The winter of this great year was not memorable. I shall briefly skim the events of it. The Chancellorship of Oxford was vacant by the death of Lord Arran.[33] The candidates were the Earls of Westmoreland[34] and Lichfield,[35] and Trevor, Bishop of Durham. The last, who had the appearance of a Court-candidate, was yet Tory enough not to make him despair of success. Lord Lichfield’s education, principles, and connexions were still more favourable to _his_ hopes. He lived in the neighbourhood, was unalterably good-humoured, and if he did not make the figure that his youth had promised, the Jacobites could not reproach him, as he had drowned his parts in the jovial promotion of their cause--but of late he had warped a little from what they thought loyalty. Lord Westmoreland was an aged man, of gravity and dignity, married to a Cavendish, and formerly so attached to the House of Hanover, that he commanded the very body of troops which King George I. had been obliged to send to Oxford to teach the University the only kind of passive obedience which they did not approve. But having fallen into the intimacy of Lord Chesterfield and Lord Cobham during the Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, his regiment[36] was taken from him, and his resentment, which was not so versatile as theirs, had led him to imbibe all the nonsensical tenets of the Jacobites. They wanted a representative, and he was a comely one. The choice accordingly fell on him, after Lord Lichfield, who divided the Tories, had flung his interest into that scale to prevent the election of the Bishop. The cloud which had hung over General Conway since the disappointment at Rochfort began to disperse. He was commissioned to meet at Sluys Monsieur de Bareil, who commanded in French Flanders, and to settle a cartel for the exchange of prisoners. The distresses of France had obliged that Crown to withdraw their allowance from their prisoners here, who were so numerous as to make that scanty stipend an object: it seemed none to the generosity of this country to replace it--private and voluntary subscriptions[37] were even made for their relief. The cartel was immediately and satisfactorily settled: yet as Mr. Pitt could not digest the smallest deviation from his plans, the essence of which was rashness, and as he wisely was desirous of inspiring the most romantic valour into our officers and troops, nothing could prevail on him to trust another enterprise to Mr. Conway, who panted for an opportunity of encountering the rudest dangers that Mr. Pitt could chalk out. But Conway was still crossed; and even Moyston, who pleaded ignorance of his profession, to excuse himself from being employed on the West Indian expeditions, was, by the favour of Newcastle, whose creature he then was, preferred to Conway for service in Germany.