sor]

Wilkes in exile had ceased to exist in the minds of the King's
Ministry. In Naples or in Paris he was as little to be feared as
Churchill in his grave. An insolent subject had presumed directly to
attack the King's advisers and indirectly the King himself, and the
insolent subject was a fugitive, a broken, powerless man. The young
King might well be pleased with the success of his policy. In
pursuance of that policy he had reduced the great fabric of the Whig
party to a ruin, and had driven the factious demagogue who opposed him
into an ignominious obscurity. To a temper flushed by two such
triumphs opposition of any kind was well-nigh welcome for the pleasure
of crushing it, and was never less likely to be encountered in a spirit
of conciliation. Yet the King was destined in the very glow of his
success to find himself face to face with an opposition which he was
not able to crush, and on which any attempt at conciliation was but so
much waste of time. The King's new and formidable opponent was his own
chief minister.

When Bute, perhaps in fear for his life, perhaps in despair at his
unpopularity, resigned the office he filled so ill, he hoped to find in
his successor Grenville a supple and responsive creature, through whom
Bute would still be as powerful as before. Bute had to taste a bitter
disappointment. Grenville's gloomy spirit and narrow mind unfitted
him, indeed, for the office he was called upon to hold, but they
afforded him a stubbornness which declined to recognize either the
authority of the favorite or the authority of the favorite's master.
By the time that Grenville had been two years in office the King hated
him as {72} bitterly as he had ever hated Pitt. If Bute was impotently
furious to find himself discarded and despised by his intended tool,
the King was still more exasperated to find that the King's servant
proposed to be the King's master. Grenville was a good lawyer and a
good man of business, but he was extremely dull and extremely tactless,
and he was at as much pains to offend the King as if he intended
offence. He was overbearing in manner to a monarch who was himself
overbearing; he badgered him with long rambling discourses upon his
royal duty; he deliberately wounded him in his two warmest affections,
his love for his mother and his regard for Bute. Grenville was right
enough in his objection to the undue influence of Bute, but his
animadversions came with a bad grac