Lord Hardwicke had been appointed one of the Regency, on the King’s absence in Germany. And his views of the crisis were gloomy enough. In a letter to Lord Glenorchy (August 15) he says, “On Tuesday last we received advice from the Duke of Argyle and my Lord Justice Clerk, that the young Pretender was landed in the north-west parts of the Highlands. He is said to have come in a single ship of 16 or 18 guns, attended by about 70 persons, among whom are Lord Tullibardine and old Lochiel. When I look round me, and consider our whole situation, _our all appears to be at stake_.” “The yachts sailed this morning for the King, who has declared he will set out from Hanover, as soon as he has heard they have arrived on the other side.” This was desponding language from so eminent a person, but it was produced by deeper feelings than alarm at the landing of a few people in the north, though with a prince at their head. The plain truth, and no man was better aware of it than Hardwicke, was, that the conduct of the late Cabinet had utterly disgusted the nation. The contempt justly felt for Walpole had spread to higher objects; and the nation looked with an ominous quietude on the coming struggle between the young Chevalier and the possessor of the throne. As if the factions of parliament had been preparing for the success of the Stuarts, all their efforts for the last ten years had been directed to dismantle the country; all their harangues were turned to extinguishing the army, which they described as at once ruinous to the finances, and dangerous to the liberties of the country. Probably there was not a man of all those declaimers who believed a single syllable which he uttered; but “Reduction” was the party cry. With France in immense military power; with the Stuarts living under its protection; with the whole force of Popery intriguing throughout the country; and with a great number of weak people, who thought that their consciences called for the return of the exiled dynasty in the person of the Pretender, the reduction of the national defences by the ministry fell little short of treason. But when the intelligence of the prince’s arrival was brought to London, the kingdom seems to have been left almost without a soldier; every battalion being engaged in the lingering war in Germany. The King had not added to the strength of his government; his passion for going to Hanover had occasioned obvious public inconvenience, and his absence at the moment of public peril was felt with peculiar irritability. The Chancellor, on this subject, after alluding to his recovery from a slight illness, says, “Would to God, the state of our affairs were as much mended; but the clouds continue as black as ever; and how soon the storm may burst on us, we know not.”