However, to the best of his ability, George admired, and if when shown some of Blake's drawings he cried, "What—what—what! Take them away, take them away!" and if he thought Shakespeare "sad stuff," on the other hand it is to his credit that he took much interest in the foundation of the Royal Academy, and, though he did not desire that Reynolds should be President, yet he sanctioned the appointment and knighted the painter. In his respect for letters he conceived the idea to establish an Order of Minerva for eminent writers and scientists. "The knights were to take rank after the Knights of the Bath, and to sport a straw-coloured ribbon and a star of sixteen points. But there was such a row among the literati as to the persons who should be appointed, that the plan was given up, and Minerva and her star never came down amongst us."[207] He accumulated a fine library that George IV, when he found he might not sell it, gave to the British Museum; but he was probably entirely ignorant of his acquisitions, though he had a fondness for the exterior of books, and it is to his credit that he instructed his librarian "never to bid a farthing against a scholar, or professor, or against any person of moderate means, desiring a particular volume for his own use."[208]
George liked to think himself a patron of art and artists, but it is hinted he was not always inspired by the right motive, as when he found a place for Gibbon as a Lord of Trade:
"King George in a fright,
Lest Gibbon should write
The Hist'ry of England's disgrace,
Thought no way so sure
His pen to secure
As to give the historian a place."
The royal patronage was certainly not exercised on the heroic scale. Thus, Richard Paton was commanded to bring to Kew for their Majesties' inspection naval pictures intended for St. Petersburg, and he obeyed the summons, at a cost of fifty pounds for carriage, for which he was repaid only with thanks; and it was the payment by the King of twenty-five pounds for a picture, the market price of which was four times that amount, painted by a friend of Dr. Wolcot, that brought down upon the monarch the many vigorous onslaughts by that keen though coarse satirist.[209]
On another occasion the Queen was persuaded to sit to young Thomas Lawrence. "The poor young fellow was naturally inexperienced in the ways of a Court, and the manner in which her Majesty treated him was not with her usual kind consideration. She declined to give him a last sitting for the ornaments, as it was too much trouble, but eventually was prevailed upon to allow Mrs. Papendiek to act as her deputy. No money was paid. The King told him to remove it to town, and have it engraved. When that was done, the portrait was to be sent to Hanover, and then the King proposed to pay. But Lawrence had no money, and could not risk the engraving at his own expense."[210] The picture, therefore, remained in his studio, and was sold with others after his death.
Even royalty itself was not able to induce the King to put aside his dislike of spending money, for when the Empress of Russia asked for a portrait of himself by Reynolds, the monarch, with "laudable royal economy," as the satirist put it, went, not to Reynolds, but to an inexpensive portrait-painter.
"I'm told, and I believe the story,
That a fam'd Queen of Northern brutes,
A gentlewoman of prodigious glory,
Whom every sort of epithet well suits;
Whose husband dear, just happening to provoke her,
Was shov'd to heaven upon a red-hot poker!
Sent to a certain King, not King of France,
Desiring by Sir Joshua's hand his phiz,
What did the royal quiz?
Why, damned genteelly, sat to Mr. Dance."[211]
Certainly on no occasion made public did George III ever show a royal generosity. He saved his old master, Goupy, from a debtor's prison, and appointed his fencing master Redman, who had fallen upon evil days, a Poor Knight of Windsor; he released a man who had been imprisoned twelve years in Dorchester Jail for a debt of £100 by paying that amount; and one day, having taken shelter in a cottage where a joint was suspended before the fire by a string, he left two guineas behind him to "buy a jack."
"I never considered the King as munificent," Lord Carlisle remarked; "when he gave the kettledrums costing £1,500 to the Blues, he was deranged. Before his illness he stopped all the hunt to give an old man something for opening a gate at Bray Wick: after a long search for his purse he produced from it a penny and bestowed it on the man. He gave a fête in the Castle to all the Eton school boys. It consisted of a very long concert of sacred music with nothing to eat or drink."[212]