of Commons. The house itself was besieged by ‘a most extraordinary concourse of people.’ The city of London prayed to be heard by counsel against the bill, and its petition was escorted by a train of coaches that extended from Temple Bar to Westminster. Discontent began to pass into disaffection. The army, it was said, could not be relied on because the soldiers believed that tobacco would be raised in price. Inside the House of Commons the ministerial majorities dwindled from sixty-one, on the introduction of the scheme on 14 March 1733, to seventeen on 10 April. On that night Walpole gave a supper to a dozen friends. ‘This dance it will no further go,’ he said, with tears in his eyes (Chatham Speeches, i. 69). On the next day he moved ‘that the bill be read a second time on 12 June’ (the recess). Frantic manifestations of delight throughout the country followed his capitulation. Walpole was burnt in effigy in the city (Carlisle MSS. p. 111), where he had incurred unpopularity by designating the formidable band of petitioners ‘sturdy beggars’ (14 March 1733). The king had taken the strongest personal interest in the bill. Its abandonment was followed by the summary dismissal of Lord Chesterfield, the lord steward, and of a group of peers in public employment who had co-operated with him in opposing it. The Duke of Bolton and Lord Cobham, both colonels of household cavalry, were cashiered. The opposition thereupon moved for leave to bring in a bill ‘for securing the constitution by preventing officers, not above the rank of colonels of regiments, from being deprived of their commissions otherwise than by judgment of a court-martial to be held for that purpose, or by address of either house of parliament’ (13 Feb. 1734). Walpole in reply warned the house of the constitutional danger of ‘stratocracy’ involved in the proposal. ‘Any minister,’ he afterwards added to Lord Hervey, ‘must be a pitiful fellow who would not show military officers that their employments were not held on a surer tenure than those of civil officers’ (Hervey, Memoirs, iii. 101). The motion was negatived without a division.
Nevertheless, Walpole's power had been shaken. It is true that he could probably have carried the excise bill through the House of Commons. The reason of its abandonment was, as he truly said, that ‘the act could not be carried into execution without an armed force, and that there would be an end of the liberties of England if supplies were to be raised by the sword.’ The reinforcements in number and vindictiveness which the recent dismissals brought about renewed the activity of the opposition. Scotland had been one of Walpole's strongholds. Its representative peers had been nothing more than the nominees of Lord Ilay, Walpole's Scottish secretary of state. Lord Stair, one of the great officers dismissed, headed a revolt of the Scots peers against this system at the general election of 1734 (Stair Annals, ii. 195; cf. Parl. Hist. ix. 608). The government, it is true, carried its list, but the allegiance of Scotland had begun to wane. Outside parliament the opposition still fanned the excitement of the populace by attributing to Walpole a design of fresh proposals for a general excise. But he knew that the opportunity even for partial reform was past. ‘I can assure this house,’ he said, ‘I am not so mad as ever again to engage in anything that looks like an excise’ (4 Feb. 1734).
A general election was now approaching. The tories proposed in the last session of the expiring parliament the repeal of the Septennial Act and the substitution of triennial parliaments. Walpole opposed the motion in a speech pronounced to be one of the best he ever made, full of brilliant though covert invective against Bolingbroke, the real inspirer of the proposal. It was not warmly supported by the opposition whigs, and was defeated by 247 to 184 votes (13 March 1734). Distrust forthwith began to set in among the opposition, Pulteney resenting Sir W. Wyndham's reliance upon Bolingbroke, whose ‘very name and presence in England did hurt’ (Bolingbroke to Wyndham, 23 July 1739). Early in 1735 Bolingbroke returned in disgust to France. The opposition whigs had thrown away the weapon which had won them their recent victory.
Meanwhile the vacancy of the crown of Poland had plunged the continent into a war, in which the emperor was rapidly succumbing before the combined forces of France, Spain, and Sardinia. His appeals for help enlisted the German sympathies of the queen at the same time that they aroused the martial ardour of the king. Walpole gratified the king so far as to press upon the expiring parliament of 1734, despite an influential protest of peers, an unconstitutional measure empowering the crown to raise sea and land forces without limit during the interval between the parliaments (28 March 1734). But he was resolute for non-intervention, except in the quality of mediator. The emperor, furious with ‘the Walpoles’ (the emperor to Count Kinski, 31 July 1734), despatched Strickland [see Strickland, Thomas John Francis], bishop of Namur, to London to intrigue against
