The founder of the race was Hans Christof, a famous warrior and plunderer

of the Thirty Years’ War. One of Hans’s sons, Otto, appeared as ambassador

at the Court of Louis XIV, and had to make a Swedish speech at his

reception before the Most Christian King. Otto was a famous dandy and

warrior, but he forgot the speech, and what do you think he did? Far from

being disconcerted, he recited a portion of the Swedish Catechism to His

Most Christian Majesty and his Court, not one of whom understood his lingo

with the exception of his own suite, who had to keep their gravity as best

they might.

Otto’s nephew, Aurora’s elder brother, Carl Johann of Königsmarck, a

favourite of Charles II, a beauty, a dandy, a warrior, a rascal of more

than ordinary mark, escaped but deserved being hanged in England, for the

murder of Tom Thynne of Longleat. He had a little brother in London with

him at this time,—as great a beauty, as great a dandy, as great a villain

as his elder. This lad, Philip of Königsmarck, also was implicated in the

affair; and perhaps it is a pity he ever brought his pretty neck out of

it. He went over to Hanover, and was soon appointed colonel of a regiment

of H. E. Highness’s dragoons. In early life he had been page in the Court

of Celle; and it was said that he and the pretty Princess Sophia Dorothea,

who by this time was married to her cousin George the Electoral prince,

had been in love with each other as children. Their loves were now to be

renewed, not innocently, and to come to a fearful end.

A biography of the wife of George I, by Dr. Doran, has lately appeared,

and I confess I am astounded at the verdict which that writer has

delivered, and at his acquittal of this most unfortunate lady. That she

had a cold selfish libertine of a husband no one can doubt; but that the

bad husband had a bad wife is equally clear. She was married to her cousin

for money or convenience, as all princesses were married. She was most

beautiful, lively, witty, accomplished: his brutality outraged her: his

silence and coldness chilled her: his cruelty insulted her. No wonder she

did not love him. How could love be a part of the compact in such a

marriage as that? With this unlucky heart to dispose of, the poor creature

bestowed it on Philip of Königsmarck, than whom a greater scamp does not

walk the history of the seventeenth century. A hundred and eighty years

after the fellow was thrust into his unknown grave, a Swedish professor

lights upon a box of letters in the University Library at Upsala, written

by Philip and Dorothea to each other, and telling their miserable story.

The bewitching Königsmarck had conquered two female hearts in Hanover.

Besides the Electoral prince’s lovely young wife Sophia Dorothea, Philip

had inspired a passion in a hideous old Court lady, the Countess of

Platen. The princess seems to have pursued him with the fidelity of many

years. Heaps of letters followed him on his campaigns, and were answered

by the daring adventurer. The princess wanted to fly with him; to quit her

odious husband at any rate. She besought her parents to receive her back;

had a notion of taking refuge in France and going over to the Catholic

religion; had absolutely packed her jewels for flight, and very likely

arranged its details with her lover, in that last long night’s interview,

after which Philip of Königsmarck was seen no more.

Königsmarck, inflamed with drink—there is scarcely any vice of which,

according to his own showing, this gentleman was not a practitioner—had

boasted at a supper at Dresden of his intimacy with the two Hanoverian

ladies, not only with the princess, but with another lady powerful in

Hanover. The Countess Platen, the old favourite of the Elector, hated the

young Electoral princess. The young lady had a lively wit, and constantly

made fun of the old one. The princess’s jokes were conveyed to the old

Platen just as our idle words are carried about at this present day: and

so they both hated each other.

The characters in the tragedy, of which the curtain was now about to fall,

are about as dark a set as eye ever rested on. There is the jolly prince,

shrewd, selfish, scheming, loving his cups and his ease (I think his good

humour makes the tragedy but darker); his princess, who speaks little but

observes all; his old, painted Jezebel of a mistress; his son, the

Electoral prince, shrewd too, quiet, selfish, not ill-humoured, and

generally silent, except when goaded into fury by the intolerable tongue

of his lovely wife; there is poor Sophia Dorothea, with her coquetry and

her wrongs, and her passionate attachment to her scamp of a lover, and her

wild imprudences, and her mad artifices, and her insane fidelity, and her

furious jealousy regarding her husband (though she loathed and cheated

him), and her prodigious falsehoods; and the confidante, of course, into

whose hands the letters are slipped; and there is Lothario, finally, than

whom, as I have said, one can’t imagine a more handsome, wicked, worthless

reprobate.

[Illustration]

A Deed Of Darkness

How that perverse fidelity of passion pursues the villain! How madly true

the woman is, and how astoundingly she lies! She has bewitched two or

three persons who have taken her up, and they won’t believe in her wrong.

Like Mary of Scotland, she finds adherents ready to conspire for her even

in history, and people who have to deal with her are charmed, and

fascinated, and bedevilled. How devotedly Miss Strickland has stood by

Mary’s innocence! Are there not scores of ladies in this audience who

persist in it too? Innocent! I remember as a boy how a great party

persisted in declaring Caroline of Brunswick was a martyred angel. So was

Helen of Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, the dangerous

young Trojan. Menelaus, her husband, ill-used her, and there never was any

siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard’s wife innocent. She never peeped

into the closet where the other wives were with their heads off. She never

dropped the key, or stained it with blood; and her brothers were quite

right in finishing Bluebeard, the cowardly brute! Yes, Caroline of

Brunswick was innocent: and Madame Laffarge never poisoned her husband;

and Mary of Scotland never blew up hers; and poor Sophia Dorothea was

never unfaithful; and Eve never took the apple—it was a cowardly

fabrication of the serpent’s.

George Louis has been held up to execration as a murderous Bluebeard,

whereas the Electoral prince had no share in the transaction in which

Philip of Königsmarck was scuffled out of this mortal scene. The prince

was absent when the catastrophe came. The princess had had a hundred

warnings; mild hints from her husband’s parents; grim remonstrances from

himself—but took no more heed of this advice than such besotted poor

wretches do. On the night of Sunday, the 1st of July, 1694, Königsmarck

paid a long visit to the princess, and left her to get ready for flight.

Her husband was away at Berlin; her carriages and horses were prepared and

ready for the elopement. Meanwhile, the spies of Countess Platen had

brought the news to their mistress. She went to Ernest Augustus, and

procured from the Elector an order for the arrest of the Swede. On the way

by which he was to come, four guards were commissioned to take him. He

strove to cut his way through the four men, and wounded more than one of

them. They fell upon him; cut him down; and, as he was lying wounded on

the ground, the countess, his enemy, whom he had betrayed and insulted,

came out and beheld him prostrate. He cursed her with his dying lips, and

the furious woman stamped upon his mouth with her heel. He was dispatched

presently; his body burnt the next day; and all traces of the man

disappeared. The guards who killed him were enjoined silence under severe

penalties. The princess was reported to be ill in her apartments, from

which she was taken in October of the same year, being then

eight-and-twenty years old, and consigned to the castle of Ahlden, where

she remained a prisoner for no less than thirty-two years. A separation

had been pronounced previously between her and her husband. She was called

henceforth the “Princess of Ahlden”, and her silent husband no more

uttered her name.

Four years after the Königsmarck catastrophe, Ernest Augustus, the first

Elector of Hanover, died, and George Louis, his son, reigned in his stead.

Sixteen years he reigned in Hanover, after which he became, as we know,

King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. The

wicked old Countess Platen died in the year 1706. She had lost her sight,

but nevertheless the legend says that she constantly saw Königsmarck’s

ghost by her wicked old bed. And so there was an end of her.

In the year 1700, the little Duke of Gloucester, the last of poor Queen

Anne’s children, died, and the folks of Hanover straightway became of

prodigious importance in England. The Electress Sophia was declared the

next in succession to the English throne. George Louis was created Duke of

Cambridge; grand deputations were sent over from our country to

Deutschland; but Queen Anne, whose weak heart hankered after her relatives

at St. Germains, never could be got to allow her cousin, the Elector Duke

of Cambridge, to come and pay his respects to her Majesty, and take his

seat in her House of Peers. Had the queen lasted a month longer; had the

English Tories been as bold and resolute as they were clever and crafty;

had the prince whom the nation loved and pitied been equal to his fortune,

George Louis had never talked German in St. James’s Chapel Royal.

When the crown did come to George Louis he was in no hurry about putting

it on. He waited at home for awhile; took an affecting farewell of his

dear Hanover and Herrenhausen; and set out in the most leisurely manner to

ascend “the throne of his ancestors”, as he called it in his first speech

to Parliament. He brought with him a compact body of Germans, whose

society he loved, and whom he kept round the royal person. He had his

faithful German chamberlains; his German secretaries; his negroes,

captives of his bow and spear in Turkish wars; his two ugly, elderly

German favourites, Mesdames of Kielmansegge and Schulenberg, whom he

created respectively Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendal. The

duchess was tall, and lean of stature, and hence was irreverently

nicknamed the Maypole. The countess was a large-sized noblewoman, and this

elevated personage was denominated the Elephant. Both of these ladies

loved Hanover and its delights; clung round the linden-trees of the great

Herrenhausen avenue, and at first would not quit the place. Schulenberg,

in fact, could not come on account of her debts; but finding the Maypole

would not come, the Elephant packed up her trunk and slipped out of

Hanover unwieldy as she was. On this the Maypole straightway put herself

in motion, and followed her beloved George Louis. One seems to be speaking

of Captain Macheath, and Polly, and Lucy. The king we had selected; the

courtiers who came in his train; the English nobles who came to welcome

him, and on many of whom the shrewd old cynic turned his back—I protest it

is a wonderful satirical picture. I am a citizen waiting at Greenwich

pier, say, and crying hurrah for King George; and yet I can scarcely keep

my countenance, and help laughing at the enormous absurdity of this

advent!

Here we are, all on our knees. Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury

prostrating himself to the head of his Church, with Kielmansegge and

Schulenberg with their raddled cheeks grinning behind the Defender of the

Faith. Here is my Lord Duke of Marlborough kneeling too, the greatest

warrior of all times; he who betrayed King William—betrayed King James

II—betrayed Queen Anne—betrayed England to the French, the Elector to the

Pretender, the Pretender to the Elector; and here are my Lords Oxford and

Bolingbroke, the latter of whom has just tripped up the heels of the

former; and if a month’s more time had been allowed him, would have had

King James at Westminster. The great Whig gentlemen made their bows and

congees with proper decorum and ceremony; but yonder keen old schemer

knows the value of their loyalty. “Loyalty,” he must think, “as applied to

me—it is absurd! There are fifty nearer heirs to the throne than I am. I

am but an accident, and you fine Whig gentlemen take me for your own sake,

not for mine. You Tories hate me; you archbishop, smirking on your knees,

and prating about Heaven, you know I don’t care a fig for your Thirty-nine

Articles, and can’t understand a word of your stupid sermons. You, my

Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford—you know you were conspiring against me a

month ago; and you, my Lord Duke of Marlborough—you would sell me or any

man else, if you found your advantage in it. Come, my good Melusina, come,

my honest Sophia, let us go into my private room, and have some oysters

and some Rhine wine, and some pipes afterwards: let us make the best of

our situation; let us take what we can get, and leave these bawling,

brawling, lying English to shout, and fight, and cheat, in their own way!”

If Swift had not been committed to the statesmen of the losing side, what

a fine satirical picture we might have had of that general _sauve qui

peut_ amongst the Tory party! How mum the Tories became; how the House of

Lords and House of Commons chopped round; and how decorously the

majorities welcomed King George!

Bolingbroke, making his last speech in the House of Lords, pointed out the

shame of peerage, where several lords concurred to condemn in one general

vote all that they had approved in former Parliaments by many particular

resolutions. And so their conduct was shameful. St. John had the best of

the argument, but the worst of the vote. Bad times were come for him. He

talked philosophy, and professed innocence. He courted retirement, and was

ready to meet persecution; but, hearing that honest Mat Prior, who had

been recalled from Paris, was about to peach regarding the past

transactions, the philosopher bolted, and took that magnificent head of

his out of the ugly reach of the axe. Oxford, the lazy and good-humoured,

had more courage, and awaited the storm at home. He and Mat Prior both had

lodgings in the Tower, and both brought their heads safe out of that

dangerous menagerie. When Atterbury was carried off to the same den a few

years afterwards, and it was asked, what next should be done with him?

“Done with him? Fling him to the lions,” Cadogan said, Marlborough’s

lieutenant. But the British lion of those days did not care much for

drinking the blood of peaceful peers and poets, or crunching the bones of

bishops. Only four men were executed in London for the rebellion of 1715;

and twenty-two in Lancashire. Above a thousand taken in arms, submitted to

the king’s mercy, and petitioned to be transported to his Majesty’s

colonies in America. I have heard that their descendants took the loyalist

side in the disputes which arose sixty years after. It is pleasant to find

that a friend of ours, worthy Dick Steele, was for letting off the rebels

with their lives.

