Walpole's victory was a very cheap affair in one sense; it cost only 900 pounds, of which 500 pounds were given to one man and 400 pounds to another. Even these two sums, Walpole used to say, were only advances. The bribed men were to have had the money at the end of the session in any case, but they took advantage of the crisis to demand their pay at once. But in another sense it was a dear, {91} a very dear, victory to the minister. The consent of the King to the offer of compromise had been extorted, more than extorted, by Walpole. Indeed, as Walpole often afterwards told the story, it was on his part not an extortion, but an actual disregard and overriding of the King's command. The King refused at the last moment to send the message to the prince; Walpole said the Peers were waiting to carry it, and that carry it they should, and he would not allow the King time to retract his former consent, and thereupon rushed off to the Lords of the Council and told them to go to the prince with the message. Even the Queen, Walpole said, had never given a real assent to the policy of the message. When the victory in the Commons was won, the King and Queen were at first well satisfied; but afterwards, when the prince became more rude and insolent in his conduct, they both blamed Walpole for it, and insisted that his policy of compromise had only filled the head and heart of the young man with pride and obstinacy, and that he regarded himself as a conqueror, even though he had been nominally conquered. The King felt bitterly about this, and the grudge he bore to Walpole was of long endurance and envenomed anger. The King and Queen would have got rid of him then if they could, Walpole thought. "I have been much nearer than you think," he said to Lord Hervey, "to throwing it all up and going to end my days at Houghton in quiet." But he also told Hervey that he believed he was of more consequence than any man before him ever was, or perhaps than any man might ever be again, and so he still held on to his place. No doubt Walpole meant that he was of more consequence than any man had been or probably would be in England. He did not mean, as Lord Hervey would seem to give out, that he believed he was a greater and more powerful man than Julius Caesar. Lord Hervey's comment, however, is interesting. "With regard to States and nations," he coldly says, "nobody's understanding is so much superior to the rest of mankind as to be missed in a week after they have gone; and, with {92} regard to particulars, there is not a great banker that breaks who does not distress more people than the disgrace or retirement of the greatest minister that ever presided in a Cabinet; nor is there a deceased ploughman who leaves a wife and a dozen brats behind him that is not lamented with greater sincerity, as well as a loss to more individuals, than any statesman that ever wore a head or deserved to lose it." There is a good deal of wholesome, although