Steele’s parliamentary career was brief. He had not been long in the House before he contrived to get expelled, and gave deadly offence to the queen, by writing “The Englishman” and “The Crisis” against the Jacobite Tories. With the advent of his “Protestant hero,” George I., Steele secured patronage, knighthood, and a seat in the first parliament, where he sat for the since-notorious Boroughbridge, Yorkshire. A deeply designed stroke of electioneering policy is credited to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who excelled in the subtle tactics invaluable in these emergencies, which raised her to the level of Wharton in election fame, while promoting the success of her nominees. Lord Grimston happened to oppose her grace’s candidates. Now, Lord Grimston, as is related by Johnson, had written a heavy play, “Love in a Hollow Tree,” having become ashamed of which bantling, he did his best to suppress it:-- “The leaden crown devolved on thee, Great poet of the hollow tree.” “But the Duchess of Marlborough had kept one, and when he was against her at an election, she had a new edition of it printed, and prefixed to it, as a frontispiece, an elephant dancing on a rope; to show that his Lordship’s writing comedy was as awkward as an elephant dancing on a rope.”[37] It was so much a matter of course that everything in a man’s life should tell against him, if he had the temerity to stand for parliament, that Johnson, when interrogated by Boswell, “whether a certain act of folly would injure a friend of theirs for life?” replied, “It may perhaps, sir, be mentioned at an election,”--the duchess’s feat probably presenting itself to Johnson’s mind at the time. Hannay, in his sparkling essay on “Electioneering,” also relates the following:--“Mamma,” said a young candidate to his parent in deep confidence, one nomination day, “tell me truly, is there anything against my birth?”--an ingenious precaution in view of eventualities which the youth not imprudently employed to prepare himself for the worst, and that he might not he taken by surprise at the hustings. The Tories were forced, after their failure to proclaim the Pretender as successor to Queen Anne, to subscribe their loyalty on the accession of George I. This they did with a reservation, as hinted by their opponents, who now held the good things of the administration:-- “Your fathers, like men, who had thoughts of a Heaven, Took the Oaths in the Sense in which they were given; But you, like your Brethren the Jesuits, can find A way to evade all the ties of mankind, So that nothing but Halters your faction can bind.”