As one thinks of what might have been, how amusing the speculation is! We

know how the doomed Scottish gentlemen came out at Lord Mar’s summons,

mounted the white cockade, that has been a flower of sad poetry ever

since, and rallied round the ill-omened Stuart standard at Braemar. Mar,

with 8,000 men, and but 1,500 opposed to him, might have driven the enemy

over the Tweed, and taken possession of the whole of Scotland; but that

the Pretender’s duke did not venture to move when the day was his own.

Edinburgh Castle might have been in King James’s hands; but that the men

who were to escalade it stayed to drink his health at the tavern, and

arrived two hours too late at the rendezvous under the castle wall. There

was sympathy enough in the town—the projected attack seems to have been

known there—Lord Mahon quotes Sinclair’s account of a gentleman not

concerned, who told Sinclair, that he was in a house that evening where

eighteen of them were drinking, as the facetious landlady said, “powdering

their hair,” for the attack of the castle. Suppose they had not stopped to

powder their hair? Edinburgh Castle, and town, and all Scotland were King

James’s. The north of England rises, and marches over Barnet Heath upon

London. Wyndham is up in Somersetshire; Packington in Worcestershire; and

Vivian in Cornwall. The Elector of Hanover, and his hideous mistresses,

pack up the plate, and perhaps the crown jewels in London, and are off

_via_ Harwich and Helvoetsluys, for dear old Deutschland. The king—God

save him!—lands at Dover, with tumultuous applause; shouting multitudes,

roaring cannon, the Duke of Marlborough weeping tears of joy, and all the

bishops kneeling in the mud. In a few years, mass is said in St. Paul’s;

matins and vespers are sung in York Minster; and Dr. Swift is turned out

of his stall and deanery house at St. Patrick’s, to give place to Father

Dominic, from Salamanca. All these changes were possible then, and once

thirty years afterwards—all this we might have had, but for the _pulveris

exigui jactu_, that little toss of powder for the hair which the Scotch

conspirators stopped to take at the tavern.

You understand the distinction I would draw between history—of which I do

not aspire to be an expounder—and manners and life such as these sketches

would describe. The rebellion breaks out in the north; its story is before

you in a hundred volumes, in none more fairly than in the excellent

narrative of Lord Mahon, The clans are up in Scotland; Derwentwater,

Nithsdale and Forster are in arms in Northumberland—these are matters of

history, for which you are referred to the due chroniclers. The Guards are

set to watch the streets, and prevent the people wearing white roses. I

read presently of a couple of soldiers almost flogged to death for wearing

oak boughs in their hats on the 29th of May—another badge of the beloved

Stuarts. It is with these we have to do, rather than the marches and

battles of the armies to which the poor fellows belonged—with statesmen,

and how they looked, and how they lived, rather than with measures of

state, which belong to history alone. For example, at the close of the old

queen’s reign, it is known the Duke of Marlborough left the kingdom—after

what menaces, after what prayers, lies, bribes offered, taken, refused,

accepted; after what dark doubling and tacking, let history, if she can or

dare, say. The queen dead; who so eager to return as my lord duke? Who

shouts God save the king! so lustily as the great conqueror of Blenheim

and Malplaquet? (By the way, he will send over some more money for the

Pretender yet, on the sly.) Who lays his hand on his blue ribbon, and

lifts his eyes more gracefully to heaven than this hero? He makes a

quasi-triumphal entrance into London, by Temple Bar, in his enormous gilt

coach—and the enormous gilt coach breaks down somewhere by Chancery Lane,

and his highness is obliged to get another. There it is we have him. We

are with the mob in the crowd, not with the great folks in the procession.

We are not the Historic Muse, but her ladyship’s attendant,

tale-bearer—valet de chambre—for whom no man is a hero; and, as yonder one

steps from his carriage to the next handy conveyance, we take the number

of the hack; we look all over at his stars, ribbons, embroidery; we think

within ourselves, O you unfathomable schemer! O you warrior invincible! O

you beautiful smiling Judas! What master would you not kiss or betray?

What traitor’s head, blackening on the spikes on yonder gate, ever hatched

a tithe of the treason which has worked under your periwig?

We have brought our Georges to London city, and if we would behold its

aspect, may see it in Hogarth’s lively perspective of Cheapside, or read

of it in a hundred contemporary books which paint the manners of that age.

Our dear old _Spectator_ looks smiling upon the streets, with their

innumerable signs, and describes them with his charming humour. “Our

streets are filled with ‘Blue Boars’, ‘Black Swans’, and ‘Red Lions’, not

to mention ‘Flying Pigs’ and ‘Hogs in Armour’, with other creatures more

extraordinary than any in the deserts of Africa.” A few of these quaint

old figures still remain in London town. You may still see there, and over

its old hostel in Ludgate Hill, the “Belle Sauvage” to whom the

_Spectator_ so pleasantly alludes in that paper; and who was, probably, no

other than the sweet American Pocahontas, who rescued from death the

daring Captain Smith. There is the “Lion’s Head’” down whose jaws the

_Spectator’s_ own letters were passed; and over a great banker’s in Fleet

Street, the effigy of the wallet, which the founder of the firm bore when

he came into London a country boy. People this street, so ornamented with

crowds of swinging chairmen, with servants bawling to clear the way, with

Mr. Dean in his cassock, his lackey marching before him; or Mrs. Dinah in

her sack, tripping to chapel, her footboy carrying her ladyship’s great

Prayer-book; with itinerant tradesmen, singing their hundred cries (I

remember forty years ago, as a boy in London city, a score of cheery,

familiar cries that are silent now). Fancy the beaux thronging to the

chocolate-houses, tapping their snuff-boxes as they issue thence, their

periwigs appearing over the red curtains. Fancy Saccharissa beckoning and

smiling from the upper windows, and a crowd of soldiers brawling and

bustling at the door—gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in scarlet, with

blue facings, and laced with gold at the seams; gentlemen of the Horse

Grenadiers, in their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter embroidered

on the front in gold and silver; men of the Halberdiers, in their long red

coats, as bluff Harry left them, with their ruffs and velvet flat caps.

Perhaps the king’s Majesty himself is going to St. James’s as we pass. If

he is going to Parliament, he is in his coach-and-eight, surrounded by his

guards and the high officers of his crown. Otherwise his Majesty only uses

a chair, with six footmen walking before, and six yeomen of the guard at

the sides of the sedan. The officers in waiting follow the king in

coaches. It must be rather slow work.

Our _Spectator_ and _Tatler_ are full of delightful glimpses of the town

life of those days. In the company of that charming guide, we may go to

the opera, the comedy, the puppet show, the auction, even the cockpit: we

can take boat at Temple Stairs, and accompany Sir Roger de Coverley and

Mr. Spectator to Spring Garden—it will be called Vauxhall a few years

since, when Hogarth will paint for it. Would you not like to step back

into the past, and be introduced to Mr. Addison?—not the Right Honourable

Joseph Addison, Esq., George I’s Secretary of State, but to the delightful

painter of contemporary manners; the man who, when in good humour himself,

was the pleasantest companion in all England. I should like to go into

Lockit’s with him, and drink a bowl along with Sir R. Steele (who has just

been knighted by King George, and who does not happen to have any money to

pay his share of the reckoning). I should not care to follow Mr. Addison

to his secretary’s office in Whitehall. There we get into politics. Our

business is pleasure, and the town, and the coffee-house, and the theatre,

and the Mall. Delightful _Spectator!_ kind friend of leisure hours! happy

companion! true Christian gentleman! How much greater, better, you are

than the king Mr. Secretary kneels to!

You can have foreign testimony about old-world London, if you like; and my

before-quoted friend, Charles Louis, Baron de Pöllnitz, will conduct us to

it. “A man of sense,” says he, “or a fine gentleman, is never at a loss

for company in London, and this is the way the latter passes his time. He

rises late, puts on a frock, and, leaving his sword at home, takes his

cane, and goes where he pleases. The Park is commonly the place where he

walks, because ’tis the Exchange for men of quality. ’Tis the same thing

as the Tuileries at Paris, only the Park has a certain beauty of

simplicity which cannot be described. The grand walk is called the Mall;

is full of people at every hour of the day, but especially at morning and

evening, when their Majesties often walk with the royal family, who are

attended only by a half-dozen yeomen of the guard, and permit all persons

to walk at the same time with them. The ladies and gentlemen always appear

in rich dresses, for the English, who, twenty years ago, did not wear gold

lace but in their army, are now embroidered and bedaubed as much as the

French. I speak of persons of quality; for the citizen still contents

himself with a suit of fine cloth, a good hat and wig, and fine linen.

Everybody is well clothed here, and even the beggars don’t make so ragged

an appearance as they do elsewhere.” After our friend, the man of quality,

has had his morning or undress walk in the Mall, he goes home to dress,

and then saunters to some coffee-house or chocolate-house frequented by

the persons he would see. “For ’tis a rule with the English to go once a

day at least to houses of this sort, where they talk of business and news,

read the papers, and often look at one another without opening their lips.

And ’tis very well they are so mute: for were they all as talkative as

people of other nations, the coffee-houses would be intolerable, and there

would be no hearing what one man said where they are so many. The

chocolate-house in St. James’s Street, where I go every morning to pass

away the time, is always so full that a man can scarce turn about in it.”

Delightful as London city was, King George I liked to be out of it as much

as ever he could; and when there, passed all his time with his Germans. It

was with them as with Blücher 100 years afterwards, when the bold old

Reiter looked down from St. Paul’s, and sighed out, “_Was für Plunder!_”

The German women plundered; the German secretaries plundered; the German

cooks and intendants plundered; even Mustapha and Mahomet, the German

negroes, had a share of the booty. Take what you can get, was the old

monarch’s maxim. He was not a lofty monarch, certainly: he was not a

patron of the fine arts: but he was not a hypocrite, he was not

revengeful, he was not extravagant. Though a despot in Hanover, he was a

moderate ruler in England. His aim was to leave it to itself as much as

possible, and to live out of it as much as he could. His heart was in

Hanover. When taken ill on his last journey, as he was passing through

Holland, he thrust his livid head out of the coach-window, and gasped out,

“Osnaburg, Osnaburg!” He was more than fifty years of age when he came

amongst us: we took him because we wanted him, because he served our turn;

we laughed at his uncouth German ways, and sneered at him. He took our

loyalty for what it was worth; laid hands on what money he could; kept us

assuredly from Popery and wooden shoes. I, for one, would have been on his

side in those days. Cynical, and selfish, as he was, he was better than a

king out of St. Germains with the French king’s orders in his pocket, and

a swarm of Jesuits in his train.

The Fates are supposed to interest themselves about royal personages; and

so this one had omens and prophecies specially regarding him. He was said

to be much disturbed at a prophecy that he should die very soon after his

wife; and sure enough, pallid Death, having seized upon the luckless

princess in her castle of Ahlden, presently pounced upon H.M. King George

I, in his travelling chariot, on the Hanover road. What postilion can

outride that pale horseman? It is said, George promised one of his

left-handed widows to come to her after death, if leave were granted to

him to revisit the glimpses of the moon; and soon after his demise, a

great raven actually flying or hopping in at the Duchess of Kendal’s

window at Twickenham, she chose to imagine the king’s spirit inhabited

these plumes, and took special care of her sable visitor. Affecting

metempsychosis—funereal royal bird! How pathetic is the idea of the

duchess weeping over it! When this chaste addition to our English

aristocracy died, all her jewels, her plate, her plunder went over to her

relations in Hanover. I wonder whether her heirs took the bird, and

whether it is still flapping its wings over Herrenhausen?

The days are over in England of that strange religion of king-worship,

when priests flattered princes in the Temple of God; when servility was

held to be ennobling duty; when beauty and youth tried eagerly for royal

favour; and woman’s shame was held to be no dishonour. Mended morals and

mended manners in Courts and people, are among the priceless consequences

of the freedom which George I came to rescue and secure. He kept his

compact with his English subjects; and if he escaped no more than other

men and monarchs from the vices of his age, at least we may thank him for

preserving and transmitting the liberties of ours. In our free air, royal

and humble homes have alike been purified; and Truth, the birthright of

high and low among us, which quite fearlessly judges our greatest

personages, can only speak of them now in words of respect and regard.

There are stains in the portrait of the first George, and traits in it

which none of us need admire; but, among the nobler features are justice,

courage, moderation—and these we may recognize ere we turn the picture to

the wall.

George The Second

On the afternoon of the 14th of June, 1727, two horsemen might have been

perceived galloping along the road from Chelsea to Richmond. The foremost,

cased in the jackboots of the period, was a broad-faced, jolly-looking,

and very corpulent cavalier; but, by the manner in which he urged his

horse, you might see that he was a bold as well as a skilful rider.

Indeed, no man loved sport better; and in the hunting-fields of Norfolk,

no squire rode more boldly after the fox, or cheered Ringwood and

Sweettips more lustily, than he who now thundered over the Richmond road.

He speedily reached Richmond Lodge, and asked to see the owner of the

mansion. The mistress of the house and her ladies, to whom our friend was

admitted, said he could not be introduced to the master, however pressing

the business might be. The master was asleep after his dinner; he always

slept after his dinner: and woe be to the person who interrupted him!

