ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.'
XXXIII.—GEORGE
IN speaking of the conduct of George III. as a King, we must not forget that we are speaking of one in whom there was not only the predisposition to insanity, but in whom that disease had exhibited itself in an open attack before he had been five years on the English Throne, and during the remainder of whose reign there were at intervals of time three more ascertained attacks of a similar kind—in one case a very prolonged one— before that which in the year 1810 finally disabled him for all rational intercourse. It is therefore impossible to estimate his moral responsibility even during the periods when he was for all practical purposes seemingly quite sane, as we should that of one whose mind was not thus ever subject to these mental derange- ments. And in George III. there are several characteristics which appear to be closely connected with this diseased state of mind. Taking this consideration into due account, his
ally declined, and the Earl of Bute, by the assistance of the Nor was George without some qualifications for the task he had another, has now the entire confidence. But whether this change undertaken,—that of making the throne, instead of the Treasury will be greatly to His Royal Highness's advantage is a nice ques- Bench or the House of Commons, the pivot of government. He had tion which cannot hitherto be determined with any certainty." all the courage, resolution, and pertinacity of his family, and the humiliation. If he could persuade the English world that his threats would be carried out, and so induce them to give way to his wishes, so much the better, but if they refused to believe in or be moved by this demonstration, George quietly covered his defeat by making their success as unpleasant as possible to the victors.
This brings us to another phase in the character of George III. We have seen that Lord Waldegrave speaks of his want of frank- ness. It is probable that the brooding temperament and indirect- ness of conduct which are among the least pleasing of George's characteristics were closely connected with the mental disease to which he had a constant tendency. Secretiveness and cunning are usually marked features in an organisation so affected, and the suspiciousness of others and the strong and irrational likes and dislikes which are main operating causes in such a nature produce sa a necessary result dissimulation and crafty under-hand intrigue. When George, then, found that his violent declarations and over- bearing wilfulness produced no effect, he restrained his morbid -impatience (although his reason on several occasions tottered and -even temporarily succumbed under the effort), and endeavoured to attain his ends by cunning watchfulness of opportunities. He acquiesced outwardly in the change of advisers and abandonment of cherished policy, and then set to work to undermine the position of the intrusive counsellors, and to thwart as much as he could venture to do the development of their plans. He intrigued, in fact, against the Ministers he could not meet openly, and waited ler the moment when he could safely dismiss them again with ignominy. Hence arose the political phenomenon which went under the name of "The King's Friends "—a set of men who formed a backstairs Anti-Cabinet, the object of which was to employ the King's name and the influence of his personal sentiments in organ- ising an Opposition to his ostensible Cabinet advisers, both in Parliament and in the country at large. it must not be supposed by this that there was any regularly constituted "cabal," or any precisely defined plans of operation for its guidance ; but there were nearly always throughout the reign of George III. two or three men—generally not men of high ability, but busy, gossiping intriguers who were irresponsible, and both un- avowed and often disavowed agents in making known what the King's real wishes were. With the assistance of such men, and by a careful observation of the variations in the public sentiment, George achieved a success in his plans of personal government which, if we remember the relative position of the Crown and Parliament at the commencement of his reign, seems at first marvellous. In the course of this protracted struggle, the King had to undergo many mortifications and not a few seem- ingly fatal checks, but he always bent to the storm in time, and generally knew when and how long to maintain an in- flexible position. Nothing but this superior cunning and adroitness could have saved him from a great civil convul- sion such as that which destroyed his predecessors in this path -of royal aggrandisement, Charles I. and James If. George III., isowever, had concentrativeness of action as well as persistence of purpose, and however tortuous his paths were at times, the tone and direction of his policy were always consistent, and no -one had ever cause to suspect him for a moment of having become a convert to Whig constitutional notions, although he might tolerate for a time Whig Ministers, and even (as in the -case of his concessions to the revolted American Colonies and his -ultimate acknowledgment of their independence) adopt Whig mea- sures and Whig policy. This persistent uniformity of senti- ment, suspended in action from time to time by the necessities of his position, but always reappearing again to the public eye, produced by degrees a great and lasting effect on the public mind. The very fact of the unity and permanent position of Kingship as compared with the shifting constituents of a House of Commons, and the diversity of personal interests in the House of Lords, was a formidable instrument when joined to a dis- tinctly perceived and unwavering unity of sentiment and purpose. Against it the power of the great Whig Houses had in reality little basis of stability. Their " connection " had become too large for the requirements of Ministerial patronage. They could have furnished two or three entire Cabinets out of their ranks, and supernumerary place-holders to any extent. So there were always disappointed men and jealous expectants, and George had little difficulty in using one element against another, until all cohesion and all solidity in their influence was at an end. He turned against the Whig statesmen the influence of the Crown—both legi- timate and corrupt —which