After these Debates, the Parliament adjourned for the Christmas holidays, during which the changes in the Administration were settled. Charles Townshend was dismissed: the Duke of Bedford was persuaded by Mr. Fox’s arts and friends to ask the exalted post of Lord Privy Seal for the Duchess’s brother, Lord Gower--a vast promotion for so young a man! Mr. Fox would have engaged his Grace to promise to drop all asperity to the Duke of Newcastle, but he frankly refused. The ductile Duke of Marlborough had ceded the Privy Seal, to accommodate this measure, and took the Ordnance with little ceremony from General Ligonier: a violence, deservedly esteemed hard--and not judicious, for the representative of the great Marlborough to dispossess almost the only man in England who approached the services of that hero, and who had the additional merit, though a Frenchman, of having saved the country[50] which had so humbled his own. The old man felt it sensibly--but as the King always consulted him on military affairs preferably to his son the Duke, of whom he could not stifle a little jealousy--the Duke, still less disposed to check a jealousy of preference, eagerly countenanced the removal of Ligonier. The latter had all the gallant gaiety of his nation. Polished from foppery by age, and by living in a more thinking country, he was universally beloved and respected. His successor, the Duke of Marlborough, had virtues and sense enough to deserve esteem, but always lost it by forfeiting respect. He was honest and generous; capable of giving the most judicious advice, and of following the worst. His profusion was never well directed, and a variety of changes in his political conduct having never been weighed previously, or preserved subsequently, joined to the greatest bashfulness and indistinction in his articulation, had confirmed the world in a very mean opinion of his understanding.