Why did Pitt take this line? If he wished for office (as he undoubtedly did), it seemed madness: he was committing something like suicide. But pique, as Sir George Savile well said, 'is the spur the devil rides the noblest tempers with.' He was unquestionably angry at his exclusion from office, which he had, no doubt, been told was due to the King. He was justly indignant that the long-continued efforts which had resulted in the overthrow of Walpole's overweening power had simply resulted in the shuffle of a few offices, and that to the victors the spoil had been denied; the sole and execrable minister Walpole had been replaced by a much less sole but not less execrable minister in Carteret. All this was gall to a man who had been among the most formidable in the heat of battle. That heat was now over, and the vanquished were picnicking with a few selected victors, while Pitt and his friends were left to cool themselves on the deserted battlefield. 'They tell me,' said Lord George Bentinck, in 1846, 'that I shall save fifteen hundred a year by Free Trade. I don't care for that. What I cannot bear is being sold.' Pitt, too, could not bear being sold. That pique and a not ignoble rage had much to do with this philippic we may well assume. But we may also surmise that his attitude was not devoid of calculation. The veto of George II. was not to be removed by deference, so he would, like another Hannibal, destroy the obstacle with vinegar. The King had been exasperated by the lambent play of Pitt's earlier insinuations; he should be made to know how Pitt had then held his hand, what thunderbolts he had kept in reserve, what unspeakable things awaited the Prince who should frown on him. 'All the things I have told you,' said Sancho Panza, 'are tarts and cheese-cakes to what remains behind.' George II. should learn that the innuendoes that Pitt had levelled at him before were tarts and cheesecakes compared to what he had the power of producing. Pitt, in a word, had made up his mind that his only means of achieving his objects was by terror. He had thrown away the scabbard. Moreover, he was appealing from the Court to the people. The Court was foreign, immoral, and unpopular: the very name of Hanover was detested. And although Pitt's actual words reached the people late or not at all, there was an echo which was audible, and made known all through the three kingdoms that there was within the walls of Parliament an intrepid, unbribed, perhaps incorruptible orator who feared the face of no man, and who was embodying in fiery words the antipathies and distrusts of the nation. CHAPTER VIII. Let us consider for a moment the character of the Sovereign whom Pitt had set himself to bait.