be made, his Majesty would consider Sir Edward Hawke and Sir Jeffery Amherst. Conway, who had received the positive promise from the King, was hurt beyond measure, and the more as the King now affirmed that the promise had only been provisional. I discovered the cause of this variation. Rigby had seduced Sir Laurence Dundas, the rich Scotch Commissary, who chose nine members into Parliament, from George Grenville, and had offered to carry him and his suite to Court, if the King would promise Sir Laurence a peerage. The King, who had involved himself in so many like promises that he had tied his hands from making any, refused to comply with the demand. Rigby resented the denial in the warmest terms--said that Mr. Conway could make peers when he could not, and was the effective Minister; and he fired the Duke of Grafton’s jealousy by telling him that Lord Hertford, Mr. Conway, and I, had done this without his Grace: to others he said, that I had drawn the Duke to acquiesce, by telling him that the Bedfords would some day or other betray him. I had told him when his Grace betrayed Mr. Conway to them; since that time I had not exchanged a word with him, and utterly avoided him. Rigby only suspected this, because he knew how much reason I had to think so; and the event proved that I knew them well. I did not doubt but Rigby had sent General Fitzwilliam,[129] the first mover, to Conway to advise him to undertake Amherst’s reconciliation. If it succeeded, Amherst would be saved to the Court; if it failed, Conway was likely to be involved in the quarrel. Conway, however, laboured the point so earnestly, that he satisfied Amherst, or would have resigned his own regiment and preferments and meddled no more. This new charge, however, contributed to exasperate the Duke of Grafton’s alienation from Conway, and the Bedfords neglected nothing to inflame it. As the first year of a Parliament is chiefly engrossed by contested elections, there were two that nearly interested the Duke--one for his friend, Lord Spencer, the other for Sir James Lowther, against the Duke of Portland. It happened that Conway, who was chosen for Thetford by Grafton himself, was engaged on opposite sides in both. In the first, Sir George Rodney was antagonist to Colonel Howe, Lord Spencer’s member. Rodney had offered himself as evidence for Conway on the miscarriage at Rochford, and therefore had not been examined by the opposite side. This was a debt of gratitude, and Conway remembered it. For the Duke of Portland he had been engaged by the Cavendishes, and to Conway that family was the law and the prophets. Though I did not, whatever the Bedfords thought, wish to make a breach between Conway and the Duke of Grafton, yet I was desirous that both they and the Duke should feel the want of him. At the same time, seeing how strict that connection grew, I thought it prudent for Conway to leave a door open between him and the Rockingham faction: I