220 The Hertford Correspondence. 
Horse.” (an engine used in the manufacture of cloth). Meanwhile, 
the fashionable posting house of The Black Bear, where the Wilt- 
shire Militia Captains were feasting, would have scorned to harbour 
the representative of the royal forces, while engaged, as in truth 
he was, in fishing for the dregs of society. The reason of all this 
is plain enough. Local troops had existed long before a standing 
army rose into ascendency ; and as these medieval levies were 
always equipped and supported by the district which produced them, 
it took a long time to dispossess the minds of the leaders, whether 
in Towns or Counties, of the idea of a proprietary right which it 
was supposed they could claim in the services of their pet battalions : 
hence their preference. This feeling has now gone by. While 
the County forces have lost none of their importance, the army has 
risen in respectability. The modern Militia, in place of being its 
rival, has come to be its feeder. During the late war with France 
the Wilts regiment alone recruited the line with more than 2,000. 
men, and many who fought with credit at Waterloo had received no 
other training. 
One of the greatest blows levelled by the Government against 
the institution of the Militia (viewed as a weapon in the hands of 
a subject) was the expulsion in 1780 of the Earl of Pembroke from 
the Lord-Lieutenancy of this County, a post which his family had 
held for nearly 200 years: simultaneously with which, the Marquis 
of Carmarthen was discharged from the like office in the East 
Riding of Yorkshire. This mode of procedure led, as is well 
known, to the resolute gathering at Devizes on the 28th of March, 
of the gentry, clergy, and freeholders of Wilts, when the Hon. 
Charles James Fox recommended the adoption of those “corres- 
ponding associations” throughout the realm, which afterwards 
proved so troublesome to the ruling powers. The meeting was in 
fact one of those declarations which at the period in question were 
common in all the principal Counties, avowedly directed against the 
Crown, whose encroachments, real or supposed, were becoming an 
object of daily increasing alarm to the landed aristocracy. But the 
circumstance which principally gave eclat to the proceedings was 
the Earl of Shelburne’s recent quarrel with Mr. Fullarton, arising 
