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A HISTORY OF THE FOUR GEORGES AND OF WILLIAM IV.
by
JUSTIN MCCARTHY and JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY
In Four Volumes
VOL. III.
Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London
1901
Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers,
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS OF THE THIRD VOLUME.
CHAPTER PAGE
XLII. "SUPREME IRONIC PROCESSION" . . . . . . . . . . . 1
XLIII. GEORGE AND THE DRAGONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
XLIV. THE "NORTH BRITON" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
XLV. NUMBER FORTY-FIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
XLVI. THE AMERICAN COLONIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
XLVII. EDMUND BURKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
XLVIII. THE STAMP ACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
XLIX. WILKES REDIVIVUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
L. THE SPIRIT OF JUNIUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
LI. CHARLES JAMES FOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
LII. ON THE CHARLES RIVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
LIII. THE "VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
LIV. YANKEE DOODLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
LV. THE GORDON RIOTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
LVI. TWO NEW MEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
LVII. FOX AND PITT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
LVIII. WARREN HASTINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
LIX. THE GREAT IMPEACHMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
LX. THE CHANGE OF THINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
LXI. "NINETY-EIGHT" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
LXII. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
{1}
A HISTORY
OF
THE FOUR GEORGES.
CHAPTER XLII.
"SUPREME IRONIC PROCESSION."
For six and forty years England had been ruled by German princes. One
Elector of Hanover named George had been succeeded by another Elector
of Hanover named George, and George the First and George the Second,
George the father and George the son, resembled each other in being by
nature German rather than English, and by inclination Electors of
Hanover rather than Kings of England. Against each of them a Stuart
prince had raised a standard and an army. George the First had his
James Francis Edward, who called himself James the Third, and whom his
opponents called the Pretender, by a translation which gave an
injurious signification to the French word "pretendant." George the
Second had his Charles Edward, the Young Pretender who a generation
later led an invading army well into England before he had to turn and
fly for his life. A very different condition of things awaited the
successor of George the Second. George the Second's grandson was an
English prince and an Englishman. He was born in England; his father
was born in England; his native tongue was the English tongue; and if
he was Elector of Hanover, that seemed an accident.
The title was as unimportant and trivial to the King of {2} England as
his title of King of France was unreal and theatrical. The remnant of
the Jacobites could not with truth call the heir to the throne a
foreigner, and they could not in reason hope to make such a
demonstration in arms against him as they had made against his
grandfather and his great-grandfather. The young King came to a much
safer throne under much more favorable auspices than either of the two
monarchs, his kinsmen and his namesakes, who had gone before him.
[Sidenote: 1760--Accession of George the Third]
The young King heard the first formal news of his accession to the
throne from the lips of no less stately a personage than the Great
Commoner himself--the foremost Englishman then alive. George the
Third, as he then actually was, had received at Kew Palace some
messages which told him that his grandfather was sinking fast, that he
was dying, that he was dead. George resolved to start for London. On
his way, and not far from Kew, he was met by a coach and six, which,
from the blue and silver liveries, he knew to be that of Mr. Pitt.
George received the congratulations of his great minister--the great
Minister whom, as it was soon to appear, he understood so little and
esteemed so poorly. Then Pitt, turning his horses' heads, followed his
sovereign into London. Never perhaps in English history was a young
king welcomed on his accession by so great a minister. Among the many
auspicious conditions which surrounded the early days of George the
Third's reign not the least auspicious was the presence of such a
bulwark to the throne and to the realm. For the name of Pitt was now
feared and honored in every civilized country in the world. It had
become synonymous with the triumphs and the greatness of England. Pitt
was the greatest War Minister England had yet known. He was the first
English statesman who illustrated in his own person the difference
between a War Minister and a Minister of War.
Truly this journey of the King and the Prime Minister from Kew to
London was what George Meredith calls a "supreme ironic procession,
with laughter of gods in the background." The ignorant, unwise young
King led the {3} way, the greatest living statesman in England followed
after. One can hardly imagine a procession more supremely ironic.
Almost all the whole range of human intellect was stretched out and
exhausted by the living contrast between the King who went first and
the Minister who meekly went second. Pitt had made for young George
the Third a great empire, which it was the work of George the Third not
long after to destroy, so far as its destruction could be compassed by
the stupidity of a man. Pitt had made the name of England a power all
over the civilized world. Rome at her greatest, Spain at her greatest,
could hardly have surpassed the strength and the fame of England as
Pitt had re-made it. George, from the very first, felt a sort of
coldness towards his superb Minister. He had all the vague pervading
jealousy which dulness naturally shows to genius. It was a displeasure
to him from the first that Pitt should have made England so great,
because the work was the inspiration of the subject and not of the
sovereign. No one can know for certain what thoughts were filling the
mind of George as he rode to London that day in front of William Pitt.
