The Court, as if to balance the advantages they reaped by the feuds in the Opposition, gave a new handle to clamour by raising their desperate tool, Colonel Lutterell, to be Adjutant-General in Ireland, obliging Colonel Cunningham, who had distinguished himself by restoring the discipline and model of the Irish army, to exchange that post for a government which they forced from Colonel Gisburne for a large pension, and the promise of the next good government. Cunningham abandoned them the next year in their distress. The gratitude of the Lutterells was of another kind, and will have its place.[107] The Middlesex election was still the favourite grievance. A meeting of the freeholders of Yorkshire was advertized, in order to remonstrate, for the 26th of August, but the High Sheriff refused to summon the county; on which Lord John Cavendish and twenty-seven more, advertized a meeting for the 25th of September. When that day arrived, Charles Turner proposed a new remonstrance; but to the surprise of the most zealous, Sir George Saville talked with much moderation; and Lord John occasioned greater astonishment by advising the assembly to expect, by decency, redress from the King. The assembly, not knowing how to decipher that change of language, broke up perplexed, and content with thanking their representatives, Sir George Saville and Lascelles. The key to this mystery, never publicly divulged, was, that Lord Mansfield had opened a negotiation with Lord Rockingham, whose aunt he had married, and the Court had offered to make sacrifices of two or three of its most specious friends: but as the Marquis, who had come to town on purpose to conclude the bargain, found it by no means intended to reinstate him in the first place, the treaty broke off, after the leaders had shown how ready both sides were to give up their second-rate friends. While discord and interest thus tore in pieces the Opposition, fate was preparing to deprive them of their most important centurians. Beckford was already gone. The next was the Marquis of Granby, the idol of the army and of the populace. He died at Scarborough, October 20th: in so few months did Lord Chatham lose his tribune and his General, and was reduced to his ill-content friend, Chancellor Camden, his ill-connected brother, Lord Temple, and his worse-reconciled brother, Mr. Grenville!