they had so long availed themselves of for their own individual or party purposes, and which they had come to regard as quite as much their own property as their family and pocket boroughs. The old Duke of Newcastle beheld with astonishment and dismay his long-cherished Government boroughs turned into agents for his own overthrow. The Whig families thus paid the penalty of having converted the natural organ of popular feeling into a mere department of Ministerial patronage. Without consciously abandoning the popular principles which had enabled them to withstand and overthrow the tyranny of the House of Stuart, they had fallen under the influence of long tenure of office, and had nearly forgotten their origin and the real conditions of their existence as a Party. Like the narrow and select civic representation into which the Spanish Cortes had degenerated when its privileges were success- fully assailed by Charles V. and Philip IL, the English House of Commons had lost its popular basis, and could evoke no popular enthusiasm in its contest with the Crown. The House of Lords, distracted by rival factions, soon also succumbed to the liberal exercise of royal favour and the dread of royal displeasure. Not only were Lord-Lieutenants of Counties dierniased from their offices for voting against the King's wishes, but officers of the Army and Navy were deprived of their commissions for a similar offence.
The King himself was a most diligent man of business. No permanent Secretary ever knew more—few half so much—of the minutite of official life and of the personnel of the civil and other services. George III. worked as hard as a Government clerk is supposed to work, and his interest in such bureaucratic details corresponds well with the type of his intellect. With two or three fixed ideas, or rather prejudices, held and pursued with the intensity of monomania, he had neither the capacity nor the inclination to form any wide or elevated views. His education had been grossly neglected, or rather he had been allowed or en- couraged to neglect it, and his mind, sharp and retentive, but narrow and essentially unphilosophical, contented itself within a sphere as limited as it was well explored. His idea of personal government was that of not being thwarted in his own wishes, and of knowing and sanctioning everything that was done. A great policy either at home or abroad had no meaning for him, and presented itself, if at all, only in a negative shape. He was a strict Protestant Church-of-England man, and no domestic policy must encourage or seem to encourage Roman Catholicism. He had severe ideas of discipline and legal and official authority, and nothing must be done to unduly relax the one or to weaken the other. He had a horror of popular politics and popular interference in government, except in support of the rights and under the leadership of the Crown. He was fond of the lower orders in their proper place ; he loved to mix familiarly with them, in the spirit of paternal condescension in which a German potentate chats with a peasant ; but he resented all independent action or thought on their part assubversive of authority and govern- ment. He wished them to be paid and fed according to their con- dition, and educated in a manner appropriate to the state of life "unto which it had pleased God to call them." He had a sincere and strong desire for the happiness of his people and the welfare of the nation, but it was necessary that there should be a general spirit of subordination, the proper and necessary amount of taxes duly paid, and the full number of persons, young and old, as deter- mined by the fixed processes of justice, whipped, imprisoned, or hung every year, if government was to be carried on at all. All ideas beyond these were sedition and anarchy. After the assistance given to the American colonists by France his foreign policy consisted in little but a blind hatred of that nation and of all "French ideas." During two periods of his life, George III. had the opportunity of putting these ideas of order and justice into practical operation. In 1770 he found in Lord North a pliant, though not always a sympathizing, agent of his views, and every- one knows how disastrous was the personal administraion of that period ; how the low-minded demagogue Wilkes bearded King and Parliament, and how the acrimonious sententiousness of " Junius " engrossed public attention ; how incapable was the administration at home, and how disastrous the events abroad which robbed us of an empire. A second time George III. had the opportunity of showing England the benefits of personal government, and under singularly favourable circumstances. At his side stood a man of real ability and thoughtful mind, per- sonally inflexibly honest, disinterestedly desirous of promoting the interests of the King as well as of the nation, and with a singular mastery alike of business and men. In the younger Pitt no doubt George III. expected to meet with a second pliant tool, like the easy- tempered North; but he met with a mind which, though compliant on many points with the royal prejudices, to the injury of his lasting reputation as a statesman, had naturally as stiff and proud a nature as his own, and was as little satisfied with the name without the reality of power. The King could not venture to order about such a man in the insolent manner in which he had treated George Grenville ; and he was wise enough to perceive this. The result was a compromise by which the King for many years always con- sulted Mr. Pitt, was much influenced by his views, and left him a considerable share of administrative power and influence; but by which Mr. Pitt on his aide gave up all ideas of a really great domestic and foreign policy, in deference to the King's rooted prejudices. The French Revolution greatly assisted King and Minister in holding their own against all opponents,—by annihilat- ing the Whig party, and driving the terrified nation into a fanatic admiration of the personal government of the Sovereign. Every needful reform was refused or postponed indefinitely,— people were educated into a state of public abuses and general jobbery and corruption as the normal condition of life. It has tasked all the ability and energies of the statesmen of William IV. and Victoria to remedy the effects of this long mal-administra- tion.
