[1] G.A. Smith (_Hist. Geog. of Holy Land_, p. 164) points out
another coincidence. "The Mahommedans who usually identify St George
with the prophet Elijah, at Lydda confound his legend with one about
Christ himself. Their name for Antichrist is Dajjal, and they have a
tradition that Jesus will slay Antichrist by the gate of Lydda. The
notion sprang from an ancient bas-relief of George and the Dragon on
the Lydda church. But Dajjal may be derived, by a very common
confusion between _n_ and _l_, from Dagon, whose name two
neighbouring villages bear to this day, while one of the gates of
Lydda used to be called the Gate of Dagon." It is a curious process
by which the monster that symbolized heathenism conquered by
Christianity has been evolved out of the first great rival of the God
of Israel.
GEORGE I. [George Louis] (1660-1727), king of Great Britain and Ireland,
born in 1660, was heir through his father Ernest Augustus to the
hereditary lay bishopric of Osnabruck, and to the duchy of Calenberg,
which formed one portion of the Hanoverian possessions of the house of
Brunswick, whilst he secured the reversion of the other portion, the
duchy of Celle or Zell, by his marriage (1682) with the heiress, his
cousin Sophia Dorothea. The marriage was not a happy one. The morals of
German courts in the end of the 17th century took their tone from the
splendid profligacy of Versailles. It became the fashion for a prince to
amuse himself with a mistress or more frequently with many mistresses
simultaneously, and he was often content that the mistresses whom he
favoured should be neither beautiful nor witty. George Louis followed
the usual course. Count Konigsmark--a handsome adventurer--seized the
opportunity of paying court to the deserted wife. Conjugal infidelity
was held at Hanover to be a privilege of the male sex. Count Konigsmark
was assassinated. Sophia Dorothea was divorced in 1694, and remained in
seclusion till her death in 1726. When George IV., her descendant in the
fourth generation, attempted in England to call his wife to account for
sins of which he was himself notoriously guilty, free-spoken public
opinion reprobated the offence in no measured terms. But in the Germany
of the 17th century all free-spoken public opinion had been crushed out
by the misery of the Thirty Years' War, and it was understood that
princes were to arrange their domestic life according to their own
pleasure.
The prince's father did much to raise the dignity of his family. By
sending help to the emperor when he was struggling against the French
and the Turks, he obtained the grant of a ninth electorate in 1692. His
marriage with Sophia, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth the daughter of
James I. of England, was not one which at first seemed likely to confer
any prospect of advancement to his family. But though there were many
persons whose birth gave them better claims than she had to the English
crown, she found herself, upon the death of the duke of Gloucester, the
next Protestant heir after Anne. The Act of Settlement in 1701 secured
the inheritance to herself and her descendants. Being old and
unambitious she rather permitted herself to be burthened with the honour
than thrust herself forward to meet it. Her son George took a deeper
interest in the matter. In his youth he had fought with determined
courage in the wars of William III. Succeeding to the electorate on his
father's death in 1698, he had sent a welcome reinforcement of
Hanoverians to fight under Marlborough at Blenheim. With prudent
persistence he attached himself closely to the Whigs and to Marlborough,
refusing Tory offers of an independent command, and receiving in return
for his fidelity a guarantee by the Dutch of his succession to England
in the Barrier treaty of 1709. In 1714 when Anne was growing old, and
Bolingbroke and the more reckless Tories were coquetting with the son of
James II., the Whigs invited George's eldest son, who was duke of
Cambridge, to visit England in order to be on the spot in case of need.
Neither the elector nor his mother approved of a step which was likely
to alienate the queen, and which was specially distasteful to himself,
as he was on very bad terms with his son. Yet they did not set
themselves against the strong wish of the party to which they looked for
support, and it is possible that troubles would have arisen from any
attempt to carry out the plan, if the deaths, first of the electress
(May 28) and then of the queen (August 1, 1714), had not laid open
George's way to the succession without further effort of his own.
In some respects the position of the new king was not unlike that of
William III. a quarter of a century before. Both sovereigns were
foreigners, with little knowledge of English politics and little
interest in English legislation. Both sovereigns arrived at a time when
party spirit had been running high, and when the task before the ruler
was to still the waves of contention. In spite of the difference between
an intellectually great man and an intellectually small one, in spite
too of the difference between the king who began by choosing his
ministers from both parties and the king who persisted in choosing his
ministers from only one, the work of pacification was accomplished by
George even more thoroughly than by William.
George I. was fortunate in arriving in England when a great military
struggle had come to an end. He had therefore no reason to call upon the
nation to make great sacrifices. All that he wanted was to secure for
himself and his family a high position which he hardly knew how to
occupy, to fill the pockets of his German attendants and his German
mistresses, to get away as often as possible from the uncongenial
islanders whose language he was unable to speak, and to use the strength
of England to obtain petty advantages for his German principality. In
order to do this he attached himself entirely to the Whig party, though
he refused to place himself at the disposal of its leaders. He gave his
confidence, not to Somers and Wharton and Marlborough, but to Stanhope
and Townshend, the statesmen of the second rank. At first he seemed to
be playing a dangerous game. The Tories, whom he rejected, were
numerically superior to their adversaries, and were strong in the
support of the country gentlemen and the country clergy. The strength of
the Whigs lay in the towns and in the higher aristocracy. Below both
parties lay the mass of the nation, which cared nothing for politics
except in special seasons of excitement, and which asked only to be let
alone. In 1715 a Jacobite insurrection in the north, supported by the
appearance of the Pretender, the son of James II., in Scotland, was
suppressed, and its suppression not only gave to the government a
character of stability, but displayed its adversaries in an unfavourable
light as the disturbers of the peace.
