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THE FOUE aEOEaES: 
 
 SKETCHES OF MANNEES, MORALS, COURT, 
 AND TOWN LIFE. 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/fourgeorgessketcOOthacrich 
 
A little Rebel. 
 
THE FOUR GEORGES: 
 
 BY 
 
 W. M. THACKERAY, 
 
 AUTHOR OF " LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS,' 
 
 ETC. ETC. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIOJ^JS 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL 
 
 M.DCCC.LXI. 
 
 [ The right of Translation is reserved.'] 
 
I.-GEOEGE THE EIEST. 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 
 
 VEKY few years 
 since, I knew 
 lamiliaiiy a 
 lady, who had 
 been asked in 
 marriage by 
 Horace Wal- 
 pole, who had 
 been patted 
 on the head 
 by George I. 
 This lady had 
 knocked at 
 Dr. Johnson's 
 door ; had been 
 intimate with 
 Fox, the beau- 
 tiful Georgina 
 
 Note. — The initial letter is from an old Dutch print of Her- 
 renhausen. 
 
 1—2 
 
4 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 of Devonshire, and that brilliant Whig society 
 of the reign of George III. ; had known the 
 Duchess of Queensberry, the patroness of Gay 
 and Prior, the admired young beauty of the court 
 of Queen Anne. I often thought as I took my 
 kind old friend's hand, how with it I held on to 
 the old society of wits and men of the world. I 
 could travel back for seven score years of time 
 — have glimpses of Brummell, Selwyn, Ches- 
 terfield and the men of pleasure; of Walpole 
 and Conway ; of Johnson, Reynolds, Gold- 
 smith; of North, Chatham, Newcastle; of the 
 fair maids of honour of George II. 's court; of 
 the German retainers of George I.'s; where 
 Addison was secretary of state ; where Dick 
 Steele held a place; whither the great Marl- 
 borough came with his fiery spouse ; when Pope, 
 and Swift, and Bolingbroke yet lived and wrote. 
 Of a society so vast, busy, brilliant, it is impos- 
 sible in four brief chapters to give a complete 
 notion ; but we may peep here and there into 
 that bygone world of the Georges, see what they 
 and their courts were like ; glance at the people 
 round about them ; look at past manners, fashions, 
 pleasures, and contrast them with our own, I have 
 
GEOKGE THE FIRST. 5 
 
 to say thus much by way of preface, because the 
 subject of these lectures has been misunderstood, 
 and I have been taken to task for not having 
 given grave historical treatises, which it never 
 was my intention to attempt. Not about battles, 
 about politics, about statesmen and measures of 
 state, did I ever think to lecture you : but to 
 sketch the manners and life of the old world ; to 
 amuse for a few hours with talk about the old 
 society; and, with the result of many a day's 
 and night's pleasant reading, to try and wile 
 away a few winter evenings for my hearers. 
 
 Among the German princes who sate under 
 Luther at Wittenberg, was Duke Ernest of Celle, 
 whose younger son, WiUiam of Llineburg, was 
 the progenitor of the illustrious Hanoverian house 
 at present reigning in Great Britain. Duke Wil- 
 liam held his court at Celle, a little town of ten 
 thousand people that lies on the railway line 
 between Hamburg and Hanover, in the midst of 
 great plains of sand, upon the river AUer. When 
 Duke William had it, it was a very humble wood- 
 built place, with a great brick church, which he 
 sedulously frequented, and in which he and others 
 
6 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 of his house He buried. He was a very religious 
 lord, and called William the Pious by his small 
 circle of subjects, over whom he ruled till fate 
 deprived him both of sight and reason. Some- 
 times, in his latter days, the good duke had 
 glimpses of mental light, when he would bid his 
 musicitos play the psalm-tunes which he loved. 
 One thinks of a descendant of his, two hundred 
 years afterwards, blind, old, and lost of wits, 
 singing Handel in Windsor Tower. 
 
 William the Pious had fifteen children, eight 
 daughters and seven sons, who, as the property 
 left among them was small, drew lots to deter- 
 mine which one of them should marry, and con- 
 tinue the stout race of the Guelphs. The lot 
 fell on Duke George, the sixth brother. The 
 others remained single, or contracted left-handed 
 marriages after the princely fashion of those days. 
 It is a queer picture — that of the old prince dying 
 in his little wood-built capital, and his seven sons 
 tossing up which should inherit and transmit the 
 crown of Brentford. Duke George, the lucky prize- 
 man, made the tour of Europe, during which he 
 visited the court of Queen Elizabeth ; and in the 
 year 1617, came back and settled at Zell, with a 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 7 
 
 wife out of Darmstadt. His remaining brothers 
 all kept their house at Zell, for economy's sake. 
 And presently, in due course, they all died — all 
 the honest dukes; Ernest, and Christian, and 
 Augustus, and Magnus, and George, and John — 
 and they are buried in the brick church of Brent- 
 ford yonder, by the sandy banks of the AUer. 
 
 Dr. Vehse gives a pleasant glimpse of the way 
 of life of our dukes in Zell. '^ When the trumpeter 
 on the tower has blown," Duke Christian orders 
 — viz. at nine o'clock in the morning, and four 
 in the evening, every one must be present at 
 meals, and those who are not must go without. 
 None of the servants, unless it be a knave who 
 has been ordered to ride out, shall eat or drink 
 in the kitchen or cellar ; or, without special leave, 
 fodder his horses at the prince's cost. When 
 the meal is served in the court-room, a page 
 shall go round and bid every one be quiet and 
 orderly, forbidding all cursing, swearing, and 
 rudeness ; all throwing about of bread, bones, 
 or roast, or pocketing of the same. Every morn- 
 ing, at seven, the squires shall have their morning 
 soup, along with which, and dinner, they shall be 
 served with their under-drink — every morning, 
 
8 THE FOUH GEOKGES. 
 
 except Friday morning, when there was sermon, 
 and no drink. Every evening they shall have 
 their beer, and at night their sleep-drink. The 
 butler is especially warned not to allow noble 
 or simple to go into the cellar : wine shall only 
 be served at the prince's or councillor's table; 
 and every Monday, the honest old Duke Christian 
 ordains the accounts shall be ready, and the 
 expenses in the kitchen, the wine and beer cellar, 
 the bakehouse and stable, made out. 
 
 Duke George, the marrying duke, did not stop 
 at home to partake of the beer and wine, and the 
 sermons. He went about fighting wherever there 
 was profit to be had. He served as general in 
 the army of the circle of Lower Saxony, the 
 Protestant army; then he went over to the 
 emperor, and fought in his armies in Germany 
 and Italy ; and when Gustavus Adolphus appeared 
 in Germany, George took service as a Swedish 
 general, and seized the Abbey of Hildesheim, as 
 his share of the plunder. Here, in the year 
 1641, Duke George died, leaving four sons behind 
 him, from the youngest of whom descend our 
 royal Georges. 
 
 Under these children of Duke George, the old 
 
GEORGE THE FIKST. 9 
 
 God-fearing, simple ways of Zell appear to have 
 gone out of mode. The second brother was con- 
 stantly visiting Venice, and leading a jolly, wicked 
 life there. It was the most jovial of all places at 
 the end of the seventeenth century ; and miUtary 
 men, after a campaign, rushed thither, as the 
 warriors of the Allies rushed to Paris in 1814, 
 to gamble, and rejoice, and partake of all sorts 
 of godless delights. This prince, then, loving 
 Venice and its pleasures, brought Italian singers 
 and dancers back with him to quiet old Zell; 
 and, worse still, demeaned himself by marrying a 
 French lady of birth quite inferior to his own — 
 Eleanor D'Olbreuse, from whom our queen is 
 descended. Eleanor had a pretty daughter, who 
 inherited a great fortune, which iniSamed her 
 cousin, George Louis of Hanover, with a desire 
 to marry her; and so, with her beauty and her 
 riches, she came to a sad end. 
 
 It is too long to tell how the four sons of Duke 
 George divided his territories amongst them, and 
 how, finally, they came into possession of the son 
 of the youngest of the four. In this generation 
 the Protestant faith was very nearly extinguished 
 in the family: and then where should we in 
 
10 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 England have gone for a king ? The third brother 
 also took delight in Italy, where the priests con- 
 verted him and his Protestant chaplain too. 
 Mass was said in Hanover once more ; and Italian 
 soprani piped their Latin rhymes in place of the 
 hymns which William the Pious and Dr. Luther 
 sang. Louis XIV. gave this and other converts 
 a splendid pension. Crowds of Frenchmen and 
 brilliant French fashions came into his court. It 
 is incalculable how much that royal bigwig cost 
 Germany. Every prince imitated the French 
 king, and had his Versailles, his Wilhelmshohe 
 or Ludwigslust; his court and its splendours; 
 his gardens laid out with statues ; his fountains, 
 and water-works, and Tritons; his actors, and 
 dancers, and singers, and fiddlers ; his harem, with 
 its inhabitants; his diamonds and duchies for 
 these latter ; his enormous festivities, his gaming- 
 tables, tournaments, masquerades, and banquets 
 lasting a week long, for which the people paid 
 with their money, when the poor wretches had it ; 
 with their bodies and very blood when they had 
 none ; being sold in thousands by their lords and 
 masters, who gaily dealt in soldiers, staked a regi- 
 ment upon the red at the gambling-table ; swapped 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 11 
 
 a battalion against a dancing-girl's diamond neck- 
 lace ; and, as it were, pocketed their people. 
 
 As one views Europe, through contemporary 
 books of travel in the early part of the last centmy, 
 the landscape is awful — wretched wastes, beggarly 
 and plundered; half-burned cottages and trem- 
 bling peasants gathering piteous harvests ; gangs 
 of such tramping along with bayonets behind 
 them, and corporals with canes and cats-of-nine- 
 tails to flog them to barracks. By these passes 
 my lord's gilt carriage floundering through the 
 ruts, as he swears at the postilions, and toils on 
 to the Eesidenz. Hard by, but away from the 
 noise and brawling of the citizens and buyers, is 
 Wilhelmslust or Ludwigsruhe, or Monbijou, or 
 Versailles — it scarcely matters which, — near to 
 the city, shut out by woods from the beggared 
 country, the enormous, hideous, gilded, mon- 
 strous marble palace, where the prince is, and the 
 Court, and the trim gardens, and huge fountains, 
 and the forest where the ragged peasants are 
 beating the game in (it is death to them to touch 
 a feather) ; and the jolly hunt sweeps by with its 
 uniform of crimson and gold ; and the prince 
 gallops ahead puffing his royal horn; and his 
 
