With the accession of King George the Second the reign of the military tailor in England began in good earnest. George did not love his brother-in-law, Frederick William, but he envied him not a little the reputation of his army. He had little capacity for military duties beyond the sphere of a sergeant-major, though he had won his spurs gallantly enough at the head of a squadron at Oudenarde, but being ambitious of military distinction he threw himself with all the enthusiasm of a narrow nature into the pleasing excitement of dressing his army. Before he had been on the throne four months he announced his desire that every regiment should have "fixed clothing," and by a single edict swept away all lace from the buff belts of the cavalry.[122] In the following year the headdress of the Horse-Grenadiers was altered,[123] and in the next year again the Foot Guards were prohibited from wearing perukes except in case of sickness.[124] And so the process went on, barely interrupted even by war, until finally it culminated in an elaborate table of regulations as to colours, clothing, facings, and lace,[125] and, to the great good fortune of posterity, in the depiction of a private of almost every regiment in the Army. In such trifles were the great lessons taught by Marlborough forgotten. The great Duke's mantle had descended on one man, but even if he had been suffered to wear it, the Secretary-at-War would not have heeded him the more. Until 1742 he remained obscure, and meanwhile the better known officers died fast. Cadogan, the Duke's successor, died in 1726, and was laid with his great chief in Henry the Seventh's chapel, not with military pomp, but, by his own express desire, with all possible privacy. It should seem that he shrank above all things from even the semblance of a share in his master's glory. Of the veterans who outlived him, Lord Orkney and the Duke of Argyll were made field-marshals in 1736, while Wade, the kindly administrator of the Highlands, and Lord Stair took their part, as shall be seen, in the next war. Beyond them no one knew whither to look for an English general. Some perhaps counted on little Prince William who, dressed as a corporal, was often to be seen drilling a miniature company of the Coldstream Guards,[126] not yet dreaming that he would one day be called the butcher of Culloden. None thought of looking into a little house at Westerham, in Kent, where Colonel Edward Wolfe, a veteran of Flanders, was educating his little son James, a remarkably ugly boy with a shock of red hair and a turned-up nose, who had been born to him in 1727. None guessed again that a natural genius for war lay in another boy two years older than Wolfe, who was the scourge of every orchard, the terror of every tradesman, and the ringleader of all mischief in and about Market Drayton, and who bore the name of Robert Clive. Yet these two, the one frail and delicate, the other an incorrigible scapegrace, were the instruments appointed to