it was entirely in their own hands to retrieve the borough, and get rid of a troublesome opponent, if they pleased; that if the king required this piece of service, it was to be done, and the borough put into Whig hands, and under his influence, without any stretch of power.” The intricacies of electioneering are supplanted by those of statecraft from this point; Bubb’s diary rehearses--spread over four months--the reasons for and against petitioning for a just return; but it peeps out, and therein lies the rub--that Dodington has inflamed the Tories by his assistance in Dorset. Now, just at this time, the Duke of Newcastle sought to make friends with the opposition; and it occurred to this slippery tactician that, as Dodington had had the sole onus of trying to keep out the Tories and failed, if he allowed Lord Egmont to retain his seat for Bridgwater, it would purchase his allegiance without the cost and inconvenience of putting some post or piece of state preferment at his disposal. Thus did Dodington sacrifice both his money and pains without conciliating the favour of the king, with whom the ambitious courtier was the reverse of popular. One important feature of electioneering, missing in the later days, was the edifying practice of “Burning a Prime Minister,” making effigies of unpopular candidates and obnoxious ministers for burnt-offerings.