12 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 lords and mistresses ride after him ; and the stag 
 is pulled down; and the grand huntsman gives 
 the knife in the midst of a chorus of bugles ; and 
 'tis time the Court go home to dinner ; and our 
 noble traveller, it may be th^ Baron of PoUnitz, 
 or the Count de Konigsmarck, or the excellent 
 Chevalier de Seingalt, sees the procession gleam- 
 ing through the trim avenues of the wood, and 
 hastens to the inn, and sends his noble name to 
 the marshal of the Court. Then our nobleman 
 arrays himself in green and gold, or pink and 
 silver, in the richest Paris mode, and is intro- 
 duced by the chamberlain, and makes his bow to 
 the jolly prince, and the gracious princess; and 
 is presented to the chief lords and ladies, and 
 then comes supper and a bank at Faro, where he 
 loses or wins a thousand pieces by daylight. If it 
 is a German court, you may add not a little 
 drunkenness to this picture of high life; but 
 German, or French, or Spanish, if you can see 
 out of your palace-windows beyond the trim-cut 
 forest vistas, misery is lying outside ; hunger is 
 stalking about the bare villages, listlessly follow- 
 ing precarious husbandry ; ploughing stony fields 
 with starved cattle ; or fearfully taking in scanty 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 13 
 
 harvests. Augustus is fat and jolly on his throne ; 
 he can knock down an ox, and eat one almost; 
 his mistress Aurora von Konigsmarck is the love- 
 liest, the wittiest creature ; his diamonds are the 
 biggest and most brilliant in the world, and his 
 feasts as splendid as those of Versailles. As for 
 Louis the Great, he is more than mortal. Lift 
 up your glances respectfully, and mark him eyeing 
 Madame de Fontanges or Madame de Montespan 
 from under his sublime periwig, as he passes 
 through the great gallery where Villars and Ven- 
 dome, and Berwick, and Bossuet, and Massillon 
 are waiting. Can Court be more splendid ; nobles 
 and knights more gallant and superb; ladies 
 more lovely ? A grander monarch, or a more 
 miserable starved wretch than the peasant his 
 subject, you cannot look on. Let us bear both 
 these types in mind, if we wish to estimate the 
 old society properly. Eemember the glory and 
 the chivalry ? Yes ! Eemember the grace and 
 beauty, the splendour and lofty politeness; the 
 gallant courtesy of Fontenoy, where the French 
 line bids the gentlemen of the Enghsh guard to 
 fire first; the noble constancy of the old king 
 and Villars his general, who fits out the last army 
 
14 THE FOUIl GEOKGES. 
 
 with the last crown-piece from the treasury, and 
 goes to meet the enemy and die or conquer for 
 France at Denain. But round all that royal 
 splendour lies a nation enslaved and ruined: 
 there are people robbed of their rights — communi- 
 ties laid waste — faith, justice, commerce trampled 
 upon, and well-nigh destroyed — nay, in the very 
 centre of royalty itself, what horrible stains and 
 meanness, crime and shame ! It is but to a silly 
 harlot that some of the noblest gentlemen, and 
 some of the proudest women in the world, are 
 bowing down ; it is the price of a miserable pro- 
 vince that the king ties in diamonds round his 
 mistress's white neck. In the first half of the 
 last century, I say, this is going on all Europe 
 over. Saxony is a waste as well as Picardy or 
 Artois; and Versailles is only larger and not 
 worse than Herrenhausen. 
 
 It was the first Elector of Hanover who made 
 the fortunate match which bestowed the race of 
 Hanoverian Sovereigns upon us Britons. Nine 
 years after Charles Stuart lost his head, his niece 
 Sophia, one of many children of another luckless 
 dethroned sovereign, the Elector Palatine, married 
 Ernest Augustus of Brunswick, and brought the 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 
 
 15 
 
 reversion to the crown of the three kingdoms in 
 her scanty trousseau. One of the handsomest, the 
 most cheerful, sensible, shrewd, accomphshed of 
 
 women, was Sophia,^ daughter of poor Frederick, 
 the winter king of Bohemia. The other daughters 
 
 * The above portraits are from contemporary prints of tliis 
 princess, before her marriage, and in her old age. 
 
16 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 of lovely, unhappy Elizabeth Stuart went off into 
 the Catholic Church ; this one, luckily for her 
 family, remained, I cannot say faithful to the 
 Eeformed Keligion, but at least she adopted no 
 other. An agent of the French king's, Gourville, 
 a convert himself, strove to bring her and her 
 husband to a sense of the truth ; and tells us that 
 he one day asked Madame the Duchess of Hano- 
 ver, of what religion her daughter was, then a 
 pretty girl of thirteen years old. The duchess 
 replied that the princess ivas of no religion as yet. 
 They were waiting to know of what religion her 
 husband would be, Protestant or Catholic, before 
 instructing her! And the Duke of Hanover 
 having heard all Gourville's proposal, said that a 
 change would be advantageous to his house, but 
 that he himself was too old to change. 
 
 This shrewd woman had such keen eyes that 
 she knew how to shut them upon occasion, and 
 was bUnd to many faults which it appeared that 
 her husband the Bishop of Osnaburg and Duke 
 of Hanover committed. He loved to take his 
 pleasure like other sovereigns — was a merry 
 prince, fond of dinner and the bottle ; Hked to 
 go to Italy, as his brothers had done before him ; 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 17 
 
 and we read hoYv^ he jovially sold 6,700 of his 
 Hanoverians to the seigniory of Venice. They 
 went bravely off to the Morea, under command 
 of Ernest's son, Prince Max, and only 1,400 of 
 them ever came home again. The German 
 princes sold a good deal of this kind of stock. 
 You may remember how George III.'s Govern- 
 ment purchased Hessians, and the use we made 
 of them during the War of Independence. 
 
 The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he 
 spent in a series of the most brilhant entertain- 
 ments. Nevertheless, the jovial prince was eco- 
 nomical, and kept a steady eye upon his own 
 interests. He achieved the electoral dignity for 
 himself : he married his eldest son George to his 
 beautiful cousin of Zell; and sending his sons 
 out in command of armies to fight — now on this 
 side, now on that — he lived on, taking his plea- 
 sure, and scheming his schemes, a merry, wise 
 prince enough, not, I fear, a moral prince, of 
 which kind we shall have but very few specimens 
 in the course of these lectures. 
 
 Ernest Augustus had seven children in all, 
 some of whom were scapegraces, and rebelled 
 against the parental system of primogeniture and 
 
 2 
 
18 THE FOUR GEOEGES. 
 
 non-division of property which the elector or- 
 dained. ^' Gustchen/' the electress writes about 
 her second son : — ** Poor Gus is thrust out, and 
 his father will give him no more keep. I laugh 
 in the day, and cry all night about it ; for I am a 
 fool with my children." Three of the six died 
 fighting against Turks, Tartars, Frenchmen. 
 One of them conspired, revolted, fled to Kome, 
 leaving an agent behind him, whose head was 
 taken off. The daughter, of whose early educa- 
 tion we have made mention, was married to the 
 Elector of Brandenburg, and so her religion 
 settled finally on the Protestant side. 
 
 A niece of the Electress Sophia — who had been 
 made to change her religion, and marry the Duke 
 of Orleans, brother of the French King; a woman 
 whose honest heart was always with her friends 
 and dear old Deutschland, though her fat little 
 body was confined at Paris, or Marly, or Versailles 
 — has left us, in her enormous correspondence 
 (part of which has been printed in German and 
 French) , recollections of the Electress, and of 
 George her son. Elizabeth Charlotte was at 
 Osnaburg when George was born (1660) . She 
 narrowly escaped a whipping for being in the w^ay 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 19 
 
 on that auspicious day. She seems not to have 
 liked Uttle George, nor George grown up; and 
 represents him as odiously hard, cold, and silent. 
 Silent he may have been : not a jolly prince like 
 his father before him, but a prudent, quiet, selfish 
 potentate, going his own way, managing his own 
 affairs, and understanding his own interests re- 
 markably well. 
 
 In his father's lifetime, and at the head of the 
 Hanover forces of 8,000 or 10,000 men, George 
 served the Emperor, on the Danube against 
 Turks, at the siege of Vienna, in Italy, and on 
 the Ehine. When he succeeded to the Electorate, 
 he handled its affairs with great prudence and 
 dexterity. He was very much liked by his people 
 of Hanover. He did not show his feelings much, 
 but he cried heartily on leaving them ; as they 
 used for joy when he came back. He showed an 
 uncommon prudence and coolness of behaviour 
 when he came into his kingdom; exhibiting no 
 elation; reasonably doubtful whether he should 
 not be turned out some day ; looking upon himself 
 only as a lodger, and making the most of his brief 
 tenure of St. James's and Hampton Court ; plun- 
 dering, it is true, somewhat, and dividing amongst 
 
 2—2 
 
20 THE FOUR GEORGES, 
 
 his German followers ; but what could be expected 
 of a sovereign who at home could sell his subjects 
 at so many ducats per head, and make no scruple 
 in so disposing of them ? I fancy a considerable 
 shrewdness, prudence, and even moderation in 
 his ways. The German Protestant was a cheaper, 
 and better, and kinder king than the Catholic 
 Stuart in whose chair he sate, and so far loyal to 
 England, that he let England govern herself. 
 
 Having these lectures in view I made it my 
 business to visit that ugly cradle in which our 
 Georges were nursed. The old town of Hanover 
 must look still pretty much as in the time when 
 George Louis left it. The gardens and pavilions 
 of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day 
 when the stout old Electress Sophia fell down in 
 her last walk there, preceding but by a few weeks 
 to the tomb James H.'s daughter, whose death 
 made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England. 
 
 The two first royal Georges, and their father, 
 Ernest Augustus, had quite royal notions regard- 
 ^ ing marriage ; and Louis XIV. and Charles II. 
 scarce distinguished themselves more at Versailles 
 or St. James's, than these German sultans in 
 their little city on the banks of the Leine. You 
 
GEORGE THE FIEST. 21 
 
 may see at Herrenhausen the very rustic theatre 
 in which the Platens danced and performed 
 masques, and sang before the Elector and his 
 sons. There are the very fauns and dryads of 
 stone still glimmering through the branches, still 
 grinning and piping their ditties of no tone, as in 
 the days when painted nymphs hung garlands 
 round them ; appeared under their leafy arcades 
 with gilt crooks, guiding rams with gilt horns ; 
 descended from '^ machines'' in the guise of 
 Diana or Minerva ; and delivered immense allego- 
 rical compliments to the princes returned home 
 from the campaign. 
 
