Chapter V: Book THE FIRST (2)

Lord Henry Petty[50] was by this event removed to the House of Lords. He was the best hope of the Whig party in the Commons; and he himself evidently at first considered the accession of a princely fortune and a seat in the House of Lords as a loss, till in a few years the solid comforts of those possessions compensated for the uncertain objects with which his ambition had occasionally dazzled his judgment.

An opinion, grounded, I suspect, on their wishes, had gone forth among the Whigs that Mr. G. Ponsonby[51] was desirous to retire from Parliament, or at least from the prominent station, which, in compliance with the earnest solicitation of friends, he had consented to occupy. His nephew, Lord Ponsonby, confirmed the report; but Mr. Ponsonby himself, on being questioned by Lord Grey, “stated distinctly his _wish_ to continue leader, if Lord Grey and Lord Grenville did not object to it.” The Duke of Bedford, at my instance, brought in Mr. Brougham, who, from his eloquence, knowledge, zeal, and activity, was a prodigious accession to that party whose principles he had espoused and in a variety of ways very ably maintained. He had, indeed, spoken of late very coldly of the Catholic question, and very contemptuously of Parliament; but when offered a seat, on the sole understanding that he was neither adverse to the concessions to the Roman Catholics nor to an immediate agitation of them in Parliament, he accepted it without hesitation. His conduct there I shall have occasion to remark; but with the exception of a few evening visits during the Walcheren inquiry, he henceforth studiously and unaccountably avoided my society. For full six years I had no political or private intercourse with a man whom I had been so anxious to place and so successful in placing in the House of Commons,[52] and who never assigned, nor, I believe, could assign, any motive for dropping all habits and connection with me.

His treatment of Mr. Horner, though more easily accounted for, was more unpardonable. They were of the same age, education, habits, and pursuits: in capacity and application nearly equal, but in temper and disposition very unlike. Mr. Horner, whose every feeling sprung from a warm heart and whose lightest actions were regulated by a well-considered sense of duty, promoted and rejoiced at every advancement of his friend towards distinction and celebrity. He was zealous in forwarding his interests, and ready to co-operate with cordiality in maintenance of the public principles which they professed in common. Not so Mr. Brougham. He visibly estranged himself from his early friend and companion. Where a shade of difference existed, he loved to bring it out rather than soften it down; and in all dealings with or about Mr. Horner, showed such want of affection that the high, though gentle, spirit of the other perceived it, and without stooping to any grovelling act of resentment, disdained to court a friendship which he saw he could not preserve. To others Mr. Horner endeared himself more and more every day, and with the House ingratiated himself very perceptibly. Had his health, fortune, and life permitted, he would soon have commanded the affections of his party, and acquired a great ascendancy in Parliament, by the variety of his attainments, the simple earnestness of his manner, the benevolence and sweetness of his disposition, and the inflexible integrity which was as firmly rooted in his mind as it was indicated in his stern and manly, but not repulsive, countenance.

Mr. Brougham, by his unwearied exertions and wonderful powers, made himself formidable to his enemies; he was frequently very serviceable to his cause, and occasionally popular out of doors. The House did not like him, but they always feared and sometimes admired him. Had the management of the Walcheren inquiry devolved upon him, he thought, and perhaps justly, that the result would have been a censure on the Ministers.

The sensation on that subject both in and out of Parliament was exceedingly strong. Many members were unquestionably inclined to express their disapprobation of the expedition by a vote at the commencement of the Session, who, in the course of the long investigation, were prevailed upon to suppress their opinions, by a persuasion that time had somewhat softened the indignation of their constituents and that a censure would inevitably change the government of the country. Lord Porchester,[53] who conducted the business in the Commons, though honest, firm, and eloquent, was not skilful in the examination of witnesses. Mr. Ponsonby was not more adroit nor more expeditious. Mr. Brougham was more intent on exposing their oversights and errors in private, than in rectifying them in public. Yet the ingenuity and imagery of Mr. Windham’s speeches must have delighted, and the sound argument and plain sense of Mr. Tierney’s convinced, the audience. The vote, therefore, of approbation was scarcely more at variance with the wishes of the minority and the expectations of the public, than with the real opinions of the majority who passed it. It was the strongest practical argument ever furnished for a reform of Parliament: for the House of Commons on that disgraceful occasion spoke neither the sense of the people whom it represented, nor even of the individuals who composed its body.

