LE ROI D'YVETOT.
[Sidenote: 1830-37--Eccentricities of William the Fourth]
We may turn for a moment from the path of politics to mention a fact
that is worth mentioning, if only because of the immense difference
between the accepted usages of that time and any usages that would be
possible in our days. King William shortly after his accession created
his eldest son Earl of Munster, and conferred upon all his other sons
and daughters the rank that belongs to the younger children of a
marquis. The King's living children, as has been said before, were all
illegitimate. In raising them to the rank of the peerage King William
was only following the example of many or most of his predecessors.
People thought none the less of him, at the time, because he had
bestowed such honor upon his progeny. Charles Greville, the famous
Clerk of the Council to George the Fourth and William the Fourth,
describes the new sovereign with characteristic frankness and lack of
reverence. "Altogether," says Greville, writing about a fortnight
after the King's accession, "he seems a kind-hearted, well-meaning, not
stupid, burlesque, bustling old fellow, and if he doesn't go mad may
make a very decent king, but he exhibits oddities."
The early bringing-up of the new King had certainly not tended much to
fill him with the highest aspirations or to qualify him for the most
dignified duties of royalty. "Never," says Greville, "was elevation
like that of King William the Fourth. His life has hitherto been
passed in obscurity and neglect, in miserable poverty, surrounded by a
numerous progeny of bastards, without consideration or friends, and he
was ridiculous from his grotesque ways and little, meddling curiosity."
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He appears to have been a man of rather kindly, and certainly not
ungenerous, disposition, and it is decidedly to his credit, in one
sense, that the expectations of most of the Whigs were disappointed
when he came to the throne. During his career in the Navy he had a way
of disregarding orders, and when in command of a squadron would
sometimes take his own vessel on an expedition according to his own
fancy, and leave the remainder of the vessels under his charge to do as
well as they could without him until it pleased him to return. Some of
his later exploits in this way drew down on him a marked expression of
disapproval from the Duke of Wellington, then at the head of the
Government, and for this reason it was thought by many, when William
came to the throne, that he would be sure to dismiss from his service
the Prime Minister who once had offended him so deeply. A man with a
more malevolent turn of mind would very likely have acted as public
expectation seemed to foreshadow, but William, as we have seen, soon
made it clear that he had no fault to find with the Duke of Wellington,
that he cherished no ill-will and was quite ready to let bygones be
bygones. There can be no doubt that William, although he had no great
defects of any deep or serious nature, no defects at least which are
not common enough among the sovereigns of his time, was yet as
undignified a figure for a throne as even the modern comic opera itself
could imagine.
He was eccentric to a degree that sometimes seemed to suggest a lurking
tendency to insanity. He was fussy, garrulous, excitable, noisy,
overbearing, apt to take strong likes and dislikes and to express his
likings and his dislikings with an utter disregard for the accepted
conventionalities of social life.
He could explode at a moment's notice into a burst of rage which
sometimes made itself felt for hours, and perhaps when the next day
came he had forgotten all about it and greeted those who were its
especial objects with hilarious good-humor. There were many anecdotes
told about him in the days not long before his accession to the throne
which were commonly believed by those who knew him, {116} and which it
would not be possible to reproduce in the modest pages suitable to our
own times.
[Sidenote: 1830-37--Some strange doings of the King]
Now it would certainly be most unfair to accept every story told by
gossip about some exalted personage as a story worthy of credit and
qualified to take its place in authentic history, but, at the same
time, it is quite fair and reasonable when forming an estimate of the
exalted personage's character to take some account of the sayings of
contemporary gossip. We may be sure that there were stories told about
the father of Frederick the Great, about Catherine of Russia, about a
late King of Bavaria, which were not true, but none the less the
historian is undoubtedly helped to form an estimate of the ways and
doings of these exalted personages by the collective testimony of the
stories that are told about them and believed in their own time.
William the Fourth could not, when he ascended the throne, suddenly
shake off all the rough manners and odd ways which he had allowed
himself to foster during his long career as a Prince of the Blood
Royal, as a sailor, and as a man much given to the full indulgence of
his humors, whatever they might happen to be.