 That was a curious state of morals and politics 
 in Europe; a queer consequence of the triumph 
 of the monarchical principle. Feudalism was 
 beaten down. The nobility, in its quarrels with 
 the crown, had pretty well succumbed, and the 
 monarch was all in all. He became almost divine : 
 the proudest and most ancient gentry of the land 
 did menial service for him. Who should carry 
 Louis XIV. 's candle when he went to bed ? what 
 prince of the blood should hold the king's 
 shirt when his Most Christian Majesty changed 
 that garment ? — the French memoirs oi the seven- 
 
22 THE FOUR GEOEGES. 
 
 teenth century are full of such details and 
 squabbles. The tradition is not yet extinct in 
 Europe. Any of you who were present, as 
 myriads were, at that splendid pageant, the open- 
 ing of our Crystal Palace in London, must have 
 seen two noble lords, great officers of the house- 
 hold, with ancient pedigrees, with embroidered 
 coats, and stars on their breasts and wands in 
 their hands, walking backwards for near the space 
 of a mile, while the royal procession made its 
 progress. Shall we wonder — shall we be angry 
 — shall we laugh at these old-world ceremonies ? 
 View them as you will, according to your mood ; 
 and with scorn or with respect, or with anger and 
 sorrow, as your temper leads j^ou. Up goes 
 Gesler's hat upon the pole. Salute that symbol 
 of sovereignty with heartfelt awe ; or with a sulky 
 shrug of acquiescence, or with a grinning 
 obeisance ; or with a stout rebellious No^ — clap 
 your own beaver down on your pate, and refuse to 
 doff it, to that spangled velvet and flaunting 
 feather. I make no comment upon the spectators' 
 behaviour ; all I say is, that Gesler's cap is still 
 up in the market-place of Europe, and not a few 
 folks are still kneeling to it. 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 23 
 
 Put clumsy, high Dutch statues in place of the 
 marbles of Versailles : fancy Herrenhausen water- 
 works in place of those of Marly : spread the 
 tables with Schweinskopf, Specksuppe, Leber 
 kuchen, and the Kke delicacies, in place of the 
 French cuisine ; and fancy Frau von Kielmansegge 
 dancing with Count Kammerjunker Quirini, or 
 singing French songs with the most awful Ger- 
 man accent : imagine a coarse Versailles, and we 
 have a Hanover before us. '' I am now got into 
 the region of beauty,'' writes Mary Wortley, from 
 Hanover in 1716 ; ^' all the women have literally 
 rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and necks, jet eye- 
 brows, to which may generally be added coal- 
 black hair. These perfections never leave them 
 to the day of their death, and have a very fine 
 effect by candle-light ; but I could wish they were 
 handsome wdth a little variety. They resemble 
 one another as Mrs. Salmon's Court of Great 
 Britain, and are in as much danger of melting 
 away by too nearly approaching the fire." The 
 sly Mary Wortley saw this painted seraglio of the 
 first George at Hanover, the year after his acces- 
 sion to the British throne. There were great 
 doings and feasts there. Here Lady. Mary saw 
 
24 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 George II. too. '^ I can tell you, without flattery 
 or partiality/' she says, ^^that our young prince 
 has all the accomplishments that it is possible to 
 have at his age, with an air of sprightliness and 
 understanding, and a something so very engaging 
 in his behaviour that needs not the advantage 
 of his rank to appear charming/' I find else- 
 where similar panegyrics upon Frederick Prince of 
 Wales, George II.'s son; and upon George III., 
 of course, and upon George IV. in an eminent 
 degree. It was the rule to be dazzled by princes, 
 and people's eyes winked quite honestly at that 
 royal radiance. 
 
 The Electoral Court of Hanover was numerous 
 — pretty well paid, as times went ; above all, paid 
 with a regularity which few other European courts 
 could boast of. Perhaps you will be amused to 
 know how the Electoral Court was composed. 
 There were the princes of the house in the first 
 class; in the second, the single field-marshal of 
 the army (the contingent was 18,000, PoUnitz 
 says, and the Elector had other 14,000 troops in 
 his pay) . Then follow, in due order, the autho- 
 rities civil and military, the working privy coun- 
 cillors, the generals of cavalry and infantry, in 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 25 
 
 the third class ; the high chamberlain, high mar- 
 shals of the court, high masters of the horse, the 
 major-generals of cavalry and infantry, in the 
 fourth class, down to the majors, the Hofjunkers 
 or pages, the secretaries or assessors, of the tenth 
 class, of whom all were noble. 
 
 We find the master of the horse had 1,090 
 thalers of pay; the high chamberlain, 2,000 — a 
 thaler being about three shillings of our money. 
 There were two chamberlains, and one for the 
 princess; five gentlemen of the chamber, and 
 five gentlemen ushers; eleven pages and per- 
 sonages to educate these young noblemen — such 
 as a governor, a preceptor, a fecht-meister, or 
 fencing master, and a dancing ditto, this latter 
 with a handsome salary of 400 thalers. There 
 were three body and court physicians, with 800 
 and 500 thalers ; a court barber, 600 thalers ; a 
 court organist; two musikanten; four French 
 fiddlers; twelve trumpeters, and a bugler; so 
 that there was plenty of music, profane and 
 pious, in Hanover. There were ten chamber 
 waiters, and twenty-four lacqueys in livery; a 
 maitre-d'hotel, and attendants of the kitchen ; a 
 French cook ; a body cook ; ten cooks ; six cooks* 
 
26 THE FOUR GEOr.GES. 
 
 assistants ; two Braten masters, or masters of the 
 roast — (one fancies enormous spits turning slowly, 
 and the honest masters of the roast beladling the 
 dripping); a pastry baker; a pie baker; and 
 finally, three scullions, at the modest remunera- 
 tion of eleven thalers. In the sugar-chamber 
 there were four pastrycooks (for the ladies, no 
 doubt); seven officers in the wine and beer cel- 
 lars; four bread bakers; and five men in the 
 plate-room. There were 600 horses in the Serene 
 stables — no less than twenty teams of princely 
 carriage horses, eight to a team ; sixteen coach- 
 men ; fourteen postilions ; nineteen ostlers ; 
 thirteen helps, besides smiths, carriage-masters, 
 horse-doctors, and other attendants of the stable. 
 The female attendants were not so numerous : 
 I grieve to find but a dozen or fourteen of 
 them about the Electoral premises, and only two 
 
 > washerwomen for all the Court, These function- 
 aries had not so much to do as in the present 
 age. I own to finding a pleasure in these small- 
 
 ' beer chronicles. I like to people the old world, 
 with its every-day figures and inhabitants — not so 
 much with heroes fighting immense battles and 
 inspiring repulsed battalions to engage ; or states- 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 27 
 
 men locked up in darkling cabinets and medi- 
 tating ponderous laws or dire conspiracies — as 
 with people occupied with their every-day work 
 or pleasure : my lord and lady hunting in the 
 forest, or dancing in the Court, or bowing to 
 their serene highnesses as they pass in to dinner ; 
 John Cook and his procession bringing the meal 
 from the kitchen; the jolly butlers bearing in 
 the flagons from the cellar; the stout coachman 
 driving the ponderous gilt waggon, with eight 
 cream-coloured horses in housings of scarlet 
 velvet and morocco leather ; a postilion on the 
 leaders, and a pair or a half-dozen of running 
 footmen scudding along by the side of the vehicle, 
 with conical caps, long silver-headed maces, which 
 they poised as they ran, and splendid jackets 
 laced all over with silver and gold. I fancy the 
 citizens' wives and their daughters looking out 
 from the balconies ; and the burghers over their 
 beer and mumm, rising up, cap in hand, as the 
 cavalcade passes through the town with torch- 
 bearers, trumpeters blowing their lusty cheeks 
 out, and squadrons of jack-booted lifeguards- 
 men, girt with shining cuirasses, and bestriding 
 thundering chargers, escorting his highnesses 
 
28 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 coach from Hanover to Herrenhausen ; or halt- 
 ing, mayhap, at Madame Platen's country house 
 of Monplaisir, which lies half-way between the 
 summer palace and the Residenz. 
 
 In the good old times of which I am treating, 
 whilst common men were driven off by herds, 
 and sold to fight the emperor's enemies on the 
 Danube, or to bayonet King Louis's troops of 
 common men on the Rhine, noblemen passed 
 from court to court, seeking service with one 
 prince or the other, and naturally taking com- 
 mand of the ignoble vulgar of soldiery which 
 battled and died almost without hope of promotion. 
 Noble adventurers travelled from court to court 
 in search of employment; not merely noble 
 males, but noble females too ; and if these latter 
 were beauties, and obtained the favourable notice 
 of princes, they stopped in the courts, became 
 the favourites of their Serene or Royal High- 
 nesses ; and received great sums of money and 
 splendid diamonds; and were promoted to be 
 duchesses, marchionesses, and the like; and did 
 not fall much in public esteem for the manner 
 in which they won their advancement. In this 
 way Mdlle. de Querouailles, a beautiful French 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 29 
 
 lady, came to London on a special mission of 
 Louis XIV., and was adopted by our grateful 
 country and sovereign, and figured as Duchess 
 of Portsmouth. In this way the beautiful Aurora 
 of Konigsmarck travelhng about found favour in 
 the eyes of Augustus of Saxony, and became 
 the mother of Marshal Saxe, who gave us a 
 beating at Fontenoy; and in this manner the 
 lovely sisters Elizabeth and Melusina of Meissen- 
 bach '(who had actually been driven out of Paris, 
 whither they had travelled on a like errand, by 
 the wise jealousy of the female favourite there in 
 possession) journeyed to Hanover, and became 
 favourites of the serene house there reigning. 
 
 That beautiful Aurora von Konigsmarck and 
 her brother are wonderful as types of bygone 
 manners, and strange illustrations of the morals 
 of old days. The Konigsmarcks were descended 
 from an ancient noble family of Brandenburgh, a 
 branch of which passed into Sweden, where it 
 enriched itself and produced several mighty men 
 of valour. 
 
 The founder of the race was Hans Christof, 
 a famous warrior and plunderer of the thirty 
 years' war. One of Hans' sons, Otto, appeared 
 
30 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 as ambassador at the court of Louis XIV., and 
 had to make a Swedish speech at his reception 
 before the Most Christian King. Otto was a 
 famous dandy and warrior, but he forgot the 
 speech, and what do you think he did ? Far 
 from being disconcerted, he recited a portion of 
 the Swedish Catechism to His Most Christian 
 Majesty and his court, not one of whom under- 
 stood his' Hugo with the exception of his own 
 suite, who had to keep their gravity as best they 
 might. 
 
 Otto's nephew, Aurora's elder brother, Carl 
 Johann of Konigsmarck, a favourite of Charles II., 
 a beauty, a dandy, a warrior, a rascal of more 
 than ordinary mark, escaped but deserved being 
 hanged in England, for the murder of Tom 
 Thynne of Longleat. He had a little brother in 
 London with him at this time : — as great a beauty, 
 as great a dandy, as great a villain as his elder. 
 This lad, Philip of Konigsmarck, also was im- 
 plicated in the affair ; and perhaps it is a pity he 
 ever brought his pretty neck out of it. He went 
 over to Hanover, and was soon appointed colonel 
 of a regiment of H. E. Highness's dragoons. In 
 early life he had been page in the court of Celle ; 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 31 
 
 and it was said that he and the pretty Princess 
 Sophia Dorothea, who by this time was married 
 to her cousin George the Electoral prince, had 
 been in love with each other as children. Their 
 loves were now to be renewed, not innocently, and 
 to come to a fearful end. 
 
 A biography of the wife of George I., by 
 Dr. Doran, has lately appeared, and I confess I 
 am astounded at the ^verdict which that writer 
 has ' delivered, and at his acquittal of this most 
 unfortunate lady. That she had a cold selfish 
 libertine of a husband no one can doubt ; but that 
 the bad husband had a bad wife is equally clear. 
 She was married to her cousin for money or con- 
 venience, as all princesses were married. She 
 was most beautiful, lively, witty, accomplished : 
 his brutaUty outraged her : his silence and cold- 
 ness chilled her: his cruelty insulted her. No 
 wonder she did not love him. How could love 
 be a part of the compact in such a marriage as 
 that ? With this unlucky heart to dispose of, the 
 poor creature bestowed it on Philip of Konigs- 
 marck, than whom a greater scamp does not walk 
 the history of the seventeenth century. A hun- 
 dred and eighty years after the fellow was thrust 
 
32 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 into his unknown grave, a Swedish professor 
 Kghts upon a box of letters in the University 
 Library at Upsala, written by Philip and Dorothea 
 to each other, and telling their miserable story. 
 