But it may fairly be assumed that he was not particularly sorry for the
death of his grandfather, and that he was pleasing his spirit with the
idea that he would soon emancipate himself from Mr. Pitt. "Be a king,
George," his mother used to say to him. The unsifted youth was
determined, if he could, to be a king.
At the time of his accession George was in his twenty-third year. He
was a decidedly personable young Prince. He had the large regular
features of his race, the warm complexion of good health, and a
vigorous constitution, keen attractive eyes, and a firm, full mouth.
He was tall and strongly made, and carried himself with a carriage that
was dignified or stiff according to the interpretation of those who
observed it. Many of the courtly ladies thought him extremely
handsome, were eagerly gracious to him, did their best to thrust
themselves upon his attention, and received, it would seem, very little
notice in return for their pains. If George showed himself {4}
indifferent and even ungallant to his enthusiastic admirers, his
brother Edward was of a different disposition. But though Edward, like
his brother, was an agreeable-looking youth, and keen to win favor in
women's eyes, he found himself like Benedict: nobody marked him because
he was not the heir to the throne.
In some illustrated histories of the reign two portraits of George the
Third are placed in immediate and pathetic contrast. The one portrait
represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign--alert,
young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and
the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast. So might a young king
look called in the flower of his age to the control of a great country,
pleased, confident, and courageous. The other picture shows how the
King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign. The face is old and
wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a
fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. The
time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old;
the longest reign then known to English history, the longest and the
most eventful.
[Sidenote: 1760--George's qualifications for King]
George the Third started with many advantages over his predecessors of
the same name. He was an Englishman. He spoke the English language.
It was his sincere wish to be above all things English. He honestly
loved English ways. He had not the faintest desire to start a seraglio
in England. He had no German mistresses. He did not care about fat
women. He was devoted to his mother--perhaps a good deal too devoted,
but even the excess of devotion might have been pardonable in the
public opinion of England; certainly it was only his own weakness and
perversity that made it for a while not pardonable. He was of the
country squire's order of mind; his tastes were wholly those of the
stolid, well-intentioned, bucolic country squire. He would probably
have been a very respectable and successful sovereign if only he had
not been plagued by the ambition to be a king.
It is curious to remember that the accession of George {5} the Third
was generally and joyfully welcomed. A hopeful people, having endured
with increasing dislike two sovereigns of the House of Hanover, were
quite prepared to believe that a third prince was rich in all regal
qualities; in all public and private virtues. It would, perhaps, have
been unreasonable on the part of any dispassionate observer of public
affairs to anticipate that a third George would make a worse monarch
than his namesakes and immediate predecessors. The dispassionate
observer might have maintained that there were limits to kingly
misgovernment in a kingdom endowed with a Constitution and blessed with
a measure of Parliamentary representation, and that those limits had
been fairly reached by the two German princes who ruled reluctantly
enough over the fortunes of England. This same dispassionate observer
might reasonably, assuming him to possess familiar knowledge of certain
facts, have hazarded the prediction that George the Third would be a
better king than his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He was
certainly a better man. There was so much of a basis whereupon to
build a hope of better things. The profligacy of his ancestors had not
apparently vitiated his blood and judgment. His young life had been a
pure life. He was in that way a pattern to princes. He had been,
which was rare with his race, a good son. He was to be--and there was
no more rare quality in one of his stock--a good husband, a good
father. He was in his way a good friend to his friends. He was
sincerely desirous to prove himself a good king to his people.
The youth of George the Third had passed under somewhat agitated
conditions. George the Second's straight-forward hatred for his son's
wife opened a great gulf between the Court and Leicester House, which
no true courtier made any effort to bridge. While the young Prince
knew, in consequence, little or nothing of the atmosphere of St.
James's or the temper of those who breathed that atmosphere, attempts
were not wanting to sunder him from the influence of his mother. Some
of the noblemen and clergymen to whom the early instruction of the
young {6} Prince was entrusted labored with a persistency which would
have been admirable in some other cause to sever him not merely from
all his father's friends but even from his father's wife. There was
indeed a time when their efforts almost succeeded in alienating the
young Prince from his mother. The wildest charges of Jacobitism were
brought against the immediate servants of the Princess, charges which
those who made them wholly failed to substantiate. The endeavor to
remove the Prince from the tutelage of his mother was abandoned. The
education of the Prince was committed to more sympathetic care. The
change had its advantage in keeping George in the wholesome atmosphere
of Leicester House instead of exposing him to the temptations of a
profligate Court. It had its disadvantages in leaving him entirely
under the influence of a man to whose guidance, counsel, and authority
the Princess Dowager absolutely submitted herself.
