We need not rake up all the scandals that echoed about the quiet household at Kew. The Whigs went on sounding an alarm that the Prince of Wales was brought up in Jacobite principles, a particular hullabaloo being raised by a charge that his tutor Stone had drunk the Pretender’s health twenty years back, in company with Murray, better known as Lord Mansfield. The chief reproach against Bute, as yet, seems to have been his easily supposed illicit relations with the Princess, of which there is no proof. It was after the accession, rather, that he came to be pilloried as having laid himself out to heighten the Prince’s notion of the prerogative. There can be no doubt that he had a great part in moulding the future King’s mind, and that they were really fond of each other. It is said that they took an _incognito_ tour together through England, and as far as Edinburgh and the Isle of Bute. At eighteen, when the Prince was considered fit to have done with tutors, in the new household formed for him, Waldegrave being shunted as a _persona ingrata_, the Kew influence availed to have Bute made his official mentor as Groom of the Stole. The King offered him quarters at Kensington, with a royal allowance; but the lad declared that he would stick to his mother, which seems only a way of speaking, as by this time he had a home of his own at Saville House in Leicester Fields. He was at Kew, at all events, when, starting for London on horseback one morning, he met a messenger with the news of George II.’s sudden death, confirmed presently by the appearance of the Prime Minister’s carriage on its way westwards to the new fountain of power and pensions.