dicule. In an interview with Queen
Caroline, "when Lord Stair talked of his conscience with great
solemnity, the queen (the whole conversation being in French) cried
out: Ah, my Lord, ne me parlez point de conscience, vous me faites
evanouir."[99] As personal advancement, and not the public service, was
the ruling aim of statesmen, it is not surprising that for this
advancement no means were regarded as too low. The king's mistresses
were the object of ceaseless attentions from aspirants for office, and
sometimes were the recipients of their bribes. Treachery was the order
of the day. Bolingbroke said to Sir Robert Walpole, "that the very air
he breathed was the gift of his bounty," and then left Sir Robert to
tell the king that Walpole "was the weakest minister any prince ever
employed abroad, and the wickedest that ever had the direction of
affairs at home."[100] The Duke of Newcastle, that "living, moving,
talking caricature," stands out an exaggerated type of the common
statesmen of the time; "hereditary possessors of ennobled folly,"[101]
maintained in offices which they had no capacity to fill by corruption,
the abuse of patronage, and the control of rotten boroughs. Speaking of
the Dukes of Devonshire, Grafton, and Newcastle, Lord Hervey says[102]:
"The two first were mutes, and the last often wished so by those he
spoke for, and always by those he spoke to." George the Second
appreciated the character and objects of his advisers. He had, also, a
frank and pointed way of describing them. In his opinion Sir Robert
Walpole was "a great rogue"; Mr. Horace Walpole, ambassador to France,
was a "dirty buffoon"; Newcastle, an "impertinent fool"; Lord
Townshend, a "choleric blockhead";[103] while Lord Chesterfield was
disposed of as a "tea-table scoundrel."[104] He complained that he was
"obliged to enrich people for being rascals, and buy them not to cut
his throat."[105] "The king and queen," wrote Hervey, "looked upon
human kind as so many commodities in a market, which, without favor or
affection, they considered only in the degree they were useful, and
paid for them in that proportion--Sir Robert Walpole being sworn
appraiser to their Majesties at all these sales."[106]

The cringing subserviency of political men was equal to their
corruption. When George I died, and it was believed that Sir Spencer
Compton would succeed to the power of Sir Robert Walpole, at the king's
reception "Sir Robert walked through these roo