This unfortunate youth, dull offspring of the stimulated lust of ages, was an apt pupil in the Jacobin theory of kingly authority. He was caught one day reading the book written at the instance of the dethroned James II. to justify his arbitrary policy; and there were so many other signs of the heir to a constitutional throne being educated in unconstitutional principles that Horace Walpole drew up a formal remonstrance against it in the name of the Whig families. This document, which was privately circulated, produced no effect. Sois roi! That remained the ruling thought in the mind of this ignorant, proud, moral young man, about to fill a place which conferred more obstructive power than any other in the world. If he had only been dissolute in that most dissolute age, he could have been ruled through his vices; but being strictly moral and temperate, he was, alas! always himself; and he had at his back the great voiceless multitude, who know by instinct that morality is the first interest of civilized human nature, and who honor it supremely even in this crude, rudimentary form. "Your dad is safe on his throne," said some boon companion of George IV., "as long as he is faithful to that ugly old woman, your mother." And wise old Franklin said, "If George III. had had a bad private character and John Wilkes a good one, he might have turned the king out of his dominions." Such is the mighty power of the mere indispensable rudiments of virtue, its mere preliminary corporeal conditions. A chaste and temperate fool will carry the day nine times in ten over profligate genius.
Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to the prince a note from the valet de chambre of his grandfather, George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king, a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king. Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences, accessible at all times only to one man—him of the good legs and Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr. Disraeli's hero, Lothair.
Lord Bute, 1768.
Princess of Wales—Bute—George III.
In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results. His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation, the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents, beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved, and whom posterity with unanimous voice pronounces the glory of England in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign, put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals.