A Bill was brought in, limiting the King's choice of a regent to the Queen or any other person of the royal family, and a question arose whether the Princess Dowager was a member of the royal family. When this was decided in the affirmative, the Duke of Bedford, who was anxious to prevent Bute from the exercise of even indirect control of affairs, persuaded Lord Halifax and Lord Sandwich to tell the King that, if the Princess Dowager's name were included, the House of Commons would reject it. The King, desirous to avoid the chance of such an insult to his mother, yielded to the ministers' representations, and the Princess Dowager was pointedly excluded. That is one version of the story, but Lord Hardwicke gives another. After stating that the Duke of Cumberland was much hurt that the princes of the blood were not to be named in the Council of Regency, he relates, "While the Regency Bill was in the House of Lords, the clause naming the King's brothers was concerted, with the Duke of Cumberland, unknown to the ministry till the King sent it to them. They, to return the compliment, framed the clause for omitting the Princess Dowager, and procured the King's consent to it. This raised a storm in the interior of the palaces; and the result of it, after many intrigues and jarrings, was the overthrow of that administration."[298] Walpole, on the other hand, thought that ministers conceived that the omission of the Princess would be universally approved. "They flattered themselves with acquiring such popularity by that act, that the King would not dare to remove them."[299] Whether the motive was desire of popularity or revenge, the move was a great mistake. George soon learnt that the danger was purely fictitious, and thereupon, with tears in his eyes, he begged Grenville to reinsert the name of the Princess Dowager; but the Prime Minister, though he had been no party to the manoeuvre practised by the secretaries of state, declined to abandon his colleagues, and would undertake to give way only if the House of Commons pressed the point. In the Lords the Duke of Richmond had moved that the regency should consist of the Queen, the Princess Dowager and all the descendants of the late King usually in England, and Lord Halifax accepted the Duke's words with the single omission of the Princess Dowager, to which amendment the House agreed. "The astonishment of the world is not to be described," Walpole wrote to Lord Hertford, "Lord Bute's friends are thunderstruck; the Duke of Bedford almost danced about the House for joy." The surprise of the friends of the Princess Dowager, however, soon gave way to indignation, and, during the second reading of the Bill in the House of Commons, Morton, the member for Abingdon and Chief Justice of Chester, well known to be in the excluded lady's confidence, moved, with the King's approval and at the suggestion of Lord Northington, the insertion of her Royal Highness's name, which,