[Sidenote: 1760--Lord Bute]
Observers of the lighter sort are pleased to insist upon the trifles
which have the most momentous influence upon the fortunes of peoples
and the fates of empires. A famous and facile French playwright
derived the downfall of a favorite and of a political revolution from
the spilling of a glass of water. There are times when the temptation
to pursue this thread of fancy is very great. Suppose, for instance,
it had not chanced to rain on a certain day at Clifden, when a cricket
match was being played in which Frederick, Prince of Wales, happened to
be interested. A fretted Prince would not have had to retire to his
tent like Achilles, would not have insisted on a game of whist to cheer
his humor. There would have been no difficulty in forming a rubber.
There would have been no need to seek for a fourth hand. No wistful
gentleman-in-attendance seeking the desirable would have had to ask the
aid of a strange nobleman perched in an apothecary's chariot. Had this
strange nobleman not been so sought and found, had the apothecary not
been wealthy enough to keep a chariot, and friendly enough to offer a
poor Scotch gentleman a seat in it, it is possible that the {7}
American Colonies might yet form portion and parcel of the British
Empire, that Chatham's splendid dreams might have become still more
splendid realities, that the name of Wilkes might never have emerged
from an obscurity of debauch to association with the name of liberty.
For the nobleman who made the fourth hand in the Prince of Wales's
rubber was unfortunately a man of agreeable address and engaging
manners, manners that pleased infinitely the Prince of Wales, and
cemented a friendship most disastrous in its consequences to England,
to the English people, and to an English king. The name of the
engaging nobleman was Lord Bute.
At the time of this memorable game of whist Lord Bute was thirty-six
years old. He was well educated, well read, tall of body, pleasing of
countenance, quick in intelligence, and curious in disposition. These
qualities won the heart of the Prince of Wales, and lifted the young
Scotch nobleman from poverty and obscurity to prominence and favor.
The Prince appointed Bute a Lord of the Bedchamber and welcomed him to
his most intimate friendship. The death of the Prince of Wales two
years later had no disastrous effect upon the rising fortunes of the
favorite. The influence which Bute had exercised over the mind of
Frederick he exercised over the mind of Frederick's wife and over the
mind of Frederick's heir. Scandal whispered, asserted, insisted then
and has insisted ever since, that the influence which Lord Bute
exercised over the Princess of Wales was not merely a mental influence.
How far scandal was right or wrong there is no means, there probably
never will be any means, of knowing. Lord Bute's defenders point to
his conspicuous affection for his wife, Edward Wortley Montagu's only
daughter, in contravention of the scandal. Undoubtedly Bute was a good
husband and a good father. Whether the scandal was justified or not,
the fact that it existed, that it was widely blown abroad and very
generally believed, was enough. As far as the popularity of the
Princess was concerned it might as well have been justified. For years
no caricature was so popular as that which displayed the Boot and the
{8} Petticoat, the ironic popular symbols of Lord Bute and the Princess.
By whatever means Lord Bute gained his influence over the Princess of
Wales, he undoubtedly possessed the influence and used it with
disastrous effect. He moulded the feeble intelligence of the young
Prince George; he guided his thoughts, directed his studies in
statecraft, and was to all intents and purposes the governor of the
young Prince's person. The young Prince could hardly have had a worse
adviser. Bute was a man of many merits, but his defects were in the
highest degree dangerous in a person who had somehow become possessed
of almost absolute power. In the obscurity of a private life, the man
who had borne poverty with dignity at an age when poverty was
peculiarly galling to one of his station might have earned the esteem
of his immediate fellows. In the exaltation of a great if an
unauthorized rule, and later in the authority of an important public
office, his defects were fatal to his fame and to the fortunes of those
who accepted his sway. For nearly ten years, from the death of
Frederick, Prince of Wales, to the death of George the Second, Bute was
all-powerful in his influence over the mother of the future King and
over the future King himself. When the young Prince came to the throne
Lord Bute did not immediately assume ostensible authority. He remained
the confidential adviser of the young King until 1761. In 1761 he took
office, assuming the Secretaryship of State resigned by Lord
Holdernesse. From a secretaryship to the place of Prime Minister was
but a step, and a step soon taken. Although he did not occupy office
very long, he held it long enough to become perhaps the most unpopular
Prime Minister England has ever had.
