Minister like George Grenville, who read him lectures on policy, or a Minister like the Duke of Bedford, who read him lectures on probity? Any person in a middle station of life whom his duties compel to come into daily conference with a superior who browbeats him, questions his statements, and meets his assertions with insolent inuendoes, can appreciate the worry and the annoyance that the King underwent in his interviews with some of his own Ministers. There are few trials in life more difficult to bear than constant intercourse with persons with whom one has no sympathy of feeling. One trial still more unbearable is that of associating with persons of stronger intellects, sterner tempers, and antagonistic tastes. Let any man who has known what it is daily to confront another, with whom he has no common feeling, but who ostentatiously exhibits a conscious superiority either of power, or of intellect or of will, imagine what it must have been for a young King, brought up in entire ignorance of the constitutional obligations of an English Sovereign, to be holding daily conferences with men whom genius had made arrogant like Pitt, or connexion had made arrogant like the Bedfords and the Grenvilles. Of course, the natural feeling in the Royal mind would be dislike of such men, and its natural bent would be to remove them out of sight. That the King endeavoured to rid himself of them is plain; but that he used the duplicity, intrigue, and subterfuges with which he has been so often charged, is not, we think, borne out by the accumulated evidence which the publication of successive contemporaneous memoirs has brought to light. Nor, indeed, was duplicity necessary on the King's part. The humours, the jealousies, and the antipathies of the rival statesmen did more for the ultimate ascendancy of the King than duplicity or astuteness of the King himself could do. In an age when Temple quarrelled with Chatham, and Chatham rated his colleagues and rebuffed his idolaters, and the Duke of Newcastle intrigued against them, a sovereign with a narrow concentration of purpose and energy of will was sure to have his own way in the end. George III. had certain well-known notions and objects; he adhered to them steadily and resolutely. He stood out for them on all occasions so long as their maintenance had a prospect of being successful. In process of time, the opinions of public men approximated to those of the King. A party grew up in and out of Parliament which shared and abetted them. The divisions and enmities of leading statesmen completed what the King's firmness had begun. Estranged from each other and distrusting each other, these naturally, each in turn, gravitated to the central sun of Royalty. Habits of selfwill, long indulged, and the exercise of traditionary power, long enjoyed, may have rendered the great chiefs of political parties as impatient of a young monarch's control as they were of mutual concession. But it is only by a splenetic and angry criticism that George III. can be accused of having used a dexterous kingcraft' to 'supplant' or 'get rid of' his different Ministers. It was their inability either to hold together among themselves or to keep a hold on the country that ousted the Ministries of George Grenville, Lord Rockingham, and the Duke of Grafton. The impracticability of one great man- the dissensions of many common-place men--the blunders of all-are quite sufficient to account for the rise and fall of three successive Administrations without seeking for singular adroitness or Machiavellian kingcraft. The facts were these. The circle from which Ministers could be selected was a particularly narrow one. The candidates for the highest office were selfwilled and incongruous. Out of London there could hardly be said to exist such a thing as public opinion. In London there was great discontent against all statesmen except Chatham. The King had defined and consistent views on politics, with which the vulgar sense of the nation was gradually coming into agreement. He was every day gaining fresh knowledge of public business and public policy; he loved the study of details; and he knew how to attach to himself friends and adherents. In any contest between two such parties, on which side was the victory sure to be? The inclination for peace which the King had so strongly shown in his first address to the Council was shared by many of his subjects in the middle and upper stations of life. But it was not shared by the lower classes. In fact, there is no more striking contrast between the popular sentiments of that day and of this, than that which is elicited by questions of peace or war. In our day a keen sense of national honour and a patriotic jealousy of foreign insult or encroachment are most keenly felt. by the educated classes. The teaching of men, some honest and some very dishonest, the studied misrepresentation of the objects of every war, the religious or the economical denunciations of all war, the fictitious accounts of the emoluments earned by the military profession, the queer belief of the working classes that their share of contribution to the military establishments of the country is disproportionately large:-all these things have rendered the lower ranks of Englishmen in our days lukewarm in the vindication of national honour and indifferent to the blazon of military triumphs. In the days of the two first Georges it was different. The lower classes had followed with huzzas and acclamations the French standards which were carried through the city by the men who had conquered by the side of Wolfe on the heights of Abraham or had braved by the side of Hawke the dark and angry tempest of Quiberon Bay. The mobs of London and of other cities felt that by the wars which the elder Pitt had planned and conducted their country had recovered its ancient position in Europe and the world. They were proud both of him and of it. The upper classes viewed war in a different light; and it was by the upper classes that the House of Commons was elected. The old feeling of the Shippens and the Windhams against a standing army under a foreign prince animated some. Dread of taxes and debt and fundholders animated others. Others again felt a vague and obscure apprehension that a glorious war involved the dangerous ascendancy of some too powerful subject. To the majority of the educated classes of the day the King's reprobation of a bloody and expensive war was as acceptable as to Pitt it was unwelcome. The knowledge of this fact, no less than of the authority which had inspired the speech, led to Pitt's resignation not long afterwards, and