Even this advantage, however, would have been thrown away if the Whigs
in power had continued to be animated by violent party spirit. What
really happened was that the Tory leaders were excluded from office, but
that the principles and prejudices of the Tories were admitted to their
full weight in the policy of the government. The natural result
followed. The leaders to whom no regard was paid continued in
opposition. The rank and file, who would personally have gained nothing
by a party victory, were conciliated into quiescence.
This mingling of two policies was conspicuous both in the foreign and
the domestic actions of the reign. In the days of Queen Anne the Whig
party had advocated the continuance of war with a view to the complete
humiliation of the king of France, whom they feared as the protector of
the Pretender, and in whose family connexion with the king of Spain they
saw a danger for England. The Tory party, on the other hand, had been
the authors of the peace of Utrecht, and held that France was
sufficiently depressed. A fortunate concurrence of circumstances enabled
George's ministers, by an alliance with the regent of France, the duke
of Orleans, to pursue at the same time the Whig policy of separating
France from Spain and from the cause of the Pretender, and the Tory
policy of the maintenance of a good understanding with their neighbour
across the Channel. The same eclecticism was discernible in the
proceedings of the home government. The Whigs were conciliated by the
repeal of the Schism Act and the Occasional Conformity Act, whilst the
Tories were conciliated by the maintenance of the Test Act in all its
vigour. The satisfaction of the masses was increased by the general
well-being of the nation.
Very little of all that was thus accomplished was directly owing to
George I. The policy of the reign is the policy of his ministers.
Stanhope and Townshend from 1714 to 1717 were mainly occupied with the
defence of the Hanoverian settlement. After the dismissal of the latter
in 1717, Stanhope in conjunction with Sunderland took up a more decided
Whig policy. The Occasional Conformity Act and the Schism Act were
repealed in 1719. But the wish of the liberal Whigs to modify if not to
repeal the Test Act remained unsatisfied. In the following year the
bursting of the South Sea bubble, and the subsequent deaths of Stanhope
in 1721 and of Sunderland in 1722, cleared the way for the accession to
power of Sir Robert Walpole, to whom and not to the king was due the
conciliatory policy which quieted Tory opposition by abstaining from
pushing Whig principles to their legitimate consequences.
Nevertheless something of the honour due to Walpole must be reckoned to
the king's credit. It is evident that at his accession his decisions
were by no means unimportant. The royal authority was still able within
certain limits to make its own terms. This support was so necessary to
the Whigs that they made no resistance when he threw aside their leaders
on his arrival in England. When by his personal intervention he
dismissed Townshend and appointed Sunderland, he had no such social and
parliamentary combination to fear as that which almost mastered his
great-grandson in his struggle for power. If such a combination arose
before the end of his reign it was owing more to his omitting to fulfil
the duties of his station than from the necessity of the case. As he
could talk no English, and his ministers could talk no German, he
absented himself from the meetings of the cabinet, and his frequent
absences from England and his want of interest in English politics
strengthened the cabinet in its tendency to assert an independent
position. Walpole at last by his skill in the management of parliament
rose as a subject into the almost royal position denoted by the name of
prime minister. In connexion with Walpole the force of wealth and
station established the Whig aristocracy in a point of vantage from
which it was afterwards difficult to dislodge them. Yet, though George
had allowed the power which had been exercised by William and Anne to
slip through his hands, it was understood to the last that if he chose
to exert himself he might cease to be a mere cipher in the conduct of
affairs. As late as 1727 Bolingbroke gained over one of the king's
mistresses, the duchess of Kendal; and though her support of the fallen
Jacobite took no effect, Walpole was not without fear that her
reiterated entreaties would lead to his dismissal. The king's death in a
carriage on his way to Hanover, in the night between 10th and 11th June
in the same year, put an end to these apprehensions.
His only children were his successor George II. and Sophia Dorothea
(1687-1757), who married in 1706 Frederick William, crown prince
(afterwards king) of Prussia. She was the mother of Frederick the Great.
(S. R. G.)
See the standard English histories. A recent popular work is L.
Melville's _The First George in Hanover and England_ (1908).
GEORGE II. [George Augustus] (1683-1760), king of Great Britain and
Ireland, the only son of George I., was born in 1683. In 1705 he married
Wilhelmina Caroline of Anspach. In 1706 he was created earl of
Cambridge. In 1708 he fought bravely at Oudenarde. At his father's
accession to the English throne he was thirty-one years of age. He was
already on bad terms with his father. The position of an heir-apparent
is in no case an easy one to fill with dignity, and the ill-treatment of
the prince's mother by his father was not likely to strengthen in him a
reverence for paternal authority. It was most unwillingly that, on his
first journey to Hanover in 1716, George I. appointed the prince of
Wales guardian of the realm during his absence. In 1717 the existing
ill-feeling ripened into an open breach. At the baptism of one of his
children, the prince selected one godfather whilst the king persisted in
selecting another. The young man spoke angrily, was ordered into arrest,
and was subsequently commanded to leave St James's and to be excluded
from all court ceremonies. The prince took up his residence at Leicester
House, and did everything in his power to support the opposition against
his father's ministers.