Nevertheless, our stout friend of the jackboots put the affrighted ladies

aside, opened the forbidden door of the bedroom, wherein upon the bed lay

a little gentleman; and here the eager messenger knelt down in his

jackboots.

He on the bed started up, and with many oaths and a strong German accent

asked who was there, and who dared to disturb him?

“I am Sir Robert Walpole,” said the messenger. The awakened sleeper hated

Sir Robert Walpole. “I have the honour to announce to your Majesty that

your royal father, King George I, died at Osnaburg, on Saturday last, the

10th inst.”

“_Dat is one big lie!_” roared out his sacred Majesty King George II: but

Sir Robert Walpole stated the fact, and from that day until

three-and-thirty years after, George, the second of the name, ruled over

England.

How the king made away with his father’s will under the astonished nose of

the Archbishop of Canterbury; how he was a choleric little sovereign; how

he shook his fist in the face of his father’s courtiers; how he kicked his

coat and wig about in his rages, and called everybody thief, liar, rascal,

with whom he differed: you will read in all the history books; and how he

speedily and shrewdly reconciled himself with the bold minister, whom he

had hated during his father’s life, and by whom he was served during

fifteen years of his own with admirable prudence, fidelity, and success.

But for Sir Robert Walpole, we should have had the Pretender back again.

But for his obstinate love of peace, we should have had wars, which the

nation was not strong enough nor united enough to endure. But for his

resolute counsels and good-humoured resistance we might have had German

despots attempting a Hanoverian regimen over us: we should have had

revolt, commotion, want, and tyrannous misrule, in place of a quarter of a

century of peace, freedom, and material prosperity, such as the country

never enjoyed, until that corrupter of Parliaments, that dissolute tipsy

cynic, that courageous lover of peace and liberty, that great citizen,

patriot, and statesman governed it. In religion he was little better than

a heathen; cracked ribald jokes at bigwigs and bishops, and laughed at

High Church and Low. In private life the old pagan revelled in the lowest

pleasures: he passed his Sundays tippling at Richmond; and his holidays

bawling after dogs, or boozing at Houghton with boors over beef and punch.

He cared for letters no more than his master did: he judged human nature

so meanly that one is ashamed to have to own that he was right, and that

men could be corrupted by means so base. But, with his hireling House of

Commons, he defended liberty for us; with his incredulity he kept

Church-craft down. There were parsons at Oxford as double-dealing and

dangerous as any priests out of Rome, and he routed them both. He gave

Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them peace, and ease, and freedom;

the three per cents nearly at par; and wheat at five-and six-and-twenty

shillings a quarter.

[Illustration]

Ave Caesar

It was lucky for us that our first Georges were not more high-minded men;

especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as to leave England

to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who

gloried in the name of Briton, and, being born in the country, proposed to

rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and

great-grandfather, who did not try. It was righting itself during their

occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying

out; the stately old English High Church was emptying itself: the

questions dropping, which, on one side and the other;—the side of loyalty,

prerogative, church, and king;—the side of right, truth, civil and

religious freedom,—had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time

when George III came to the throne, the combat between loyalty and liberty

was come to an end; and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was

dying in Italy.

Those who are curious about European Court history of the last age know

the memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a Court was that of

Berlin, where George II’s cousins ruled sovereign. Frederick the Great’s

father knocked down his sons, daughters, officers of state; he kidnapped

big men all Europe over to make grenadiers of; his feasts, his parades,

his wine parties, his tobacco parties, are all described. Jonathan Wild

the Great in language, pleasures, and behaviour, is scarcely more delicate

than this German sovereign. Louis XV, his life, and reign, and doings, are

told in a thousand French memoirs. Our George II, at least, was not a

worse king than his neighbours. He claimed and took the royal exemption

from doing right which sovereigns assumed. A dull little man of low tastes

he appears to us in England; yet Hervey tells us that this choleric prince

was a great sentimentalist, and that his letters—of which he wrote

prodigious quantities—were quite dangerous in their powers of fascination.

He kept his sentimentalities for his Germans and his queen. With us

English, he never chose to be familiar. He has been accused of avarice,

yet he did not give much money, and did not leave much behind him. He did

not love the fine arts, but he did not pretend to love them. He was no

more a hypocrite about religion than his father. He judged men by a low

standard; yet, with such men as were near him, was he wrong in judging as

he did? He readily detected lying and flattery, and liars and flatterers

were perforce his companions. Had he been more of a dupe he might have

been more amiable. A dismal experience made him cynical. No boon was it to

him to be clear-sighted, and see only selfishness and flattery round about

him. What could Walpole tell him about his Lords and Commons, but that

they were all venal? Did not his clergy, his courtiers, bring him the same

story? Dealing with men and women in his rude, sceptical way, he comes to

doubt about honour, male and female, about patriotism, about religion. “He

is wild, but he fights like a man,” George I, the taciturn, said of his

son and successor. Courage George II certainly had. The Electoral Prince,

at the head of his father’s contingent, had approved himself a good and

brave soldier under Eugene and Marlborough. At Oudenarde he specially

distinguished himself. At Malplaquet the other claimant to the English

throne won but little honour. There was always a question about James’s

courage. Neither then in Flanders, nor afterwards in his own ancient

kingdom of Scotland, did the luckless Pretender show much resolution. But

dapper little George had a famous tough spirit of his own, and fought like

a Trojan. He called out his brother of Prussia, with sword and pistol; and

I wish, for the interest of romancers in general, that that famous duel

could have taken place. The two sovereigns hated each other with all their

might; their seconds were appointed; the place of meeting was settled; and

the duel was only prevented by strong representations made to the two, of

the European laughter which would have been caused by such a transaction.

Whenever we hear of dapper George at war, it is certain that he demeaned

himself like a little man of valour. At Dettingen his horse ran away with

him, and with difficulty was stopped from carrying him into the enemy’s

lines. The king, dismounting from the fiery quadruped, said bravely: “Now

I know I shall not run away;” and placed himself at the head of the foot,

drew his sword, brandishing it at the whole of the French army, and

calling out to his own men to come on, in bad English, but with the most

famous pluck and spirit. In ’45, when the Pretender was at Derby, and many

people began to look pale, the king never lost his courage—not he. “Pooh!

don’t talk to me that stuff!” he said, like a gallant little prince as he

was, and never for one moment allowed his equanimity, or his business, or

his pleasures, or his travels, to be disturbed. On public festivals he

always appeared in the hat and coat he wore on the famous day of

Oudenarde; and the people laughed, but kindly, at the odd old garment, for

bravery never goes out of fashion.

In private life the prince showed himself a worthy descendant of his

father. In this respect, so much has been said about the first George’s

manners, that we need not enter into a description of the son’s German

harem. In 1705 he married a princess remarkable for beauty, for

cleverness, for learning, for good temper—one of the truest and fondest

wives ever prince was blessed with, and who loved him and was faithful to

him, and he, in his coarse fashion, loved her to the last. It must be told

to the honour of Caroline of Anspach, that, at the time when German

princes thought no more of changing their religion than you of altering

your cap, she refused to give up Protestantism for the other creed,

although an Archduke, afterwards to be an Emperor, was offered to her for

a bridegroom. Her Protestant relations in Berlin were angry at her

rebellious spirit; it was they who tried to convert her (it is droll to

think that Frederick the Great, who had no religion at all, was known for

a long time in England as the Protestant hero), and these good Protestants

set upon Caroline a certain Father Urban, a very skilful Jesuit, and

famous winner of souls. But she routed the Jesuit; and she refused Charles

VI; and she married the little Electoral Prince of Hanover, whom she

tended with love, and with every manner of sacrifice, with artful

kindness, with tender flattery, with entire self-devotion, thenceforward

until her life’s end.

When George I made his first visit to Hanover, his son was appointed

regent during the royal absence. But this honour was never again conferred

on the Prince of Wales; he and his father fell out presently. On the

occasion of the christening of his second son, a royal row took place, and

the prince, shaking his fist in the Duke of Newcastle’s face, called him a

rogue, and provoked his august father. He and his wife were turned out of

St. James’s, and their princely children taken from them, by order of the

royal head of the family. Father and mother wept piteously at parting from

their little ones. The young ones sent some cherries, with their love, to

papa and mamma; the parents watered the fruit with tears. They had no

tears thirty-five years afterwards, when Prince Frederick died—their

eldest son, their heir, their enemy.

The king called his daughter-in-law “_cette diablesse madame la

princesse_”. The frequenters of the latter’s Court were forbidden to

appear at the king’s: their royal highnesses going to Bath, we read how

the courtiers followed them thither, and paid that homage in Somersetshire

which was forbidden in London. That phrase of “_cette diablesse madame la

princesse_” explains one cause of the wrath of her royal papa. She was a

very clever woman: she had a keen sense of humour: she had a dreadful

tongue: she turned into ridicule the antiquated sultan and his hideous

harem. She wrote savage letters about him home to members of her family.

So, driven out from the royal presence, the prince and princess set up for

themselves in Leicester Fields, “where,” says Walpole, “the most promising

of the young gentlemen of the next party, and the prettiest and liveliest

of the young ladies, formed the new Court.” Besides Leicester House, they

had their lodge at Richmond, frequented by some of the pleasantest company

of those days. There were the Herveys, and Chesterfield, and little Mr.

Pope from Twickenham, and with him, sometimes, the savage Dean of St.

Patrick’s, and quite a bevy of young ladies, whose pretty faces smile on

us out of history. There was Lepell, famous in ballad song; and the saucy,

charming Mary Bellenden, who would have none of the Prince of Wales’s fine

compliments, who folded her arms across her breast, and bade H.R.H. keep

off; and knocked his purse of guineas into his face, and told him she was

tired of seeing him count them. He was not an august monarch, this

Augustus. Walpole tells how, one night at the royal card-table, the

playful princesses pulled a chair away from under Lady Deloraine, who, in

revenge, pulled the king’s from under him, so that his Majesty fell on the

carpet. In whatever posture one sees this royal George, he is ludicrous

somehow; even at Dettingen, where he fought so bravely, his figure is

absurd—calling out in his broken English, and lunging with his rapier,

like a fencing-master. In contemporary caricatures, George’s son, “the

Hero of Culloden,” is also made an object of considerable fun, as witness

the following picture of him defeated by the French (1757) at Hastenbeck:

[Illustration]

I refrain to quote from Walpole regarding George—for those charming

volumes are in the hands of all who love the gossip of the last century.

Nothing can be more cheery than Horace’s letters. Fiddles sing all through

them: wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages,

glitter and sparkle there: never was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking

Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us. Hervey, the next great

authority, is a darker spirit. About him there is something frightful: a

few years since his heirs opened the lid of the Ickworth box; it was as if

a Pompeii was opened to us—the last century dug up, with its temples and

its games, its chariots, its public places—lupanaria. Wandering through

that city of the dead, that dreadfully selfish time, through those godless

intrigues and feasts, through those crowds, pushing, and eager, and

struggling—rouged, and lying, and fawning—I have wanted some one to be

friends with. I have said to friends conversant with that history, Show me

some good person about that Court; find me, among those selfish courtiers,

those dissolute, gay people, some one being that I can love and regard.

There is that strutting little sultan, George II; there is that

hunchbacked, beetle-browed Lord Chesterfield; there is John Hervey, with

his deadly smile, and ghastly, painted face—I hate them. There is Hoadly,

cringing from one bishopric to another: yonder comes little Mr. Pope, from

Twickenham, with his friend, the Irish dean, in his new cassock, bowing

too, but with rage flashing from under his bushy eyebrows, and scorn and

hate quivering in his smile. Can you be fond of these? Of Pope I might: at

least I might love his genius, his wit, his greatness, his

sensibility—with a certain conviction that at some fancied slight, some

sneer which he imagined, he would turn upon me and stab me. Can you trust

the queen? She is not of our order: their very position makes kings and

queens lonely. One inscrutable attachment that inscrutable woman has. To

that she is faithful, through all trial, neglect, pain, and time. Save her

husband, she really cares for no created being. She is good enough to her

children, and even fond enough of them: but she would chop them all up

into little pieces to please him. In her intercourse with all around her,

she was perfectly kind, gracious, and natural; but friends may die,

daughters may depart, she will be as perfectly kind and gracious to the

next set. If the king wants her, she will smile upon him, be she ever so

sad; and walk with him, be she ever so weary; and laugh at his brutal

jokes, be she in ever so much pain of body or heart. Caroline’s devotion

to her husband is a prodigy to read of. What charm had the little man?