 The bewitching Konigsmarck had conquered 
 two female hearts in Hanover. Besides the 
 Electoral prince's lovely young wife Sophia Doro- 
 thea, Philip had inspired a passion in a hideous 
 old court lady, the Countess of Platen. The 
 princess seems to have pursued him with the 
 fidelity of many years. Heaps of letters followed 
 him on his campaigns, and were answered by the 
 daring adventurer. The princess wanted to fly 
 with him; to quit her odious husband at any 
 rate. She besought her parents to receive her 
 back; had a notion of taking refuge in France 
 and going over to the Cathohc rehgion; had 
 absolutely packed her jewels for flight, and very- 
 likely aijanged its details with her lover, in that 
 last long night's interview, after which Philip 
 of Konigsmarck was seen no more. 
 
 Konigsmarck, inflamed with drink — there is 
 scarcely any vice of which, according to his own 
 showing, this gentleman was not a practitioner — 
 had boasted at a supper at Dresden of his 
 
GEOKGE THE FIRST. 33 
 
 intimacy with the two Hanoverian ladies, not 
 only with the princess, but with another lady 
 powerful in Hanover. The Countess Platen, the 
 old favourite of the Elector, hated the young 
 Electoral Princess. The young lady had a lively 
 wit, and constantly made fun of the old one. 
 The princess's jokes were conveyed to the old 
 Platen just as our idle words are carried about at 
 this present day : and so they both hated each 
 other. 
 
 The characters in the tragedy, of which the 
 curtain was now about to fall, are about as dark 
 a set as eye ever rested on. There is the jolly 
 prince, shrewd, selfish, scheming, loving his cups 
 and his ease (I think his good-humour makes the 
 tragedy but darker); his princess, who speaks 
 little but observes all ; his old, painted Jezebel of 
 a mistress ; his son, the Electoral Prince, shrewd 
 too, quiet, selfish, not ill-humoured, and generally 
 silent, except when goaded into fury by the 
 intolerable tongue of his lovely wife ; there is 
 poor Sophia Dorothea, with her coquetry and her 
 wrongs, and her passionate attachment to her 
 scamp of a lover, and her wild imprudences, and 
 her mad artifices, and her insane fidehty, and her 
 
 3 
 
34 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 furious jealousy regarding her husband (though 
 she loathed and cheated him), and her prodigious 
 falsehoods; and the confidante, of course, into 
 whose hands the letters are slipped; and there 
 is Lothario, finally, than whom, as I have said, 
 one can't imagine a more handsome, wicked, 
 worthless reprobate. 
 
 How that perverse fidelity of passion pursues 
 the villain ! How madly true the woman is, and 
 how astoundingly she lies ! She has bewitched 
 two or three persons who have taken her up, and 
 they won't believe in her WTong. Like Mary of 
 Scotland, she finds adherents ready to conspire 
 for her even in history, and people who have to 
 deal with her are charmed, and fascinated, and 
 bedevilled. How devotedly Miss Strickland has 
 stood by Mary's innocence ! Are there not scores 
 of ladies in this audience who persist in it too ? 
 Innocent ! I remember as a boy how a great 
 party persisted in declaring Caroline of Bruns- 
 wick was a martyred angel. So was Helen of 
 Greece innocent. She never ran away with Paris, 
 the dangerous young Trojan. Menelaus, her 
 husband, illused her; and there never was any 
 siege of Troy at all. So was Bluebeard's wife 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 35 
 
 innocent. She never peeped into the closet 
 Yv^here the other wives were with their heads off. 
 She never dropped the key, or stained it v/ith 
 blood ; and her brothers were quite right in finish- 
 ing Bluebeard, the cowardly brute ! Yes, Caro- 
 line of Brunsv/ick was innocent : and Madame 
 Laffarge never poisoned her husband ; and Mary 
 of Scotland never blew up hers ; and poor Sophia 
 Dorothea v\^as never unfaithful; and Eve never 
 took the apple — it was a cowardly fabrication of 
 the serpent's. 
 
 George Louis has been held up to execration as 
 a murderous Bluebeard, whereas the Electoral 
 Prince had no share in the transaction in which 
 Philip of Konigsmarck was scuffled out of this 
 mortal scene. The prince was absent when the 
 catastrophe came. The princess had had a hun- 
 dred warnings; mild hints from her husband's 
 parents ; grim remonstrances from himself — but 
 took no more heed of this advice than such be- 
 sotted poor wretches do. On the night of Sun- 
 day, the 1st of July, 1694, Konigsmarck paid a 
 long visit to the princess, and left her to get ready 
 for flight. Her husband was away at Berlin ; her 
 carriages and horses were prepared and ready for 
 
 3—2 
 
36 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 the elopement. Meanwhile, the spies of Countess 
 Platen had brought the news to their mistress. 
 She went to Ernest Augustus, and procured from 
 the Elector an order for the arrest of the Swede. 
 On the way by which he was to come, four guards 
 were commissioned to take him. He strove to 
 cut his way through the four men, and wounded 
 more than one of them. They fell upon him ; 
 cut him down ; and, as he was lying wounded on 
 the ground, the countess, his enemy, whom he 
 had betrayed and insulted, came out and beheld 
 him prostrate. He cursed her with his dying lips, 
 and the furious woman stamped upon his mouth 
 with her heel. He was despatched presently ; his 
 body burnt the next day ; and all traces of the 
 man disappeared. The guards who killed him 
 were enjoined silence under severe penalties. The 
 princess was reported to be ill in her apartments, 
 from which she was taken in October of the same 
 year, being then eight-and-twenty years old, and 
 consigned to the castle of Ahlden, where she 
 remained a prisoner for no less than thirty-two 
 years. A separation had been pronounced pre- 
 viously between her and her husband. She was 
 called henceforth the '* Princess of Ahlden," 
 
GEOKGE THE FIEST. 37 
 
 and her silent husband no more uttered her 
 name. 
 
 Four years after the Konigsmarck catastrophe, 
 Ernest Augustus, the first Elector of Hanover, 
 died, and George Louis, his son, reigned in his 
 stead. Sixteen years he reigned in Hanover, 
 after which he became, as we know. King of 
 Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of 
 the Faith. The wicked old Countess Platen died 
 in'the year 1706. She had lost her sight, but 
 nevertheless the legend says that she constantly 
 saw Konigsmarck's ghost by her wicked old bed. 
 And so there was an end of her. 
 
 In the year 1700, the Uttle Duke of Gloucester, 
 the last of poor Queen Anne's children, died, and 
 the folks of Hanover straightway became of pro- 
 digious importance in England. The Electress 
 Sophia was declared the next in succession to the 
 English throne. George Louis was created Duke 
 of Cambridge; grand deputations were sent over 
 from our country to Deutschland; but Queen 
 Anne, whose weak heart hankered after her 
 relatives at St. Germains, never could be got to 
 allow her cousin, the Elector Duke of Cambridge, 
 to come and pay his respects to her Majesty, and 
 
38 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 take his seat in her House of Peers. Had the 
 queen lasted a month longer ; had the English 
 Tories been as bold and resolute as they were 
 clever and crafty ; had the prince whom the 
 nation loved and pitied been equal to his for- 
 tune, George Louis had never talked German in 
 St. James's Chapel Eoyal. 
 
 When the crown did come to George Louis he 
 was in no hurry about putting it on. He waited 
 at home for awhile ; took an affecting farewell of 
 his dear Hanover and Herrenhausen ; and set out 
 in the most leisurely manner to ascend *' the 
 throne of his ancestors/' as he called it in his 
 first speech to Parliament. He brought with him 
 a compact body of Germans, whose society he 
 loved, and whom he kept round the royal person. 
 He had his faithful German chamberlains; his 
 German secretaries ; his negroes, captives of his 
 bow and spear in Turkish w^ars ; his two ugly, 
 elderly Germ.an favourites, Mesdames of Kiel- 
 mansegge and Schulenberg, whom he created 
 respectively Countess of Darlington and Duchess 
 of Kendal. The duchess was tall, and lean of 
 stature, and hence was irreverently nicknamed 
 the Maypole. The countess was a large-sized 
 
I 
 
 GEOKGE THE FIRST. 39 
 
 noblewoman, and this elevated personage was 
 denominated the Elephant. Both of these ladies 
 loved Hanover and its delights ; clung round the 
 linden-trees of the great Herrenhausen avenue, 
 and at first would not quit the place. Schulen- 
 berg, in fact, could not come on account of her 
 debts ; but finding the Maypole would not come, 
 the Elephant packed up her trunk and sUpped out 
 of Hanover unwieldy as she was. On this the 
 Maypole straightway put herself in motion, and 
 followed her beloved George Louis. One seems 
 to be speaking of Captain Macheath, and Polly, 
 and Lucy. The king we had selected; the 
 courtiers who came in his train ; the English 
 nobles who came to welcome him, and on 
 many of whom the shrewd old cynic turned 
 his back — I protest it is a wonderful satirical 
 picture. I am a citizen waiting at Greenwich 
 pier, say, and crying hurrah for King George; 
 and yet I can scarcely keep my countenance, and 
 help laughing at the enormous absurdity of this 
 advent ! 
 
 Here we are, all on our knees. Here is the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury prostrating himself to 
 the head of his church, with Kielmansegge and 
 
40 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 Scliulenberg with their ruddled cheeks grinning 
 behind the defender of the faith. Here is my 
 Lord Duke of Marlborough kneeling too, the 
 greatest warrior of all times; he who betrayed 
 King WilKam — betrayed King JamesII. — betrayed 
 Queen Anne — betrayed England to the French, 
 the Elector to the Pretender, the Pretender to 
 the Elector ; and here are my Lords Oxford and 
 Bolingbroke, the latter of whom has just tripped 
 up the heels of the former; and if a month's 
 more time had been allowed him, would have had 
 King James at Westminster. The great Whig 
 gentlemen made their bows and congees with 
 proper decorum and ceremony ; but yonder keen 
 old schemer knows the value of their loyalty. 
 '* Loyalty," he must think, ^' as applied to me — 
 it is absurd ! There are fifty nearer heirs to the 
 throne than I am. I am but an accident, and 
 you fine Whig gentlemen take me for your own 
 sake, not for mine. You Tories hate me ; you 
 archbishop, smirking on your knees, and prating 
 about Heaven, you know I don't care a fig for 
 your Thirty-nine Articles, and can't understand a 
 word of your stupid sermons. You, my Lords 
 Bolingbroke and Oxford— you know you were 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 41 
 
 conspiring against me a month ago ; and you, my 
 Lord Duke of Marlborough — you would sell me 
 or any man else, if you found your advantage in 
 it. Come, my good Melusina, come, my honest 
 Sophia, let us go into my private room, and have 
 some oysters and some Ehine wine, and some 
 pipes afterwards : let us make the best of our 
 situation ; let us take what we can get, and leave 
 these bawling, brawling, lying English to shout, 
 and fight, and cheat, in their own way ! " 
 . If Swift had not been committed to the states- 
 men of the losing side, what a fine satirical pic- 
 ture we might have had of that general sauve qui 
 pent amongst the Tory party! How mum the 
 Tories became; how the House of Lords and 
 House of Commons chopped round; and how 
 decorously the majorities welcomed King George! 
 Bolingbroke, making his last speech in the 
 House of Lords, pointed out the shame of peerage, 
 where several lords concurred to condemn in one 
 general vote all that they had approved in former 
 parliaments by many particular resolutions. And 
 so their conduct was shameful. St. John had the 
 best of the argument, but the worst of the vote. 
 Bad times were come for him. He talked philo- 
 
42 THE FOUR GEOllGES. 
 
 sopliy, and professed innocence. He courted 
 retirement, and was ready to meet persecution ; 
 but, hearing that honest Mat Prior, who had been 
 recalled from Paris, was about to peach regarding 
 the past transactions, the philosopher bolted, and 
 took that magnificent head of his out of the ugly 
 reach of the axe. Oxford, the lazy and good- 
 humoured, had more courage, and awaited the 
 storm at home. He and Mat Prior both had 
 lodgings in the Tower, and both brought their 
 heads safe out of that dangerous menagerie. 
 When Atterbury was carried off to the same den 
 a few years afterwards, and it was asked, what 
 next should be done with him ? ^' Done with 
 him? Fling him to the lions," Cadogan said, 
 Marlborough's lieutenant. But the British lion 
 of those days did not care much for drinking the 
 blood of peaceful peers and poets, or crunching 
 ' the bones of bishops. Only four men were 
 executed in London for the rebellion of 1715; 
 and twenty-two in Lancashire. Above a thousand 
 taken in arms, submitted to the king's mercy, and 
 petitioned to be transported to his majesty's 
 colonies in America. I have heard that their 
 descendants took the loyalist side in the disputes 
 
GEOrvGE THE FIRST. 43 
 
 which arose sixty years after. It is pleasant tp 
 find that a friend of ours, worthy Dick Steele, 
 was for letting off the rebels with their lives. 
 
