Notwithstanding these various obstacles, the necessity of some provision surmounted all impediments; and the very opposition made by the Ministers did but serve to fix the irresolution of the Favourite. I saw that this was the favourable moment for bringing out the half-concealed, and, by consequence, for producing a total, rupture between Lord Bute and the Ministers. I early went to Lord Holland, and asked him why they did not think of a Regency-bill? He said he had pressed it on Lord Bute and Lord Mansfield, but the latter was too timid to propose it. That he himself had written twice to Lord Bute on that subject, and had given him leave to show his letters to the King, which he believed he had _not_ done: himself, however, should not desist from pressing it, as he owned he believed the King in a consumption, and not likely to live a year. We then talked over all the considerable persons, and how their affections would probably lie on such a question. Among others I named Lord Granby, and said, he was wholly Grenville’s. “Yes,” replied Lord Holland, “and should the King die, might, if he had sense enough, be king himself; and now,” said he, “you see the wisdom of not letting any of the princes of the blood be at the head of the Army.” I was not so dull as not to see deeper into this hint. It informed me why Mr. Conway had been removed out of the Army with so much alacrity. It was a context to what Grenville himself had dropped to me on that head, “_that the King could not trust his Army in such hands_:”--that is, the Court was determined to insure the Army for whatever purposes they might have occasion to employ it in. Another of Lord Bute’s creatures told me about the same time that Grenville was grown too powerful in the House of Commons. I own I did not think the Constitution quite ruined, when the House of Commons could make a Minister formidable to the Crown. These and such like accidental passages discover how deep the views of the Court had gone. How happy for the nation that they who had laid such plans were so unequal to the execution!