When the Duke had set himself to restore the discipline of the army, and bring it nearer to the standard of German severity, he found it necessary to reform the military code, that whatever despotism he had a mind to establish might be grounded in an appearance of law. The Secretary at War, with a few General Officers, was ordered to revise the Mutiny Bill, and (if one may judge by their execution of this commission) to double the rigour of it. The penalty of death came over as often as the curses in the Commination on Ash-Wednesday. Oaths of secrecy were imposed on Courts Martial; and even officers on half-pay were for the future to be subject to all the jurisdiction of military law. My Lord Anson, who governed at the Admiralty Board, was struck with so amiable a pattern, and would have chained down his tars to a like oar; but it raised such a ferment in that boisterous profession, that the Ministry were forced to drop several of the strongest articles, to quiet the tempest that this innovation had caused. The Mutiny Bill was likely to pass with less noise; when Colonel Richard Lyttleton, intending mischief, though without seeing half way into the storm he was raising, took notice of the extraordinary novelties and severity of these modern regulations. He was a younger brother of the pious George Lyttelton, with less appearance of, but with not much more real integrity. He was grown a favourite of the Prince of Wales by a forwardness of flattery that had revolted even the Duke, at whose expense on some disobligations he was now paying court to the elder brother. He was seconded by Colonel George Townshend, eldest son of my Lord Townshend, a very particular young man, who, with much oddness, some humour, no knowledge, great fickleness, greater want of judgment, and with still more disposition to ridicule, had once or twice promised to make a good speaker. He was governed by his mother, the famous Lady Townshend,[47] who having been neglected by the Duke, after some overtures of civility to him, had dipped into all the excess of Scotch Jacobitism, and employed all her wit and malice, the latter of which, without any derogation to the former, had vastly the ascendant, to propagate the Duke’s unpopularity. The Pelhams, who were very near as ill with her, had placed their nephew, Mr. Townshend, in the Duke’s family, to remove him from her influence; and the Duke had softened his haughtiness as much as possible to second their views. But my Lady Townshend’s resentments were not at all disappointed by this notable scheme, nor by the opportunities it gave her son of learning more of his commander’s temper, nor by the credit it gave to any reflections on him when authorized by, or coming directly from one of his own servants and a supposed favourite. The Duke has often said since, that he was never hurt but by the ingratitude[48] of Mr. Townshend and Lord Robert Sutton, whom he had made the greatest efforts to oblige.