[Sidenote: 1760--Hannah Lightfoot and Lady Sarah Lennox]
The youth of George the Third was starred with a strange romance. The
full truth of the story of Hannah Lightfoot will probably never be
known. What is known is sufficiently romantic without the additions of
legend. Hannah Lightfoot was a beautiful Quaker girl, the daughter of
a decent tradesman in Wapping. Association with the family of an
uncle, a linendraper, who lived near the {9} Court, brought the girl
into the fashionable part of the town. The young Prince saw her by
accident somehow, somewhere, in the early part of 1754, and fell in
love with her. From that moment the girl disappears from certain
knowledge, and legend busies itself with her name. It is asserted that
she was actually married to the young Prince; that William Pitt,
afterwards Earl of Chatham, was present at the marriage; that she bore
the Prince several children. Other versions have it that she was
married as a mere form to a man named Axford, who immediately left her,
and that after this marriage she lived with the Prince. She is
supposed to have died in a secluded villa in Hackney. It is said that
not only the wife of George the Third but the wife of George the Fourth
believed that the marriage had taken place. We must not attach too
much importance to a story which in itself is so very unlikely. It is
in the last degree improbable that a statesman like Pitt would have
lent himself to so singular a proceeding. Even if an enamoured young
Prince were prepared to sanction his affections by a marriage, he would
scarcely have found an assistant in the ablest politician of the age.
The story of the Axford marriage is far more probable. If Hannah
Lightfoot had been married to George she would have been Queen of
England, for there was no Royal Marriage Act in those days.
Another and more famous romance is associated with the youth of George
the Third. Lady Sarah Lennox, the youngest daughter of the second Duke
of Richmond, was one of the most beautiful women of her time. The
writers of the day rave about her, describe her as "an angel," as
lovelier than any Magdalen by Correggio. When she was only seventeen
years old her beauty attracted the young King, who soon made no secret
of his devotion to her. The new passion divided the Court into two
camps. The House of Lennox was eager to bring about a marriage, which
was not then obstructed by the law. Henry Fox, one of the most
ambitious men of that time or of any time, was Lady Sarah's
brother-in-law, and he did his best to promote the marriage. On the
other hand, the {10} party which followed the lead of the Princess
Dowager and Lord Bute fought uncompromisingly against the scheme. The
Princess Dowager had everything to lose, Lord Bute had everything to
lose, by such an alliance. The power of the Princess Dowager over the
young King would vanish, and the influence of Lord Bute over the
Princess Dowager would cease to have any political importance. Lord
Bute did all he could to keep the lovers apart. Henry Fox did all he
could to bring the lovers together. For lovers they undoubtedly were.
George again and again made it plain to those who were in his
confidence that he was in love with Lady Sarah, and was anxious to make
her his queen; and Lady Sarah, though her heart is said to have been
given to Lord Newbottle, was quite ready to yield to the wishes of her
family when those wishes were for the crown of England. On the meadows
of Holland House the beautiful girl, loveliest of Arcadian rustics,
would play at making hay till her royal lover came riding by to greet
her.
But the idyll did not end in the marriage for which Fox and the
Lennoxes hoped. It is said that the King was jealous of Lord
Newbottle; it is said that a sense of duty to his place and to his
people made him resolve to subdue and sacrifice his own personal
feelings. He offered his hand and his crown to the Princess of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Lady Sarah lost both her lovers, the King and
Lord Newbottle, who, in the words of Grenville, "complained as much of
her as she did of the King." But she did not remain long unmarried.
In 1762 she accepted as husband the famous sporting Baronet Sir Thomas
Charles Bunbury, and nineteen years later she married the Hon. George
Napier, and became the mother of an illustrious pair of soldier
brothers, Sir Charles Napier, the hero of Scinde, and Sir William
Napier, perhaps the best military historian since Julius Caesar. Lady
Sarah died in 1826, in her eighty-second year. In her later years she
had become totally blind, and she bore her affliction with a sweet
patience. At her death she is described by the chroniclers of the time
as "probably the last surviving {11} great-grand-daughter of King
Charles the Second." A barren honor, surely.