What was there in those wonderful letters of thirty pages long, which he

wrote to her when he was absent, and to his mistresses at Hanover, when he

was in London with his wife? Why did Caroline, the most lovely and

accomplished princess of Germany, take a little red-faced staring

princeling for a husband, and refuse an emperor? Why, to her last hour,

did she love him so? She killed herself because she loved him so. She had

the gout, and would plunge her feet in cold water in order to walk with

him. With the film of death over her eyes, writhing in intolerable pain,

she yet had a livid smile and a gentle word for her master. You have read

the wonderful history of that death-bed? How she bade him marry again, and

the reply the old king blubbered out, “_Non, non: j’aurai des

maitresses_.” There never was such a ghastly farce. I watch the

astonishing scene—I stand by that awful bedside, wondering at the ways in

which God has ordained the lives, loves, rewards, successes, passions,

actions, ends of his creatures—and can’t but laugh, in the presence of

death, and with the saddest heart. In that often-quoted passage from Lord

Hervey, in which the queen’s death-bed is described, the grotesque horror

of the details surpasses all satire: the dreadful humour of the scene is

more terrible than Swift’s blackest pages, or Fielding’s fiercest irony.

The man who wrote the story had something diabolical about him: the

terrible verses which Pope wrote respecting Hervey, in one of his own

moods of almost fiendish malignity, I fear are true. I am frightened as I

look back into the past, and fancy I behold that ghastly, beautiful face;

as I think of the queen writhing on her death-bed, and crying out,

“Pray!—pray!”—of the royal old sinner by her side, who kisses her dead

lips with frantic grief, and leaves her to sin more;—of the bevy of

courtly clergymen, and the archbishop, whose prayers she rejects, and who

are obliged for propriety’s sake to shuffle off the anxious inquiries of

the public, and vow that her Majesty quitted this life “in a heavenly

frame of mind”. What a life!—to what ends devoted! What a vanity of

vanities! It is a theme for another pulpit than the lecturer’s. For a

pulpit?—I think the part which pulpits play in the deaths of kings is the

most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of

disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the

falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State

churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial

over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson

must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical

black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter

him—announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies

of “our most religious and gracious king”.

I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious king’s

favourite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5,000_l._ (She betted him

5,000_l._ that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.)

Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?

As I peep into George II’s St. James’s, I see crowds of cassocks rustling

up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping

purses into their laps; that godless old king yawning under his canopy in

his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing. Discoursing

about what?—about righteousness and judgement? Whilst the chaplain is

preaching, the king is chattering in German almost as loud as the

preacher; so loud that the clergyman—it may be one Dr. Young, he who wrote

_Night Thoughts_, and discoursed on the splendours of the stars, the

glories of heaven, and utter vanities of this world—actually burst out

crying in his pulpit because the Defender of the Faith and dispenser of

bishoprics would not listen to him! No wonder that the clergy were corrupt

and indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption. No wonder that

sceptics multiplied and morals degenerated, so far as they depended on the

influence of such a king. No wonder that Whitfield cried out in the

wilderness, that Wesley quitted the insulted temple to pray on the

hillside. I look with reverence on those men at that time. Which is the

sublimer spectacle—the good John Wesley, surrounded by his congregation of

miners at the pit’s mouth, or the queen’s chaplains mumbling through their

morning office in their ante-room, under the picture of the great Venus,

with the door opened into the adjoining chamber, where the queen is

dressing, talking scandal to Lord Hervey, or uttering sneers at Lady

Suffolk, who is kneeling with the basin at her mistress’s side? I say I am

scared as I look round at this society—at this king, at these courtiers,

at these politicians, at these bishops—at this flaunting vice and levity.

Whereabouts in this Court is the honest man? Where is the pure person one

may like? The air stifles one with its sickly perfumes. There are some

old-world follies and some absurd ceremonials about our Court of the

present day, which I laugh at, but as an Englishman, contrasting it with

the past, shall I not acknowledge the change of to-day? As the mistress of

St. James’s passes me now, I salute the sovereign, wise, moderate,

exemplary of life; the good mother; the good wife; the accomplished lady;

the enlightened friend of art; the tender sympathizer in her people’s

glories and sorrows.

Of all the Court of George and Caroline, I find no one but Lady Suffolk

with whom it seems pleasant and kindly to hold converse. Even the

misogynist Croker, who edited her letters, loves her, and has that regard

for her with which her sweet graciousness seems to have inspired almost

all men and some women who came near her. I have noted many little traits

which go to prove the charms of her character (it is not merely because

she is charming, but because she is characteristic, that I allude to her).

She writes delightfully sober letters. Addressing Mr. Gay at Tunbridge (he

was, you know, a poet, penniless and in disgrace), she says: “The place

you are in, has strangely filled your head with physicians and cures; but,

take my word for it, many a fine lady has gone there to drink the waters

without being sick; and many a man has complained of the loss of his

heart, who had it in his own possession. I desire you will keep yours; for

I shall not be very fond of a friend without one, and I have a great mind

you should be in the number of mine.”

When Lord Peterborough was seventy years old, that indomitable youth

addressed some flaming love-, or rather gallantry-, letters to Mrs.

Howard—curious relics they are of the romantic manner of wooing sometimes

in use in those days. It is not passion; it is not love; it is gallantry:

a mixture of earnest and acting; high-flown compliments, profound bows,

vows, sighs, and ogles, in the manner of the Clelie romances, and

Millamont and Doricourt in the comedy. There was a vast elaboration of

ceremonies and etiquette, of raptures—a regulated form for kneeling and

wooing which has quite passed out of our downright manners. Henrietta

Howard accepted the noble old earl’s philandering; answered the queer

love-letters with due acknowledgement; made a profound curtsey to

Peterborough’s profound bow; and got John Gay to help her in the

composition of her letters in reply to her old knight. He wrote her

charming verses, in which there was truth as well as grace. “O wonderful

creature!” he writes:—

O wonderful creature, a woman of reason!

Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season!

When so easy to guess who this angel should be,

Who would think Mrs. Howard ne’er dreamt it was she?

The great Mr. Pope also celebrated her in lines not less pleasant, and

painted a portrait of what must certainly have been a delightful lady:—

I know a thing that’s most uncommon—

Envy, be silent and attend!—

I know a reasonable woman,

Handsome, yet witty, and a friend:

Not warp’d by passion, aw’d by rumour,

Not grave through pride, or gay through folly:

An equal mixture of good humour

And exquisite soft melancholy.

Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir?

Yes, she has one, I must aver—

When all the world conspires to praise her,

The woman’s deaf, and does not hear!

Even the women concurred in praising and loving her. The Duchess of

Queensberry bears testimony to her amiable qualities, and writes to her:

“I tell you so and so, because you love children, and to have children

love you.” The beautiful, jolly Mary Bellenden, represented by

contemporaries as “the most perfect creature ever known”, writes very

pleasantly to her “dear Howard”, her “dear Swiss”, from the country,

whither Mary had retired after her marriage, and when she gave up being a

maid of honour. “How do you do, Mrs. Howard?” Mary breaks out. “How do you

do, Mrs. Howard? that is all I have to say. This afternoon I am taken with

a fit of writing; but as to matter, I have nothing better to entertain

you, than news of my farm. I therefore give you the following list of the

stock of eatables that I am fatting for my private tooth. It is well known

to the whole county of Kent, that I have four fat calves, two fat hogs,

fit for killing, twelve promising black pigs, two young chickens, three

fine geese, with thirteen eggs under each (several being duck-eggs, else

the others do not come to maturity); all this, with rabbits, and pigeons,

and carp in plenty, beef and mutton at reasonable rates. Now, Howard, if

you have a mind to stick a knife into anything I have named, say so!”

A jolly set must they have been, those maids of honour. Pope introduces us

to a whole bevy of them, in a pleasant letter. “I went,” he says, “by

water to Hampton Court, and met the Prince, with all his ladies, on

horseback, coming from hunting. Mrs. Bellenden and Mrs. Lepell took me

into protection, contrary to the laws against harbouring Papists, and gave

me a dinner, with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversation

with Mrs. Howard. We all agreed that the life of a maid of honour was of

all things the most miserable, and wished that all women who envied it had

a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham of a morning, ride over hedges and

ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever,

and (what is worse a hundred times) with a red mark on the forehead from

an uneasy hat—all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for

hunters. As soon as they wipe off the heat of the day, they must simper an

hour and catch cold in the princess’s apartment; from thence to dinner

with what appetite they may; and after that till midnight, work, walk, or

think which way they please. No lone house in Wales, with a mountain and

rookery, is more contemplative than this Court. Miss Lepell walked with me

three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality

but the king, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain all alone under

the garden wall.”

I fancy it was a merrier England, that of our ancestors, than the island

which we inhabit. People high and low amused themselves very much more. I

have calculated the manner in which statesmen and persons of condition

passed their time—and what with drinking, and dining, and supping, and

cards, wonder how they got through their business at all. They played all

sorts of games, which, with the exception of cricket and tennis, have

quite gone out of our manners now. In the old prints of St. James’s Park,

you still see the marks along the walk, to note the balls when the Court

played at Mall. Fancy Birdcage Walk now so laid out, and Lord John and

Lord Palmerston knocking balls up and down the avenue! Most of those jolly

sports belong to the past, and the good old games of England are only to

be found in old novels, in old ballads, or the columns of dingy old

newspapers, which say how a main of cocks is to be fought at Winchester

between the Winchester men and the Hampton men; or how the Cornwall men

and the Devon men are going to hold a great wrestling match at Totnes, and

so on.

A hundred and twenty years ago there were not only country towns in

England, but people who inhabited them. We were very much more gregarious;

we were amused by very simple pleasures. Every town had its fair, every

village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred jolly ditties about

great cudgel-playings, famous grinning through horse-collars, great

maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used to run races clad in

very light attire; and the kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame

in looking on. Dancing bears went about the country with pipe and tabor.

Certain well-known tunes were sung all over the land for hundreds of

years, and high and low rejoiced in that simple music. Gentlemen who

wished to entertain their female friends constantly sent for a band. When

Beau Fielding, a mighty fine gentleman, was courting the lady whom he

married, he treated her and her companion at his lodgings to a supper from

the tavern, and after supper they sent out for a fiddler—three of them.

Fancy the three, in a great wainscoted room, in Covent Garden or Soho,

lighted by two or three candles in silver sconces, some grapes and a

bottle of Florence wine on the table, and the honest fiddler playing old

tunes in quaint old minor keys, as the Beau takes out one lady after the

other, and solemnly dances with her!

The very great folks, young noblemen, with their governors, and the like,

went abroad and made the great tour; the home satirists jeered at the

Frenchified and Italian ways which they brought back; but the greater

number of people never left the country. The jolly squire often had never

been twenty miles from home. Those who did go went to the baths, to

Harrogate, or Scarborough, or Bath, or Epsom. Old letters are full of

these places of pleasure. Gay writes to us about the fiddlers at

Tunbridge; of the ladies having merry little private balls amongst

themselves; and the gentlemen entertaining them by turns with tea and

music. One of the young beauties whom he met did not care for tea: “We

have a young lady here,” he says, “that is very particular in her desires.

I have known some young ladies, who, if ever they prayed, would ask for

some equipage or title, a husband or matadores: but this lady, who is but

seventeen, and has 30,000_l._ to her fortune, places all her wishes on a

pot of good ale. When her friends, for the sake of her shape and

complexion, would dissuade her from it, she answers, with the truest

sincerity, that by the loss of shape and complexion she could only lose a

husband, whereas ale is her passion.”

Every country town had its assembly-room—mouldy old tenements, which we

may still see in deserted inn-yards, in decayed provincial cities, out of

which the great wen of London has sucked all the life. York, at assize

time, and throughout the winter, harboured a large society of northern

gentry. Shrewsbury was celebrated for its festivities. At Newmarket, I

read of “a vast deal of good company, besides rogues and blacklegs”; at

Norwich, of two assemblies, with a prodigious crowd in the hall, the

rooms, and the gallery. In Cheshire (it is a maid of honour of Queen

Caroline who writes, and who is longing to be back at Hampton Court, and

the fun there) I peep into a country house, and see a very merry party:

“We meet in the work-room before nine, eat and break a joke or two till

twelve, then we repair to our own chambers and make ourselves ready, for

it cannot be called dressing. At noon the great bell fetches us into a

parlour, adorned with all sorts of fine arms, poisoned darts, several pair

of old boots and shoes worn by men of might, with the stirrups of King

Charles I, taken from him at Edgehill,”—and there they have their dinner,

after which comes dancing and supper.

As for Bath, all history went and bathed and drank there. George II and

his queen, Prince Frederick and his Court, scarce a character one can

mention of the early last century, but was seen in that famous Pump-room

where Beau Nash presided, and his picture hung between the busts of Newton

and Pope:

This picture, placed these busts between,

Gives satire all its strength:

Wisdom and Wit are little seen,

But Folly at full length.

I should like to have seen the Folly. It was a splendid, embroidered,

be-ruffled, snuff-boxed, red-heeled, impertinent Folly, and knew how to

make itself respected. I should like to have seen that noble old madcap

Peterborough in his boots (he actually had the audacity to walk about Bath

in boots!), with his blue ribbon and stars, and a cabbage under each arm,

and a chicken in his hand, which he had been cheapening for his dinner.

