The Ministers, on the other hand, wore a good countenance, and were as alert as their adversaries were supine and lifeless. To procure votes, to work underground, to write letters, dispatch messengers, and collect all possible forces, this was the fort and excellence of Sandwich’s genius. He and Rigby were desperate, and Grenville little less so. They soon perceived the want of discipline in the enemy’s troops, and the insufficiency of their commanders. With some address of their own, and with the defect of it in their opponents, they weathered the session, obtained full power, and showed that they dared to make use of it despotically. On the very day of the last great debate in the House of Commons, Lord Lyttelton, seconded by the Duke of Grafton, acquainted the Lords that on the following Tuesday he should lay a complaint before them against a new book called _Droit le Roi_. This pestilent treatise was a collection from old statutes and obsolete customs of the darkest and most arbitrary ages of whatever tended, or had tended, to show and uphold the prerogative of the Crown. The fulsome flattery and servility of ancient lawyers in every reign were amassed together, and shoved upon the world as the standing law of England; no retrospect had to all the immunities obtained since by the Civil War, by the Revolution, and by various other struggles of Parliaments with the Crown. Such a code obtruded on the Crown, as a codicil to the stretch of General Warrants, spoke for itself. It was incense laid on an altar erected to power on which human sacrifices had already been offered. Without metaphor, such a compilation proved that prerogative must have been the object of the Court before such gross adulation could dare to step forth in the face of both Houses of Parliament. The author was one Brecknock, a retainer of the law, and a hackney writer. As no attempt was made to prove whether he wrote by instigation, it remained problematic. Certain it is, that he soon afterwards attached himself to the Earl of Northumberland.[443] On the 21st, Lord Lyttelton made his complaint, and moved for a censure of the book as Jacobitical, and violating the Bill of Rights, and the Revolution. Ministers, he said, ought to have taken notice of it; but they who had fallen so severely on seditious pamphlets, had overlooked this tract, so subversive of all liberty. Lord Dartmouth treated the book with still more severity. Lord Halifax affected to go farther, but complained of Lord Lyttelton for not acquainting him with his intention. Lord Marchmont to the censure proposed to tack a compliment to the King on his love of liberty; for so servile are some men, that they cannot condemn flattery without making use of it.[444] The book, thus attacked on one side and given up on the other, was sentenced to be burnt, and the author ordered to be taken into custody. The latter part of the sentence nobody took any pains to execute.