When therefore George I. died in 1727, it was generally supposed that
Walpole would be at once dismissed. The first direction of the new king
was that Sir Spencer Compton would draw up the speech in which he was to
announce to the privy council his accession. Compton, not knowing how to
set about his task, applied to Walpole for aid. Queen Caroline took
advantage of this evidence of incapacity, advocated Walpole's cause with
her husband and procured his continuance in office. This curious scene
was indicative of the course likely to be taken by the new sovereign.
His own mind was incapable of rising above the merest details of
business. He made war in the spirit of a drill-sergeant, and he
economized his income with the minute regularity of a clerk. A blunder
of a master of the ceremonies in marshalling the attendants on a levee
put him out of temper. He took the greatest pleasure in counting his
money piece by piece, and he never forgot a date. He was above all
things methodical and regular. "He seems," said one who knew him well,
"to think his having done a thing to-day an unanswerable reason for his
doing it to-morrow."
Most men so utterly immersed in details would be very impracticable to
deal with. They would obstinately refuse to listen to a wisdom and
prudence which meant nothing in their ears, and which brought home to
them a sense of their own inferiority. It was the happy peculiarity of
George II. that he was exempt from this failing. He seemed to have an
instinctive understanding that such and such persons were either wiser
or even stronger than himself, and when he had once discovered that, he
gave way with scarcely a struggle. Thus it was that, though in his
domestic relations he was as loose a liver as his father had been, he
allowed himself to be guided by the wise but unobtrusive counsels of his
wife until her death in 1737, and that when once he had recognized
Walpole's superiority he allowed himself to be guided by the political
sagacity of the great minister. It is difficult to exaggerate the
importance of such a temper upon the development of the constitution.
The apathy of the nation in all but the most exciting political
questions, fostered by the calculated conservatism of Walpole, had
thrown power into the hands of the great landowners. They maintained
their authority by supporting a minister who was ready to make use of
corruption, wherever corruption was likely to be useful, and who could
veil over the baseness of the means which he employed by his talents in
debate and in finance. To shake off a combination so strong would not
have been easy. George II. submitted to it without a struggle.
So strong indeed had the Whig aristocracy grown that it began to lose
its cohesion. Walpole was determined to monopolize power, and he
dismissed from office all who ventured to oppose him. An opposition
formidable in talents was gradually formed. In its composite ranks were
to be found Tories and discontented Whigs, discarded official hacks who
were hungry for the emoluments of office, and youthful purists who
fancied that if Walpole were removed, bribes and pensions would cease to
be attractive to a corrupt generation. Behind them was Bolingbroke,
excluded from parliament but suggesting every party move. In 1737 the
opposition acquired the support of Frederick, prince of Wales. The young
man, weak and headstrong, rebelled against the strict discipline exacted
by his father. His marriage in 1736 to Augusta of Saxony brought on an
open quarrel. In 1737, just as the princess of Wales was about to give
birth to her first child, she was hurried away by her husband from
Hampton Court to St James's Palace at the imminent risk of her life,
simply in order that the prince might show his spite to his father who
had provided all necessary attendance at the former place. George
ordered his son to quit St James's, and to absent himself from court.
Frederick in disgrace gave the support of his name, and he had nothing
else to give, to the opposition. Later in the year 1737, on the 20th of
November, Queen Caroline died. In 1742 Walpole, weighed down by the
unpopularity both of his reluctance to engage in a war with Spain and of
his supposed remissness in conducting the operations of that war, was
driven from office. His successors formed a composite ministry in which
Walpole's old colleagues and Walpole's old opponents were alike to be
found.
The years which followed settled conclusively, at least for this reign,
the constitutional question of the power of appointing ministers. The
war between Spain and England had broken out in 1739. In 1741 the death
of the emperor Charles VI. brought on the war of the Austrian
succession. The position of George II. as a Hanoverian prince drew him
to the side of Maria Theresa through jealousy of the rising Prussian
monarchy. Jealousy of France led England in the same direction, and in
1741 a subsidy of L300,000 was voted to Maria Theresa. The king himself
went to Germany and attempted to carry on the war according to his own
notions. Those notions led him to regard the safety of Hanover as of far
more importance than the wishes of England. Finding that a French army
was about to march upon his German states, he concluded with France a
treaty of neutrality for a year without consulting a single English
minister. In England the news was received with feelings of disgust. The
expenditure of English money and troops was to be thrown uselessly away
as soon as it appeared that Hanover was in the slightest danger. In 1742
Walpole was no longer in office. Lord Wilmington, the nominal head of
the ministry, was a mere cipher. The ablest and most energetic of his
colleagues, Lord Carteret (afterwards Granville), attached himself
specially to the king, and sought to maintain himself in power by his
special favour and by brilliant achievements in diplomacy.
In part at least by Carteret's mediation the peace of Breslau was
signed, by which Maria Theresa ceded Silesia to Frederick (July 28,
1742). Thus relieved on her northern frontier, she struck out vigorously
towards the west. Bavaria was overrun by her troops. In the beginning of
1743 one French army was driven across the Rhine. On June 27th another
French army was defeated by George II. in person at Dettingen. Victory
brought elation to Maria Theresa. Her war of defence was turned into a
war of vengeance. Bavaria was to be annexed. The French frontier was to
be driven back. George II. and Carteret after some hesitation placed
themselves on her side. Of the public opinion of the political classes
in England they took no thought. Hanoverian troops were indeed to be
employed in the war, but they were to be taken into British pay.