[Sidenote: 1760--Princess Charlotte Sophia]
The young Princess whom George married was in many ways well and even
excellently qualified to make a good queen. It is said that she was
discovered for her young husband after a fashion something resembling a
tale from the "Arabian Nights." The Princess Dowager, eager to
counteract the fatal effect of the beauty of Lady Sarah Lennox, was
anxious to have the young King married as soon as possible. Her own
wishes were in favor of a daughter of the House of Saxe-Gotha, but it
is said that fear of a disease hereditary in the family overruled her
wishes. Then, according to the story, a Colonel Graeme, a Scotch
gentleman upon whose taste Lord Bute placed great reliance, was sent on
a kind of roving embassy to the various little German Courts in search
of the ideal bride. The lady of the quest was, according to the
instructions given to Colonel Graeme, to be at once beautiful, healthy,
accomplished, of mild disposition, and versed in music, an art to which
the King was much devoted. Colonel Graeme, with this pleasing picture
of feminine graces ever in his mind, found the original of the portrait
in Charlotte Sophia, the second daughter of Charles Lewis Frederick,
Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.
There is another version of the manner of George's wooing which
nullifies the story of Colonel Graeme's romantic mission. According to
this other version George fell in love with his future queen simply
from reading a letter written by her. The tale sounds as romantic as
that of the Provencal poet's passion for the portrait of the Lady of
Tripoli. It is true, however, that the letter of Charlotte Sophia was
something of the nature of a state paper. The Duchy of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, of which the Princess Charlotte's brother was the
sovereign, had been overrun by the troops of the King of Prussia. The
young Princess wrote a letter to the Prussian King, which came to
George's notice and inspired him, it is said, with the liveliest
admiration for the lady who penned it. Whatever the actual reason,
whether the report of Colonel Graeme or the {12} charms of her
epistolary style, the certain thing is that George was married, first
by proxy and afterwards in due form, to the young Princess in 1761.
The young Princess was not remarkably beautiful. Even the courtiers of
the day, anxious to say their strongest in her praise, could not do
much more than commend her eyes and complexion and call her "a very
fine girl," while those who were not inclined to flatter said her face
was all mouth, and declared, probably untruly, that the young King was
at first obviously repelled by the plainness of his wife's appearance.
If she was plain, her plainness, as Northcote, the painter, said, was
an elegant, not a vulgar plainness, and the grace of her carriage much
impressed him. Walpole found her sensible, cheerful, and remarkably
genteel, a not inconsiderable eulogy from him. She was fairly
educated, as the education of princesses went in those days. She knew
French and Italian, knew even a little English. She had various
elegant accomplishments--could draw, and dance, and play, had acquired
a certain measure of scientific knowledge, and she had what was better
than all these attainments, a good, kindly, sensible nature. The
marriage could hardly be called a popular marriage at first. Statesmen
and politicians thought that the King of England ought to have found
some more illustrious consort than the daughter of a poor and petty
German House. The people at large, we are told from a private letter
of the time, were "quite exasperated at her not being handsome," beauty
in a sovereign being a great attraction to the mass of subjects. The
courtiers in general were amused by, and secretly laughed at, her
simple ways and old-fashioned--or at least un-English--manners.
[Sidenote--1761--The Coronation of George the Third]
After the wedding came the coronation, a very resplendent ceremony,
which was not free from certain somewhat ludicrous features, and was
not denied a certain tragic dignity. It was enormously expensive.
