The Duchess at first hailed with delight the rising talents of Lord Carteret, whose disinterested and aspiring mind excited her lively admiration. Upon the motion of censure upon Sir Robert Walpole, made by Mr. Sandys, her hopes of the country revived, yet she dreaded lest the influence of the minister behind the throne might continue, after a “golden bridge” had been made for him to pass over to his unhonoured retirement. She lived to see Sir Robert Walpole driven to the very threshold of the Tower, and to learn that he had been compelled to the expedient, almost unparalleled in effrontery, of offering through the Bishop of Oxford a bribe to the Prince of Wales of fifty thousand pounds, to detach him from the party by whom he had been espoused. The indignant refusal of the Prince to accept of any conditions while Sir Robert Walpole remained at the head of affairs, completed the downfal of the despised, but still indefatigable minister. The Duchess had the mortification of seeing him, in spite of contempt, protected by the sovereign, and honoured by a peerage; and still more, of learning that he had succeeded by bribes and insinuations to corrupt and divide his foes, and to frustrate the scheme of his impeachment, the only proof of public honour that had been signalised for many years.[391] Lord Carteret, her favourite, who had spoken against Walpole, in her grace’s opinion, as well as man could, who had exerted against the minister the powers of what was, in the estimation of an incomparable judge,[392] the ablest head in England, was, with Mr. Sandys, the first to embrace the offers of a court, and to accept employments and honours, upon the condition that Walpole should remain unpunished. This the Duchess, in her own manner, foretold. She who knew courtiers and statesmen well, “was confident that there was nothing Sir Robert Walpole so much desired as to secure himself by a treaty of quitting with safety;” and “that there were some so desirous to have the power, that they would give him a golden bridge to go over; and that there would be a scheme to settle a ministry from which she could not believe that England would receive any good.” Events proved the justness of this prediction.