 As one thinks of what might have been, how 
 amusing the speculation is ! We know how the 
 doomed Scottish gentlemen came out at Lord 
 Mar's summons, mounted the white cockade, that 
 has been a flower of sad poetry ever since, and 
 rallied round the ill-omened Stuart standard at 
 Braemar. Mar, with 8,000 men, and but 1,500 
 opposed to him, might have driven the enemy 
 over the Tweed, and taken possession of the 
 whole of Scotland ; but that the Pretender's duke 
 did not venture to move when the day was his 
 own. Edinburgh Castle might have been in King 
 James's hands; but that the men who were to 
 escalade it stayed to drink his health at the 
 tavern, and arrived two hours too late at the 
 rendezvous under the castle wall. There was 
 sympathy enough in the town — the projected 
 attack seems to have been known there — Lord 
 Malion quotes Sinclair's account of a gentleman 
 not concerned, who told Sinclair, that he was in 
 a house that evening where eighteen of them 
 were drinking, as the facetious landlady said, 
 
44 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 *' powdering their hair/* for the attack of the 
 castle. Suppose they had not stopped to powder 
 their hair? Edinburgh Castle, and town, and 
 all Scotland were King James's. The north of 
 England rises, and marches over Barnet Heath 
 upon London. Wyndham is up in Somerset- 
 shire ; Packington in Worcestershire ; and Vivian 
 in Cornwall. The Elector of Hanover, and his 
 hideous mistresses, pack up the plate, and per- 
 haps the crown jewels in London, and are off 
 via Harwich and Helvoetsluys, for dear old 
 Deutschland. The king — God save him ! — lands 
 at Dover, with tumultuous applause; shouting 
 multitudes, roaring cannon, the Duke of Marl- 
 borough weeping tears of joy, and all the bishops 
 kneeling in the mud. In a few years, mass is 
 said in St. Paul's ; matins and vespers are sung 
 in York Minster; and Dr. Swift is turned out 
 of his stall and deanery house at St. Patrick's, 
 to give place to Father Dominic, from Salamanca. 
 All these changes were possible then, and once 
 thirty years afterwards — all this we might have 
 had, but for the pulveris exigui jactu, that little 
 toss of powder for the hair which the Scotch 
 conspirators stopped to take at the tavern. 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 45 
 
 You understand the distinction I would draw 
 between history — of which I do not aspire to be 
 an expounder — and manners and hfe such as 
 these sketches would describe. The rebeUion 
 breaks out in the north; its story is before you 
 in a hundred volumes, in none more fairly than 
 in the excellent narrative of Lord Mahon. The 
 clans are up in Scotland ; Derwentwater, Nithis- 
 dale and Forster are in arms in Northumberland 
 — ^these are matters of history, for which you are 
 referred to the due chroniclers. The Guards are 
 set to watch the streets, and prevent the people 
 wearing white roses. I read presently of a couple 
 of soldiers almost flogged to death for wearing 
 oakboughs in their hats on the 29th of May — 
 another badge of the beloved Stuarts. It is with 
 these we have to do, rather than the marches and 
 battles of the armies to which the poor fellows 
 belonged — with statesmen, and how they looked, 
 and how they Hved, rather than with measures 
 of State, vv^hich belong to history alone. For 
 example, at the close of the old queen's reign, 
 it is known the Duke of Marlborough left the 
 kingdom — after what menaces, after what prayers, 
 lies, bribes offered, taken, refused, accepted ; after 
 
40 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 what dark doubling- and tacking, let history, if 
 she can or dare, say. The queen dead ; who so 
 eager to return as my lord duke ? Who shouts 
 Clod save the king ! so lustily as the great con- 
 queror of Blenheim and Malplaquet ? (By the 
 way, he will send over some more money for the 
 Pretender yet, on the sly.) Who lays his hand 
 on his blue ribbon, and lifts his eyes more grace- 
 fully to heaven than this hero ? He makes a 
 quasi-triumphal entrance into London, by Temple 
 Bar, in his enormous gilt coach — and the enor- 
 mous gilt coach breaks down somewhere by 
 Chancery Lane, and his highness is obliged to 
 get another. There it is we have him. We are 
 with the mob in the crowd, not with the great 
 folks in the procession. We are not the Historic 
 Muse, but her ladyship's attendant, tale-bearer — 
 valet de chamhre — for whom no man is a hero ; 
 and, as yonder one steps from his carriage to 
 the next handy conveyance, we take the number 
 of the hack; we look all over at his stars, rib- 
 bons, embroidery; we think within ourselves, 
 you unfathomable schemer ! you warrior in- 
 vincible ! you beautiful smiling Judas ! What 
 master would you not kiss or betray ? What 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 47 
 
 traitor's head, blackening on the spikes on yonder 
 gate, ever hatched a tithe of the treason v;hich 
 has worked under your periwig ? 
 
 We have brought our Georges to London city, 
 and if we would behold its aspect, may see it in 
 Plogarth's lively perspective of Cheapside, or 
 read of it in a hundred contemporary books 
 which paint the manners of that age. Our dear 
 old Spectator looks smihng upon the streets, with 
 their innumerable signs, and describes them with 
 his charming humour. '^ Our streets are filled 
 with Blue Boars, Black Swans, and Bed Lions, 
 not to mention Flying Pigs and Hogs in Armour, 
 with other creatures more extraordinary than any 
 in the deserts of Africa.'' A few of these quaint 
 old figures still remain in London to\\Ti. You may 
 still see there, and over its old hostel in Ludgate 
 Hill, the Belle Sauvage to whom the Spectator 
 so pleasantly alludes in that paper ; and who was, 
 probably, no other than the sweet American 
 Pocahontas, who rescued from death the daring 
 Captain Smith. There is the Lion's Head, 
 down whose jaws the Spectator s own letters were 
 passed ; and over a great banker's in Fleet Street, 
 the effigy of the wallet, which the founder of the 
 
48 THE FOUE GEORGES. 
 
 firm bore when he came into London a country 
 boy. People this street, so ornamented with 
 crowds of swinging chairmen, with servants bawl- 
 ing to clear the way, with Mr. Dean in his 
 cassock, his lacquey marching before him; or 
 Mrs. Dinah in her sack, tripping to chapel, her 
 footboy carrying her ladyship's great prayer-book ; 
 with itinerant tradesmen, singing their hundred 
 cries (I remember forty years ago, as a boy in 
 London city, a score of cheery, familiar cries 
 that are silent now). Fancy the beaux thronging 
 to the chocolate-houses, tapping their snuff-boxes 
 as they issue thence, their periwigs appearing 
 over the red curtains. Fancy Saccharissa beckon- 
 ing and smiHng from the upper windows, and a 
 crowd of soldiers brawling and bustling at the 
 door — gentlemen of the Life Guards, clad in 
 scarlet, with blue facings, and laced with gold at 
 the seams; gentlemen of the Horse Grenadiers, 
 in their caps of sky-blue cloth, with the garter 
 embroidered on the front in gold and silver; 
 men of the Halberdiers, in their long red coats, 
 as bluff Harry left them, with their ruffs and 
 velvet flat caps. Perhaps the king's majesty 
 himself is going to St. James's as we pass. If 
 
GEOKGE THE FIRST. 49 
 
 he is going to parliament, he is in his coach- 
 and-eight, surrounded by his guards and the high 
 officers of his crown. Otherwise his majesty only 
 uses a chair, with six footmen walking before, 
 and six yeomen of the guard at the sides of the 
 sedan. The officers in waiting follow the king in 
 coaches. It must be rather slow work. 
 
 Our Spectator and Tatler are full of delightful 
 glimpses of the town life of those days. In the 
 company of that charming guide, we may go to 
 the opera, the comedy, the puppet show, the 
 auction, even the cockpit : we can take boat at 
 Temple Stairs, and accompany Sir Eoger de 
 Coverley and Mr. Spectator to Spring Garden — 
 it will be called Vauxhall a few years since, when 
 Hogarth will paint for it. Would you not hke to 
 step back into the past, and be introduced to 
 Mr. Addison ? — not the Eight Honourable Joseph 
 Addison, Esq., George I.'s Secretary of State, 
 but to the dehghtful painter of contemporary 
 manners; the man who, when in good-humour 
 himself, was the pleasantest companion in all 
 England. I should like to go into Lockit's with 
 him, and drink a bowl along with Sir E. Steele 
 (who has just been knighted by King George, 
 
50 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 and ^Yho does not happen to have any money 
 to pay his share of the reckoning). I should 
 not care to follow Mr. Addison to his secretary's 
 office in Whitehall. There we get into politics. 
 Our business is pleasure, and the town, and the 
 coffee-house, and the theatre, and the Mall. 
 Delightful Spectator ! kind friend of leisure hours ! 
 happy companion ! true Christian gentleman ! 
 How much greater, better, you are than the king 
 Mr. Secretary kneels to ! 
 