Horace Walpole called it a puppet-show that cost a million. Loyal
London turned out in its thousands. Surprisingly large sums of money
were paid for rooms and scaffolds from which the outdoor sight could be
seen, and much larger were paid {13} for places inside the Abbey. It
was very gorgeous, very long, and very fatiguing. The spectator
carried away, with aching senses, a confused memory of many soldiers,
of great peers ill at ease in unbecoming habits, of beautiful women
beautifully attired, of a blaze of jewels that recalled the story of
Aladdin's mine, and of the wonderful effect by which the darkness of
Westminster Hall was suddenly illuminated by an ingenious arrangement
of sconces that caught fire and carried on the message of light with
great rapidity. The heralds in whose hands the ceremonial arrangements
lay bungled their business badly, causing fierce heartburnings by
confusions in precedence, and displaying a lamentable ignorance of the
names and the whereabouts of many wearers of stately and ancient
titles. When the King expressed his annoyance at some of the blunders,
Lord Effingham, the Earl Marshal, offered, for amazing apology, the
assurance that the next coronation would be conducted with perfect
order, an unfortunate speech, which had, however, the effect of
affording the King infinite entertainment. The one tragic touch in the
whole day's work may be legend, but it is legend that might be and that
should be truth. When Dymoke, the King's Champion, rode, in accordance
with the antique usage, along Westminster Hall, and flung his glove
down in challenge to any one who dared contest his master's right to
the throne of England, it is said that some one darted out from the
crowd, picked up the glove, slipped back into the press, and
disappeared, without being stopped or discovered. According to one
version of the incident, it was a woman who did the deed; according to
another it was Charles Edward himself, the Young Pretender--now no
longer so very young--who made this last protest on behalf of his lost
fortunes and his fallen House. It is possible, it is even probable,
that Charles Edward was in London then and thereafter, and it seems
certain that if he was in London King George knew of it and ignored it
in a chivalrous and kingly way. The Young Pretender could do no harm
now. Stuart hopes had burned high for a moment, fifteen years earlier,
when a handsome young {14} Prince carried his invading flag halfway
through England, and a King who was neither handsome nor young was
ready to take ship from Tower Stairs if worse came of it. But those
hopes were quenched now, down in the dust, extinguished forever. No
harm could come to the House of Hanover, no harm could come to the King
of England, if at Lady Primrose's house in St. James's Square a party
should be interrupted by the entrance of an unexpected guest, of a man
prematurely aged by dissipation and disappointment, a melancholy ruin
of what had once been fair and noble, and in whom his amazed and
reverent hostess recognized the last of the fated Stuarts. There were
spies among those who still professed adherence to Charles Edward and
allegiance to his line, spies bearing names honorable in Scottish
history, who were always ready to keep George and George's ministers
posted in the movements of the unhappy Prince they betrayed. George
could afford to be magnanimous, and George was magnanimous. If it
pleased the poor Pretender to visit, like a premature ghost, the city
and the scenes associated with his House and its splendor and its awful
tragedies, he did so untroubled and unharmed. It was but a cast of the
dice in Fortune's fingers, and Charles Edward would have been in
Westminster Hall and had a champion to assert his right. But the cast
of the dice went the other way, and George the Third was King, and his
little German Princess was Queen of England.
[Sidenote--1761--The London gayeties of the time]
It is probable that those early days in London were the happiest in the
little Queen's long life. She had come from exceeding quiet to a great
and famous city; she was the centre of splendor; she was surrounded by
splendid figures; she was the first lady of a great land; she was the
queen of a great king; she was the fortunate wife of a loyal,
honorable, and pure-minded man. She was young, she was frank, she was
fond of all innocent pleasures, keenly alive to all the entertainment
that Court and capital could offer her. She crammed more gayeties into
the first few days of her marriage than she had dreamed of in all her
previous life. The girl, who had never seen {15} the sea until she
took ship for England, had never seen a play acted until she came to
London. Mecklenburg-Strelitz had its own strong ideas about the folly
and frivolity of the stage, and no Puritan maiden in the sternest days
of Cromwellian ascendency, no Calvinist daughter of the most rigorous
Scottish household, could have been educated in a more austere
ignorance of the arts that are supposed to embellish and that are
intended to amuse existence. She went to playhouse after playhouse,
alarmed at the crowds that thronged the streets to see her, but
fascinated by the delights that awaited her within the walls. She
attended the opera. She saw "The Beggar's Opera," which may have
charmed her for its story without perplexing her by its satire. She
saw "The Rehearsal," and did not dream that twenty years later the
humors of Bayes, which she probably did not understand, would be
eclipsed forever by the fantasies of Mr. Puff. She carried the King to
Ranelagh, to that amazing, enchanting assembly where all the world made
masquerade, and mandarins, harlequins, shepherdesses, and
much-translated pagan divinities jostled each other through Armida's
gardens, where the pink of fashion and the plain citizen, the patrician
lady and the plebeian waiting-maid made merry together in a motley rout
of Comus, and marvelled at the brilliancy of the illuminations and the
many-colored glories of the fireworks.
The London to which the little Princess came, and which she found so
full of entertainment, was a very different London from the city for
which the first of the Georges had quitted reluctantly the pleasures of
Hanover and the gardens of Herrenhausen. The Hanoverian princes had
never tried, as the Stuart sovereigns had tried, to stop by peremptory
legislation the spread of the metropolis. London had been steadily
spreading in the half-century of Guelph dominion, eating up the green
fields in all directions, linking itself with little lonely hamlets and
tiny rustic villages, and weaving them close into the web of its being,
choking up rural streams and blotting out groves and meadows with
monuments of brick and mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the
First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded
country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with
miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then
the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it
was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals,
if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England. The
great city did not deserve the adjective that is applied to it by the
poet of Chevy Chase. London was by no means lovely. However much it
might have increased in size, it had increased very little in beauty,
and not at all in comfort, since the days when an Elector of Hanover
became King of England. It still compared only to its disadvantage
with the centres of civilization on the Continent; it still was rich in
all the dangers and all the discomforts Gay had celebrated nearly two
generations earlier. And these dangers and discomforts were not
confined to London. The world beyond London was a world of growing
provincial towns and increasing seaports connected by tolerable and
sometimes admirable highways, and of smaller towns and villages reduced
for the most part to an almost complete isolation by roads that were
always nearly and often quite impassable. To travel much in England in
those days was scarcely less adventurous even for an Englishman than to
travel in Africa to-day; for a foreigner the adventure was indeed
environed by perils.
