Walpole was now visibly approaching decline. He had become negligent of the claims of his friends, and solicitous only to conciliate his enemies. Of course, where he bought over one opponent, there were fifty others ready to fill up his place. This policy failed, and ought always to fail. At the close of the session, say the Memoirs, “the harvest of court favour was small, though the labourers were many.” The only things to give away were the Privy Seal, by the retirement of Lord Lonsdale, and the Secretaryship at War, by the dismissal of Sir William Strickland, “who was become so weak in mind and body, that his head was as much in its second infancy as his limbs.” A new source of ministerial vexation was added to the _mêlée_, by the King’s sudden determination to run over to Hanover, in spite of all remonstrance—the royal answer being always “Pooh, stuff! You think to get the better of me, but you shall not.” Walpole, who dreaded that the King, once in Hanover, would plunge the country into a war, tried to set the Queen against this untoward journey; but her Majesty, though she gave the minister fair words, was in favour of the freak. The reasons assigned by the Memoir for her conduct being those rather irreverent ones, on the part of his lordship—pride in the _éclat_ of the regency; the ease of being mistress of her hours, which was not the case for two hours together, when the King was in England; and, “besides these _agrémens_, she had the certainty of being, for six months at least, not only free from the fatigue of being obliged to entertain him for twenty hours in the twenty-four, but also from the more irksome office of being set up to receive the _quotidian_ sallies of a temper that, let it be charged by what hand it would, used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her.” But “one trouble arose from the King’s going to Hanover, which her Majesty did not at all foresee;” and which was his becoming, soon after his arrival, so much attached to a Madame Walmoden, “a married woman of the first fashion in Hanover,” that nobody in England talked of any thing but the declining power of the Queen. They might justly have talked much more of the insult of this conduct to public morals; but we shall not go further into those details. They absolutely repel the common-sense of propriety, to a degree which, we hope, will never be endurable in England. The King, however, gave her Majesty, in the long succession of his correspondence, the complete history of his passion, its progress, and his final purchase of the lady for 1000 ducats! A proof, as Lord Hervey says, more of his economy than his passion. The life of courts is stripped of its glitter a good deal by the indefatigable courtier who has here left us his reminiscences; but it requires strong evidence, to believe that the persons who constitute the officials of royal households _can_ submit to the humiliations described in these volumes.