After he had become King, and it was part of his royal duty to give
great State dinners, it was sometimes his way to behave himself on the
occasions of those festivities after a fashion which even W. S. Gilbert
never could have caricatured in any "Mikado" or other such piece of
delightful burlesque. The King was fond of making speeches at his
State dinners, and it was his way to ramble along on all manner of
subjects in the same oration. Whatever idea happened to come uppermost
in his mind he usually blurted out, without the slightest regard for
time, place, or company. This habit of his became very embarrassing
now and then when some of the ambassadors of great European States
happened to be guests at his dinner-table. In the presence of the
French Ambassador, for instance, the King, while delivering his
after-dinner speech, would suddenly recall some of his recollections of
the days when the great Napoleon held the Imperial throne of France,
and he would then, perhaps, close a sentence {117} with an exultant
reference to the glorious triumphs we had obtained over our enemies the
French.
On one occasion when Leopold, King of the Belgians, was dining with him
the King suddenly observed that his royal guest was drinking water, and
he called to him with an oath and demanded what he was drinking that
sort of stuff for; and not content with the poor King's plea that he
drank water because he liked it better than wine, William insisted
that, in his house at least, his royal brother must swallow the juice
of the grape. One day when Talleyrand was among his guests King
William favored the company with a very peculiar sort of speech, and he
concluded the speech by proposing a toast which is described by those
who heard it as utterly unsuited for publication. One of the guests
was Charles Greville. He was anxious to know what impression this
extraordinary performance had made upon Talleyrand. He asked
Talleyrand in a whisper if he had ever heard anything like that before.
But Talleyrand, who had listened to the oration and the toast with
unmoved composure, was not to be thrown off his balance or drawn into
any expression of opinion by an indiscreet question. He merely
answered that it was certainly "bien remarquable."
The Duchess of Kent and the young Princess Victoria were dining with
the King one day, and some of the guests, although not all, were well
aware that there had been differences of opinion lately between William
and his sister-in-law. The guests, however, were amazed indeed when
the King rose and delivered a speech in which he raked up all his old
grievances against the Duchess of Kent, and complained of her and
denounced her as if he were the barrister, the hero of the old familiar
story, who, having no case, is advised to abuse the plaintiff's
attorney. The child Princess Victoria is said to have been so
distressed by some parts of this unexpected oration that she burst into
tears; but the Duchess, her mother, retained self-control, and sat as
composedly silent as if the King had been taking his part in some
dignified State ceremonial.
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King William sometimes broke the conventionalities of royal deportment
in a quite different sort of way, in a way which undoubtedly shocked
the traditional sensibilities of the older officials of the Court, but
with which the lovers of modern and more simple manners are inclined
sometimes, perhaps, to have a sort of wilful sympathy. He would
sometimes insist on dropping some great royal visitor from abroad at
the door of his hotel, just as if he were an ordinary London resident
giving a lift in his carriage to a friend from the country. At the
most solemn State ceremonial he would bustle about irresponsibly, and
talk in a loud voice to any one who might seem to him at the moment to
be an attractive person with whom to have a pleasant chat. It might
happen that some great State functionary or some dignified ambassador
from a foreign capital, who ought to have been spoken to long before,
was kept waiting until the unconcerned sovereign had had his talk out
with some comparatively insignificant personage who had been known to
the King in former days, and whose appearance brought with it certain
early and jovial associations. Many of the King's minor offences in
this way seem now to the unconcerned reader about as venial as that by
which Marie Antoinette in her early Court days broke through the
established rules of etiquette among the ladies of her bedchamber by
snatching her chemise one morning with her own hands instead of
allowing it to pass in its regular order from the lowest to the highest
degree of the attendant women. But it certainly was perhaps a little
too much of a departure from the usages of a Court when the monarch,
about to sign an important document in the presence of his State
Council, flung down the quill with which he had begun to write and
proclaimed it to be a damned bad pen.
[Sidenote: 1830-37--Béranger's King of Yvetot]
Every day the King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach
of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong
likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments
in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his
young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119}
mother. The Duchess of Kent would appear to have had no particular
liking for him, and she very much objected to be brought into familiar
association with the sons and daughters of the eccentric sovereign.