Chesterfield came there many a time and gambled for hundreds, and grinned

through his gout. Mary Wortley was there, young and beautiful; and Mary

Wortley, old, hideous, and snuffy. Miss Chudleigh came there, slipping

away from one husband, and on the look-out for another. Walpole passed

many a day there; sickly, supercilious, absurdly dandified, and affected;

with a brilliant wit, a delightful sensibility; and for his friends, a

most tender, generous, and faithful heart. And if you and I had been alive

then, and strolling down Milsom Street—hush! we should have taken our hats

off, as an awful, long, lean, gaunt figure, swathed in flannels, passed by

in its chair, and a livid face looked out from the window—great fierce

eyes staring from under a bushy, powdered wig, a terrible frown, a

terrible Roman nose—and we whisper to one another, “There he is! There’s

the great commoner! There is Mr. Pitt!” As we walk away, the abbey bells

are set a-ringing; and we meet our testy friend Toby Smollett, on the arm

of James Quin the actor, who tells us that the bells ring for Mr. Bullock,

an eminent cowkeeper from Tottenham, who has just arrived to drink the

waters; and Toby shakes his cane at the door of Colonel Ringworm—the

Creole gentleman’s lodgings next his own—where the colonel’s two negroes

are practising on the French horn.

When we try to recall social England, we must fancy it playing at cards

for many hours every day. The custom is wellnigh gone out among us now,

but fifty years ago was general, fifty years before that almost universal,

in the country. “Gaming has become so much the fashion,” writes Seymour,

the author of the _Court Gamester_, “that he who in company should be

ignorant of the games in vogue, would be reckoned low-bred, and hardly fit

for conversation.” There were cards everywhere. It was considered ill-bred

to read in company. “Books were not fit articles for drawing-rooms,” old

ladies used to say. People were jealous, as it were, and angry with them.

You will find in Hervey that George II was always furious at the sight of

books; and his queen, who loved reading, had to practise it in secret in

her closet. But cards were the resource of all the world. Every night, for

hours, kings and queens of England sat down and handled their majesties of

spades and diamonds. In European Courts, I believe the practice still

remains, not for gambling, but for pastime. Our ancestors generally

adopted it. “Books! prithee, don’t talk to me about books,” said old Sarah

Marlborough. “The only books I know are men and cards.” “Dear old Sir

Roger de Coverley sent all his tenants a string of hogs’ puddings and a

pack of cards at Christmas,” says the _Spectator_, wishing to depict a

kind landlord. One of the good old lady writers in whose letters I have

been dipping cries out, “Sure, cards have kept us women from a great deal

of scandal!” Wise old Johnson regretted that he had not learnt to play.

“It is very useful in life,” he says; “it generates kindness, and

consolidates society.” David Hume never went to bed without his whist. We

have Walpole, in one of his letters, in a transport of gratitude for the

cards. “I shall build an order to Pam,” says he, in his pleasant dandified

way, “for the escape of my charming Duchess of Grafton.” The duchess had

been playing cards at Rome, when she ought to have been at a cardinal’s

concert, where the floor fell in, and all the monsignors were precipitated

into the cellar. Even the Nonconformist clergy looked not unkindly on the

practice. “I do not think,” says one of them, “that honest Martin Luther

committed sin by playing at backgammon for an hour or two after dinner, in

order by unbending his mind to promote digestion.” As for the High Church

parsons, they all played, bishops and all. On Twelfth Day the Court used

to play in state. “This being Twelfth Day, his Majesty, the Prince of

Wales, and the Knights Companions of the Garter, Thistle, and Bath,

appeared in the collars of their respective orders. Their Majesties, the

Prince of Wales, and three eldest Princesses, went to the Chapel Royal,

preceded by the heralds. The Duke of Manchester carried the sword of

state. The king and prince made offering at the altar of gold,

frankincense, and myrrh, according to the annual custom. At night their

Majesties played at hazard with the nobility, for the benefit of the

groom-porter; and ’twas said the king won 600 guineas; the queen, 360;

Princess Amelia, twenty; Princess Caroline, ten; the Duke of Grafton and

the Earl of Portmore, several thousands.”

Let us glance at the same chronicle, which is of the year 1731, and see

how others of our forefathers were engaged.

“Cork, 15th January.—This day, one Tim Croneen was, for the murder and

robbery of Mr. St. Leger and his wife, sentenced to be hanged two minutes,

then his head to be cut off, and his body divided in four quarters, to be

placed in four crossways. He was servant to Mr. St. Leger, and committed

the murder with the privity of the servant-maid, who was sentenced to be

burned; also of the gardener, whom he knocked on the head, to deprive him

of his share of the booty.”

“January 3.—A postboy was shot by an Irish gentleman on the road near

Stone, in Staffordshire, who died in two days, for which the gentleman was

imprisoned.”

“A poor man was found hanging in a gentleman’s stables at Bungay, in

Norfolk, by a person who cut him down, and running for assistance, left

his penknife behind him. The poor man recovering, cut his throat with the

knife; and a river being nigh, jumped into it; but company coming, he was

dragged out alive, and was like to remain so.”

“The Honourable Thomas Finch, brother to the Earl of Nottingham, is

appointed ambassador at the Hague, in the room of the Earl of

Chesterfield, who is on his return home.”

“William Cowper, Esq., and the Rev. Mr. John Cowper, chaplain in ordinary

to her Majesty, and rector of Great Berkhampstead, in the county of

Hertford, are appointed clerks of the commissioners of bankruptcy.”

“Charles Creagh, Esq., and —— Macnamara, Esq., between whom an old grudge

of three years had subsisted, which had occasioned their being bound over

about fifty times for breaking the peace, meeting in company with Mr.

Eyres, of Galloway, they discharged their pistols, and all three were

killed on the spot—to the great joy of their peaceful neighbours, say the

Irish papers.”

“Wheat is 26_s._ to 28_s._, and barley 20_s._ to 22_s._ a quarter; three

per cents, 92; best loaf sugar, 9-1/4_d._; Bohea, 12_s._ to 14_s._; Pekoe,

18_s._, and Hyson, 35_s._ per pound.”

“At Exon was celebrated with great magnificence the birthday of the son of

Sir W. Courtney, Bart., at which more than 1,000 persons were present. A

bullock was roasted whole; a butt of wine and several tuns of beer and

cider were given to the populace. At the same time Sir William delivered

to his son, then of age, Powdram Castle, and a great estate.”

“Charlesworth and Cox, two solicitors, convicted of forgery, stood on the

pillory at the Royal Exchange. The first was severely handled by the

populace, but the other was very much favoured, and protected by six or

seven fellows who got on the pillory to protect him from the insults of

the mob.”

“A boy killed by falling upon iron spikes, from a lamppost, which he

climbed to see Mother Needham stand in the pillory.”

“Mary Lynn was burned to ashes at the stake for being concerned in the

murder of her mistress.”

“Alexander Russell, the foot soldier, who was capitally convicted for a

street robbery in January sessions, was reprieved for transportation; but

having an estate fallen to him, obtained a free pardon.”

“The Lord John Russell married to the Lady Diana Spencer, at Marlborough

House. He has a fortune of 30,000_l._ down, and is to have 100,000_l._ at

the death of the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough, his grandmother.”

“March 1 being the anniversary of the queen’s birthday, when her Majesty

entered the forty-ninth year of her age, there was a splendid appearance

of nobility at St. James’s. Her Majesty was magnificently dressed, and

wore a flowered muslin head-edging, as did also her Royal Highness. The

Lord Portmore was said to have had the richest dress, though an Italian

Count had twenty-four diamonds instead of buttons.”

New clothes on the birthday were the fashion for all loyal people. Swift

mentions the custom several times. Walpole is constantly speaking of it;

laughing at the practice, but having the very finest clothes from Paris,

nevertheless. If the king and queen were unpopular, there were very few

new clothes at the Drawing-room. In a paper in the _True Patriot_, No. 3,

written to attack the Pretender, the Scotch, French, and Popery, Fielding

supposes the Scotch and the Pretender in possession of London, and himself

about to be hanged for loyalty,—when, just as the rope is round his neck,

he says: “My little girl entered my bedchamber, and put an end to my dream

by pulling open my eyes, and telling me that the tailor had just brought

home my clothes for his Majesty’s birthday.” In his _Temple Beau_, the

beau is dunned for a birthday suit of velvet, 40_l._ Be sure that Mr.

Harry Fielding was dunned too.

The public days, no doubt, were splendid, but the private Court life must

have been awfully wearisome. “I will not trouble you,” writes Hervey to

Lady Sundon, “with any account of our occupations at Hampton Court. No

mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more unchanging

circle; so that by the assistance of an almanac for the day of the week,

and a watch for the hour of the day, you may inform yourself fully,

without any other intelligence but your memory, of every transaction

within the verge of the Court. Walking, chaises, levées, and audiences

fill the morning. At night the king plays at commerce and backgammon, and

the queen at quadrille, where poor Lady Charlotte runs her usual nightly

gauntlet, the queen pulling her hood, and the Princess Royal rapping her

knuckles. The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly opiate of lottery, and

sleeps as usual between the Princesses Amelia and Caroline. Lord Grantham

strolls from one room to another (as Dryden says), like some discontented

ghost that oft appears, and is forbid to speak; and stirs himself about as

people stir a fire, not with any design, but in hopes to make it burn

brisker. At last the king gets up; the pool finishes; and everybody has

their dismission. Their Majesties retire to Lady Charlotte and my Lord

Lifford; my Lord Grantham, to Lady Frances and Mr. Clark: some to supper,

some to bed; and thus the evening and the morning make the day.”

The king’s fondness for Hanover occasioned all sorts of rough jokes among

his English subjects, to whom _Sauerkraut_ and sausages have ever been

ridiculous objects. When our present Prince Consort came among us, the

people bawled out songs in the streets indicative of the absurdity of

Germany in general. The sausage-shops produced enormous sausages which we

might suppose were the daily food and delight of German princes. I

remember the caricatures at the marriage of Prince Leopold with the

Princess Charlotte. The bridegroom was drawn in rags. George III’s wife

was called by the people a beggarly German duchess; the British idea being

that all princes were beggarly except British princes. King George paid us

back. He thought there were no manners out of Germany. Sarah Marlborough

once coming to visit the princess, whilst her Royal Highness was whipping

one of the roaring royal children, “Ah!” says George, who was standing by,

“you have no good manners in England, because you are not properly brought

up when you are young.” He insisted that no English cooks could roast, no

English coachman could drive: he actually questioned the superiority of

our nobility, our horses, and our roast beef!

Whilst he was away from his beloved Hanover, everything remained there

exactly as in the prince’s presence. There were 800 horses in the stables,

there was all the apparatus of chamberlains, Court-marshals, and

equerries; and Court assemblies were held every Saturday, where all the

nobility of Hanover assembled at what I can’t but think a fine and

touching ceremony. A large armchair was placed in the assembly-room, and

on it the king’s portrait. The nobility advanced, and made a bow to the

armchair, and to the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up; and

spoke under their voices before the august picture, just as they would

have done had the King Churfürst been present himself.

He was always going back to Hanover. In the year 1729, he went for two

whole years, during which Caroline reigned for him in England, and he was

not in the least missed by his British subjects. He went again in ’35 and

’36; and between the years 1740 and 1755 was no less than eight times on

the Continent, which amusement he was obliged to give up at the outbreak

of the Seven Years’ War. Here every day’s amusement was the same. “Our

life is as uniform as that of a monastery,” writes a courtier whom Vehse

quotes. “Every morning at eleven, and every evening at six, we drive in

the heat to Herrenhausen, through an enormous linden avenue; and twice a

day cover our coats and coaches with dust. In the king’s society there

never is the least change. At table, and at cards, he sees always the same

faces, and at the end of the game retires into his chamber. Twice a week

there is a French theatre; the other days there is play in the gallery. In

this way, were the king always to stop in Hanover, one could make a ten

years’ calendar of his proceedings; and settle beforehand what his time of

business, meals, and pleasure would be.”

The old pagan kept his promise to his dying wife. Lady Yarmouth was now in

full favour, and treated with profound respect by the Hanover society,

though it appears rather neglected in England when she came among us. In

1740, a couple of the king’s daughters went to see him at Hanover; Anna,

the Princess of Orange (about whom, and whose husband and marriage-day,

Walpole and Hervey have left us the most ludicrous descriptions), and

Maria of Hesse-Cassel, with their respective lords. This made the Hanover

Court very brilliant. In honour of his high guests, the king gave several

fêtes; among others, a magnificent masked ball, in the green theatre at

Herrenhausen—the garden theatre, with linden and box for screen, and grass

for a carpet, where the Platens had danced to George and his father the

late sultan. The stage and a great part of the garden were illuminated

with coloured lamps. Almost the whole Court appeared in white dominos,

“like,” says the describer of the scene, “like spirits in the Elysian

fields. At night, supper was served in the gallery with three great

tables, and the king was very merry. After supper dancing was resumed, and

I did not get home till five o’clock by full daylight to Hanover. Some

days afterwards we had in the opera-house at Hanover, a great assembly.