_Sir H. Raeburn, R.A. Pinx 1812._

_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._]

Pending the inquiry, the House of Lords was more than usually inactive. We could not with prudence or even with propriety take up the same subject; and the public was so engrossed with it that no other would have excited much interest. Lord Grenville, Lord Grey, and Lord Lauderdale[54] opposed the thanks to Lord Wellington for the victory of Talavera. The two last, much to my regret, entered a protest to the vote. Lord Wellesley spoke for the first time in the character of a Minister, and he spoke with feeling, vivacity, and effect. He was designated for Secretary for the War Department, in room of Lord Castlereagh, by Mr. Canning; but had in the meanwhile been sent by him [as] Ambassador to Spain, where, after indulging his bad taste in a few silly bravadoes, he showed in essentials much foresight, and took a more accurate and comprehensive view of the policy of the country to which he was accredited, than is usual in an English diplomatist, and than could have been expected in so short a residence. On the rejection of the overtures to the Whigs, Mr. Perceval offered him the Foreign Seals. Mr. Canning and his friends were not a little mortified at his accepting them. Lord Liverpool, who had successively held the Foreign and Home Department, succeeded Lord Castlereagh in the third Secretaryship; and Mr. Ryder[55] replaced him, after Mr. Yorke had refused to resume that office which he had filled during Mr. Addington’s Administration with some credit for talents for business.

The melancholy death of Mr. Eden[56] in January, 1810, induced his father, Lord Auckland, to absent himself from Parliament, and vacated a Tellership of the Exchequer. It was rumoured at first that Mr. Perceval would give it to another son of Lord Auckland’s; but though Mr. Perceval was not devoid of that sort of liberality, it was not likely to make him so far overstep the line of political interest. The Admiralty was vacated by Lord Mulgrave succeeding to the Ordnance, which Lord Chatham had been compelled to relinquish; and Mr. Yorke[57] was induced to accept the Admiralty by the provision for life, which the Tellership, offered with it, afforded.

On the first report of his vacating his seat for Cambridgeshire, a hair-brained, zealous man of the name of Goodwin, without any connection or acquaintance with the county, apprised the freeholders in an anonymous advertisement that a Whig candidate would start; and thus prevailed upon Lord Francis Osborne to come forward, who was chosen with little expense—a circumstance not less surprising from his gallantry in furnishing Mr. Goodwin, without any previous acquaintance with him, with an unlimited credit on his banker. This anecdote, hardly worth preserving, shows how activity and decision carry points little expected, and was at the time an indication of the unpopularity of Ministry.

Much of the Session and more of the public attention were occupied on questions of privilege. They had been very unadvisably raised by the imprisonment of one Gale Jones,[58] who had written against the exclusion of strangers from the House; and they were further provoked and kept up by Sir Francis Burdett. He denied in the most offensive form he could devise the right of the House to imprison. He forgot that he had, the year before, directed papers to be seized and other powers to be exerted, which, supposing no authority in Parliament to punish, could hardly be legal and certainly could not be enforced. As Gale Jones had been imprisoned, the House could not with decency overlook yet more flagrant conduct in a member. Sir Francis Burdett was sent to the Tower. Disturbances in the town, division among the Whigs, division of public attention from the incapacity and misconduct of Ministers, and great diminution of confidence in the House of Commons, were the natural consequences of this ill-timed execution of an arbitrary power, which, though in some cases necessary to the preservation of Parliament, can scarcely ever be expedient except against the inroads of some other authority in the State. The privileges of the Commons are intended as means of defence against power, not as weapons of offence against liberty or even licentiousness. Such powers must indeed be discretionary. But the representative body, when it assumes an attitude of menace towards the people, perverts such instruments to purposes for which they were never entrusted to it, and runs considerable hazard of having them wrested from their hands.

The last efforts of Mr. Windham in Parliament were in support of its unquestionable privileges and of the unseasonable and unwarrantable exercise of them on this occasion. He had been during the whole of the Session at war with the public prints and reporters. Upon the exclusion of strangers, whence directly or indirectly flowed all the embarrassing questions concerning privilege, both he and Mr. Tierney had expressed themselves in a way which gave great offence to that class of men, who had been of late years, and are still, actuated by a common feeling, an _esprit de corps_, not altogether so favourable to liberty or advantageous to the cause of truth as formidable to those with whom they chance to be displeased. They suppressed for a time the speeches of both these gentlemen.[59] Cobbett disclosed some particulars of Mr. Windham’s intercourse with him, from which it would seem that Mr. Windham was not so incapable of courting a good word from the newspapers as he pretended, and, above all, was not likely to be indifferent to the menaced omission of his name in debates. He had often corrected his speeches, and consulted both the taste and convenience of the reporters, by speaking from the place in the House which they had informed him was best adapted to his voice and delivery. The gratification derived from his eloquence, which the spite of these little men had for a season interrupted, was soon irretrievably lost. He died lamented and admired in the beginning of June, 1810.

