Pelham complained of his idleness, saying that with him it was ‘all jollity, boyishness, and vanity,’ and that he was almost always at his seat at Woburn, Bedfordshire (Coxe, u.s. pp. 454, 460). He seems to have cared more for sport, and specially for cricket, than for politics (Walpole, Memoirs of George II, i. 43). The ministry was at once divided into the Newcastle and Bedford factions, and Bedford connected himself with the Duke of Cumberland, who had broken entirely with the Pelhams. In spite of this connection he honourably maintained the claim of the Princess of Wales to the regency, should the next king be under age at his accession. After much bickering with Newcastle he resigned the seals on 13 June 1751. The king offered him the post of president of the council, which he declined on the ground that it was impossible for him to work with the Pelhams (Correspondence, ii. 80–92; Walpole, George II, i. 161, 165–8).
After his resignation Bedford, though not personally inclined to enter on active opposition, was led by his friends to attack the government in January 1752; he resisted the scheme for a new subsidiary treaty with Saxony, and in March spoke against the bill for purchasing and colonising the Scottish forfeited estates. In conjunction with Beckford he started an anti-ministerial paper called ‘The Protestor,’ edited by James Ralph [q. v.], which first appeared in June 1753, and seems to have come to an end in the following November (Correspondence, ii. 127, 135). A reconciliation with the court was urged upon him by his duchess, his second wife, and in 1754 he received some overtures from Newcastle, then prime minister, which he peremptorily rejected. At that time he was in alliance with Henry Fox [q. v.], who, on becoming secretary of state in the autumn of 1755, persuaded him against his own judgment to support the Russian and Hessian subsidiary treaties, and vainly tried to prevail on him to accept the privy seal. Nevertheless he accepted offices for his party, for Sandwich, Gower, Richard Rigby [q. v.], his secretary and intimate friend, and others (ib. pp. 168–71, 188; Walpole, u.s. 404–5). On Newcastle's resignation soon after, Bedford tried to effect a conjunction between Fox and Pitt, and, failing in this, accepted, at the instigation of his relatives and Fox, the office of lord-lieutenant of Ireland in the administration of the Duke of Devonshire. He entered warmly into the abortive scheme for a new government under Lord Waldegrave with Fox as chancellor of the exchequer, but did not resign when Newcastle and Pitt returned to office (ib. p. 223; Correspondence, ii. 245). During the riots caused by the militia bill in June his house at Woburn was threatened, and the blues were sent down to defend it. He acted with much spirit in preventing riots in other parts of Bedfordshire (Chatham Correspondence, i. 258–60).
Bedford went to Ireland in September and opened parliament on 11 Oct. Entering on his government with excellent intentions, he declared that he would observe strict neutrality between the rival factions, and would discourage pensions and compel absentee officials to return to their duties. Owing, however, to the influence of Rigby and others, he did not fully act up to his resolves; he obtained a pension on the Irish establishment for his sister-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, and yielded to other and larger demands of a like kind. Moreover he favoured the faction of Lord Kildare [see Fitzgerald, James, first Duke of Leinster], and the primate Stone, the head of a rival party, worked against the castle. Bedford refused to transmit to England without an expression of his dissent some strong resolutions of the Irish House of Commons on absentees and other grievances, and a quarrel with the parliament ensued. Pitt, then secretary of state, approved his conduct, and recommended him to conciliate and unite the Kildare and Ponsonby factions, which he declared himself willing to attempt (ib. pp. 284–92). His duchess delighted the Irish by her gracious conduct and the splendour of the castle festivities in which Bedford's cordial manners gained him popularity. He provided a fund for the relief of the poor who were suffering from the failure of the potato crop, showed himself strongly in favour of a relaxation of the penal laws against Roman catholics (Lecky, Hist. of England, ii. 435–6), and he conciliated the primate. Considering the difficulty of his situation, his government was, on the whole, by no means discreditable. He returned to England in May 1758, and, according to custom, spent the second year of his viceroyalty there. In the autumn Newcastle, who was becoming jealous of Pitt, made some overtures towards a connection with him; they were supported by Fox and Bedford's following, and were in the end successful. He went back to Ireland early in October 1759. A rumour that a legislative union was contemplated led to serious riots in Dublin, and Bedford and the council were forced to call out a troop of horse to quell them. In February 1760 a French expedition, under Thurot, surprised Carrickfergus. The invaders soon found it expedient to sail away, and their frigates were captured by the English frigates that Bedford sent to pursue
