. Sir Robert Walpole then endeavoured to
demonstrate, that the annual sum of fifty thousand pounds was as much
as the king could afford to allow for the prince's maintenance; and he
expatiated upon the bad consequences that might ensue, if the son should
be rendered altogether independent of the father.

These suggestions did not pass unanswered. Sir Robert Walpole had
asserted, that the parliament had no right to interfere in the creation
or maintenance of a prince of Wales; and that in the case of Richard
II., who, upon the death of his father, the Black Prince, was created
prince of Wales, in consequence of an address or petition from
parliament, that measure was in all probability directed by the king
himself. In answer to this assertion, it was observed, that probably the
king would not have been so forward in creating his grandson prince of
Wales, if he had not been forced into this step by his parliament; for
Edward in his old age fell into a sort of love dotage, and gave himself
entirely up to the management of his mistress, Alice Pierce, and his
second son, the duke of Lancaster; a circumstance that raised a most
reasonable jealousy in the Black Prince, at that time on his death-bed,
who could not but be anxious about the safety and right of his only son,
whom he found he was soon to leave a child in the hands of a doating
grandfather and an ambitious aspiring uncle. The supporters of the
motion observed, that the allowance of fifty thousand pounds was not
sufficient to defray the prince's yearly expense, without alloting
one shilling for acts of charity and munificence; and that the several
deductions for land taxes and fees reduced it to forty-three thousand
pounds. They affirmed, that his whole income, including the revenues of
the duchy of Cornwall, did not exceed fifty-two thousand pounds a-year,
though, by his majesty's own regulation, the expense of the prince's
household amounted to sixty-three thousand. They proved that the produce
of the civil list exceeded nine hundred thousand pounds, a sum above
one hundred thousand pounds a-year more than was enjoyed by his late
majesty; and that, in the first year of the late king, the whole expense
of his household and civil government did not much exceed four hundred
and fifty thousand pounds a-year. They observed, that the parliament
added one hundred and forty thousand pounds annually for acts of charity
and bounty, together with the article of secret-service