Mr. Malone printed a short sketch of his life and character. It is probably very correct; it is certainly very insipid. Mr. Windham left behind him some treatises on scientific subjects, and many volumes of a journal, begun, it is said, at the instance of Dr. Johnson.[60] It was entrusted to Mr. G. Ellis,[61] who, with a view of writing a life of Mr. Windham, made many extracts from it, which I have seen. I am told that Mr. Windham mentions in his journal, his having prayed fervently for the soul of Dr. Johnson in Switzerland many years after that great writer’s death. It is, I believe, well ascertained that previous to the operation on which his own death ensued, he took the Sacrament privately at a distant church.[62] Such circumstances prove that the extreme aversion he always manifested to anything bordering on impiety in conversation was not merely dictated by taste, decorum, or good breeding, but the result of a real sense of religion. If Crawford had “known” (says General FitzPatrick, in a letter to me of September 30, 1810) “more of Windham, he would not have been surprised at his strict observance of the ceremonies of religion. He held the _profession_ of it to be a high moral duty, as did Burke, and I believe neither of them ever allowed their sincerity to be questioned.”

I hope the Christian reader will not be scandalised, or the sceptical disposed to scoff at my mentioning these circumstances; it is useful to record the various sentiments held by men of integrity and capacity on such topics in the same age. The religious and irreligious may learn from thence to have less confidence in their own persuasion and more toleration for opinions in which they do not concur. The passages[63] extracted by Mr. G. Ellis from Mr. Windham’s journal, and, as I am informed, all the other parts of that work, relate rather to the history of his studies, his feelings, and his understanding, than to any actual events of his life or public occurrences of his time. Self-examination and self-reproach, magnificent projects and poor performances, designs of study and periods of idleness, irresolution, and remorse, form a lamentable picture of an infirm mind; and though there are some paragraphs remarkable for their eloquence, and more observations worth the attention of a metaphysician, the total absence of all affection and, with the exception of Dr. Johnson, of all admiration or deference for others, deprives this painful exposure of all his inmost thoughts and feelings of anything like interest for the man. Few, it would appear, have been less satisfied, but none more exclusively occupied with themselves, than Mr. Windham. On that subject he is minute even to tediousness, plaintive and melancholy almost to insanity. _Pauvre humanité!_

Mr. Perceval’s unnecessary grant of £100,000 to the clergy[64] led me and Mr. Allen[65] to examine the history of the first-fruits and tenths. We thought that we had discovered that the Crown was empowered, and even enjoined by law, to make a new valuation of them, and to appropriate the amount of the revenue which would arise from such a measure to the objects of Queen Anne’s Bounty. I moved a string of resolutions to that purpose, but was discomfited by the production of a clause in an Act of George I., which had, I believe, been originally introduced into the Bill by some manœuvre or contrivance, and which certainly bore little or no reference to the title thereof. It was discovered by the learned Bench about twenty-four hours before I came down to the House; and as I had communicated the substance and, I think, the form of my resolutions to them, their policy was more conspicuous than their candour in withholding this discovery from my notice till my speech was delivered and my motion made.

In June Lord Grey moved an address on the state of the nation. The object of the motion was to recapitulate the dangers of the country; to expose the rashness of our policy, foreign and domestic; and to record the public principles of himself and his friends by marking, on one hand, the difference between the system he recommended and that pursued by the Government, and on the other, a line of separation between himself and those reformers who were for circumscribing the powers of Parliament as well as altering fundamentally the basis of the representation. In all parts of this address, even those which glanced at a moderate reform of Parliament, Lord Grenville, though absent from illness, signified his concurrence. I, who voted for the motion, had some slight objection to parts of it, and entertained great doubt of the necessity or policy of any such laboured declaration of our political creed. Lord Erskine and the Duke of Norfolk courted popularity by expressing doubts on the privilege question; but neither the one nor the other had the courage to contend manfully with Lord Grey and resort to the only arguments by which their opinions could be plausibly maintained. They therefore involved themselves in generalities, or entangled the question in legal subtleties.

