The decision of the press was against the court, but highly acceptable to the people. Prince George, though himself an occasional conformist, was not ashamed to go to the House and vote for the bill;[470] yet even this singular proof of the Queen’s good wishes towards the measure could not save it. The commercial part of the nation were warm in their dislike to its principles and details. Lord Somers, in a celebrated speech, in which he designated the great body of merchants, tradesmen, and mechanics, as “the nation,” denounced the measure. Lord Wharton lent the aid of his forcible eloquence to advocate the cause of toleration. His speech was strongly characteristic. “Men’s minds,” he argued, “are different, and their sentiments of divine worship, various. It were, indeed, to be wished, but is hardly to be expected, that men were all of one opinion. Many people like variety, as I myself do, provided it be not injurious to the public.” It was not long after these debates, that these two lords, “having,” says Cunningham, “over-strained their voices in the heat of debates in Parliament, fell into dangerous sickness.”[471] Such was the violence with which the discussion was carried on. The loss of the bill was a great mortification to the Tories; and Lord Rochester, about this time, resigned his appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, it was said, chiefly from his unwillingness to leave England, lest the church should be betrayed in his absence. But it was with more truth supposed, that jealousy of Lord Godolphin, and vexation at the Queen’s not making Rochester her sole director and adviser, had a share in producing his lordship’s resignation. This, “if true,” says the Duchess, “affords a remarkable instance how much self-love and conceit can blind even a man of sense; for such, by his own party at least, he was esteemed to be. I don’t wonder he should like power, (it is what most people are fond of,) or that, being related to the Queen, he should expect a particular consideration: this was very natural and very reasonable, if he had behaved himself to her as he ought. But when one considers that his relation to her was by such a sort of accident, and that his conduct had been so very extraordinary, it is an amazing thing that he should imagine that he was to domineer over the Queen and everybody else, as he did over his own family.”[472] “Whether the church was in any danger or _not_ before,” adds the Duchess, contemptuously, “it could not be questioned by any good churchman but it _now_ began to be in some peril, when my Lord Rochester was no longer in place, nor in the council.”[473]