Towards the end of the first French war, George became tired of even the limited check which the talents and established public ascendancy of Pitt placed on his own autocracy ; he became jealous as well as tired of this higher intellectual companionship, and began once more to intrigue against his Minister with a new set of "King's Friends." A difference between himself and Pitt on the subject of Catholic Emancipation, as a necessary sequel to the Act of Union with Ireland, gave him the opportunity of giving vent to an outburst of dogmatic self-assertion which produced a recurrence of his terrible disease ; Pitt resigned, Addington, the "King's Friend," became Minister, but when Pitt again returned to power, the question of Catholic Emancipation was not again mooted by him, the well-known dangerous state of the King's mind thus enabling the latter to carry his point and to endanger the safety of the Empire without further resistance.
But if the absolutist notions which the King's mother had instilled into his mind exposed both England and himself to great danger, and inflicted nearly irreparable injury on the former ; the home-loving and homely habits which that princess had also cultivated in him produced a great accession to his personal popularity, and consti- tuted no small ingredient in his political power. An affectionate husband to a plain, dull, narrow-minded woman, whose naturally kind feelings had been stiffened into something like insensibility by the formalities of Court ceremonial, and the father of a large and stately family, George m. appealed to one of the marked characteristics of English middle-class sentiment, and commanded universal sympathy and regard as exhibiting a pattern of English domestic life. His ill-judged partialities and severities with his children were not at the time fully known, or if so, not estimated at their due importance, and the public delighted in seeing him the centre figure of a striking family group on the terraces of Windsor, and in listening to stories of his affability to his subjects of all classes in his country walks, while they smiled with kindly indulgence, and a certain satis- faction at his stammering, "What! what! what!" and other oddities of speech, and at the naive and grotesque ignorance of the stock- knowledge of ordinary life which he displayed on such occasions. The pupil of Bute was no longer remembered as such in those days, and the portrait which has descended to us from the last genera- tion is not that of the astute plotter for irresponsible authority, but of the "good old King."
So far as his narrowness of judgment and prejudices permitted, George was a just and a kind man ; he was a religious man, too, as far as the general intention to do right and a regular observance of the religious forms prescribed by a Church entitle any one to that character. He had good abilities, chiefly of the administra- tive order, and some power of penetration into the dispositions, and especially the weaknesses, of those around him, but he gene- rally dreaded and seldom understood the higher class of genius. He was too apt to nourish a supposed injury, and his memory was too good for him easily to exercise the virtue of Christian
forgiveness. But he was not implacable, and his resent- ment was generally sullen and passive, rather than aggres- sive; and if he forgot old services too soon when his wishes were at length thwarted, he soon became reconciled to individuals when he thought he saw in them real marks of devotion to his person. Personal government, indeed, was the bane of his reign, and an overweening idea of his own paramount importance and competency lay at the root of all his errors. Disease probably ren- dered this characteristic more masterful, but disease also perhaps quickened his intellectual faculties, and made him more than a match for men of actually far higher intellectual capacities. If we &sign his duplicity to the influence of disease, we may, on the whole, presume him to have been a good man ; but it is impossible not to regard him, as far as statesmanship is concerned, as one of ' the most inefficient and unfortunate of our rulers.
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