At the latter end of this Session Lord Lauderdale objected to a flagrant job in favour of Mr. Walter Scott’s brother; Lord Melville defended it on the score of rewarding poetical genius; and I, after ironically congratulating Lord Melville on his tardy conversion to the beauties of poetry, to which he had shown himself so insensible in the instance of his countryman Burns, acquiesced in the propriety of rewarding Walter Scott, but deprecated a job injurious to the public service in favour of his brother. When I visited Scotland in the summer the irritable bard would not deign to speak to me, and even closed his mouth when he perceived me listening to the good stories he was telling at the other end of the table at a club where I met him at Edinburgh.[66]

Both the theatres had been burnt down in the autumn of 1808 and the spring of 1809.[67] Notwithstanding the losses of Mr. Kemble, which were in some degree repaired by the Duke of Northumberland, who on this and some other rare occasions capriciously belied his general character by an act of useful generosity, Covent Garden Theatre was rebuilt and opened in 1810. An attempt was made to raise the prices. An unusual number of private boxes, and the introduction of an Italian singer on the stage, rendered that innovation yet more unpalatable to the public. They thought an undue advantage was taken of that entire monopoly which the hopeless state of the Drury Lane Theatre concerns virtually conferred on Covent Garden.

The taste for expensive exhibitions, the real or nominal change in the value of money, and the increased salary of the actors, did indeed seem to justify some advance in the price of admission. But the managers were injudicious in their mode of proposing the innovation, of resisting the clamours of the audience, and of yielding piecemeal to their demands. Prejudice and hissing became clamour; clamour was soon exasperated into riot; and riot, when headed by Mr. Clifford,[68] a Roman Catholic lawyer of considerable name, seemed likely, in the apprehension of many, to swell into political sedition, and become the prelude or instrument of more mischief than disturbing a play or keeping down the price of theatrical exhibitions.[69]

The apprehension was groundless; though it must be acknowledged that the pretension of affixing a price to anything by popular clamour was one of fearful example, and Mr. Clifford was a man capable, both from temper and talents, of harbouring and executing very mischievous designs. Impatience of the unjust disabilities under which his sect labours had reconciled him to violent opinions in politics; and unrestrained habits of intemperance had inflamed the malignity of a disposition not originally amiable, without impairing the very acute perceptions and strong intellect with which Nature had endowed him. He was, however, pacified by the submission of the managers, seemed to bear his triumph meekly, and if he entertained any project of engrafting further designs on the popularity to which he had raised himself, he did not live to develop them. The drams, which were unable to extinguish his spirit or drown his reason, undermined his bodily constitution, and brought him in the middle of life and in possession of all his faculties to an untimely grave soon after the unenviable distinction he had obtained.

If in the unprofitable career of such men moralists may find a warning against the indulgence of sensual or malignant passions, legislators and statesmen may learn the impolicy of converting by laws of exclusion those faculties, which in the service of the State might improve the happiness and raise the glory of the country, into engines of torment to the possessors, and of mischief to the Commonwealth. This incident (which was called O.P., or Old Prices) probably suggested to many minds the necessity of another theatre, and thereby facilitated the completion of an undertaking in which I was soon afterwards subordinately engaged, _viz._, the rebuilding of Drury Lane Play-house, and procuring an Act of Parliament to constitute the subscribers a Joint Stock Company for that purpose.

At the close of this year, 1810, the disorder to which the King had been frequently subject recurred with such violence as to incapacitate him from discharging the functions of his situation, and ultimately to become confirmed insanity without any hope of recovery. In preserving some facts connected with his complaint, and in making some remarks on his character, I trust to the reports of others rather than to my own personal observation. My direct intercourse with George III. was very slight, and chiefly confined to mere form and civility. He inherited from his mother a scrofulous habit, which, when malignant, not unfrequently terminates in madness. Such instances had, I believe, occurred in the Saxe-Gotha family, from which Frederick, Prince of Wales, unfortunately selected his consort.

