Who was alive and is dead,
There’s no more to be said.
George II. behaved at first not unkindly to his widowed daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He visited the bereaved family, throwing off royal ceremonial, kissed them, wept with them, and gave the princes good advice: “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.” Horace Walpole remarks in his malicious way that the King, who had never acted the tender father, grew so pleased with playing the part of grandfather that he soon became it in earnest. For the moment, natural good-feeling reigned in the families that had been such bad neighbours. The Opposition was crushed by the death of its patron, the Prince; and the discordant place-hunters of the day let themselves be tuned to a comparative harmony of interest under the Pelham brothers, who now had all their own way. Later on there sprang up fresh clouds between Kew and Kensington, the respective horizons of the rising and of the setting sun. For a little, Prince George appears to have lived with his grandfather at Hampton Court; but they did not take to each other, and the boy went back under his mother’s wing.
The first care of the King and the Ministry was to appoint instructors for the young Princes, an important choice in the case of the Heir to the Crown. The Governor appointed was Lord Harcourt, who “wanted a governor himself,” says Horace Walpole, and sneers at him as unfit to “teach the young Prince any arts but what he knew himself—hunting and drinking.” For Preceptor was chosen the Bishop of Norwich. Under these figure-heads were the tutors who should be about the royal children and do the actual work of education. Stone, the sub-governor, was a personal favourite of the King, “a dark, proud man, very able and very mercenary.” As sub-preceptor, or real schoolmaster, was kept on Mr. Scott, who had already been chosen by the Princess to teach her sons, when she found that at eleven Prince George could not read English. Of him, in old age, George III. spoke highly, and seems to have liked him best of all his instructors. But he was suspected in some quarters as recommended by Bolingbroke, the author of that “patriot-king” theory so abhorrent to Whigs.
THE LAKE
The question of the Regency had to be settled, in case of the King’s death before his grandson came of age. That high office might have fallen to George II.’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, between whom and his sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, no love was lost; nor was he beloved by the nation, least of all by the Jacobites. Horace Walpole tells a story of Prince George visiting his uncle. “To amuse the boy, he took down a sword and drew it. The young Prince turned pale and trembled, and thought his uncle was going to murder him.” There were others who judged the “Butcher” quite capable of altering the succession on mediæval precedent, in which party spirit was unjust to this Prince, not so black or so bloodthirsty as he was painted in the hatreds of the time. To the satisfaction of most people, but not of the Duke, the future King’s mother was appointed Regent under control of a council; and her father-in-law allowed her to act as guardian of her children.
A lady, who any day might thus become the chief personage in the State, would not lack courtiers in a generation of politicians more concerned about interest than principle. Among her special friends came to be noted John Stuart, Earl of Bute, that unpopular bogy of the next reign. Their intimacy did not fail to pass for scandalous; but the Archangel Gabriel himself would hardly have escaped scandal had he moved in Court society of the period. Bute had been a favourite and boon companion of the Prince, and remained a close counsellor of the widow, especially in the matter of bringing up her sons. Another matter influenced by him was the development of Kew Gardens, he himself taking a strong interest in botany and horticulture; but the Gardens may best be treated apart from the royal residences.
The best-founded reproach made against the Princess is that she brought up George III. and his brothers in strict seclusion, entirely under her influence and Bute’s. A careful mother’s excuse might well be the manners of the fashionable world. Bubb Doddington, admitted to walks and talks with her in Kew Gardens, reports her as anxious to keep the future King out of bad society, and not knowing where to find good companions for him among the dissipated nobility. Our age can sympathise with this desire more than did the factious scandalmongers of the period, who soon raised a cry that the Princes were being trained in principles of arbitrary power. To Doddington the Princess protested that she did not interfere with her son’s teachers. Between the contradictory statements of friends and foes, it is difficult to judge how far she was sincere in such professions; but it is clear that George loved her as sons of that house have not always loved their parents. Later on, he was thought to have grown a little impatient under the yoke of this masterful mother.
Before long the staff of preceptors fell all by the ears, the high officials quarrelling with the sub-tutors, who were understood to be in more favour with the mother. The former complained of Stone as taking too much on himself; and as for Scott, Horace Walpole tells a wicked story of the Bishop turning him out of the Prince’s Chamber “by an imposition of hands that had at least as much of the flesh as of the spirit.” What brought these jars to light was the Bishop finding in the Prince of Wales’s hands a French book written to justify James II.’s measures, an offence which Stone tried to palliate by making out that this Jacobite treatise had been lent the Prince by his sister, to whom, one understands, it would do no such great harm. The end of it was that both Governor and Preceptor resigned their offices, replaced by Lord Waldegrave and the Bishop of Peterborough, who appear to have got on for a time more smoothly with the subordinate instructors, as with the family. The new Bishop, said their mother, gave great satisfaction, and the children took to him. Lord Waldegrave, by his own account, became no favourite with his most important pupil, and had a poor opinion of him. His Memoirs scout the Princess’s professions that she did not interfere in the boys’ education. The preceptors had little influence, he says; “the mother and the nursery always prevailed.” The Prince he sets down as obstinate, sulky, too stingy and too self-righteous for his years. George, for his part, is afterwards found recalling this Governor as a “depraved, worthless man.”