Perhaps it is not to William's discredit that he always treated these
children as if they were his legitimate descendants. It was no fault
of theirs if the ceremony of marriage had not preceded their coming
into the world, and the King apparently did not see why even the most
righteous person should feel any objection to their frequent presence.
But one can understand that the Duchess of Kent must have often wished
that the sense of public decorum, which was even already growing up in
English society, should not be shocked by the too frequent reminder
that the King had several children who were not born in wedlock.
Béranger, the once popular French lyric poet, satirized a certain royal
personage, a contemporary of William the Fourth, as the King of Yvetot.
There was a French legend which told of the conditions under which the
descendants of a certain lord of the manor in Brittany had been created
by Clotaire kings of Yvetot. Béranger's monarch is described by him as
one having made little mark of his own in history, who could live very
comfortably without troubling himself about glory, and who liked to be
crowned with a simple cotton nightcap. This monarch, the poet tells
us, could enjoy his four meals a day, and liked very often to lift his
glass to his lips.
There are many reasons, we are told, why some of his subjects might
have called him a father to his people, but the name was not applied by
the poet in the ordinary metaphorical sense of the word. He never
desired to trouble his neighbors, and never disturbed his mind with any
projects for the increase of his dominions, and, like a true model to
all potentates, found his ambition quite satisfied in the indulgence of
his own pleasures while desiring as little as possible to interfere
with the pastimes of his people. Every verse of the ballad ends by
telling us what a good little king was this sovereign of Yvetot. With
certain slight alterations Béranger's satirical verses might {120} have
served as a picture of William the Fourth. But our good little King of
Yvetot was not destined altogether to have quite an easy time of it,
although he was more successful in that way than the monarch for whom
Béranger intended his satire. William had come in for the age of
reform. The whole course of English history hardly tells us of any
reign, of anything like equal length, into which so many reforms were
crowded. William the Fourth, we may be sure, would never have troubled
himself or any of his subjects about any projects of improvement in the
political or social conditions of his realm. He would have been quite
content to let things go on just as they had been going in the days
before he came to the throne, and would probably have asked no higher
title of affection from the loyalty of his subjects than the familiar
name that they gave him of the Sailor King. When for a while he began
to be called the Patriot King he must have associated the title with a
sense of all the worry and trouble brought upon him by the incessant
preparation of patriotic projects for the improvement of everything all
over the country.
[Sidenote: 1830-37--Lord Grey and William the Fourth]
It seems like a curious freak of fate that such a sovereign, at such a
time, should have had to get rid of the Duke of Wellington and accept
Lord Grey as his Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington was himself
simple, plain, and occasionally rough in manners, with little taste for
Court ceremonial and little inclination for the exchange of stately
phrase and inflated language. There are many anecdotes told of
Wellington which show that he had no more liking or aptitude for the
ways dear to a Court functionary than King William himself had. Lord
Grey was a man of the most stately bearing and the most refined style.
His manner was courtly without the slightest affectation; he was
courtly by nature, and dignity was an element of his every-day
demeanor. He had been in constant companionship with some of the
greatest statesmen and orators of his time, but even his devotion to
Charles James Fox had never beguiled him into any of Fox's careless,
free-and-easy ways. He was sorely tried, as all {121} contemporary
accounts tell us, by the abrupt and overbearing manners of his
son-in-law, Lord Durham, but he always contrived, in public at least,
to bear Durham's eccentricities with unruffled temper and undisturbed
dignity. Such a statesman must have had a hard time of it with King
William of Yvetot; but let it be freely admitted that King William of
Yvetot must have had a hard time of it with such a minister as Lord
Grey. William would probably, if left to his own inclinations, have
made up his mind to hold on to the Duke of Wellington, join with the
Duke in opposing all schemes of reform, and face the music, if we may
adopt a familiar modern phrase. But there was good sense enough in
William's head, for all his odd ways and his unkingly humors, to teach
him that he had better not begin his reign by setting himself against
the public opinion of the great majority of his subjects, and therefore
our good King of Yvetot consented to become, if not the head, at least
the figure-head of a great historical movement.
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