CHAPTER IX
THE COURT OF GEORGE III
Even before he ascended the throne George III had determined that his Court should be very different from that of his grandfather, and when he came into his kingdom he began at once a very drastic process of purification. He was a religious man, somewhat narrow in his views, and he held sacred things in great respect. At the coronation, after he had been anointed and crowned, when the Archbishop of Canterbury came to hand him down from the throne to receive the Sacrament, he told them he would not go to the Lord's Supper and partake of that ordinance with the crown on his head. The Archbishop of Canterbury did not know if it might be removed, and, after consulting the Bishop of Rochester, told the King neither could say if there was any order in the service for receiving communion with or without the crown. "Then there ought to be," said the monarch, and himself laid aside the crown.[178] Indeed he held very strong views as to the Sacrament, and when in 1805 Lord Chesterfield[179] prior to an Installation asked if the new Knights of the Garter would be required to take it, "No, My Lord," he replied severely, "the Holy Sacrament is not to be profaned by our Gothic institutions. Even at my coronation I was very unwilling to take it, but they told me it was indispensable. As it was, I took off the bauble from my head before I approached the Altar."[180]
George had this deep feeling for religion from his childhood, and before he was six years old had without direction learnt by heart several pages of Doddridge's "Principles of the Christian Religion"; while, from the time he grew up to the end of his life, he devoted one hour in the early morning to reading the Scriptures and to meditation. He was well acquainted with the works of Andrews, Sanderson and Sherlock, and asked a fashionable preacher of the day if he, too, were acquainted with them. "No, please your Majesty, my reading is all modern. The writers of whom you speak are now obsolete, though I doubt not they might have been very well at the time." The King looked at him, thinking of the man's own sermons, and replied: "There were giants on earth in those days."[181] One day George missed an under-gardener, and inquired as to the reason of his absence. "Please your Majesty, he is of late so very troublesome with his religion and he is always talking about it." "Is he dishonest? Does he neglect his work?" "No, your Majesty, he is very honest. I have nothing to say against him for that." "Then send for him again. Why should he be turned off? Call me Defender of the Faith!" he thundered. "Defender of the Faith!—and turn away a man for his religion!"
George III was not so bigoted but that he would visit a Quaker, and he and his consort witnessed the Lord Mayor's Show in 1761 from the house of Robert Barclay, one of the sect; and he could speak kindly of Nonconformists. On one occasion at Windsor he saw a maid-servant in tears and learnt that her distress was occasioned by the refusal of a superior to allow her to attend a dissenting meeting, whereupon he sent for the housekeeper and admonished her severely: "I will suffer no persecution during my reign!" "The Methodists are a quiet good kind of people and will disturb nobody; and if I can learn that any persons in my employment disturb them, they shall be immediately dismissed," he said when an attempt was made to interrupt the service at a Methodist chapel; and when a Bible Society was formed at Windsor, and the name of the Independent minister omitted, he desired that the name of "that good man" should without delay be added. But though George III could tolerate Nonconformists, on the other hand nothing could induce him to abate his prejudice against the Roman Catholics, and when urged to make concessions to them: "Tell me who took the coronation oath, did you or I? Dundas, let me have no more of your Scotch sophistry. I took the oath, and I must keep it."
After George's accession Dr. Thomas Wilson, Prebendary of Westminster, thought, by flattering him in a sermon delivered in the Chapel Royal, to ingratiate himself with the new King, only to be summoned to receive, to his great surprise, a stern rebuke: those who preached before him, the monarch warned Dr. Wilson, must remember "I go to church to hear God praised and not myself." George had, indeed, a high ideal for those in clerical orders, and this he enforced on all classes. "I could not help giving you the notification of the grief and concern with which my breast was affected at receiving an authentic information that routs have made their way into your palace," he wrote to Archbishop Cornwallis, when in 1772 he was informed by the Countess of Huntingdon that the prelate's wife had given a ball. "At the same time I must signify to you my sentiments on this subject, which hold these levities and vain dissipations as utterly inexpedient, if not unlawful, to pass in a residence for many centuries devoted to Divine studies, religious retirement, and the extensive exercise of charity and benevolence—I add, in a place where so many of your predecessors have led their lives in such sanctity as has thrown lustre upon the pure religion they professed and adorned. From the dissatisfaction with which you must perceive I behold these improprieties, not to speak in harsher terms, and still more pious principles, I trust you will suppress them immediately; so that I may not have occasion to show any further marks of displeasure, or to interpose in a different manner. May God take your Grace into His Almighty protection."
"I wish that every poor child in my dominion shall be able to read his Bible,"[182] he said rightly enough; but sometimes his fervour led him into excesses, such as the striking out in his copy of the Prayer-Book in the prayer for the Royal Family the words "our most Gracious King and Governor," and substituting an "unworthy sinner." It was this and similar examples of misdirected fervour that prompted Byron to write:
"All I saw further, in the last confusion,
Was, that King George slipped into Heaven for one;
And when the tumult dwindled to a calm,
I left him practising the hundredth psalm."[183]
One of the first acts of the King was to issue a proclamation for the "encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness, and immorality," which was especially commended to the notice of "judges, mayors, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and all other our officers and ministers, both ecclesiastical and civil."