The king was right. On the 18th of May 1803 the declaration of war was laid before parliament. The war was accepted by all classes as inevitable, and the French preparations for an invasion of England roused the whole nation to a glow of enthusiasm only equalled by that felt when the Armada threatened its shores. On the 26th of October the king reviewed the London volunteers in Hyde Park. He found himself the centre of a great national movement with which he heartily sympathized, and which heartily sympathized with him.
On the 12th of February 1804 the king’s mind was again affected. When he recovered, he found himself in the midst of a ministerial crisis. Public feeling allowed but one opinion to prevail in the country—that Pitt, not Addington, was the proper man to conduct the administration in time of war. Pitt was anxious to form an administration on a broad basis, including Fox and all prominent leaders of both parties. The king would not hear of the admission of Fox. His dislike of him was personal as well as political, as he knew that Fox had had a great share in drawing the prince of Wales into a life of profligacy. Pitt accepted the king’s terms, and formed an administration in which he was the only man of real ability. Eminent men, such as Lord Grenville, refused to join a ministry from which the king had excluded a great statesman on purely personal grounds.
The whole question was reopened on Pitt’s death on the 23rd of January 1806. This time the king gave way. The ministry of All the Talents, as it was called, included Fox amongst its members. At first the king was observed to appear depressed at the necessity of surrender. But Fox’s charm of manner soon gained upon him. “Mr Fox,” said the king, “I little thought that you and I should ever meet again in this place; but I have no desire to look back upon old grievances, and you may rest assured I never shall remind you of them.” On the 13th of September Fox died, and it was not long before the king and the ministry were openly in collision. The ministry proposed a measure enabling all subjects of the crown to serve in the army and navy in spite of religious disqualifications. The king objected even to so slight a modification of the laws against the Catholics and Dissenters, and the ministers consented to drop the bill. The king asked more than this. He demanded a written and positive engagement that this ministry would never, under any circumstances, propose to him “any measure of concession to the Catholics, or even connected with the question.” The ministers very properly refused to bind themselves for the future. They were consequently turned out of office, and a new ministry was formed with the duke of Portland as first lord of the treasury and Mr Perceval as its real leader. The spirit of the new ministry was distinct hostility to the Catholic claims. On the 27th of April 1807 a dissolution of parliament was announced, and a majority in favour of the king’s ministry was returned in the elections which speedily followed.
The elections of 1807, like the elections of 1784, gave the king the mastery of the situation. In other respects they were the counterpart of one another. In 1784 the country declared, though perhaps without any clear conception of what it was doing, for a wise and progressive policy. In 1807 it declared for an unwise and retrogressive policy, with a very clear understanding of what it meant. It is in his reliance upon the prejudices and ignorance of the country that the constitutional significance of the reign of George III. appears. Every strong government derives its power from its representative character. At a time when the House of Commons was less really representative than at any other, a king was on the throne who represented the country in its good and bad qualities alike, in its hatred of revolutionary violence, its moral sturdiness, its contempt of foreigners, and its defiance of all ideas which were in any way strange. Therefore it was that his success was not permanently injurious to the working of the constitution as the success of Charles I. would have been. If he were followed by a king less English than himself, the strength of representative power would pass into other hands than those which held the sceptre.
The overthrow of the ministry of All the Talents was the last political act of constitutional importance in which George III. took part. The substitution of Perceval for Portland as the nominal head of the ministry in 1809 was not an event of any real significance, and in 1811 the reign practically came to an end. The king’s reason finally broke down after the death of the princess Amelia, his favourite child; and the prince of Wales (see GEORGE IV.) became prince regent. The remaining nine years of George III.’s life were passed in insanity and blindness, and he died on the 29th of January 1820.
His wife, Charlotte Sophia (1744-1818), was a daughter of Charles Louis of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1816), and was married to the king in London on the 8th of September 1761. After a peaceful and happy married life the queen died at Kew on the 17th of November 1818.
George III. had nine sons. After his successor came Frederick, duke of York and Albany (1763-1827); William Henry, duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV. (1765-1837); Edward Augustus, duke of Kent (1767-1825), father of Queen Victoria; Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland, afterwards king of Hanover (1771-1851); Augustus Frederick, duke of Sussex (1773-1843); Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge (1774-1850); Octavius (1779-1783); Alfred (1780-1782). He had also six daughters—Charlotte Augusta (1766-1828), married in 1797 to Frederick, afterwards king of Württemberg; Augusta Sophia (1768-1840); Elizabeth (1770-1840), married Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, 1818; Mary (1776-1857), married to William Frederick, duke of Gloucester, 1816; Sophia (1777-1848); Amelia (1783-1810).
(S. R. G.)
The numerous contemporary memoirs and diaries are full of the best material for a picture of George III.’s reign, apart from the standard histories. Thackeray’s Four Georges must not be trusted so far as historical judgment is concerned; Jesse’s Memoirs of the Life and Reign of George III. (2nd ed., 1867) is chiefly concerned with personalities. See also Beckles Willson, George III., as Man, Monarch and Statesman (1907).