Collisions between British and Hanoverian officers were frequent. A
storm arose against the preference shown to Hanoverian interests. After
a brief struggle Carteret, having become Lord Granville by his mother's
death, was driven from office in November 1744.
Henry Pelham, who had become prime minister in the preceding year, thus
saw himself established in power. By the acceptance of this ministry,
the king acknowledged that the function of choosing a ministry and
directing a policy had passed from his hands. In 1745 indeed he recalled
Granville, but a few days were sufficient to convince him of the
futility of his attempt, and the effort to exclude Pitt at a later time
proved equally fruitless.
Important as were the events of the remainder of the reign, therefore,
they can hardly be grouped round the name of George II. The resistance
to the invasion of the Young Pretender in 1745, the peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the great war ministry of Pitt at the close of
the reign, did not receive their impulse from him. He had indeed done
his best to exclude Pitt from office. He disliked him on account of his
opposition in former years to the sacrifices demanded by the Hanoverian
connexion. When in 1756 Pitt became secretary of state in the Devonshire
administration, the king bore the yoke with difficulty. Early in the
next year he complained of Pitt's long speeches as being above his
comprehension, and on April 5, 1757, he dismissed him, only to take him
back shortly after, when Pitt, coalescing with Newcastle, became master
of the situation. Before Pitt's dismissal George II. had for once an
opportunity of placing himself on the popular side, though, as was the
case of his grandson during the American war, it was when the popular
side happened to be in the wrong. In the true spirit of a martinet, he
wished to see Admiral Byng executed. Pitt urged the wish of the House of
Commons to have him pardoned. "Sir," replied the king, "you have taught
me to look for the sense of my subjects in another place than in the
House of Commons." When George II. died in 1760, he left behind him a
settled understanding that the monarchy was one of the least of the
forces by which the policy of the country was directed. To this end he
had contributed much by his disregard of English opinion in 1743; but it
may fairly be added that, but for his readiness to give way to
irresistible adversaries, the struggle might have been far more bitter
and severe than it was.
Of the connexion between Hanover and England in this reign two memorials
remain more pleasant to contemplate than the records of parliamentary
and ministerial intrigues. With the support of George II., amidst the
derision of the English fashionable world, the Hanoverian Handel
produced in England those masterpieces which have given delight to
millions, whilst the foundation of the university of Gottingen by the
same king opened a door through which English political ideas afterwards
penetrated into Germany.
George II. had three sons,--Frederick Louis (1707-1751); George William
(1717-1718); and William Augustus, duke of Cumberland (1721-1765); and
five daughters, Anne (1709-1759), married to William, prince of Orange,
1734; Amelia Sophia Eleonora (1711-1786); Elizabeth Caroline
(1713-1757); Mary (1723-1772), married to Frederick, landgrave of
Hesse-Cassel, 1740; Louisa (1724-1751), married to Frederick V., king of
Denmark, 1743. (S. R. G.)
See Lord Hervey, _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._, ed. by J. W,
Croker (3 vols., London, 1884); Horace Walpole, _Mem. of the Reign of
George II._, with notes by Lord Holland (3 vols., 2nd ed., 1847).
GEORGE III. [George William Frederick] (1738-1820), king of Great
Britain and Ireland, son of Frederick, prince of Wales, and grandson of
George II., whom he succeeded in 1760, was born on the 4th of June 1738.
After his father's death in 1751 he had been educated in seclusion from
the fashionable world under the care of his mother and of her favourite
counsellor the earl of Bute. He had been taught to revere the maxims of
Bolingbroke's "Patriot King," and to believe that it was his appointed
task in life to break the power of the Whig houses resting upon
extensive property and the influence of patronage and corruption. That
power had already been gravely shaken. The Whigs from their incompetency
were obliged when the Seven Years' War broke out to leave its management
in the hands of William Pitt. The nation learned to applaud the great
war minister who succeeded where others had failed, and whose immaculate
purity put to shame the ruck of barterers of votes for places and
pensions.
In some sort the work of the new king was the continuation of the work
of Pitt. But his methods were very different. He did not appeal to any
widely spread feeling or prejudice; nor did he disdain the use of the
arts which had maintained his opponents in power. The patronage of the
crown was to be really as well as nominally his own; and he calculated,
not without reason, that men would feel more flattered in accepting a
place from a king than from a minister. The new Toryism of which he was
the founder was no recurrence to the Toryism of the days of Charles II.
or even of Anne. The question of the amount of toleration to be accorded
to Dissenters had been entirely laid aside. The point at issue was
whether the crown should be replaced in the position which George I.
might have occupied at the beginning of his reign, selecting the
ministers and influencing the deliberations of the cabinet. For this
struggle George III. possessed no inconsiderable advantages. With an
inflexible tenacity of purpose, he was always ready to give way when
resistance was really hopeless. As the first English-born sovereign of
his house, speaking from his birth the language of his subjects, he
found a way to the hearts of many who never regarded his predecessors as
other than foreign intruders. The contrast, too, between the pure
domestic life which he led with his wife Charlotte, whom he married in
1761, and the habits of three generations of his house, told in his
favour with the vast majority of his subjects. Even his marriage had
been a sacrifice to duty. Soon after his accession he had fallen in love
with Lady Sarah Lennox, and had been observed to ride morning by morning
along the Kensington Road, from which the object of his affections was
to be seen from the lawn of Holland House making hay, or engaged in some
other ostensible employment. Before the year was over Lady Sarah
appeared as one of the queen's bridesmaids, and she was herself married
to Sir Charles Bunbury in 1762.