There was a story current, that a disposition to lunacy was apprehended in the King’s illness of 1765. Letters from the King soon afterwards, speaking of medical injunctions to him to abstain from business,[70] and a passage in Smollett’s _Continuation_, mysteriously worded and yet more mysteriously cancelled in most but not all the copies, give, it is said, some colour to the report. If his son’s account of his behaviour in the riots of 1780 and at the dissolution of Lord North’s Ministry can be credited, strong symptoms of derangement appeared on both those occasions. He announced, on both, a design of retiring to Hanover. Disgust at the scenes of 1780, and chagrin at the events of 1782, might indeed, in both instances, rationally account for so hasty a resolution; but the disproportionate earnestness about trifles, especially the liveries of his servants when he should arrive in Germany (circumstances which I have heard His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales describe with more vivacity than filial grace), could hardly be reconciled with the possession of a sound judgment. Throughout life his manner was hurried, his conversation on indifferent subjects rapid and incoherent, on persons detracting and malicious. When constrained to business he was clear and decisive; but he often betrayed the narrowest prejudices on things and that constitutional suspicion of mankind which is so frequent a concomitant of a disordered understanding. Mr. Fox, in his first interview with the King, remarked that he had a “very mad look in his eyes.” They were without question singularly unsteady, through their extreme short-sightedness, and the continued see-saw motion of his body seemed to account for that defect. In the Coalition Administration his conduct in Cabinet was one day so strange that on his leaving the room, which he did with levity and abruptness, Lord John Cavendish observed, “His Majesty is certainly wrong in the upper story.”[71]

In 1788 a positive derangement of intellect was discovered and acknowledged. Since that period he had two very decided relapses, and perhaps he was never afterwards entirely free from occasional aberrations of mind, though they were sufficiently controlled to escape the notice of the public and the interference of Ministers. The recollection of his first illness and the dread of its return gave for some time great ascendancy to those about him, and combined with his alarm at the French Revolution to render him accommodating and even submissive to Mr. Pitt for many years. But when the secession seemed to disband the party whom he dreaded, George III. insensibly reverted to his early habits of intrigue and duplicity, thwarted many little projects of his ostensible Ministers, fortified subordinate agents in their hostility to others, and finally drove his confidential servants to resign by a passionate and obstinate resistance to a measure long in contemplation and of great national importance.[72] No sooner had he released himself from the constraint of Mr. Pitt’s Administration than a virulent attack of his disorder occurred. The appointments necessary to complete the new Ministry were suspended for some weeks in consequence of his incapacity, and Lord Chancellor Rosslyn had the hardihood to make him sign a Commission to pass the Brown Bread Bill while he was actually under the control of keepers. His relapses afterwards were frequent. Lord Sidmouth has more than once acknowledged to me, that the uncertainty of the King’s health was his chief, if not only, motive for resigning in 1804, and not facing the coalition of Fox, Pitt, and Grenville, which, had he remained in office, would have speedily ensued.

In 1806 the King was kept on his good behaviour by his fears of a Ministry which he had considered as hostile to him and favourable to his son. He confined himself strictly to business, and indeed his intercourse with all of us was so rare that it could not be difficult for him to suppress any morbid delusion during the few hours, which once in the course of a fortnight he allotted to audiences of the members of his Cabinet. The gentleman who conducted his correspondence was Colonel Taylor,[73] a man of discretion and judgment, who had many obvious and possibly some secret (though not dishonourable) motives for concealing any infirmity of the kind. For myself, in my last, and indeed only, audience, when I delivered up the Privy Seal, His Majesty was so hurried that I felt it a relief to quit the room. I will not say that his conversation denoted madness, but certainly the subsequent insanity of any man, who had spoken in the way and with the gestures he then did, could never have surprised me.

In the autumn of 1810 the approaching death of Princess Amelia deeply afflicted him. That affliction was followed by a paroxysm which terminated in confirmed insanity. It was an affecting coincidence, that the dawn of his reviving reason in 1788 had been marked by the strong emotions of natural affection at the accidental sight of the very daughter whose illness occasioned this last and fatal relapse. She was said to be his favourite child; but he had much tenderness for all his daughters, as well [as] for the Duke of York, and perhaps the Duke of Cambridge: he had little, if any, for his other children. In the early part of his reign he had shown himself harsh, unkind, and vindictive to his brothers. He was cold, jealous, and unjust to the Prince of Wales in his childhood; distant and suspicious ever afterwards.

In general his virtues were not of an engaging nor his endowments of a dazzling character. He had a bad opinion of mankind, a contracted but by no means a feeble view of every subject. With a nature so little attractive, without one brilliant qualification, and during a reign marked by disasters, how did he contrive to win the affections of many and popularity with the great mass of his subjects? After due allowance be made for the childish love of Princes so prevalent in England, and the systematic policy of the demagogues in vilifying Parliament rather than the Crown, other causes must still be sought for to explain so extraordinary a phenomenon. He said indeed himself, with as much contempt for the public, but with more point, than was usual in his conversation: “I have been the most unpopular and most popular King in England; but I owed the first to my Minister, Lord Bute, and I owe the second to my son, the Prince of Wales.” But there were other reasons. He was a regular, decorous, church-going family man. The practice of the austerer virtues was not to be imputed in him to any coldness of constitution. He was of an amorous complexion, and many involuntary avowals made during his derangements proved that his fidelity never arose from any blind partiality to the personal charms of the Queen, but from a sense of duty and propriety.[74] Whatever be the moral value of such self-denial, the people of England were then, and, I believe, still are, disposed to pay it full as much homage as it deserves in persons whose high stations render it of difficult attainment and wholesome example.