thus laid the foundation of many of the troubles by which the King's reign was destined to be harassed. When Pitt proposed to avert the consequences of the family compact by declaring war against Spain, Lord Temple alone of his colleagues was ready to support him. Lord Bute and the Duke of Newcastle had no suspicion of the projects of France and no dread of the power of Spain. Pitt and Temple then withdrew from the Cabinet, and with them vanished the terror of a name and a policy which had won respect for England in every Court of Europe. George III. was left with Bute and Newcastle: Bute, under whose eye he had been brought up, from whose lips he had learned all the political knowledge which he had mastered, and whose sentiments were identical with his own; Newcastle, who had fawned on Pitt at one time, had deserted him at another, and was equally ready to fawn on him or to desert him again, whenever an opportunity should offer. Newcastle, who regarded the retention of office simply as dependent on a proper tact in bribing members of Parliament, went about chuckling at the loss of a colleague who inspired him with awe, and wholly free from any apprehension of his own loss of royal favour. Yet he himself was shortly to feel the overshadowing influence of a rival colleague. As Walpole informs us, all kinds of disgusts had been given to convince him how unwelcome his company was.' The disinterested young 6 creature,' as the same authority styles him, had no alternative but to resign, and in the summer of 1762 he made Bute's refusal to continue subsidies to the King of Prussia a pretext for quitting the Administration. Before he actually resigned he threatened to do so several times; but to his great disgust found that the threat made no impression on his colleague, who had a stronger and more certain support than the Pelham connexion. He himself told Lord Hardwicke that, in reply to this threat, Bute answered drily that, if I resigned, the peace might be retarded, but he never requested me to keep in office, nor said a civil thing to me afterwards, while we ' remained together.' As Mr. Massey has well observed, nothing in the Duke's official life became him like the leaving it. Office had to him and to Pitt alone of contemporary statesmen not been a source of profit. On the contrary, so far from increasing his fortune he had impaired it by the prodigal expenditure which he had incurred in the service of the Crown. He had spared his own purse as little as he had spared the public purse in buying boroughs, and perhaps members also, to support the Government. An estate of 25,000l. a year had thus fallen to the value of 6,000l. a year. Yet when, on delivering up the seals of office, the King offered him a pension, it was proudly though courteously declined. Contemporaries who cannot easily comprehend the whole character of a public man and who estimate rival statesmen by the standard of their own ephemeral caprices, contrasted the dignified refusal of the Duke with Pitt's obsequious acceptance of the royal bounty, us, regarding the two men after the lapse of a century, nothing seems so absurd as to institute any comparison between their characters in this sense. When the Duke was gone, Bute became in name, as he had been for some time in reality, the head of the Administration. He was gazetted First Commissioner of the Treasury and was made a Knight of the Garter. This elevation was destined to cost both him and his Sovereign dear. Bute became the most unpopular of men, and his unpopularity proceeded from causes the most different. He was a Scotchman, and in those days Scotch nationality, when it was not associated with Jacobitism, was associated with the most squalid forms of penury and the most loathsome forms of dirt. Every Scotchman who came to seek his fortune in London was regarded by the vulgar as an adventurer whom indigence had driven from the bleakest of mountains or the most barren of moors to prey on the unsuspecting industry of civilised men. The great cry against Lord Bute,' writes Chesterfield, was on account of his being a Scotchman, the Το 6 only fault which he could not possibly correct.' His patronage of his countrymen naturally exposed him to much obloquy and them to much ridicule. Among the myriads of verses printed at that time on the rapacity of Scotch adventurers, Lord Stanhope has recorded these four on the brothers Adam, architects who succeeded in obtaining contracts in London, and one of whom planned the Adelphi Buildings :— 'Four Scotchmen by the name of Adam, Who kept their coaches and their Madam, At a later time than this, we find Boswell going into fits of gratitude that Johnson's prejudices had not prevented him from selecting a Scotchman for his friend. If Johnson retained such a prejudice, how was Churchill and how was Wilkes likely to give expression to it? A pen that dipped itself in gall and a pen that dipped itself in filth, found equally in Bute an object to bespatter and befoul. Bute was not only a native of a bleak and poverty-stricken country, but he was a favourite, was believed to be a favourite of a kind that had not been seen in England since the times of Charles I. His influence over the King was popularly supposed to be derived from his influence over the King's mother; and his influence over the Princess Dowager was supposed to arise from the most tender of intimacies. Grub Street pamphleteers, and coffee-house politicians, and men like Wilkes and Churchill, at once more gifted and more scandalous than either, talked and wrote in terms that none could misunderstand, of the modern Mortimer and the mother of Edward III. As often as the daily or half-weekly sheet appeared, there was sure to be a scurrilous jest about a Jack Boot and a petticoat, or a royal minion and Scotch beggary. The unpopularity of the Minister increased daily, and not without reason. He punished opposition on the part of powerful peers by depriving them of distinguished but honorary offices which we have long been accustomed to consider tenable by men opposed to the Administration of the day. Nor was the manner of proceeding less offensive than the proceeding itself. A harsh thing was done in the rudest and harshest way. It was perhaps natural that the Duke of Devonshire should be dismissed from his post in the King's Household after the distinct intimation of his disagreement with the policy of the King's Government. But the manner of his dismissal was gratuitously churlish. And there was no plea but that of spite for dismissing the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Rockingham, and the Duke of Devonshire |