At first everything seemed easy to him. Pitt had come to be regarded by
his own colleagues as a minister who would pursue war at any price, and
in getting rid of Pitt in 1761 and in carrying on the negotiations which
led to the peace of Paris in 1762, the king was able to gather round him
many persons who would not be willing to acquiesce in any permanent
change in the system of government. With the signature of the peace his
real difficulties began. The Whig houses, indeed, were divided amongst
themselves by personal rivalries. But they were none of them inclined to
let power and the advantages of power slip from their hands without a
struggle. For some years a contest of influence was carried on without
dignity and without any worthy aim. The king was not strong enough to
impose upon parliament a ministry of his own choice. But he gathered
round himself a body of dependants known as the king's friends, who were
secure of his favour, and who voted one way or the other according to
his wishes. Under these circumstances no ministry could possibly be
stable; and yet every ministry was strong enough to impose some
conditions on the king. Lord Bute, the king's first choice, resigned
from a sense of his own incompetency in 1763. George Grenville was in
office till 1765; the marquis of Rockingham till 1766; Pitt, becoming
earl of Chatham, till illness compelled him to retire from the conduct
of affairs in 1767, when he was succeeded by the duke of Grafton. But a
struggle of interests could gain no real strength for any government,
and the only chance the king had of effecting a permanent change in the
balance of power lay in the possibility of his associating himself with
some phase of strong national feeling, as Pitt had associated himself
with the war feeling caused by the dissatisfaction spread by the
weakness and ineptitude of his predecessors.
Such a chance was offered by the question of the right to tax America.
The notion that England was justified in throwing on America part of the
expenses caused in the late war was popular in the country, and no one
adopted it more pertinaciously then George III. At the bottom the
position which he assumed was as contrary to the principles of
parliamentary government as the encroachments of Charles I. had been.
But it was veiled in the eyes of Englishmen by the prominence given to
the power of the British parliament rather than to the power of the
British king. In fact the theory of parliamentary government, like most
theories after their truth has long been universally acknowledged, had
become a superstition. Parliaments were held to be properly vested with
authority, not because they adequately represented the national will,
but simply because they were parliaments. There were thousands of people
in England to whom it never occurred that there was any good reason why
a British parliament should be allowed to levy a duty on tea in the
London docks and should not be allowed to levy a duty on tea at the
wharves of Boston. Undoubtedly George III. derived great strength from
his honest participation in this mistake. Contending under parliamentary
forms, he did not wound the susceptibilities of members of parliament,
and when at last in 1770 he appointed Lord North--a minister of his own
selection--prime minister, the object of his ambition was achieved with
the concurrence of a large body of politicians who had nothing in common
with the servile band of the king's friends.
As long as the struggle with America was carried on with any hope of
success they gained that kind of support which is always forthcoming to
a government which shares in the errors and prejudices of its subjects.
The expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons in 1769, and the
refusal of the House to accept him as a member after his re-election,
raised a grave constitutional question in which the king was wholly in
the wrong; and Wilkes was popular in London and Middlesex. But his case
roused no national indignation, and when in 1774 those sharp measures
were taken with Boston which led to the commencement of the American
rebellion in 1775, the opposition to the course taken by the king made
little way either in parliament or in the country. Burke might point out
the folly and inexpedience of the proceedings of the government. Chatham
might point out that the true spirit of English government was to be
representative, and that that spirit was being violated at home and
abroad. George III., who thought that the first duty of the Americans
was to obey himself, had on his side the mass of unreflecting Englishmen
who thought that the first duty of all colonists was to be useful and
submissive to the mother-country. The natural dislike of every country
engaged in war to see itself defeated was on his side, and when the news
of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga arrived in 1777, subscriptions of
money to raise new regiments poured freely in.
In March 1778 the French ambassador in London announced that a treaty of
friendship and commerce had been concluded between France and the new
United States of America. Lord North was anxious to resign power into
stronger hands, and begged the king to receive Chatham as his prime
minister. The king would not hear of it. He would have nothing to say to
"that perfidious man" unless he would humble himself to enter the
ministry as North's subordinate. Chatham naturally refused to do
anything of the kind, and his death in the course of the year relieved
the king of the danger of being again overruled by too overbearing a
minister. England was now at war with France, and in 1779 she was also
at war with Spain.
George III. was still able to control the disposition of office. He
could not control the course of events. His very ministers gave up the
struggle as hopeless long before he would acknowledge the true state of
the case. Before the end of 1779, two of the leading members of the
cabinet, Lords Gower and Weymouth, resigned rather than bear the
responsibility of so ruinous an enterprise as the attempt to overpower
America and France together. Lord North retained office, but he
acknowledged to the king that his own opinion was precisely the same as
that of his late colleagues.
The year 1780 saw an agitation rising in the country for economical
reform, an agitation very closely though indirectly connected with the
war policy of the king. The public meetings held in the country on this
subject have no unimportant place in the development of the
constitution. Since the presentation of the Kentish petition in the
reign of William III. there had been from time to time upheavings of
popular feeling against the doings of the legislature, which kept up the
tradition that parliament existed in order to represent the nation. But
these upheavings had all been so associated with ignorance and violence
as to make it very difficult for men of sense to look with displeasure
upon the existing emancipation of the House of Commons from popular
control. The Sacheverell riots, the violent attacks upon the Excise
Bill, the no less violent advocacy of the Spanish War, the declamations
of the supporters of Wilkes at a more recent time, and even in this very
year the Gordon riots, were not likely to make thoughtful men anxious to
place real power in the hands of the classes from whom such exhibitions
of folly proceeded. But the movement for economical reform was of a very
different kind. It was carried on soberly in manner, and with a definite
practical object. It asked for no more than the king ought to have been
willing to concede. It attacked useless expenditure upon sinecures and
unnecessary offices in the household, the only use of which was to
spread abroad corruption amongst the upper classes. George III. could
not bear to be interfered with at all, or to surrender any element of
power which had served him in his long struggle with the Whigs. He held
out for more than another year. The news of the capitulation of Yorktown
reached London on the 25th of November 1781. On the 20th of March 1782
Lord North resigned.
George III. accepted the consequences of defeat. He called the marquis
of Rockingham to office at the head of a ministry composed of pure Whigs
and of the disciples of the late earl of Chatham, and he authorized the
new ministry to open negotiations for peace. Their hands were greatly
strengthened by Rodney's victory over the French fleet, and the failure
of the combined French and Spanish attack upon Gibraltar; and before the
end of 1782 a provisional treaty was signed with America, preliminaries
of peace with France and Spain being signed early in the following year.
On the 3rd of September 1783 the definitive treaties with the three
countries were simultaneously concluded. "Sir," said the king to John
Adams, the first minister of the United States of America accredited to
him, "I wish you to believe, and that it may be understood in America,
that I have done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself
indispensably bound to do by the duty which I owed to my people. I will
be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation: but
the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have
always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the
friendship of the United States as an independent power."
Long before the signature of the treaties Rockingham died (July 1,
1782). The king chose Lord Shelburne, the head of the Chatham section of
the government, to be prime minister. Fox and the followers of
Rockingham refused to serve except under the duke of Portland, a
minister of their own selection, and resigned office. The old
constitutional struggle of the reign was now to be fought out once more.
Fox, too weak to obtain a majority alone, coalesced with Lord North, and
defeated Shelburne in the House of Commons on the 27th of February 1783.
On the 2nd of April the coalition took office, with Portland as nominal
prime minister, and Fox and North the secretaries of state as its real
heads.
This attempt to impose upon him a ministry which he disliked made the
king very angry. But the new cabinet had a large majority in the House
of Commons, and the only chance of resisting it lay in an appeal to the
country against the House of Commons. Such an appeal was not likely to
be responded to unless the ministers discredited themselves with the
nation. George III. therefore waited his time. Though a coalition
between men bitterly opposed to one another in all political principles
and drawn together by nothing but love of office was in itself
discreditable, it needed some more positive cause of dissatisfaction to
arouse the constituencies, which were by no means so ready to interfere
in political disputes at that time as they are now. Such dissatisfaction
was given by the India Bill, drawn up by Burke. As soon as it had passed
through the Commons the king hastened to procure its rejection in the
House of Lords by his personal intervention with the peers. He
authorized Lord Temple to declare in his name that he would count any
peer who voted for the bill as his enemy. On the 17th of December 1783
the bill was thrown out. The next day ministers were dismissed. William
Pitt became prime minister. After some weeks' struggle with a constantly
decreasing majority in the Commons, the king dissolved parliament on the
25th of March 1784. The country rallied round the crown and the young
minister, and Pitt was firmly established in office.
There can be no reasonable doubt[1] that Pitt not only took advantage of
the king's intervention in the Lords, but was cognizant of the intrigue
before it was actually carried out. It was upon him, too, that the
weight of reconciling the country to an administration formed under such
circumstances lay. The general result, so far as George III. was
concerned, was that to all outward appearance he had won the great
battle of his life. It was he who was to appoint the prime minister, not
any clique resting on a parliamentary support. But the circumstances
under which the victory was won were such as to place the constitution
in a position very different from that in which it would have been if
the victory had been gained earlier in the reign. Intrigue there was
indeed in 1783 and 1784 as there had been twenty years before.
Parliamentary support was conciliated by Pitt by the grant of royal
favours as it had been in the days of Bute. The actual blow was struck
by a most questionable message to individual peers. But the main result
of the whole political situation was that George III. had gone a long
way towards disentangling the reality of parliamentary government from
its accidents. His ministry finally stood because it had appealed to the
constituencies against their representatives. Since then it has properly
become a constitutional axiom that no such appeal should be made by the
crown itself. But it may reasonably be doubted whether any one but the
king was at that time capable of making the appeal. Lord Shelburne, the
leader of the ministry expelled by the coalition, was unpopular in the
country, and the younger Pitt had not had time to make his great
abilities known beyond a limited circle. The real question for the
constitutional historian to settle is not whether under ordinary
circumstances a king is the proper person to place himself really as
well as nominally at the head of the government; but whether under the
special circumstances which existed in 1783 it was not better that the
king should call upon the people to support him, than that government
should be left in the hands of men who rested their power on close
boroughs and the dispensation of patronage, without looking beyond the
walls of the House of Commons for support.