[Sidenote: 1761--Fashions under George the Third]
Dress and manners had changed in the Hanoverian half-century, though
not as much as they were to change in the fifty years that were still
in futurity. Extravagance of attire still persisted, though the
extravagance had changed its expression. The gigantic hoops in which
ladies had delighted had diminished, had dwindled, and gowns were of a
slender seemliness. But reformed below, fantasy rioted above. The
headdresses of women in the early days of the third George were as
monstrous, as horrible, and as shapeless in their way as the hideous
hoops had been in theirs. Vast pyramids of false hair were piled on
the heads of fashionable ladies, were pasted together with pomatums,
{17} were smothered in powder and pricked with feathers like the
headgear of a savage. These odious erections took so long to build up
that they were suffered to remain in their ugly entirety not for days
but for weeks together, until the vast structure became a decomposing
mass. It is rather ghastly to remember that youth and beauty and grace
allowed itself to be so loathsomely adorned, that the radiant women
whose faces smile from the canvases of great painters, and whose names
illuminate the chronicles of the wasted time of the reign of George the
Third, were condemned to dwell with corruption in consenting to be
caricatured. Till far on in the lifetime of Queen Charlotte the
fashion in women's wear oscillated from one extreme to another, the
gracious of to-day becoming the grotesque of yesterday, and mode
succeeding mode with the confusion and fascination of a masquerade.
The men were no less remarkable than the women for the clothes they
wore, no less capricious in their changes. A decided, if not a
conspicuous, turn of public taste had done much since the accession of
the first George to minimize if not to obliterate the differences
between class and class. Men no longer consented readily to carry the
badge of their calling in their daily costume, and the great world came
gradually to be no longer divided sharply from the little world by
marked distinction of dress. But still, and for long after 1760, the
clothes of men were scarcely less brilliant, scarcely less importunate
in their demands upon the attention of their wearers, than the clothes
of women. Men made a brave show in those days. A group of men might
be as strong in color and as vivid in contrast as a group of women; the
neutralization of tone, the degradation of hue, did not begin till much
later, and only conquered in the cataclysm of the birth-throes of two
republics. Blue and scarlet, green and yellow, crimson and purple,
orange and plum-color were the daily wear of the well-to-do; and even
for the less wealthy there were the warm browns and murreys, the
bottle-greens and clarets, and lavenders and buffs which made any crowd
a thing to please a painter in the eighteenth century. In all the {18}
varying breeds of beaux and macaronis and dandies, of bucks and
fribbles, into which the fine gentlemen of the age allowed themselves
to be classified, the one dominant feature, the one common
characteristic, was the love for gold and silver and fine laces, for
gaudiness of color and richness of ornament, for every kind of
exquisite extravagance, every refinement in foppishness. There was a
passion for the punctilio of dress, for the grace of a gold-headed cane
and a chased sword-hilt, for the right ribbon, the right jewel, the
right flower, and the right perfume, for the right powder in the hair
and the right seals on the fob and the right heels and buckles on the
shoes. There was an ardent appreciation, an uncompromising worship of
the fine feathers that make fine birds.
