CHAPTER VIII.
Let us consider for a moment the character of the Sovereign whom Pitt had set himself to bait.
George II. was first and fundamentally a German prince of his epoch. What other could he be? And these magnates all aped Louis XIV. as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In these grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous dalliance with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Vallière. This monotonous programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms, represented the even tenor of their lives.
George II. was better than this training would suggest. His first ambition indeed was to be a Lovelace, but his second was to be a soldier. As a soldier he had the unaffected courage of the princes of his race. George, red and angry, fighting on foot at the battle of Dettingen, is a figure that is memorable and congenial to his British subjects.
As a Lovelace he lives to this day, for his portraits are generally in the posture of a coxcomb, with his face in outline wearing an irresistible smile, only comical to the beholder now, but with which he goes smirking into the eternities. It is not necessary to dwell on this part of his character; after all, a shallow part, for the one woman whom he loved was his wife. It was, however, a necessary part, vital to his conception of an ideal monarch. His confidences to his wife on this delicate point, though gross to us, seemed natural to him and to her, and were probably not alien to the atmosphere in which he was reared. Withal he bored his mistresses to death, and not impossibly they bored him. But that did not matter; the thing had to be done; he saw himself as in a mirror the fourteenth or fifteenth Louis; and when on the Saturdays in summer he drove down with Lady Yarmouth and his court to Richmond, escorted by Lifeguards kicking up the dust, to walk an hour in the garden, dine, and return to London, he imagined himself, as Horace Walpole tells us, the most gallant and lively prince in Europe![144]
We must admit then that he was born and bred a coxcomb, like his son. That he was a fond father no one will allege. His pleasures were coarse and dull. Even here one strange exception must be made. His letters to women, in the opinion of hostile critics, were tender and even exquisite.[145] How he came to write them we cannot know, for his character could not make one expect a grace of this kind.
In other respects we think him underrated. Sir Robert Walpole said that politically he was a coward. To what does this charge really amount? That a prince who had never left Germany till he was thirty-one, who succeeded to the throne when he was forty-four, after a life of such severe repression that his father even entertained the idea of transporting him to the plantations, should display that familiarity with his position, his political relations, and a strange nation, which alone could justify the independent action which is implied by the phrase 'political courage,' would have been astonishing; it would indeed have savoured of political recklessness. Walpole may have uttered the charge in resentment for some refusal of the King's. He was, we know, irritated at the moment by finding that the King had promised to go to Hanover without informing him. The King no doubt blustered in private when he yielded in public. But domestic effervescence was the only method of relief for a Sovereign who knew his own limitations, and who also knew that, constitutionally, he would have at last to yield to his Minister. What is 'political courage' in a constitutional Sovereign? What would Walpole have said had the monarch shown 'political courage' and insisted on having his own stubborn way? 'Had he,' wrote Waldegrave, with his usual good sense, 'always been as firm and undaunted in the Closet as he showed himself at Oudenarde and Dettingen, he might not have proved quite as good a king in this limited monarchy.'
His foible, we are told, was avarice. We do not know that he was mean in his personal expenditure. Waldegrave, again, who was fair, and knew him better than most men, declared that 'he was always just, and sometimes charitable, though rarely generous.' He amused himself, we are told, with counting his guineas in private. That perhaps was not a very royal occupation, though a nursery rhyme indicates that it is; it may have been a trick learned when he was poor, or it may have been his substitute for those games of anxious futility now known as 'patience.' But the real ground for the charge of avarice in the eyes of his British subjects was that he accumulated a great treasure in Hanover. If that be avarice, it was the avarice of the kings who made Prussia, the famous Frederick and his father. Parsimony in such cases may well be a virtue; and subjects may even prefer to be ruled by those who possess it rather than by princes who rear vast and idle palaces like the Bourbons of Spain and Naples, or live with unbridled extravagance like George IV. But kings rarely hit the right mean; if they are generous they are called profuse, if they are careful they are called mean. George's avarice, if such it was, was a public-spirited avarice. He hoarded for his own beloved country, he got as much out of his Kingdom as he could for his Electorate; for he was a Hanoverian first and a Briton a long way afterwards. But when Hanover needed it, he spent all his hoards on her behalf ungrudgingly, and died poor.