The king appeared in a Turkish dress; his turban was ornamented with a

magnificent agraffe of diamonds; the Lady Yarmouth was dressed as a

sultana; nobody was more beautiful than the Princess of Hesse.” So, while

poor Caroline was resting in her coffin, dapper little George, with his

red face and his white eyebrows and goggle-eyes, at sixty years of age, is

dancing a pretty dance with Madame Walmoden, and capering about dressed up

like a Turk! For twenty years more, that little old Bajazet went on in

this Turkish fashion, until the fit came which choked the old man, when he

ordered the side of his coffin to be taken out, as well as that of poor

Caroline’s who had preceded him, so that his sinful old bones and ashes

might mingle with those of the faithful creature. O strutting Turkey-cock

of Herrenhausen! O naughty little Mahomet! in what Turkish paradise are

you now, and where be your painted houris? So Countess Yarmouth appeared

as a sultana, and his Majesty in a Turkish dress wore an agraffe of

diamonds, and was very merry, was he? Friends! he was your fathers’ king

as well as mine—let us drop a respectful tear over his grave.

He said of his wife that he never knew a woman who was worthy to buckle

her shoe: he would sit alone weeping before her portrait, and when he had

dried his eyes, he would go off to his Walmoden and talk of her. On the

25th day of October, 1760, he being then in the seventy-seventh year of

his age, and the thirty-fourth of his reign, his page went to take him his

royal chocolate, and behold! the most religious and gracious king was

lying dead on the floor. They went and fetched Walmoden; but Walmoden

could not wake him. The sacred Majesty was but a lifeless corpse. The king

was dead; God save the king! But, of course, poets and clergymen

decorously bewailed the late one. Here are some artless verses, in which

an English divine deplored the famous departed hero, and over which you

may cry or you may laugh, exactly as your humour suits:—

While at his feet expiring Faction lay,

No contest left but who should best obey;

Saw in his offspring all himself renewed;

The same fair path of glory still pursued;

Saw to young George Augusta’s care impart

Whate’er could raise and humanize the heart;

Blend all his grandsire’s virtues with his own,

And form their mingled radiance for the throne—

No farther blessing could on earth be given—

The next degree of happiness was—heaven!

If he had been good, if he had been just, if he had been pure in life, and

wise in council, could the poet have said much more? It was a parson who

came and wept over this grave, with Walmoden sitting on it, and claimed

heaven for the poor old man slumbering below. Here was one who had neither

dignity, learning, morals, nor wit—who tainted a great society by a bad

example; who in youth, manhood, old age, was gross, low, and sensual; and

Mr. Porteus, afterwards my Lord Bishop Porteus, says the earth was not

good enough for him, and that his only place was heaven! Bravo, Mr.

Porteus! The divine who wept these tears over George II’s memory wore

George III’s lawn. I don’t know whether people still admire his poetry or

his sermons.

George The Third

We have to glance over sixty years in as many minutes. To read the mere

catalogue of characters who figured during that long period, would occupy

our allotted time, and we should have all text and no sermon. England has

to undergo the revolt of the American colonies; to submit to defeat and

separation; to shake under the volcano of the French Revolution; to

grapple and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy Napoleon; to gasp

and rally after that tremendous struggle. The old society, with its

courtly splendours, has to pass away; generations of statesmen to rise and

disappear; Pitt to follow Chatham to the tomb; the memory of Rodney and

Wolfe to be superseded by Nelson’s and Wellington’s glory; the old poets

who unite us to Queen Anne’s time to sink into their graves; Johnson to

die, and Scott and Byron to arise; Garrick to delight the world with his

dazzling dramatic genius, and Kean to leap on the stage and take

possession of the astonished theatre. Steam has to be invented; kings to

be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored. Napoleon to be but an episode,

and George III is to be alive through all these varied changes, to

accompany his people through all these revolutions of thought, government,

society; to survive out of the old world into ours.

When I first saw England, she was in mourning for the young Princess

Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our

ship touched at an island on the way home, where my black servant took me

a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a

man walking. “That is he,” said the black man: “that is Bonaparte! He eats

three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on!”

There were people in the British dominions besides that poor Calcutta

serving-man, with an equal horror of the Corsican ogre.

With the same childish attendant, I remember peeping through the colonnade

at Carlton House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I can

see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place. The place? What

place? The palace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is

but a name now. Where be the sentries who used to salute as the Royal

chariots drove in and out? The chariots, with the kings inside, have

driven to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into darkness,

and the echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades. Where the palace once

stood, a hundred little children are paddling up and down the steps to St.

James’s Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the

Athenaeum Club; as many grizzly warriors are garrisoning the United

Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London

now—the mart of news, of politics, of scandal, of rumour—the English

forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last dispatch from the Crimea,

the last speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now and

then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the past rather than

with the present, it is a memorial of old times and old people, and Pall

Mall is our Palmyra. Look! About this spot, Tom of Ten Thousand was killed

by Königsmarck’s gang. In that great red house Gainsborough lived, and

Culloden Cumberland, George III’s uncle. Yonder is Sarah Marlborough’s

palace, just as it stood when that termagant occupied it. At 25, Walter

Scott used to live; at the house, now No. 79, and occupied by the Society

for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs. Eleanor

Gwynn, comedian.

How often has Queen Caroline’s chair issued from under yonder arch! All

the men of the Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen

Walpole’s chariot and Chatham’s sedan; and Fox, Gibbon, Sheridan, on their

way to Brookes’s; and stately William Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas;

and Hanger and Tom Sheridan reeling out of Raggett’s; and Byron limping

into Wattier’s; and Swift striding out of Bury Street; and Mr. Addison and

Dick Steele, both perhaps a little the better for liquor; and the Prince

of Wales and the Duke of York clattering over the pavement; and Johnson

counting the posts along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley’s

window; and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a gimcrack just

bought out at Christie’s; and George Selwyn sauntering into White’s.

In the published letters to George Selwyn we get a mass of correspondence

by no means so brilliant and witty as Walpole’s, or so bitter and bright

as Hervey’s, but as interesting, and even more descriptive of the time,

because the letters are the work of many hands. You hear more voices

speaking, as it were, and more natural than Horace’s dandified treble, and

Sporus’s malignant whisper. As one reads the Selwyn letters—as one looks

at Reynolds’s noble pictures illustrative of those magnificent times and

voluptuous people—one almost hears the voice of the dead past; the

laughter and the chorus; the toast called over the brimming cups; the

shout at the racecourse or the gaming-table; the merry joke frankly spoken

to the laughing fine lady. How fine those ladies were, those ladies who

heard and spoke such coarse jokes; how grand those gentlemen!

I fancy that peculiar product of the past, the fine gentleman, has almost

vanished off the face of the earth, and is disappearing like the beaver or

the Red Indian. We can’t have fine gentlemen any more, because we can’t

have the society in which they lived. The people will not obey: the

parasites will not be as obsequious as formerly: children do not go down

on their knees to beg their parents’ blessing: chaplains do not say grace

and retire before the pudding: servants do not say “your honour” and “your

worship” at every moment: tradesmen do not stand hat in hand as the

gentleman passes: authors do not wait for hours in gentlemen’s ante-rooms

with a fulsome dedication, for which they hope to get five guineas from

his lordship. In the days when there were fine gentlemen, Mr. Secretary

Pitt’s under-secretaries did not dare to sit down before him; but Mr.

Pitt, in his turn, went down on his gouty knees to George II; and when

George III spoke a few kind words to him, Lord Chatham burst into tears of

reverential joy and gratitude; so awful was the idea of the monarch, and

so great the distinctions of rank. Fancy Lord John Russell or Lord

Palmerston on their knees whilst the sovereign was reading a dispatch, or

beginning to cry because Prince Albert said something civil!

At the accession of George III, the patricians were yet at the height of

their good fortune. Society recognized their superiority, which they

themselves pretty calmly took for granted. They inherited not only titles

and estates, and seats in the House of Peers, but seats in the House of

Commons. There were a multitude of Government places, and not merely

these, but bribes of actual 500_l._ notes, which Members of the House took

not much shame in assuming. Fox went into Parliament at 20: Pitt was just

of age: his father not much older. It was the good time for Patricians.

Small blame to them if they took and enjoyed, and over-enjoyed, the prizes

of politics, the pleasures of social life.

In these letters to Selwyn, we are made acquainted with a whole society of

these defunct fine gentlemen: and can watch with a curious interest a

life, which the novel-writers of that time, I think, have scarce touched

upon. To Smollett, to Fielding even, a lord was a lord: a gorgeous being

with a blue ribbon, a coroneted chair, and an immense star on his bosom,

to whom commoners paid reverence. Richardson, a man of humbler birth than

either of the above two, owned that he was ignorant regarding the manners

of the aristocracy, and besought Mrs. Donnellan, a lady who had lived in

the great world, to examine a volume of _Sir Charles Grandison_, and point

out any errors which she might see in this particular. Mrs. Donnellan

found so many faults, that Richardson changed colour; shut up the book;

and muttered that it were best to throw it in the fire. Here, in Selwyn,

we have the real original men and women of fashion of the early time of

George III. We can follow them to the new club at Almack’s: we can travel

over Europe with them: we can accompany them not only to the public

places, but to their country-houses and private society. Here is a whole

company of them; wits and prodigals; some persevering in their bad ways;

some repentant, but relapsing; beautiful ladies, parasites, humble

chaplains, led captains. Those fair creatures whom we love in Reynolds’s

portraits, and who still look out on us from his canvases with their sweet

calm faces and gracious smiles—those fine gentlemen who did us the honour

to govern us; who inherited their boroughs; took their ease in their

patent places; and slipped Lord North’s bribes so elegantly under their

ruffles—we make acquaintance with a hundred of these fine folks, hear

their talk and laughter, read of their loves, quarrels, intrigues, debts,

duels, divorces; can fancy them alive if we read the book long enough. We

can attend at Duke Hamilton’s wedding, and behold him marry his bride with

the curtain-ring: we can peep into her poor sister’s death-bed: we can see

Charles Fox cursing over the cards, or March bawling out the odds at

Newmarket: we can imagine Burgoyne tripping off from St. James’s Street to

conquer the Americans, and slinking back into the club somewhat

crestfallen after his beating: we can see the young king dressing himself

for the Drawing-room and asking ten thousand questions regarding all the

gentlemen: we can have high life or low, the struggle at the Opera to

behold the Violetta or the Zamperini—the Macaronis and fine ladies in

their chairs trooping to the masquerade or Madame Cornelys’s—the crowd at

Drury Lane to look at the body of Miss Ray, whom Parson Hackman has just

pistolled—or we can peep into Newgate, where poor Mr. Rice the forger is

waiting his fate and his supper. “You need not be particular about the

sauce for his fowl,” says one turnkey to another: “for you know he is to

be hanged in the morning.” “Yes,” replies the second janitor, “but the

chaplain sups with him, and he is a terrible fellow for melted butter.”

Selwyn has a chaplain and parasite, one Dr. Warner, than whom Plautus, or

Ben Jonson, or Hogarth, never painted a better character. In letter after

letter he adds fresh strokes to the portrait of himself, and completes a

portrait not a little curious to look at now that the man has passed away;

all the foul pleasures and gambols in which he revelled, played out; all

the rouged faces into which he leered, worms and skulls; all the fine

gentlemen whose shoebuckles he kissed, laid in their coffins. This worthy

clergyman takes care to tell us that he does not believe in his religion,

though, thank Heaven, he is not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on

Mr. Selwyn’s errands, any errands, and is proud, he says, to be that

gentleman’s proveditor. He waits upon the Duke of Queensberry—old Q.—and

exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. He comes home “after a hard

day’s christening”, as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting

down to whist and partridges for supper. He revels in the thoughts of

ox-cheek and burgundy—he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his

master’s shoes with explosions of laughter and cunning smack and gusto,

and likes the taste of that blacking as much as the best claret in old

Q.’s cellar. He has Rabelais and Horace at his greasy fingers’ ends. He is

inexpressibly mean, curiously jolly; kindly and good-natured in secret—a

tender-hearted knave, not a venomous lickspittle. Jesse says, that at his

chapel in Long Acre, “he attained a considerable popularity by the

pleasing, manly, and eloquent style of his delivery.” Was infidelity

endemic, and corruption in the air? Around a young king, himself of the

most exemplary life and undoubted piety, lived a Court society as

dissolute as our country ever knew. George II’s bad morals bore their

fruit in George III’s early years; as I believe that a knowledge of that

good man’s example, his moderation, his frugal simplicity, and God-fearing

life, tended infinitely to improve the morals of the country and purify

the whole nation.

After Warner, the most interesting of Selwyn’s correspondents is the Earl

of Carlisle, grandfather of the amiable nobleman at present Viceroy in

Ireland. The grandfather, too, was Irish Viceroy, having previously been

treasurer of the king’s household; and, in 1778, the principal

commissioner for treating, consulting, and agreeing upon the means of

quieting the divisions subsisting in his Majesty’s colonies, plantations,

and possessions in North America. You may read his lordship’s manifestos

in the _Royal New York Gazette_. He returned to England, having by no

means quieted the colonies; and speedily afterwards the _Royal New York

Gazette_ somehow ceased to be published.

