a year, so that, all told, the prince's income
available for spending purposes was but 53,000 pounds a year. And yet,
they pleaded pathetically, the yearly expense of the prince's household,
acknowledged and ratified by the King himself, came to 63,000 pounds
without allowing his Royal Highness one shilling for the indulgence of
that generous and charitable disposition with which Heaven had so
bounteously endowed him.

[Sidenote: Wealthy King; semi-starved people]

Walpole's instinct had conducted him right. The reading of the message,
which Walpole delivered with great rhetorical effect, carried confusion
into the Tory ranks. Two hundred and four members voted for the Address,
two hundred and thirty-four voted against it. The King's friends were in
a majority of thirty. Archdeacon Coxe in his "Life of Walpole" gives it
as his opinion that the victory was obtained because some forty-five of
the Tories quitted the House in a body before the division, believing
that they were thus acting on constitutional principles, and that the
interference of the House of Commons would be an unconstitutional,
democratic, and dangerous innovation. But it is hardly possible to
believe that the managers of the prince's case could have been kept in
total ignorance up to the last moment of the fact that forty-five Tories
were determined to regard the interference of Parliament as
unconstitutional, and to abstain from taking part in the division. It is
declared to be positively certain that the "whips," as we should now call
them, of the prince's party had canvassed every man on their own side, if
not on both sides. They could not have made up anything like the number
they announced in anticipation to the prince if they had taken into
account forty-five probable or possible abstentions among their own men.
The truth evidently is that the reading of the King's message compelled a
good many Tories to withdraw who already were somewhat uncertain as to
the constitutionalism, in the Tory sense, of the course their leaders
were taking. They would probably have swallowed {89} their scruples but
for the message; that dexterous stroke of policy was too much for them.
How can we--they probably thus reasoned with themselves--back up to the
last a prince who positively refused to listen to the offer of a
compromise spontaneously made by his father?

Money went much further in those days than it does in ours. Fifty
thousand pounds a year must