May 14th, the Duke[221] acquainted the King that he would resign, who answered coldly, “Then, my Lord, I must fill up your place as well as I can.” Still Newcastle lingered; and, as he owned afterwards to the Duke of Cumberland, his friends had laboured to prevent the fatal blow. Lord Mansfield, he said, had _pleaded_ with Lord Bute for above an hour, and could not extract from him a wish that the Duke should continue in the Treasury. Fox asked Lord Mansfield if this was true? He replied, “Not an hour, for I soon saw it was to no purpose.” Thus disgraced, and disgracing himself, on the 26th the Duke of Newcastle resigned: and he, who had begun the world with heading mobs against the ministers of Queen Anne; who had braved the Heir-apparent[222] of the new family, and forced himself upon him as godfather to his son; who had recovered that Prince’s favour, and preserved power under him at the expense of every minister whom that Prince preferred; and who had been a victorious rival of another Prince of Wales;[223] was now buffeted from a fourth Court[224] by a very suitable competitor, and was reduced in his tottering old age to have recourse to those mobs and that popularity which had raised him fifty years before; and as almost the individual crisis was revolved, with a scandalous treaty and a new prospect of arbitrary power, it looked as if Newcastle thought himself young again, because the times of his youth were returned, and he was obliged to act with boys! Such pains, however, had been taken to disjoint his faction, that his exit from power was by no means attended with consolatory circumstances. The Duke of Devonshire would not resign, though he declared he would seldom or never go to council. Fox had warned him not to be too hasty in embarking in a party in which Pitt must be a principal actor; and remembering his Grace how large a share Pitt had had in planting the Tories at Court, and that, speaking of Legge, Pitt had said, “I will have no more ear for Whig grievances.” The rest of Newcastle’s friends were as little disposed to follow him: but that he might taste the full mortification of being deserted by those whom he had most obliged, whom he had most courted and most patronized, the clergy gave the most conspicuous example of ingratitude. For thirty years Newcastle had had the almost sole disposal of ecclesiastic preferments, and consequently had raised numbers of men from penury and the meanest birth to the highest honours and amplest incomes in their profession. At this very period there were not three bishops on the bench who did not owe their mitres to him. His first levée after his fall was attended but by one bishop,[225] Cornwallis of Lichfield; who being a man of quality, and by his birth entitled to expect a greater rise, did but reflect the more shame on those who owed everything to favour, and scarce one of them anything to abilities.