Administration placed upon a broad bottom, but of a decidedly liberal complexion. Of the eleven Ministers who formed the Cabinet, seven were Chathamite Whigs; two had been followers of Rockingham; Lord Grantham had hitherto connected himself with no political party; the Chancellor represented the King.[1]
The first attack which the new Ministry had to meet was on the 9th of July, when Mr. Coke called attention to a pension of £3200 to Colonel Barré, which he understood was then passing the offices.[2] This pension was loudly attacked as scandalous and profligate, more especially because coming from ministers pledged to economy. The pension, as was shown during the debate, had received the consent of Rockingham, if indeed the suggestion did not actually originate with him; for Barré himself would have preferred some provision in the line of his profession.[3] The real question however was whether the pension was deserved or not, for the argument that a Ministry pledged to economy is debarred from granting rewards to the persons who deserve them, carries with it its own refutation. The main facts of Barré's case were these. The value of the posts from which he had been dismissed in 1763 were £1500 net money. It was true, as he acknowledged, that he had no right to look upon either the post of Adjutant-General or the governorship of Stirling Castle as tenable for lite; but they were military places, and he had a right to imagine that he would only have been dismissed from them for a
- ↑ The Cabinet was thus composed of eleven persons with the addition subsequently of the Duke of Rutland. This number was at the time considered unusually large. "In that supreme Administration Board there were," says Bentham, "three grades of power distinguished by appropriate denominations: the Cabinet simply; the Cabinet with the circulation; and the Cabinet with the circulation and the Post Office. By the circulation was meant the privilege of a key to the box in which the foreign despatches, with or without other documents of the day, went its rounds; by the Post Office, the power of ordering the letters of individuals to be opened at the Post Office. Such is the information given by that minister (Lord Shelburne) to the author of these pages when present at the opening of one of these receptacles and reading of the contents."—Bentham, Works, ix. 218.
- ↑ For an account of this debate see the Parliamentary History, xxiii. 152.
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xxiii. 195. Rockingham to Shelburne, March 1782. Memorandum on the formation of the Ministry. Lord Rockingham's own words are, "Col. Barry, Treasurer of the Navy, with an increased salary in proportion to all former advantages being cut off. The extra increased salary to be made out to Col. Barry for his life."