[Sidenote: 1761--The wine-drinking propensities of the age]
The social system of the polite world had been slowly changing with the
successive Georges. The familiar events in the lives of the well-to-do
classes were growing steadily later. The dinner hour, which was
generally at noon or one in the reign of Queen Anne, had crept on to
three o'clock under the first, and to four o'clock under the second
George. Under the third it was to grow later and later, until it made
Horace Walpole rage as if the world were coming to an end because among
fashionable folk it had settled itself at six o'clock. In the country,
indeed, for the most part people lived the quiet lives and kept the
early hours of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, however, London lived, and
whatever London chose to do, England's simple honest King and England's
simple honest Queen would have no concern with the follies of fashion
and the luxuries of late hours. However much the rashness and
wrong-headedness of his public policy forced him to accept the services
and prime the pockets of a gang of drunkards and debauchees who called
themselves and were called the King's friends, the evil communications
had not the slightest influence upon the royal good manners, and did
not alter by one jot the rigid frugality of George's life and that of
his royal consort. The King's friends were only the King's jackals;
they never were suffered for a moment to cross the line which severed
the {19} sovereign's private life from his public actions. Indeed, it
may be assumed that few of the hard-drinking, hard-living, gambling,
raking ruffians who battened on the King's bounty, and who voted white
black and good bad with uncompromising pertinacity and unappeasable
relish, would have welcomed the hard seats at the royal table, the
meagre fare on the royal platters, the homely countrified air the royal
couple breathed, and the homely countrified hour at which the royal
couple took up their candles and went to bed. George the Third would
be long asleep at an hour when his friends would be thinking of paying
a visit to Ranelagh, or preparing to spend a pleasant evening over
their cards, their dice-box, and their wine.
Especially their wine. The one great characteristic of the gentility
of the day was its capacity for drinking wine. "Wine, dear child, and
truth," says a Greek poet, naming the two most admirable gifts of life.
Truth was not always very highly prized by the men who set manners and
made history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but to wine
they clung with an absolutely unswerving and unalterable attachment.
If the great Oriental scholar who adorned the age had been more
fortunate in his studies, if Sir William Jones had chanced to make
acquaintance with a Persian poet who has since become very famous among
Englishmen, he would have found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam the
very verses to please the minds and to interpret the desires of the
majority of the statesmen, soldiers, divines, lawyers, and fine
gentlemen of the day. It is as impossible to imagine the men of the
eighteenth century without their incessant libations of wine as it is
impossible to imagine what the eighteenth century would have been like
if it had been for the most part abstemious, sober, or even reasonably
temperate. As we read the memoirs of the day, and if we believe only a
part of what they tell us, making the most liberal allowance for the
exaggeration of the wit and the satire of the cynic, we have to picture
the political and social life of the time as a drunken orgy.
Undoubtedly there were then, as always, men of decent behavior and
discreet life, men who would {20} no more have exceeded in wine than in
any other way. But the temper of the age and the tone of the
fashionable world was not in tune with their austerity. Wonder at the
frequency with which men of position got drunk then is only rivalled by
wonder at the amount which they could drink without getting drunk.
[Sidenote: 1761--Unpropitious time for the King's rule]
The cry of the Persian nightingale to the Persian rose, "wine, wine,
wine," was the cry to which hearts responded most readily in all the
Georgian era. Walpole the father made Walpole the son drink too much,
that he might not be unfilially sober while his father was unpaternally
drunk. A generation later the younger Pitt plied himself with port as
a medicine for the gout. The statesmen of the period, in the words of
Sir George Trevelyan, sailed on a sea of claret from one comfortable
official haven to another. The amount of liquor consumed by each man
at a convivial gathering was Gargantuan, prodigious, hardly to be
credited. Thackeray tells, in some recently published notes for his
lectures on the four Georges, of a Scotch judge who was forced to drink
water for two months, and being asked what was the effect of the
_régime_, owned that he saw the world really as it was for the first
time for twenty years. For a quarter of a century he had never been
quite sober. This man might be taken as a type of the _bons vivants_,
the _buveurs très illustres_ of the eighteenth century. They were
never quite sober all through their lives. They never saw the world as
it really was. They pleaded, preached, debated, fought, gambled,
loved, and hated under the influence of their favorite vintage, saw all
things through a vinous fume, and judged all things with inflamed
pulses and a reeling brain. But it must not be forgotten that the
population of the country was not entirely composed of corrupt,
hard-drinking politicians, profligate, hard-drinking noblemen, and
furious, hard-drinking country gentlemen. If these were, in a sense,
the more conspicuous types, there were other types very different and
very admirable. Apart from the great mass of the people, living their
dull daily lives, doing their dull daily tasks, quiet, ignorant,
unconscious that they {21} could or should ever have any say in the
disposition of their existences, there were both in town and country
plenty of decent, sober, honorable, and upright men and women who had
nothing in common with the fine gentlemen and the fine ladies who fill
the historical fashion plates. If, unfortunately, Squire Western and
Parson Truliber were true pictures, at least Parson Adam and Sir Roger
de Coverley still held good. None the less a young, self-willed King,
not too intelligent and not too well educated, could scarcely have come
to his sovereignty at a time less like to be fruitful of good for him
or for the country that he was resolved to govern.
{22}