Whatever the cause, Pulteney, having committed himself, could not retrace his steps; an iron grip constrained him. In vain did he seek to recall his patent and escape his peerage. Walpole held him fast. Pulteney had finally conquered in the long struggle of twenty years, and overthrown Sir Robert; but the prostrate Minister had from the dust worked Pulteney like a marionette. For behind all these strange scenes Walpole pulled the strings. His main object was to avoid his own impeachment, and this, in spite of the determination of the hostile majority which called for his head, he achieved; a feat little less than miraculous. The Tory candidates for office were rejected by the King, and as for the not less bitter Whigs, as '... bees, on flowers alighting, cease to hum, So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb.' They were dumb in spite of themselves. The nation, which had been excited by the hope of seeing corruption extinguished, and the advent of a new era of virtue and public spirit, was again disappointed. People saw this sublime struggle result in a jobbing distribution of such places as were vacated to the same sort of people as had vacated them, with precisely the same system. It was much the same ministry without the one great minister. Fooled once more, as so often before and since, people shrugged their shoulders, and turned their attention to other things, more honest and more practical than party politics. With the fall of Walpole this narrative is not otherwise concerned, for his successors found no post for Pitt. Two members of the Prince of Wales's household, Lords Baltimore and Archibald Hamilton, had found acceptance as members of the new administration; the King probably could not stomach more, certainly not Pitt. For long years afterwards he could not endure contact with the orator who sneered at him and at Hanover, and who even insinuated with factious injustice doubts of his personal courage. It must also be remembered that Pitt was not merely attached to the party of the Prince but to the group of Cobham. That veteran accepted for a short time a seat in the Cabinet and the command of a regiment. But his animosity against Carteret was second only to his animosity against Walpole. Carteret was a powerful, and aimed at being the controlling member of the new Government. He therefore succeeded to the position of target for the barbed arrows of Pitt and his friends which had been vacated by Walpole's retirement. Carteret, the new object of philippic, had striven hard for the succession to Walpole when Pulteney stood aside, but had been foiled by Walpole acting through the King. Lord Wilmington, whom Horace Walpole describes as a solemn debauchee and Hervey as fond only of money and eating, but who was the favourite nonentity of George II., had been fobbed off upon the party as First Minister; and the choice had its advantages. For, always incapable, he was now moribund; and so as a feeble and transient barrier