The King had, however, virtues of a higher order, great decision and consistency and courage, both personal and political. He adhered firmly to the principles of government that he approved, and he was steady in the protection of those who supported him in them. He never lost sight of his objects; and could he have found Ministers as firm or as obstinate as himself, he would never have surrendered a measure, as he certainly never changed an opinion. He said, indeed, to every American Minister who was accredited to him, “I was the last man in England to acknowledge your independence, and I will be the last to disturb it”; but if he ever repented of his conduct, it was in submitting to that peace, not in fomenting and persisting so long in the war. “As to the question,” says he, in a letter to Mr. Fox, of August, 1783, “whether I wish to receive a Minister from America, I certainly can never express its being agreeable to me; indeed, I should think it wisest for both parties to have only agents who can settle any matter of commerce; but so far I cannot help adding, that I shall ever have a bad opinion of any Englishman who would accept being an accredited Minister for that revolted State, which certainly for years cannot establish a stable Government.”[75]

He not only cherished obstinacy in himself, but admired and inculcated it in others. In spite of his vaunted Christianity, he despised a man who was not irreconcilable in his enmities as well as constant in his friendships, and he exacted not only consistent conduct but an adherence to the prejudices of education and family. This persuasion, combining with a propensity common to all old men, led him in the latter end of his life to estimate individuals by his recollection of the characters of their fathers rather than by observation on theirs. He himself rigidly conformed to the rule he expected in others. The absurd German notions of birth, imbibed in childhood, recurred with double force upon his mind in his old age. By them he regulated his sense of duty and his opinion of men. He fortified his morbid prejudices against Roman Catholics by a reference to the Protestant maxims of his House. He judged of the fitness for high station by rank rather than by talent, and he hailed the appointment of two Archbishops,[76] whom from their connections he called _gentlemen_, as a triumph for the Church and a consolation to himself. Descent from an early enemy or obscurity of birth were in his eyes such offences, that, with the exception of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Addington, he was seldom prevailed upon to pardon either, even in persons who were subservient or necessary to his views.

His conduct with respect to Hanover was irreproachable. He never diverted the revenue of that country to any personal or British object; he never sacrificed any British treasure or English objects to Hanoverian policy; he never converted his distinct authority as Elector into the means of thwarting an obnoxious Minister at home, or enforcing wishes which as King of England he was compelled to conceal. His behaviour to Sir James Craufurd and other Englishmen, who had broken their parole and escaped from France, reflects much honour upon him; as Napoleon had furnished examples of a less scrupulous policy, and the violence of the times, as well as the temper of his Ministers, would have enabled him to follow them without reproach or animadversion. “If a gentleman,” he observed, “had derived indulgence from a promise, even to usurped authority, he was bound in honour to abide by it, however illegal the original detention or the conditions might be.” George III. adhered to this principle, and would never receive any officer or English traveller who had violated it. These are the two best traits I knew of him, and for that reason I have faithfully recorded them.[77]

To sum up his character: he was a man of principle, honest and anxious in forming his rule of action, sagacious in the application and steady in the observance of it; but then his views were narrow and mischievous, his judgments warped, and his feelings illiberal. His distrust of mankind made him deem insincerity necessary and justifiable. He practised dissimulation, and in some few instances simulation likewise, without scruple. If he had the heart of a courageous and the talents of a dexterous or shrewd man, he wanted the enlarged understanding which constitutes wisdom, as well as all elevation and refinement of sentiment which shed so much lustre on rank. He was, too, a stranger to every generous affection which renders a Prince either amiable or benevolent. There was nothing great, nothing kind, nothing open, nothing graceful in his character or manners.

Those who look to the objects for which Governments are instituted must pronounce him an inglorious, if not a pernicious, sovereign of a free country; but more (and I fear they are not few) who contemplate the preservation and perhaps the extension of the monarchical branch of our Constitution more as the end than the means of public administration, will, with some justice, regard George III. as a sensible man, and an able, useful, and fortunate Prince.