The scandal and also the evil effects of his political vices were greatly increased by that total want of decorum which Burke has justly noted as the weakest point of his character. In this respect his public and private life resembled one another. That he lived for many years in open adultery and indulged to excess in the pleasures of the table were facts which in the early part of the eighteenth century were in themselves not likely to excite much attention; but his boisterous revelries at Houghton exceeded even the ordinary license of the country squires of his time, and the gross sensuality of his conversation was conspicuous in one of the coarsest periods of English history. When he did not talk of business, it was said, he talked of women; politics and obscenity were his tastes. There seldom was a court less addicted to prudery than that of George II, but even its tolerance was somewhat strained by a minister who jested with the queen upon the infidelity of her husband; who advised her on one occasion to bring to court a beautiful but silly woman as a “safe fool” for the king to fall in love with; who, on the death of the queen, urged her daughters to summon without delay the two mistresses of the king in order to distract the mind of their father; who at the same time avowed, with a brutal frankness, as the scheme of his future policy, that though he had been for the wife against the mistress, he would be henceforth for the mistress against the daughters. In society he had the weakness of wishing to be thought a man of gallantry and fashion, and his awkward addresses, rendered the more ludicrous by a singularly corpulent and ungraceful person, as well as the extreme coarseness into which he usually glided when speaking to and of women, drew down upon him much ridicule and some contempt. His estimate of political integrity was very similar to his estimate of female virtue. He governed by means of an assembly which was saturated with corruption, and he fully acquiesced in its conditions and resisted every attempt to improve it. He appears to have cordially accepted the maxim that government must be carried on by corruption or by force, and he deliberately made the former the basis of his rule. He bribed George II by obtaining for him a civil list exceeding by more than one hundred thousand pounds a year that of his father. He bribed the queen by securing for her a jointure of one hundred thousand pounds a year, when his rival, Sir Spencer Compton, could only venture to promise sixty thousand pounds. He bribed the dissenting ministers to silence by the Regium Donum for the benefit of their widows. He employed the vast patronage of the crown uniformly and steadily with the single view of sustaining his political position, and there can be no doubt that a large proportion of the immense expenditure of secret-service money during his administration was devoted to the direct purchase of members of Parliament.