That the king gained credit far beyond his own deserts by the glories of
Pitt's ministry is beyond a doubt. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt
that his own example of domestic propriety did much to strengthen the
position of his minister. It is true that that life was insufferably
dull. No gleams of literary or artistic taste lightened it up. The
dependants of the court became inured to dull routine unchequered by
loving sympathy. The sons of the household were driven by the sheer
weariness of such an existence into the coarsest profligacy. But all
this was not visible from a distance. The tide of moral and religious
improvement which had set in in England since the days of Wesley brought
popularity to a king who was faithful to his wife, in the same way that
the tide of manufacturing industry and scientific progress brought
popularity to the minister who in some measure translated into practice
the principles of the _Wealth of Nations_.
Nor were there wanting subjects of importance beyond the circle of
politics in which George III. showed a lively interest. The voyages of
discovery which made known so large a part of the islands and coasts of
the Pacific Ocean received from him a warm support. In the early days of
the Royal Academy, its finances were strengthened by liberal grants from
the privy purse. His favourite pursuit, however, was farming. When
Arthur Young was issuing his _Annals of Agriculture_, he was supplied
with information by the king, under the assumed name of Mr Ralph
Robinson, relating to a farm at Petersham.
The life of the king was suddenly clouded over. Early in his reign, in
1765, he had been out of health, and--though the fact was studiously
concealed at the time--symptoms of mental aberration were even then to
be perceived. In October 1788 he was again out of health, and in the
beginning of the following month his insanity was beyond a doubt. Whilst
Pitt and Fox were contending in the House of Commons over the terms on
which the regency should be committed to the prince of Wales, the king
was a helpless victim to the ignorance of physicians and the brutalities
of his servants. At last Dr Willis, who had made himself a name by
prescribing gentleness instead of rigour in the treatment of the insane,
was called in. Under his more humane management the king rapidly
recovered. Before the end of February 1789 he was able to write to Pitt
thanking him for his warm support of his interests during his illness.
On the 23rd of April he went in person to St Paul's to return thanks for
his recovery.
The popular enthusiasm which burst forth around St Paul's was but a
foretaste of a popularity far more universal. The French Revolution
frightened the great Whig landowners till they made their peace with the
king. Those who thought that the true basis of government was
aristocratical were now of one mind with those who thought that the true
basis of government was monarchical; and these two classes were joined
by a far larger multitude which had no political ideas whatever, but
which had a moral horror of the guillotine. As Elizabeth had once been
the symbol of resistance to Spain, George was now the symbol of
resistance to France. He was not, however, more than the symbol. He
allowed Pitt to levy taxes and incur debt, to launch armies to defeat,
and to prosecute the English imitators of French revolutionary courses.
At last, however, after the Union with Ireland was accomplished, he
learned that Pitt was planning a scheme to relieve the Catholics from
the disabilities under which they laboured. The plan was revealed to him
by the chancellor, Lord Loughborough, a selfish and intriguing
politician who had served all parties in turn, and who sought to forward
his own interests by falling in with the king's prejudices. George III.
at once took up the position from which he never swerved. He declared
that to grant concessions to the Catholics involved a breach of his
coronation oath. No one has ever doubted that the king was absolutely
convinced of the serious nature of the objection. Nor can there be any
doubt that he had the English people behind him. Both in his peace
ministry and in his war ministry Pitt had taken his stand on royal
favour and on popular support. Both failed him alike now, and he
resigned office at once. The shock to the king's mind was so great that
it brought on a fresh attack of insanity. This time, however, the
recovery was rapid. On the 14th of March 1801 Pitt's resignation was
formally accepted, and the late speaker, Mr Addington, was installed in
office as prime minister.
The king was well pleased with the change. He was never capable of
appreciating high merit in any one; and he was unable to perceive that
the question on which Pitt had resigned was more than an improper
question, with which he ought never to have meddled. "Tell him," he
said, in directing his physician to inform Pitt of his restoration to
health, "I am now quite well, quite recovered from my illness; but what
has he not to answer for, who has been the cause of my having been ill
at all?" Addington was a minister after his own mind. Thoroughly honest
and respectable, with about the same share of abilities as was possessed
by the king himself, he was certainly not likely to startle the world by
any flights of genius. But for one circumstance Addington's ministry
would have lasted long. So strong was the reaction against the
Revolution that the bulk of the nation was almost as suspicious of
genius as the king himself. Not only was there no outcry for legislative
reforms, but the very idea of reform was unpopular. The country
gentlemen were predominant in parliament, and the country gentlemen as a
body looked upon Addington with respect and affection. Such a minister
was therefore admirably suited to preside over affairs at home in the
existing state of opinion. But those who were content with inaction at
home would not be content with inaction abroad. In time of peace
Addington would have been popular for a season. In time of war even his
warmest admirers could not say that he was the man to direct armies in
the most terrible struggle which had ever been conducted by an English
government.
For the moment this difficulty was not felt. On the 1st of October 1801,
preliminaries of peace were signed between England and France, to be
converted into the definitive peace of Amiens on the 27th of March 1802.
The ruler of France was now Napoleon Bonaparte, and few persons in
England believed that he had any real purpose of bringing his aggressive
violence to an end. "Do you know what I call this peace?" said the king;
"an experimental peace, for it is nothing else. But it was unavoidable."
