The favour of Lord Bute was scarce sooner known, than the connexions of Pitt and Legge with him. The mystery of Pitt’s breach with Fox was at once unravelled; and a Court secret of that nature was not likely long to escape the penetration of Legge, who wormed himself into every intrigue where his industry and subservience could recommend him--yet Legge had not more application to power, than Newcastle’s jealousy of it. Such an entrenchment round the successor alarmed him. It was determined in his little council that the moment the Prince of Wales should be of age, he should be taken from his mother; but the secret evaporating, intimations by various channels were conveyed to the Duke of Newcastle and to the Chancellor, how much the Prince would resent any such advice being given to the King, and that it would not be easy to carry it into execution. The Prince lived shut up with his mother and Lord Bute; and must have thrown them under some difficulties: their connexion was not easily reconcileable to the devotion which they had infused into the Prince; the Princess could not wish him always present, and yet dreaded his being out of her sight. His brother Edward, who received a thousand mortifications, was seldom suffered to be with him; and Lady Augusta, now a woman, was, to facilitate some privacy for the Princess, dismissed from supping with her mother, and sent back to cheese-cakes, with her little sister Elizabeth, on pretence that meat at night would fatten her too much. The Ministers, too apt to yield when in the right, were now obstinate in the wrong place; and without knowing how to draw the King out of the difficulty into which they were pushing him, advised this extraordinary step. On May 31st, Lord Waldegrave, as the last act of his office of Governor, was sent with letters of the same tenour to the Prince and to his mother, to acquaint them that the Prince, being now of age, the King, who had ever shown the greatest kindness and affection for him, had determined to give him 40,000_l._ a-year, would settle an establishment for him, of the particulars of which he should be informed, and that his Majesty had ordered the apartments of the late Prince at Kensington and of the Queen at St. James’s to be fitted up for him: that the King would take Prince Edward too, and give him an allowance of 5000_l._ a-year.