This good, clever, kind, highly-bred Lord Carlisle was one of the English

fine gentlemen who were wellnigh ruined by the awful debauchery and

extravagance which prevailed in the great English society of those days.

Its dissoluteness was awful: it had swarmed over Europe after the Peace;

it had danced, and raced, and gambled in all the Courts. It had made its

bow at Versailles; it had run its horses on the plain of Sablons, near

Paris, and created the Anglomania there: it had exported vast quantities

of pictures and marbles from Rome and Florence: it had ruined itself by

building great galleries and palaces for the reception of the statues and

pictures: it had brought over singing-women and dancing-women from all the

operas of Europe, on whom my lords lavished their thousands, whilst they

left their honest wives and honest children languishing in the lonely,

deserted splendours of the castle and park at home.

Besides the great London society of those days, there was another

unacknowledged world, extravagant beyond measure, tearing about in the

pursuit of pleasure; dancing, gambling, drinking, singing; meeting the

real society in the public places (at Ranelaghs, Vauxhalls, and Ridottos,

about which our old novelists talk so constantly), and outvying the real

leaders of fashion, in luxury, and splendour, and beauty. For instance,

when the famous Miss Gunning visited Paris as Lady Coventry, where she

expected that her beauty would meet with the applause which had followed

her and her sister through England, it appears she was put to flight by an

English lady still more lovely in the eyes of the Parisians. A certain

Mrs. Pitt took a box at the opera opposite the countess; and was so much

handsomer than her ladyship, that the parterre cried out that this was the

real English angel, whereupon Lady Coventry quitted Paris in a huff. The

poor thing died presently of consumption, accelerated, it was said, by the

red and white paint with which she plastered those luckless charms of

hers. (We must represent to ourselves all fashionable female Europe, at

that time, as plastered with white, and raddled with red.) She left two

daughters behind her, whom George Selwyn loved (he was curiously fond of

little children), and who are described very drolly and pathetically in

these letters, in their little nursery, where passionate little Lady

Fanny, if she had not good cards, flung hers into Lady Mary’s face; and

where they sat conspiring how they should receive a new mother-in-law whom

their papa presently brought home. They got on very well with their

mother-in-law, who was very kind to them; and they grew up, and they were

married, and they were both divorced afterwards—poor little souls! Poor

painted mother, poor society, ghastly in its pleasures, its loves, its

revelries!

As for my lord commissioner, we can afford to speak about him: because,

though he was a wild and weak commissioner at one time, though he hurt his

estate, though he gambled and lost ten thousand pounds at a sitting—“five

times more,” says the unlucky gentleman, “than I ever lost before;” though

he swore he never would touch a card again; and yet, strange to say, went

back to the table and lost still more: yet he repented of his errors,

sobered down, and became a worthy peer and a good country gentleman, and

returned to the good wife and the good children whom he had always loved

with the best part of his heart. He had married at one-and-twenty. He

found himself, in the midst of a dissolute society, at the head of a great

fortune. Forced into luxury, and obliged to be a great lord and a great

idler, he yielded to some temptations, and paid for them a bitter penalty

of manly remorse; from some others he fled wisely, and ended by conquering

them nobly. But he always had the good wife and children in his mind, and

they saved him. “I am very glad you did not come to me the morning I left

London,” he writes to G. Selwyn, as he is embarking for America. “I can

only say, I never knew till that moment of parting, what grief was.” There

is no parting now, where they are. The faithful wife, the kind, generous

gentleman, have left a noble race behind them: an inheritor of his name

and titles, who is beloved as widely as he is known; a man most kind,

accomplished, gentle, friendly, and pure; and female descendants occupying

high stations and embellishing great names; some renowned for beauty, and

all for spotless lives, and pious matronly virtues.

Another of Selwyn’s correspondents is the Earl of March, afterwards Duke

of Queensberry, whose life lasted into this century; and who certainly as

earl or duke, young man or greybeard, was not an ornament to any possible

society. The legends about old Q. are awful. In _Selwyn_, in _Wraxall_,

and contemporary chronicles, the observer of human nature may follow him,

drinking, gambling, intriguing to the end of his career; when the

wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don Juan died, as wicked and unrepentant

as he had been at the hottest season of youth and passion. There is a

house in Piccadilly, where they used to show a certain low window at which

old Q. sat to his very last days, ogling through his senile glasses the

women as they passed by.

There must have been a great deal of good about this lazy, sleepy George

Selwyn, which, no doubt, is set to his present credit. “Your friendship,”

writes Carlisle to him, “is so different from anything I have ever met

with or seen in the world, that when I recollect the extraordinary proofs

of your kindness, it seems to me like a dream.” “I have lost my oldest

friend, and acquaintance, G. Selwyn,” writes Walpole to Miss Berry: “I

really loved him, not only for his infinite wit, but for a thousand good

qualities.” I am glad, for my part, that such a lover of cakes and ale

should have had a thousand good qualities—that he should have been

friendly, generous, warm-hearted, trustworthy. “I rise at six,” writes

Carlisle to him, from Spa (a great resort of fashionable people in our

ancestors’ days), “play at cricket till dinner, and dance in the evening,

till I can scarcely crawl to bed at eleven. There is a life for you! You

get up at nine; play with Raton your dog till twelve, in your

dressing-gown; then creep down to White’s; are five hours at table; sleep

till supper-time; and then make two wretches carry you in a sedan-chair,

with three pints of claret in you, three miles for a shilling.”

Occasionally, instead of sleeping at White’s, George went down and snoozed

in the House of Commons by the side of Lord North. He represented

Gloucester for many years, and had a borough of his own, Ludgershall, for

which, when he was too lazy to contest Gloucester, he sat himself. “I have

given directions for the election of Ludgershall to be of Lord Melbourne

and myself,” he writes to the Premier, whose friend he was, and who was

himself as sleepy, as witty, and as good-natured as George.

If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and

fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal,

we must make allowances for the rich men’s failings, and recollect that

we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for

work, a mortal’s natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a

large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a

great fortune, do but be splendid and idle? In these letters of Lord

Carlisle’s from which I have been quoting, there is many a just complaint

made by the kind-hearted young nobleman of the state which he is obliged

to keep; the magnificence in which he must live; the idleness to which his

position as a peer of England bound him. Better for him had he been a

lawyer at his desk, or a clerk in his office;—a thousand times better

chance for happiness, education, employment, security from temptation. A

few years since the profession of arms was the only one which our nobles

could follow. The Church, the Bar, medicine, literature, the arts,

commerce, were below them. It is to the middle class we must look for the

safety of England: the working educated men, away from Lord North’s

bribery in the senate; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by

hopes of preferment; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence; the

painters pursuing their gentle calling; the men of letters in their quiet

studies; these are the men whom we love and like to read of in the last

age. How small the grandees and the men of pleasure look beside them! how

contemptible the story of the George III Court squabbles are beside the

recorded talk of dear old Johnson! What is the grandest entertainment at

Windsor, compared to a night at the club over its modest cups, with Percy

and Langton, and Goldsmith, and poor Bozzy at the table? I declare I

think, of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest

gentleman. And they were good, as well as witty and wise, those dear old

friends of the past. Their minds were not debauched by excess, or

effeminate with luxury. They toiled their noble day’s labour: they rested,

and took their kindly pleasure: they cheered their holiday meetings with

generous wit and hearty interchange of thought: they were no prudes, but

no blush need follow their conversation: they were merry, but no riot came

out of their cups. Ah! I would have liked a night at the “Turk’s Head”,

even though bad news had arrived from the colonies, and Doctor Johnson was

growling against the rebels; to have sat with him and Goldy; and to have

heard Burke, the finest talker in the world; and to have had Garrick

flashing in with a story from his theatre!—I like, I say, to think of that

society; and not merely how pleasant and how wise, but how _good_ they

were. I think it was on going home one night from the club that Edmund

Burke—his noble soul full of great thoughts, be sure, for they never left

him; his heart full of gentleness—was accosted by a poor wandering woman,

to whom he spoke words of kindness; and moved by the tears of this

Magdalen, perhaps having caused them by the good words he spoke to her, he

took her home to the house of his wife and children, and never left her

until he had found the means of restoring her to honesty and labour. O you

fine gentlemen! you Marches, and Selwyns, and Chesterfields, how small you

look by the side of these great men! Good-natured Carlisle plays at

cricket all day, and dances in the evening “till he can scarcely crawl”,

gaily contrasting his superior virtue with George Selwyn’s “carried to bed

by two wretches at midnight with three pints of claret in him”. Do you

remember the verses—the sacred verses—which Johnson wrote on the death of

his humble friend, Levett?

Well tried through many a varying year,

See Levett to the grave descend;

Officious, innocent, sincere,

Of every friendless name the friend.

In misery’s darkest cavern known,

His useful care was ever nigh,

Where hopeless anguish poured the groan,

And lonely want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,

No petty gain disdained by pride,

The modest wants of every day

The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void:

And sure the Eternal Master found

His single talent well employed.

Whose name looks the brightest now, that of Queensberry the wealthy duke,

or Selwyn the wit, or Levett the poor physician?

I hold old Johnson (and shall we not pardon James Boswell some errors for

embalming him for us?) to be the great supporter of the British Monarchy

and Church during the last age—better than whole benches of bishops,

better than Pitts, Norths, and the great Burke himself. Johnson had the

ear of the nation: his immense authority reconciled it to loyalty, and

shamed it out of irreligion. When George III talked with him, and the

people heard the great author’s good opinion of the sovereign, whole

generations rallied to the king. Johnson was revered as a sort of oracle;

and the oracle declared for Church and King. What a humanity the old man

had! He was a kindly partaker of all honest pleasures: a fierce foe to all

sin, but a gentle enemy to all sinners. “What, boys, are you for a

frolic?” he cries, when Topham Beauclerc comes and wakes him up at

midnight: “I’m with you,” And away he goes, tumbles on his homely old

clothes, and trundles through Covent Garden with the young fellows. When

he used to frequent Garrick’s theatre, and had “the liberty of the

scenes”, he says, “all the actresses knew me, and dropped me a curtsy as

they passed to the stage.” That would make a pretty picture: it is a

pretty picture in my mind, of youth, folly, gaiety, tenderly surveyed by

wisdom’s merciful, pure eyes.

George III and his queen lived in a very unpretending but elegant-looking

house, on the site of the hideous pile under which his granddaughter at

present reposes. The king’s mother inhabited Carlton House, which

contemporary prints represent with a perfect paradise of a garden, with

trim lawns, green arcades, and vistas of classic statues. She admired

these in company with my Lord Bute, who had a fine classic taste, and

sometimes counsel took and sometimes tea in the pleasant green arbours

along with that polite nobleman. Bute was hated with a rage of which there

have been few examples in English history. He was the butt for everybody’s

abuse; for Wilkes’s devilish mischief; for Churchill’s slashing satire;

for the hooting of the mob that roasted the boot, his emblem, in a

thousand bonfires; that hated him because he was a favourite and a

Scotchman, calling him “Mortimer”, “Lothario”, I know not what names, and

accusing his royal mistress of all sorts of crimes—the grave, lean,

demure, elderly woman, who, I dare say, was quite as good as her

neighbours. Chatham lent the aid of his great malice to influence the

popular sentiment against her. He assailed, in the House of Lords, “the

secret influence, more mighty than the Throne itself, which betrayed and

clogged every administration.” The most furious pamphlets echoed the cry.

“Impeach the king’s mother,” was scribbled over every wall at the Court

end of the town, Walpole tells us. What had she done? What had Frederick,

Prince of Wales, George’s father, done, that he was so loathed by George

II and never mentioned by George III? Let us not seek for stones to batter

that forgotten grave, but acquiesce in the contemporary epitaph over him:—

Here lies Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead.

Had it been his father,

I had much rather.

Had it been his brother,

Still better than another.

Had it been his sister,

No one would have missed her.

Had it been the whole generation,

Still better for the nation.

But since ’tis only Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead,

There’s no more to be said.

The widow with eight children round her, prudently reconciled herself with

the king, and won the old man’s confidence and goodwill. A shrewd, hard,

domineering, narrow-minded woman, she educated her children according to

her lights, and spoke of the eldest as a dull, good boy: she kept him very

close: she held the tightest rein over him: she had curious prejudices and

bigotries. His uncle, the burly Cumberland, taking down a sabre once, and

drawing it to amuse the child—the boy started back and turned pale. The

prince felt a generous shock: “What must they have told him about me?” he

asked.

His mother’s bigotry and hatred he inherited with the courageous obstinacy

of his own race; but he was a firm believer where his fathers had been

freethinkers, and a true and fond supporter of the Church, of which he was

the titular defender. Like other dull men, the king was all his life

suspicious of superior people. He did not like Fox; he did not like

Reynolds; he did not like Nelson, Chatham, Burke; he was testy at the idea

of all innovations, and suspicious of all innovators. He loved

mediocrities; Benjamin West was his favourite painter; Beattie was his

poet. The king lamented, not without pathos, in his after-life, that his

education had been neglected. He was a dull lad brought up by

narrow-minded people. The cleverest tutors in the world could have done

little probably to expand that small intellect, though they might have

improved his tastes, and taught his perceptions some generosity.