The king was right. On the 18th of May 1803 the declaration of war was
laid before parliament. The war was accepted by all classes as
inevitable, and the French preparations for an invasion of England
roused the whole nation to a glow of enthusiasm only equalled by that
felt when the Armada threatened its shores. On the 26th of October the
king reviewed the London volunteers in Hyde Park. He found himself the
centre of a great national movement with which he heartily sympathized,
and which heartily sympathized with him.
On the 12th of February 1804 the king's mind was again affected. When he
recovered, he found himself in the midst of a ministerial crisis. Public
feeling allowed but one opinion to prevail in the country--that Pitt,
not Addington, was the proper man to conduct the administration in time
of war. Pitt was anxious to form an administration on a broad basis,
including Fox and all prominent leaders of both parties. The king would
not hear of the admission of Fox. His dislike of him was personal as
well as political, as he knew that Fox had had a great share in drawing
the prince of Wales into a life of profligacy. Pitt accepted the king's
terms, and formed an administration in which he was the only man of real
ability. Eminent men, such as Lord Grenville, refused to join a ministry
from which the king had excluded a great statesman on purely personal
grounds.
The whole question was reopened on Pitt's death on the 23rd of January
1806. This time the king gave way. The ministry of All the Talents, as
it was called, included Fox amongst its members. At first the king was
observed to appear depressed at the necessity of surrender. But Fox's
charm of manner soon gained upon him. "Mr Fox," said the king, "I
little thought that you and I should ever meet again in this place; but
I have no desire to look back upon old grievances, and you may rest
assured I never shall remind you of them." On the 13th of September Fox
died, and it was not long before the king and the ministry were openly
in collision. The ministry proposed a measure enabling all subjects of
the crown to serve in the army and navy in spite of religious
disqualifications. The king objected even to so slight a modification of
the laws against the Catholics and Dissenters, and the ministers
consented to drop the bill. The king asked more than this. He demanded a
written and positive engagement that this ministry would never, under
any circumstances, propose to him "any measure of concession to the
Catholics, or even connected with the question." The ministers very
properly refused to bind themselves for the future. They were
consequently turned out of office, and a new ministry was formed with
the duke of Portland as first lord of the treasury and Mr Perceval as
its real leader. The spirit of the new ministry was distinct hostility
to the Catholic claims. On the 27th of April 1807 a dissolution of
parliament was announced, and a majority in favour of the king's
ministry was returned in the elections which speedily followed.
The elections of 1807, like the elections of 1784, gave the king the
mastery of the situation. In other respects they were the counterpart of
one another. In 1784 the country declared, though perhaps without any
clear conception of what it was doing, for a wise and progressive
policy. In 1807 it declared for an unwise and retrogressive policy, with
a very clear understanding of what it meant. It is in his reliance upon
the prejudices and ignorance of the country that the constitutional
significance of the reign of George III. appears. Every strong
government derives its power from its representative character. At a
time when the House of Commons was less really representative than at
any other, a king was on the throne who represented the country in its
good and bad qualities alike, in its hatred of revolutionary violence,
its moral sturdiness, its contempt of foreigners, and its defiance of
all ideas which were in any way strange. Therefore it was that his
success was not permanently injurious to the working of the constitution
as the success of Charles I. would have been. If he were followed by a
king less English than himself, the strength of representative power
would pass into other hands than those which held the sceptre.
The overthrow of the ministry of All the Talents was the last political
act of constitutional importance in which George III. took part. The
substitution of Perceval for Portland as the nominal head of the
ministry in 1809 was not an event of any real significance, and in 1811
the reign practically came to an end. The king's reason finally broke
down after the death of the princess Amelia, his favourite child; and
the prince of Wales (see GEORGE IV.) became prince regent. The remaining
nine years of George III.'s life were passed in insanity and blindness,
and he died on the 29th of January 1820.
His wife, Charlotte Sophia (1744-1818), was a daughter of Charles Louis
of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1816), and was married to the king in London
on the 8th of September 1761. After a peaceful and happy married life
the queen died at Kew on the 17th of November 1818.
George III. had nine sons. After his successor came Frederick, duke of
York and Albany (1763-1827); William Henry, duke of Clarence, afterwards
King William IV. (1765-1837); Edward Augustus, duke of Kent (1767-1825),
father of Queen Victoria; Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland,
afterwards king of Hanover (1771-1851); Augustus Frederick, duke of
Sussex (1773-1843); Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge (1774-1850);
Octavius (1779-1783); Alfred (1780-1782). He had also six
daughters--Charlotte Augusta (1766-1828), married in 1797 to Frederick,
afterwards king of Wurttemberg; Augusta Sophia (1768-1840); Elizabeth
(1770-1840), married Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, 1818; Mary
(1776-1857), married to William Frederick, duke of Gloucester, 1816;
Sophia (1777-1848); Amelia (1783-1810). (S. R. G.)
The numerous contemporary memoirs and diaries are full of the best
material for a picture of George III.'s reign, apart from the standard
histories. Thackeray's _Four Georges_ must not be trusted so far as
historical judgment is concerned; Jesse's _Memoirs of the Life and
Reign of George III._ (2nd ed., 1867) is chiefly concerned with
personalities. See also Beckles Willson, _George III., as Man, Monarch
and Statesman_ (1907).