"I like that the prince should amuse himself now and then at small play; but princes should never play deep, both for the example, and because it does not become them to win great sums. George's real disposition, do you ask? You know him almost as well as I do. He is very honest, but I wish he was a little more forward and less childish at his age. I hope his preceptors will improve him. I really do not know what they are teaching him, but, to speak freely, I am afraid not much. They are in the country, and follow their diversions, and not much else that I can discover."
Dodington remarked upon this that, for his part, he did not much regard books; what he most wished was that the prince should begin to acquire knowledge of the world, and be informed of the general frame and nature of the British Government and Constitution, and, without going into minutiæ, get some insight into the manner of doing public business.
"I am of your opinion," said the princess; "and his tutor, Stone, tells me that when he talks with him on those subjects, he seems to give proper attention, and makes pertinent remarks. I stick to the learning as the chief point. You know how backward the children were, and I am sure you do not think them much improved since. It may be that it is not too late to acquire a competence. I am highly sensible how necessary it is that the prince should keep company with men. I know that women can not inform him; but if his education was in my power absolutely, to whom could I address him? What company can I wish him to keep? What friendships can I desire him to contract? Such is the universal profligacy, such is the character and conduct of the young people of distinction, that I am really afraid to have them near my children. I shall even be in more pain for my daughters than I am for my sons, for the behavior of the women is indecent, low, and much against their own interest by making themselves so very cheap."
Three years passed. The prince was seventeen. Still the anxious mother deplored the neglect of his education.
"His book-learning," said she to the same friend, "I am no judge of, though I suppose it is small or useless; but I did hope he might have been instructed in the general understanding of things. I once desired Mr. Stone to inform the prince about the Constitution; but he declined it to avoid giving jealousy to the Bishop of Norwich (official educator). I mentioned it again, but he still declined it as not being his province."
"Pray, madam," asked Dodington, "what is his province?"
"I don't know, unless it is to go before the prince up-stairs, to walk with him sometimes, seldomer to ride with him, and now and then to dine with him. But when they do walk together, the prince generally takes that time to think of his own affairs and say nothing."
The youth was, indeed, extremely indolent and stupid. At school he would have been simply called a dunce, for at eleven he could not read English with any fluency, and he could never have been induced to apply his mind to study except by violence. He never had the slightest notion of what Chatham, Burke, or Fox meant when they spoke of the Constitution. If Mr. Stone had not been in dread of invading the Bishop of Norwich's province, and if the bishop had not been a verbose and wearisome formalist, their united powers could not have shown this young man the unique and prodigious happiness of a constitutional king in governing through responsible ministers. His "governor" during the last few years of his minority was Lord Waldegrave, whose too brief memoirs confirm the excellent report which contemporaries give of his mind and character. Lord Waldegrave could make nothing of him. Speaking of the prince at nineteen, he says he was "uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs." He found the heavy youth an insufferable bore, and he was soon, as his relation, Horace Walpole, relates, "thoroughly fatigued with the insipidity of his pupil." The prince derived from his education only two ideas, one very good and the other very bad. The first was that he must be a Good Boy and not keep a mistress; the second was that he must be a king indeed.
An indolent and ignorant monarch who will not govern by ministers must govern by favorites. He has no other alternative but abdication. A favorite was at hand in the person of a poor Scotch lord who had married one of the richest heiresses in Europe, the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her miserly husband. He had also, if we may believe Lord Waldegrave, "a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance." He was likewise fond of medals, engravings, and flowers; he pensioned Dr. Johnson and the dramatist Home; he really enjoyed some products of art, and was far from being either the execrable or the ridiculous personage which he was esteemed by men whom he kept from place. "Bute," said Prince Frederick, father of George III., "you would make an excellent embassador in a small, proud little court where there is nothing to do." He would have arranged the ceremonials, superintended the plays, been gracious to artists and musicians, smiled benignantly upon the court poet, bored the reigning prince, enchanted the reigning princess, amused her children, and ripened into a courtly and garrulous old Polonius, "full of wise saws and modern instances." Above all, he would have upheld the prerogative of the prince with stanch sincerity. Sois roi!
There is something in the Scotch character that causes it to relish royal prerogative. To this hour there are in Scotland families that cherish a kind of sentimental attachment to the memory of the Stuarts; and we find Scotchmen as eminent as Hume, Carlyle, Lockhart, Scott, Wilson—men of distinguished liberality in some provinces of thought—unable to widen out into liberal politics. Bute was a lord as well as a Scotchman, not as ignorant nor as vulgar as lords in that generation usually were, but still subject to the lowering influences that always beset a privileged order; predisposed, too, by temperament to the worship of the picturesque, and now the cherished sharer of the shy, proud, gloomy seclusion of the family upon which the hopes of an empire were fixed. He showed them medals and pictures, he discoursed of music and architecture—two of his most pronounced tastes—and he nourished every princely prejudice which a wise tutor would have striven to eradicate.