But he admired as well as he could. There is little doubt that a letter,

written by the little Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz,—a letter

containing the most feeble commonplaces about the horrors of war, and the

most trivial remarks on the blessings of peace, struck the young monarch

greatly, and decided him upon selecting the young princess as the sharer

of his throne, I pass over the stories of his juvenile loves—of Hannah

Lightfoot, the Quaker, to whom they say he was actually married (though I

don’t know who has ever seen the register)—of lovely black-haired Sarah

Lennox, about whose beauty Walpole has written in raptures, and who used

to lie in wait for the young prince, and make hay at him on the lawn of

Holland House. He sighed and he longed, but he rode away from her. Her

picture still hangs in Holland House, a magnificent masterpiece of

Reynolds, a canvas worthy of Titian. She looks from the castle window,

holding a bird in her hand, at black-eyed young Charles Fox, her nephew.

The royal bird flew away from lovely Sarah. She had to figure as

bridesmaid at her little Mecklenburg rival’s wedding, and died in our own

time a quiet old lady, who had become the mother of the heroic Napiers.

They say the little princess who had written the fine letter about the

horrors of war—a beautiful letter without a single blot, for which she was

to be rewarded, like the heroine of the old spelling-book story—was at

play one day with some of her young companions in the gardens of Strelitz,

and that the young ladies’ conversation was, strange to say, about

husbands. “Who will take such a poor little princess as me?” Charlotte

said to her friend, Ida von Bulow, and at that very moment the postman’s

horn sounded, and Ida said, “Princess! there is the sweetheart.” As she

said, so it actually turned out. The postman brought letters from the

splendid young King of all England, who said, “Princess! because you have

written such a beautiful letter, which does credit to your head and heart,

come and be Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and the true wife

of your most obedient servant, George!” So she jumped for joy; and went

upstairs and packed all her little trunks; and set off straightway for her

kingdom in a beautiful yacht, with a harpsichord on board for her to play

upon, and around her a beautiful fleet, all covered with flags and

streamers, and the distinguished Madame Auerbach complimented her with an

ode, a translation of which may be read in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ to

the present day:—

Her gallant navy through the main,

Now cleaves its liquid way.

There to their queen a chosen train

Of nymphs due reverence pay.

Europa, when conveyed by Jove

To Crete’s distinguished shore,

Greater attention scarce could prove,

Or be respected more.

They met, and they were married, and for years they led the happiest,

simplest lives sure ever led by married couple. It is said the king winced

when he first saw his homely little bride; but, however that may be, he

was a true and faithful husband to her, as she was a faithful and loving

wife. They had the simplest pleasures—the very mildest and simplest—little

country dances, to which a dozen couple were invited, and where the honest

king would stand up and dance for three hours at a time to one tune; after

which delicious excitement they would go to bed without any supper (the

Court people grumbling sadly at that absence of supper), and get up quite

early the next morning, and perhaps the next night have another dance; or

the queen would play on the spinet—she played pretty well, Haydn said—or

the king would read to her a paper out of the _Spectator_, or perhaps one

of Ogden’s sermons. O Arcadia! what a life it must have been! There used

to be Sunday drawing-rooms at Court; but the young king stopped these, as

he stopped all that godless gambling whereof we have made mention. Not

that George was averse to any innocent pleasures, or pleasures which he

thought innocent. He was a patron of the arts, after his fashion; kind and

gracious to the artists whom he favoured, and respectful to their calling.

He wanted once to establish an Order of Minerva for literary and

scientific characters; the knights were to take rank after the knights of

the Bath, and to sport a straw-coloured ribbon and a star of sixteen

points. But there was such a row amongst the _literati_ as to the persons

who should be appointed, that the plan was given up, and Minerva and her

star never came down amongst us.

He objected to painting St. Paul’s, as Popish practice; accordingly, the

most clumsy heathen sculptures decorate that edifice at present. It is

fortunate that the paintings, too, were spared, for painting and drawing

were wofully unsound at the close of the last century; and it is far

better for our eyes to contemplate whitewash (when we turn them away from

the clergyman) than to look at Opie’s pitchy canvases, or Fuseli’s livid

monsters.

And yet there is one day in the year—a day when old George loved with all

his heart to attend it—when I think St. Paul’s presents the noblest sight

in the whole world: when five thousand charity children, with cheeks like

nosegays, and sweet, fresh voices, sing the hymn which makes every heart

thrill with praise and happiness. I have seen a hundred grand sights in

the world—coronations, Parisian splendours, Crystal Palace openings,

Pope’s chapels with their processions of long-tailed cardinals and

quavering choirs of fat soprani—but think in all Christendom there is no

such sight as Charity Children’s Day. _Non Angli, sed angeli_. As one

looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents: as the first note strikes:

indeed one may almost fancy that cherubs are singing.

Of church music the king was always very fond, showing skill in it both as

a critic and a performer. Many stories, mirthful and affecting, are told

of his behaviour at the concerts which he ordered. When he was blind and

ill he chose the music for the Ancient Concerts once, and the music and

words which he selected were from _Samson Agonistes_, and all had

reference to his blindness, his captivity, and his affliction. He would

beat time with his music-roll as they sang the anthem in the Chapel Royal.

If the page below was talkative or inattentive, down would come the

music-roll on young scapegrace’s powdered head. The theatre was always his

delight. His bishops and clergy used to attend it, thinking it no shame to

appear where that good man was seen. He is said not to have cared for

Shakespeare or tragedy much; farces and pantomimes were his joy; and

especially when clown swallowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would

laugh so outrageously that the lovely princess by his side would have to

say, “My gracious monarch, do compose yourself.” But he continued to

laugh, and at the very smallest farces, as long as his poor wits were left

him.

There is something to me exceedingly touching in that simple early life of

the king’s. As long as his mother lived—a dozen years after his marriage

with the little spinet-player—he was a great, shy, awkward boy, under the

tutelage of that hard parent. She must have been a clever, domineering,

cruel woman. She kept her household lonely and in gloom, mistrusting

almost all people who came about her children. Seeing the young Duke of

Gloucester silent and unhappy once, she sharply asked him the cause of his

silence. “I am thinking,” said the poor child. “Thinking, sir! and of

what?” “I am thinking if ever I have a son I will not make him so unhappy

as you make me.” The other sons were all wild, except George. Dutifully

every evening George and Charlotte paid their visit to the king’s mother

at Carlton House. She had a throat complaint, of which she died; but to

the last persisted in driving about the streets to show she was alive. The

night before her death the resolute woman talked with her son and

daughter-in-law as usual, went to bed, and was found dead there in the

morning. “George, be a king!” were the words which she was for ever

croaking in the ears of her son: and a king the simple, stubborn,

affectionate, bigoted man tried to be.

He did his best; he worked according to his lights; what virtue he knew,

he tried to practise; what knowledge he could master, he strove to

acquire. He was for ever drawing maps, for example, and learned geography

with no small care and industry. He knew all about the family histories

and genealogies of his gentry, and pretty histories he must have known. He

knew the whole _Army __ List_; and all the facings, and the exact number

of the buttons, and all the tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked

hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. He knew the _personnel_ of the

Universities; what doctors were inclined to Socinianism, and who were

sound Churchmen; he knew the etiquettes of his own and his grandfather’s

Courts to a nicety, and the smallest particulars regarding the routine of

ministers, secretaries, embassies, audiences; the humblest page in the

ante-room, or the meanest helper in the stables or kitchen. These parts of

the royal business he was capable of learning, and he learned. But, as one

thinks of an office, almost divine, performed by any mortal man—of any

single being pretending to control the thoughts, to direct the faith, to

order the implicit obedience of brother millions, to compel them into war

at his offence or quarrel; to command, “In this way you shall trade, in

this way you shall think; these neighbours shall be your allies whom you

shall help, these others your enemies whom you shall slay at my orders; in

this way you shall worship God;”—who can wonder that, when such a man as

George took such an office on himself, punishment and humiliation should

fall upon people and chief?

Yet there is something grand about his courage. The battle of the king

with his aristocracy remains yet to be told by the historian who shall

view the reign of George more justly than the trumpery panegyrists who

wrote immediately after his decease. It was he, with the people to back

him, who made the war with America; it was he and the people who refused

justice to the Roman Catholics; and on both questions he beat the

patricians. He bribed: he bullied: he darkly dissembled on occasion: he

exercised a slippery perseverance, and a vindictive resolution, which one

almost admires as one thinks his character over. His courage was never to

be beat. It trampled North under foot: it bent the stiff neck of the

younger Pitt: even his illness never conquered that indomitable spirit. As

soon as his brain was clear, it resumed the scheme, only laid aside when

his reason left him: as soon as his hands were out of the

strait-waistcoat, they took up the pen and the plan which had engaged him

up to the moment of his malady. I believe it is by persons believing

themselves in the right that nine-tenths of the tyranny of this world has

been perpetrated. Arguing on that convenient premiss, the Dey of Algiers

would cut off twenty heads of a morning; Father Dominic would burn a score

of Jews in the presence of the most Catholic King, and the Archbishops of

Toledo and Salamanca sing Amen. Protestants were roasted, Jesuits hung and

quartered at Smithfield, and witches burned at Salem, and all by worthy

people, who believed they had the best authority for their actions.

And so, with respect to old George, even Americans, whom he hated and who

conquered him, may give him credit for having quite honest reasons for

oppressing them. Appended to Lord Brougham’s biographical sketch of Lord

North are some autograph notes of the king, which let us most curiously

into the state of his mind. “The times certainly require,” says he, “the

concurrence of all who wish to prevent anarchy. I have no wish but the

prosperity of my own dominions, therefore I must look upon all who would

not heartily assist me as bad men, as well as bad subjects.” That is the

way he reasoned. “I wish nothing but good, therefore every man who does

not agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.” Remember that he believed

himself anointed by a Divine commission; remember that he was a man of

slow parts and imperfect education; that the same awful will of Heaven

which placed a crown upon his head, which made him tender to his family,

pure in his life, courageous and honest, made him dull of comprehension,

obstinate of will, and at many times deprived him of reason. He was the

father of his people; his rebellious children must be flogged into

obedience. He was the defender of the Protestant faith; he would rather

lay that stout head upon the block than that Catholics should have a share

in the government of England. And you do not suppose that there are not

honest bigots enough in all countries to back kings in this kind of

statesmanship? Without doubt the American war was popular in England. In

1775 the address in favour of coercing the colonies was carried by 304 to

105 in the Commons, by 104 to 29 in the House of Lords. Popular?—so was

the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes popular in France: so was the

massacre of St. Bartholomew: so was the Inquisition exceedingly popular in

Spain.

Wars and revolutions are, however, the politician’s province. The great

events of this long reign, the statesmen and orators who illustrated it, I

do not pretend to make the subjects of an hour’s light talk.(187) Let us

return to our humbler duty of Court gossip. Yonder sits our little queen,

surrounded by many stout sons and fair daughters whom she bore to her

faithful George. The history of the daughters, as little Miss Burney has

painted them to us, is delightful. They were handsome—she calls them

beautiful; they were most kind, loving, and ladylike; they were gracious

to every person, high and low, who served them. They had many little

accomplishments of their own. This one drew: that one played the piano:

they all worked most prodigiously, and fitted up whole suites of

rooms—pretty, smiling Penelopes,—with their busy little needles. As we

picture to ourselves the society of eighty years ago, we must imagine

hundreds of thousands of groups of women in great high caps, tight bodies,

and full skirts, needling away, whilst one of the number, or perhaps a

favoured gentleman in a pigtail, reads out a novel to the company. Peep

into the cottage at Olney, for example, and see there Mrs. Unwin and Lady

Hesketh, those high-bred ladies, those sweet, pious women, and William

Cowper, that delicate wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentleman,

absolutely reading out _Jonathan Wild_ to the ladies! What a change in our

manners, in our amusements, since then!

[Illustration]

Lord North, Mr. Fox

[Illustration]

Mr. Pitt, Mr. Burke

King George’s household was a model of an English gentleman’s household.

It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was frugal; it was

orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to

contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of that

dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals.

Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the king kissed his

daughters’ jolly cheeks; the princesses kissed their mother’s hand; and

Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. At the same hour the equerries

and women in waiting had their little dinner, and cackled over their tea.

The king had his backgammon or his evening concert; the equerries yawned

themselves to death in the ante-room; or the king and his family walked on

Windsor slopes, the king holding his darling little princess Amelia by the

hand; and the people crowded round quite good-naturedly; and the Eton boys

thrust their chubby cheeks under the crowd’s elbows; and the concert over,

the king never failed to take his enormous cocked-hat off, and salute his

band, and say, “Thank you, gentlemen.”

[Illustration]

A Little Rebel