 You can have foreign testimony about old- 
 world London, if you like ; and my before-quoted 
 friend, Charles Louis, Baron de PoUnitz, will 
 conduct us to it. '^A man of sense,'' says he, 
 *' or a fine gentleman, is never at a loss for com- 
 pany in London, and this is the way the latter 
 passes his time. He rises late, puts on a frock, 
 and, leaving his sword at home, takes his cane, 
 and goes where he pleases. The park is com- 
 monly the place where he walks, because 'tis the 
 Exchange for men of quality. 'Tis the same 
 thing as the Tuileries at Paris, only the park has 
 a certain beauty of simplicity which cannot be 
 described. The grand walk is called the Mall; 
 is full of people at every hour of the day, but 
 
GEOEGE THE FIRST. 51 
 
 especially at morning and evening, when their 
 Majesties often walk with the royal family, who 
 are attended only by a half-dozen yeomen of the 
 guard, and permit all persons to walk at the same 
 time with them. The ladies and gentlemen 
 always appear in rich dresses, for the English, 
 who, twenty years ago, did not wear gold lace 
 but in their army, are now embroidered and 
 bedaubed as much as the French. I speak of 
 persons of quality; for the citizen still contents 
 himself with a suit of ifine cloth, a good hat and 
 wig, and fine linen. Everybody is well clothed 
 here, and even the beggars don't make so ragged 
 an appearance as they do elsewhere.'' After our 
 friend, the man of quality, has had his morning 
 or undress walk in the Mall, he goes home to 
 dress, and then saunters to some coffee-house or 
 chocolate-house frequented by the persons he 
 would see. '^ For 'tis a rule with the English 
 to go once a day at least to houses of this sort, 
 where they talk of business and news, read the 
 papers, and often look at one another without 
 opening their lips. And 'tis very well they are 
 so mute : for were they all as talkative as people 
 of other nations, the coffee-houses would be 
 
 4—2 
 
52 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 intolerable, and there would be no hearing what 
 one man said where they are so many. The 
 chocolate-house in St. James's Street, where I 
 go every morning to pass away the time, is always 
 so full that a man can scarce turn about in it/' 
 
 Dehghtful as London city was. King George !• 
 liked to be out of it as much as ever he could ; 
 and when there, passed all his time with his 
 Germans. It was with them as with Blucher, 
 100 years afterwards, when the bold old Eeiter 
 looked down from St. Paul's, and sighed out, 
 **Was fiir Plunder!" The German women 
 plundered; the German secretaries plundered; 
 the German cooks and intendants plundered; 
 even Mustapha and Mahomet, the German 
 negroes, had a share of the booty. Take what 
 you can get, was the old monarch's maxim. He 
 was not a lofty monarch, certainly : he was not a 
 patron of the fine arts : but he was not a hypocrite, 
 he was not revengeful, he was not extravagant. 
 Though a despot in Hanover, he was a moderate 
 ruler in England. His aim was to leave it to 
 itself as much as possible, and to live out of it 
 as much as he could. His heart was in Hanover* 
 When taken ill on his last journey, as he was 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 53 
 
 passing through Holland, he thrust his livid head 
 out of the coach- window, and gasped out, '' Osna- 
 burg, Osnaburg ! " He was more than fifty years 
 of age when he came amongst us : we took him 
 because we wanted him, because he served our 
 turn ; we laughed at his uncouth German ways, 
 and sneered at him. He took our loyalty for 
 what it was worth ; laid hands on what money he 
 could ; kept us assuredly from Popery and wooden 
 shoes. I, for one, would have been on his side 
 in those days. Cynical, and selfish, as he was, 
 he was better than a king out of St. Germains 
 with the French king's orders in his pocket, and 
 a swarm of Jesuits in his train. 
 
 The Fates are supposed to interest themselves 
 about royal personages; and so this one had 
 omens and prophecies specially regarding him. 
 He was said to be much disturbed at a prophecy 
 that he should die very soon after his wife ; and 
 sure enough, paUid Death, having seized upon 
 the luckless princess in her castle of Ahlden, 
 presently pounced upon H. M. King George I., 
 in his travelhng chariot, on the Hanover road. 
 What postilion can outride that pale horseman ? 
 It is said, George promised one of his left-handed 
 
54 THE FOUK GEORGES, 
 
 widows to come to her after death, if leave were 
 granted to him to revisit the gHmpses of the 
 moon; and soon after his demise, a great raven 
 actually flying or hopping in at the Duchess of 
 Kendal's window at Twickenham, she chose to 
 imagine the king's spirit inhabited these plumes, 
 and took special care of her sable visitor. Affect- 
 ing metempsychosis — funereal royal bird ! How 
 pathetic is the idea of the duchess weeping over 
 it ! "When this chaste addition to our English 
 aristocracy died, all her jewels, her plate, her 
 plunder went over to her relations in Hanover. 
 I wonder whether her heirs took the bird, and 
 whether it is still flapping its wings over Herren- 
 hausen ? 
 
 The days are over in England of that strange 
 religion of king-worship, when priests flattered 
 princes in the Temple of God; when servility 
 was held to be ennobling duty; when beauty 
 and youth tried eagerly for royal favour; and 
 woman's shame was held to be no dishonour. 
 Mended morals and mended manners in courts 
 and people, are among the priceless consequences 
 of the freedom which George I. came to rescue 
 and secure. He kept his compact with his 
 
GEORGE THE FIRST. 55 
 
 English subjects; and if he escaped no more 
 than other men and monarchs from the vices of 
 his age, at least we may thank him for preserving 
 and transmitting the liberties of om-s. In our 
 free air, royal and humble homes have alike been 
 purified ; and Truth, the birthright of high and 
 low among us, which quite fearlessly judges our 
 greatest personages, can only speak of them now 
 in words of respect and regard. There are stains 
 in the portrait of the first George, and traits in 
 it which none of us need admire ; but, among the 
 nobler features are justice, courage, moderation — 
 and these we may recognize ere we turn the 
 picture to the wall. 
 
IL-GEOEGE THE SECOND. 
 
Ave Csesar. 
 
69 
 
 GEORGE THE SECOND. 
 
 N the af- 
 ternoon of 
 the 14th 
 of June, 
 1727, two 
 horsemen 
 might 
 _ have heen 
 perceived 
 galloping 
 along the 
 road from 
 
 Chelsea to Eichmond. The foremost, cased in 
 the jackboots of the period, was a broad-faced, 
 jolly-looking, and very corpulent cavalier ; but, by 
 the manner in which he urged his horse, you 
 might see that he' was a bold as well as a skilful 
 
60 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 rider. Indeed, no man loved sport better ; and 
 in the hunting-fields of Norfolk, no squire rode 
 more boldly after the fox, or cheered Kingwood 
 and Sweettips more lustily, than he who now 
 thundered over the Eichmond road. 
 
 He speedily reached Richmond Lodge, and 
 asked to see the owner of the mansion. The 
 mistress of the house and her ladies, to whom our 
 friend was admitted, said he could not be intro- 
 duced to the master, however pressing the business 
 might be. The master was asleep after his dinner; 
 he always slept after his dinner : and woe be to 
 the person who interrupted him ! Nevertheless, 
 our stout friend of the jackboots put the affrighted 
 ladies aside, opened the forbidden door of the 
 bedroom, wherein upon the bed lay a little gentle- 
 man ; and here the eager messenger knelt down 
 in his jack-boots. 
 
 He on the bed started up, and with many 
 oaths and a strong German accent asked who was 
 there, and who dared to disturb him ? 
 
 ^' I am Sir Eobert Walpole," said the mes- 
 senger. The awakened sleeper hated Sir Eobert 
 Walpole. '* I have the honour to announce to 
 your Majesty that your royal father, King 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 61 
 
 George I., died at Osnaburg, on Saturday last, 
 the lOth inst." 
 
 '^ Dat is one big lie ! " roared out his sacred 
 Majesty King George II. : but Sir Kobert Wal- 
 pole stated the fact, and from that day until three 
 and thirty years after, George, the second of the 
 name, ruled over England. 
 
 How the king made away with his father's will 
 under the astonished nose of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury ; how he was a choleric Uttle sove- 
 reign ; how he shook his fist in the face of his 
 father's courtiers; how he kicked his coat and 
 wig about in his rages, and called everybody thief, 
 liar, rascal, with whom he differed : you will read 
 in all the history books ; and how he speedily and 
 shrewdly reconciled himself with the bold minister, 
 whom he had hated during his father's life, and 
 by whom he was served during fifteen years of his 
 own with admirable prudence, fidelity, and suc- 
 cess. But for Sir Robert Walpole, we should 
 have had the Pretender back again. But for his 
 obstinate love of peace, we should have had wars, 
 which the nation was not strong enough nor 
 united enough to endure. But for his resolute 
 counsels and good-humoured resistance we might 
 
62 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 have had German despots attempting a Hanoverian 
 regimen over us : we should have had revolt, 
 commotion, want, and tyrannous misrule, in place 
 of a quarter of a century of peace, freedom, and 
 material prosperity, such as the country never 
 enjoyed, until that corrupter of parliaments, that 
 dissolute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of 
 peace and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and 
 statesman governed it. In religion he was little 
 better than a heathen ; cracked ribald jokes at 
 bigwigs and bishops, and laughed at High Church 
 and Low. In private life the old pagan revelled 
 in the lowest pleasures : he passed his Sundays 
 tippling at Eichmond ; and his holydays bawling 
 after dogs, or boozing at Houghton with boors 
 over beef and punch. He cared for letters no 
 more than his master did : he judged human 
 nature so meanly that one is ashamed to have to 
 own that he was right, and that men could be 
 corrupted by means so base. But, with his hire- 
 ling House of Commons, he defended liberty 
 for us ; with his incredulity he kept Church- 
 craft down. There were parsons at Oxford 
 as doubledealing and dangerous as any priests 
 out of Kome, and he routed them both. He 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 63 
 
 gave Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them 
 peace, and ease, and freedom; the three per 
 cents, nearly at par ; and wheat at five and six 
 and twenty shillings a quarter. 
 
 It was lucky for us that our first Georges were 
 not more high-minded men ; especially fortunate 
 that they loved Hanover so much as to leave 
 England to have her own way. Our chief troubles 
 began when we got a king who gloried in the 
 name of Briton, and, being born in the country, 
 proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to govern 
 England than his grandfather and great-grand- 
 father, who did not try. It was righting itself 
 during their occupation. The dangerous, noble 
 old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying out ; the 
 stately old English High Church was emptying 
 itself: the questions dropping, which, on one side 
 and the other ; — the side of loyalty, prerogative, 
 church, and king ; — the side of right, truth, civil 
 and religious freedom, — had set generations of 
 brave men in arms. By the time when George III. 
 came to the throne, the combat between loyalty 
 and liberty was come to an end; and Charles 
 Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was dying in 
 Italy. 
 
64 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 Those who are curious about European Court 
 history of the last age know the memoirs of the 
 Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a Court was 
 that of Berhn, where George II/s cousins ruled 
 sovereign. Frederick the Great's father knocked 
 down his sons, daughters, officers of state ; he 
 kidnapped big men all Europe over to make grena- 
 diers of; his feasts, his parades, his wine parties, 
 his tobacco parties, are all described. Jonathan 
 Wild the Great in language, pleasures, and beha- 
 viour, is scarcely more delicate than this German 
 sovereign. Louis XV., his life, and reign, and 
 doings, are told in a thousand French memoirs. 
 Our George II., at least, was not a worse king 
 than his neighbours. He claimed and took the 
 royal exemption from doing right which sovereigns 
 assumed. A dull little man of low tastes he 
 appears to us in England; yet Hervey tells us 
 that this choleric prince was a great sentimen- 
 talist, and that his letters — of which he wrote 
 prodigious quantities — were quite dangerous in 
 their powers of fascination. He kept his senti- 
 mentalities for his Germans and his queen. With 
 us English, he never chose to be familiar. He 
 has been accused of avarice, yet he did not give 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 65 
 
 much money, and did not leave much behind him. 
 He did not love the fine arts, but he did not pre- 
 tend to love them. He was no more a hypocrite 
 about religion than his father. He judged men 
 by a low standard ; yet, with such men as were 
 near him, was he wrong in judging as he did ? 
 He readily detected lying and flattery, and liars 
 and flatterers were perforce his companions. Had 
 he been more of a dupe he might have been more 
 amiable. A dismal experience made him cynical. 
 No boon was it to him to be clearsighted, and see 
 only selfishness and flattery round about him. 
 What could Walpole tell him about his Lords and 
 Commons, but that they were all venal ? Did 
 not his clergy, his courtiers, bring him the same 
 story ? Dealing with men and women in his rude, 
 sceptical way, he comes to doubt about honour, 
 male and female, about patriotism, about religion. 
 *' He is wild, but he fights like a man,'' George I., 
 the taciturn, said of his son and successor. 
 Courage George II. certainly had. The Electoral 
 Prince, at the head of his father's contingent, had 
 approved himself a good and brave soldier under 
 Eugene and Marlborough. At Oudenarde he 
 specially distinguished himself. At Malplaquet 
 
 5 
 
66 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 the other claimant to the English throne won but 
 little honour. There was always a question about 
 James's courage. Neither then in Flanders, nor 
 afterwards in his own ancient kingdom of Scot- 
 land, did the luckless Pretender show much reso- 
 lution. But dapper little George had a famous 
 tough spirit of his own, and fought like a Trojan. 
 He called out his brother of Prussia, with sword 
 and pistol; and I wish, for the interest of 
 romancers in general, that that famous duel could 
 have taken place. The two sovereigns hated each 
 other with all their might; their seconds were 
 appointed; the place of meeting was settled; 
 and the duel was only prevented by strong repre- 
 sentations made to the two, of the European 
 laughter which would have been caused by such a 
 transaction. 
 
