On the 10th, came advice that 20,000 French were ready to embark at the Isle of Rhee. Lord Rothes, and the officers on the Irish establishment, were ordered to their posts in that kingdom; whither Lord Hartington and Mr. Conway went, without ceremony, at the end of the month. 23rd.--At midnight was finished the Oxfordshire election, after hearings of near fifty days: the Jacobite members were set aside by 231 to 103. It was the year in turn for the King to go to Hanover. The French armaments, the defenceless state of the kingdom, the doubtful faith of the King of Prussia, and, above all, the age of the King, and the youth of his heir at so critical a conjuncture, everything pleaded against so rash a journey. But, as his Majesty was never despotic but in the single point of leaving his kingdom, no arguments or representations had any weight with him. When all had failed, so ridiculous a step was taken to dissuade him, that it almost grew a serious measure to advise his going. Earl Poulet notified an intention of moving the House of Lords to Address against the Hanoverian journey. However, as the Motion would not be merely ridiculous, but offensive too, Mr. Fox dissuaded him from it. He was convinced; and though he had been disgraced as much as he could be, he took a panic, and intreated Mr. Fox and Lady Yarmouth to make apologies for him to the King. Before they were well delivered, he relapsed, and assembled the Lords, and then had not resolution enough to utter his Motion. This scene was repeated two or three times: at last, on the 24th, he vented his speech, extremely modified, though he had repeated it so often in private companies, that half the House could have told him how short it fell of what he had intended. Lord Chesterfield, not famous heretofore for tenderness to Hanover, nor called on now by any obligations to undertake the office of the Ministers, represented the impropriety of the Motion, and moved to adjourn. Lord Poulet cried, “My Lords, and what is to become of my Motion?” The House burst into a laughter, and adjourned, after he had divided it singly. The next day the Lord Chamberlain forbade him the _entrées_; the Parliament was prorogued; and on the 28th, the King went abroad, leaving the Duke at the head of the Regency. This was thought an artful stroke of the Newcastle faction, as it would tie up Fox, who, by being a Cabinet Councillor, became a Regent too, from censuring, in the ensuing session, the measures of the summer, in which the Duke and he would necessarily be involved: but the truth was, that the Duke of Devonshire, terrified by old Horace Walpole at the thoughts of the King’s going abroad, had proposed the Duke for sole Regent. The Duke of Newcastle, in a panic for his power, hurried to the King, and besought him to place the Duke only first in the Regency. In fact, the nomination of him for sole Regent might have been attended with this absurdity; had the King