Whig of still greater note and authority, the Marquess of
Hartington, separated himself on this occasion from the junto.
The current was irresistible. At last the voices of those who
tried to speak for the Instruction were drowned by clamour. When
the question was put, there was a great shout of No, and the
minority submitted. To divide would have been merely to have
exposed their weakness.

By this time it became clear that the relations between the
executive government and the Parliament were again what they had
been before the year 1695. The history of our polity at this time
is closely connected with the history of one man. Hitherto
Montague's career had been more splendidly and uninterruptedly
successful than that of any member of the House of Commons, since
the House of Commons had begun to exist. And now fortune had
turned. By the Tories he had long been hated as a Whig; and the
rapidity of his rise, the brilliancy of his fame, and the
unvarying good luck which seemed to attend him, had made many
Whigs his enemies. He was absurdly compared to the upstart
favourites of a former age, Carr and Villiers, men whom he
resembled in nothing but in the speed with which he had mounted
from a humble to a lofty position. They had, without rendering
any service to the State, without showing any capacity for the
conduct of great affairs, been elevated to the highest dignities,
in spite of the murmurs of the whole nation, by the mere
partiality of the Sovereign. Montague owed every thing to his own
merit and to the public opinion of his merit. With his master he
appears to have had very little intercourse, and none that was
not official. He was in truth a living monument of what the
Revolution had done for the Country. The Revolution had found him