 Whenever we hear of dapper George at war, it 
 is certain that he demeaned himself like a little 
 man of valour. At Dettingen his horse ran away 
 with him, and with difficulty was stopped from 
 carrying him into the enemy's lines. The king, 
 dismounting from the fiery quadruped, said 
 bravely: *' Now I know I shall not run away;" 
 and placed himself at the head of the foot, drew 
 
GEOEGE THE SECOND. 67 
 
 his sword, brandishing it at the whole of the 
 French army, and caUing out to his own men to 
 come on, in bad Enghsh, but with the most 
 famous pluck and spirit. In '45, when the Pre- 
 tender was at Derby, and many people began to 
 look pale, the king never lost his courage — not 
 he. '* Pooh ! don't talk to me that stuff!'' he 
 said, like a gallant httle prince as he was, and 
 never for one moment allowed his equanimity, or 
 his business, or his pleasures, or his travels, to be 
 disturbed. On public festivals he always appeared 
 in the hat and coat he wore on the famous day of 
 Oudenarde ; and the people laughed, but kindly, 
 at the odd old garment, for bravery never goes 
 out of fashion. 
 
 In private life the prince showed himself a 
 v/orthy descendant of his father. In this respect,, 
 so much has been said about the first George's 
 manners, that we need not enter into a description 
 of the son's German harem. In 1705 he married 
 a princess remarkable for beauty, for cleverness, 
 for learning, for good temper — one of the truest 
 and fondest wives ever prince was blessed with, 
 and who loved him and was faithful to him, and 
 he, in his coarse fashion, loved her to the last* 
 
 5—2 
 
68 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 It must be told to the honour of CaroHne of 
 Anspach, that, at the time when German prmces 
 thought no more of changing their rehgion than 
 you of altering your cap, she refused to give up 
 Protestantism for the other creed, although an 
 Archduke, afterwards to be an Emperor, was 
 offered to her for a bridegroom. Her Protestant 
 relations in Berlin were angry at her rebellious 
 spirit ; it was they who tried to convert her (it is 
 droll to think that Frederick the Great, who had 
 no religion at all, was known for a long time in 
 England as the Protestant hero), and these good 
 Protestants set upon Caroline a certain Father 
 Urban, a very skilful Jesuit, and famous winner 
 of souls. But she routed the Jesuit; and she 
 refused Charles VI. ; and she married the little 
 Electoral Prince of Hanover, whom she tended 
 with love, and with every manner of sacrifice, 
 with artful kindness, with tender flattery, with 
 entire self-devotion, thenceforward until her life's 
 end. 
 
 When George I. made his first visit to Hanover, 
 his son was appointed regent during the royal 
 absence. But this honour was never again con- 
 ferred on the Prince of Wales ; he and his father 
 
GEOEGE THE SECOND. 69 
 
 fell out presently. On the occasion of the 
 christemng of his second son, a royal row took 
 place, and the prince, shaking his list in the Puke 
 of Newcastle's face, called him a rogue, and pro- 
 voked his august father. He and his wife were 
 turned out of St. James's, and their princely 
 children taken from them, by order of the royal 
 head of the family. Father and mother wept 
 piteously at parting from their little ones. The 
 young ones sent some cherries, with their love, to 
 papa and mamma ; the parents watered the fruit 
 with tears. They had no tears thirty-five years 
 afterwards, when Prince Frederick died — their 
 eldest son, their heir, their enemy. 
 
 The king called his daughter-in-law '^ cette 
 diahlesse madame la princesse." The frequenters 
 of the latter's court were forbidden to appear at 
 the king's : their royal highnesses going to Bath, 
 v/e read how the courtiers followed them thither, 
 and paid that homage in Somersetshire Vs^hich 
 vfas forbidden in London. That phrase of '* cette 
 diahlesse madame la p)yincesse " explains one cause 
 of the wrath of her royal papa. She was a very 
 clever woman : she had a keen sense of humour : 
 she had a dreadful tongue : she turned into 
 
70 THE FOUR GEOEGES. 
 
 ridicule the antiquated sultan and liis hideous 
 harem. She wrote savage letters about him 
 home to members of her family. So, driven out 
 from the royal presence, the prince and princess 
 set up for themselves in Leicester Fields, ^Svhere,'' 
 says Walpole, 'Hhe most promising of the young 
 gentlemen of the next party, and the prettiest 
 and liveliest of the young ladies, formed the new 
 court.'' Besides Leicester House, they had their 
 lodge at Kichmond, frequented by some of the 
 pleasantest company of those days. There \Yere 
 the Herveys, and Chesterfield, and little Mr. Pope 
 from Twickenham, and with him, sometimes, the 
 savage Dean of St. Patrick's, and quite a bevy 
 of young ladies, whose pretty faces smile on us 
 out of history. There was Lepell, famous in 
 ballad song ; and the saucy, charming Mary 
 Bellenden, who would have none of the Prince 
 of Wales's fine compliments, who folded her 
 arms across her breast, and bade H.R.H. keep 
 off; and knocked his purse of guineas into his 
 face, and told him she was tired of seeing him 
 count them. He was not an august monarch, 
 this Augustus. Walpole tells how, one night at 
 the royal card-table, the playful princesses pulled 
 
GEOEGE THE SECOND. 
 
 71 
 
 a chair away from under Lady Deloraine, who, 
 in revenge, pulled the king's from under him, 
 so that his Majesty fell on the carpet. In what- 
 ever posture one sees this royal George, he is 
 ludicrous somehow ; even at Dettingen, where he 
 fought so bravely, his figure is absurd — calling 
 out in his broken English, and lunging with his 
 rapier, like a fencing-master. In contemporary 
 caricatures, George's son, ^' the Hero of Cul- 
 loden,'' is also made an object of considerable 
 fun, as witness the following picture of liim 
 defeated by the French (1757) at Hastenbeck : 
 
 I refrain to quote from Walpole regarding 
 George — for those charming volumes are in the 
 
72 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 hands of all who love the gossip of the last 
 century. Nothing can be more cheery than 
 Horace's letters. Fiddles sing all through them : 
 wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, 
 fine equipages, glitter and sparkle there : never 
 was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity 
 Fair as that through which he leads us. Hervey, 
 the next great authority, is a darker spirit. 
 About him there is something frightful : a few 
 years since his heirs opened the lid of the Ick- 
 worth box; it was as if a Pompeii was opened 
 to us — the last century dug up, with its temples 
 and its games, its chariots, its public places — 
 lupanaria. Wandering through that city of the 
 dead, that dreadfully selfish time, through those 
 godless intrigues and feasts, through those crowds, 
 pushing, and eager, and struggling — rouged, and 
 lying, and fawning — I have wanted some one to 
 be friends with. I have said to friends conver- 
 sant with that history, ** Show me some good 
 person about that Court; find me, among those 
 selfish courtiers, those dissolute, gay people, 
 some one being that I can love and regard. 
 There is that strutting little sultan, George II. ; 
 there is that hunchbacked, beetle-browed Lord 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 73 
 
 Chesterfield; there is John Hervey, with his 
 deadly smile, and ghastly, painted face — I hate 
 them. There is Hoadly, cringing from one 
 bishopric to another: yonder comes little Mr. 
 Pope, from Twickenham, with his friend, the 
 Irish dean, in his new cassock, bowing too, but 
 with rage flashing from under his bushy eye^ 
 brows, and scorn and hate quivering in his smile. 
 Can you be fond of these ? Of Pope I might : 
 at least I might love his genius, his wit, his 
 greatness, his sensibility — with a certain con- 
 viction that at some fancied slight, some sneer 
 which he imagined, he would turn upon me and 
 stab me. Can you trust the queen ? She is not 
 of our order : their very position makes kings 
 and queens lonely. One inscrutable attachment 
 that inscrutable woman has. To that she is 
 faithful, through all trial, neglect, pain, and time. 
 Save her husband, she really cares for no created 
 being. She is good enough to her children, and 
 even fond enough of them : but she would chop 
 them all up into little pieces to please him. In 
 her intercourse with all around her, she was per- 
 fectly kind, gracious, and natural : but friends 
 may die, daughters may depart, she wdll be as 
 
74- THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 perfectly kind and gracious to the next set. If 
 the king wants her, she will smile upon him, be 
 she ever so sad ; and walk with him, be she ever 
 so weary ; and laugh at his brutal jokes, be she 
 in ever so much pain of body or heart. Caroline's 
 devotion to her husband is a prodigy to read of. 
 What charm had the little man ? What was 
 there in those wonderful letters of thirty pages 
 long, which he wrote to her when he was absent, 
 and to his mistresses at Hanover, when he was in 
 London with his wife ? Why did Caroline, the 
 most lovely and accomplished princess of Ger- 
 many, take a little red-faced staring princeling 
 for a husband, and refuse an emperor ? Why, to 
 her last hour, did she love him so ? She killed 
 herself because she loved him so. She had the 
 gout, and would plunge her feet in cold water in 
 order to walk with him. With the film of death 
 over her eyes, writhing in intolerable pain, she 
 yet had a livid smile and a gentle word for her 
 master. You have read the wonderful history of 
 that death-bed ? How she bade him marry again, 
 and the reply the old king blubbered out, ^' Non, 
 non: faurai des mattresses J' There never was 
 such a ghastly farce. I watch the astonishing 
 
GEOKGE THE SECOND. 75 
 
 scene — I stand by that awful bedside, wondering 
 at the ways in which God has ordained the hves, 
 loves, rewards, successes, passions, actions, ends 
 of his creatures — and can't but laugh, in the 
 presence of death, and with the saddest heart. 
 In that often-quoted passage from Lord Hervey, 
 in which the queen's death-bed is described, the 
 grotesque horror of the details surpasses all 
 satire : the dreadful humour of the scene is more 
 terrible than Swift's blackest pages, or Fielding's 
 fiercest irony. The man who wrote the story 
 had something diabolical about him : the terrible 
 verses v/hich Pope wrote respecting Hervey, in 
 one of his own moods of almost fiendish malig- 
 nity, I fear are true. I am frightened as I look 
 back into the past, and fancy I behold that 
 ghastly, beautiful face ; as I think of the queen 
 writhing on her death-bed, and crying out, 
 '' Pray ! — pray ! " — of the royal old sinner by her 
 side, who kisses her dead hps with frantic grief, 
 and leaves her to sin more ; — of the bevy of 
 courtly clergymen, and the archbishop, whose 
 prayers she rejects, and who are obliged for pro- 
 priety's sake to shufile off the anxious inquiries 
 of the public, and vow that her Majesty quitted 
 
