At the council Sir Spencer took Walpole aside, and begged of him, as a speech would be necessary for the King in Council, that, as Sir Robert was more accustomed to that sort of composition than himself, he should go into another room, and make a draft of the speech. Sir Robert retired to draw up his paper, and Sir Spencer went to Leicester Fields, where the King and Queen were already, followed by all who had any thing to ask, or any thing to hope—a definition which seems to have included the whole of what, in later parlance, are called the fashionable world. Whether the present sincerity of court life is purer than of old may be doubtful, but the older manners were certainly the more barefaced. When the new premier was returning to his coach he walked through a lane of “bowers,” all shouldering each other to pay adoration to the new idol. During the four days of the King’s remaining in town, Leicester House, which used to be a desert, was “thronged from morning till night, like the ‘Change at noon.’” But Walpole walked through those rooms “as if they had been empty.” The same people who were officiously, a-week before, crowding the way to flatter his prosperity, were now getting out of it to avoid sharing his disgrace. Horace Walpole says, that his mother could not make her way to pay her respects to the King and Queen between the scornful backs and elbows of her late devotees, nor could approach nearer to the Queen than the third or fourth row, until the Queen cried out,—“There, I am sure I see a friend.” The torrent then divided, and shrank to either side. In short, Walpole, with his brother Horace, ambassador to France, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Townshend, the two Secretaries of State, were all conceived to be as much undone, as a pasha on the arrival of the janizary with the bowstring. The evidences, it must be owned, seemed remarkably strong. The King had openly, and more than once, called Walpole “rogue and rascal;” he had called the ambassador “a scoundrel and a fool;” he had declared his utter contempt for the Duke, and his determination never to forgive him. Townshend fared still worse. The King looked on him to be no more an honest man than an able minister, and attributed all the confusion in foreign affairs to the heat of his temper and his scanty genius, to the strength of his passions and the weakness of his understanding. There can be no doubt that a minister of foreign affairs, with those qualities, might become a very mischievous animal.