76 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 this life ''in a heavenly frame of mind/' "What 
 a life ! — to what ends devoted ! What a vanity 
 of vanities ! It is a theme for another pulpit 
 than the lecturer's. For a pulpit ? — I think the 
 part which pulpits play in the deaths of kings is 
 the most ghastly of all the ceremonial : the lying 
 eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the 
 sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the false- 
 hood and sycophancies — all uttered in the name 
 of Heaven in our State churches : these mon- 
 strous threnodies have been sung from time im- 
 memorial over kings and queens, good, bad, 
 wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring 
 out his commonplaces ; his apparatus of rhetorical 
 black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the 
 clergyman must flatter him — announce his piety 
 whilst living, and when dead, perform the obse- 
 quies of '' our most religious and gracious king." 
 I read that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious 
 and gracious king's favourite) sold a bishopric to 
 a clergyman for 5,000L (She betted him 5,000Z. 
 that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, 
 and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his 
 time led up by such hands for consecration ? As 
 I peep into George II. 's St. James's, I see crowds 
 
GEORGE THE SECOXD. 77 
 
 of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the 
 ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping 
 purses into their laps; that godless old king 
 yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, 
 as the chaplain before him is discoursing. Dis- 
 coursing about \Yhat ? — about righteousness and 
 judgment ? Whilst the chaplain is preaching, 
 tlie king is chattering in German almost as 
 loud as the preacher; so loud that the clergy- 
 man — it may be one Dr. Young, he who wrote 
 Night ThoiightSy and discoursed on the splendours 
 of the stars, the glories of heaven, and utter 
 vanities of this world — actually burst out crying 
 in his pulpit because the defender of the faith 
 and dispenser of bishoprics would not listen to 
 him ! No wonder that the clergy were corrupt and 
 indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption. 
 No wonder that sceptics multiplied and morals 
 degenerated, so far as they depended on the 
 influence of such a king. No wonder that Whit- 
 field cried out in the wilderness, that Wesley 
 quitted the insulted temple to pray on the hill- 
 side. I look with reverence on those men at 
 that time. Which is the sublimer spectacle — the 
 good John Wesley, surrounded by his congrega- 
 
78 TILE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 tion of miners at the pit's mouth, or the queen's 
 chaplains mumbhng through their morning office 
 in their ante-room, under the picture of the great 
 Venus, with the door opened into the adjoining- 
 chamber, where the queen is dressing, talking 
 scandal to Lord Hervey, or uttering sneers at 
 Lady Suffolk, who is kneeling with the basin at 
 her mistress's side ? I say I am scared as I look 
 round at this society — at this king, at these 
 courtiers, at these politicians, at these bishops — 
 at this flaunting vice and levity. Whereabouts 
 in this Court is the honest man ? Where is the 
 pure person one may like ? The air stifles one 
 with its sickly perfumes. There are some old- 
 world follies and some absurd ceremonials about 
 our Court of the present day, w^hich I laugh at, 
 but as an Englishman, contrasting it with the 
 past, shall I not acknowledge the change of to- 
 day ? As the mistress of St. James's passes me 
 now, I salute the sovereign, wise, moderate, 
 exemplary of life; the good mother; the good 
 wife ; the accomplished lady ; the enlightened 
 friend of art; the tender sympathizer in her 
 people's glories and sorrows. 
 
 Of all the Court of George and Caroline, I find 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 79 
 
 no one but Lady Suffolk with whom it seems 
 pleasant and kindly to hold converse. Even the 
 misogynist Croker, who edited her letters, loves 
 her, and has that regard for her with which her 
 sweet graciousness seems to have inspired almost 
 all men and some v/omen who came near her. 
 I have noted many little traits wliich go to prove 
 the charms of her character (it is not merely 
 because she is charming, but because she is cha- 
 racteristic, that I allude to her). She writes 
 delightfully sober letters. Addressing Mr. Gay 
 at Tunbridge (he was, you know, a poet, penni- 
 less and in disgrace), she says : '' The place you 
 are in, has strangely filled your head with phy- 
 sicians and cures ; but, take my word for it, many 
 a fine lady has gone there to drink the waters 
 without being sick; and many a man has com- 
 plained of the loss of his heart, who had it in his 
 own possession. I desire you will keep yours; 
 for I shall not be very fond of a friend w^ithout 
 one, and I have a great mind you should be in 
 the number of mine.'' 
 
 When Lord Peterborough vras seventy years 
 old, that indomitable youth addressed some 
 flaming love-, or rather gallantry-, letters to 
 
80 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 Mrs. Howard — curious relics they are of the 
 romantic manner of wooing sometimes in use in 
 those days. It is not passion ; it is not love ; 
 it is gallantry : a mixture of earnest and acting ; 
 high-flown compliments, profound bows, vows, 
 sighs and ogles, in the manner of the Clelie 
 romances, and Millamont and Doricourt in the 
 comedy. There was a vast elaboration of cere- 
 monies and etiquette, of raptures — a regulated 
 form for kneeling and wooing which has quite 
 passed out of our downright manners. Henrietta 
 Howard accepted the noble old earl's philander- 
 ing; answered the queer love-letters with due 
 acknowledgment; made a profound curtsey to 
 Peterborough's profound bow ; and got John Gay 
 to help her in the composition of her letters in 
 reply to her old knight. He wrote her charming 
 verses, in which there was truth as well as grace. 
 ^' wonderful creature ! '' he writes : — 
 
 ** wonderful creature, a woman of reason ! 
 Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season ! 
 When so easy to guess who this angel should be. 
 Who would think Mrs. Howard ne'er dreamt it was she ? " 
 
 The great Mr. Pope also celebrated her in lines 
 not less pleasant, and painted a portrait of 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 81 
 
 what must certainly have been a dehghtful 
 lady : — 
 
 *' I know a thing that's most uncommon — 
 Envy, be silent and attend ! — 
 I know a reasonable woman, 
 
 Handsome, yet witty, and a friend : 
 
 ** Not war]D'd by passion, aw'd by mmour, 
 
 Not grave through pride, or gay through folly : 
 An equal mixture of good-humour 
 And exquisite soft melancholy. 
 
 *' Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir ? 
 Yes, she has one, I must aver — 
 When all the world conspires to praise her, 
 The woman's deaf, and does not hear ! " 
 
 Even the women concurred in praising and 
 loving her. The Duchess of Queensberry bears 
 testimony to her amiable qualities, and writes to 
 her: ^^ I tell you so and so, because you love 
 children, and to have children love you." The 
 beautiful, jolly Mary Bellenden, represented by 
 contemporaries as '^ the most perfect creature ever 
 known," writes very pleasantly to her '' dear 
 Howard," her '^ dear Swiss," from the country, 
 whither Mary had retired after her marriage, and 
 when she gave up being a maid of honour. 
 ^^ How do you do, Mrs. Howard ?" Mary breaks 
 
 6 
 
82 THE FOUE, GEOHGES. 
 
 out. *' How do yon do, Mrs. Howard ? that is 
 all I have to say. This afternoon I am taken 
 with a fit of vmting; but as to matter, I have 
 nothing better to entertain you, than news of my 
 farm. I therefore give you the following list of 
 the stock of eatables that I am fatting for my 
 private tooth. It is well known to the whole 
 county of Kent, that I have four fat calves, two 
 fat hogs, fit for killing, twelve promising black 
 pigs, two young chickens, three fine geese, with 
 thirteen eggs under each (several «being duck- 
 eggs, else the others do not come to maturity) ; 
 all this, with rabbits, and pigeons, and carp in 
 plenty, beef and mutton at reasonable rates. 
 Now, Howard, if you have a mind to stick a 
 knife into anything I have named, say so !" 
 
 A jolly set must they have been, those maids 
 of honour. Pope introduces us to a whole bevy 
 of them, in a pleasant letter. '' I went,'' he says, 
 ^' by water to Hampton Court, and met the 
 Prince, with all his ladies, on horseback, coming 
 from hunting. Mrs. Bellenden and Mrs. Lepell 
 took me into protection, contrary to the laws 
 figainst harbouring papists, and gave me a dinner, 
 with something I liked better, an opportunity of 
 
GEOKGE THE SEC0:N^D. 83 
 
 conversation with Mrs. Howard. We all agreed 
 that the life of a maid of honour was of all 
 things the most miserable, and wished that all 
 women who envied it had a specimen of it. To 
 eat Westphalia ham of a morning, ride over 
 hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home 
 in the heat of the day with a fever, and (what 
 is worse a hundred times) with a red mark on 
 the forehead from an uneasy hat — all this may 
 qualify them to make excellent wives for hunters. 
 As soon as they wipe off the heat of the day, 
 they must simper an hour and catch cold in the 
 princess's apartment ; from thence to dinner with 
 what appetite they may ; and after that till mid- 
 night, work, walk, or think which w^ay they 
 please. No lone house in Wales, with a moun» 
 tain and rookery, is more contemplative than 
 this Court. Miss Lepell walked with me three 
 or four hours by moonlight, and we met no 
 creature of any quahty but the king, who gave 
 audience to the vice-chamberlain all alone under 
 the garden wall.'' 
 
 I fancy it w^as a merrier England, that of our 
 ancestors, than the island which we inhabit. 
 People high and low amused themselves very 
 
 6—2 
 
84 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 much more. I have calculated the manner in 
 which statesmen and persons of condition passed 
 their time — and what with drinldng, and dining, 
 and supping, and cards, wonder how they got 
 through their business at all. They played all 
 sorts of games, which, with the exception of 
 cricket and tennis, have quite gone out of our 
 manners now. In the old prints of St. James's 
 Park, you still see the marks along the walk, to 
 note the balls when the Court played at Mall. 
 Fancy Birdcage Walk now so laid out, and Lord 
 John and Lord Palmerston knocking balls up and 
 down the avenue ! Most of those jolly sports 
 belong to the past, and the good old games of 
 England are only to be found in old novels, in 
 old ballads, or the columns of dingy old news- 
 papers, which say how a main of cocks is to be 
 fought at Winchester between the Winchester 
 men and the Hampton men; or how the 
 Cornwall men and the Devon men are going 
 to hold a great wrestling match at Totnes, and 
 so on. 
 
 A hundred and twenty years ago there were 
 not only country towns in England, but people 
 wiio inhabited them. We were very much more 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND, 85 
 
 gregarious ; we were amused by very simple 
 pleasures. Every town had its fair, every village 
 its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred 
 jolly ditties about great cudgel-playings, famous 
 grinning through horse-collars, great maypole 
 meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used 
 to run races clad in very light attire ; and the 
 kind gentry and good parsons thought no shame 
 in looking on. Dancing bears went about the 
 country with pipe and tabor. Certain well- 
 known tunes were sung all over the land for 
 hundreds of years, and high and low rejoiced 
 in that simple music. Gentlemen who wished 
 to entertain their female friends constantly sent 
 for a band. When Beau Fielding, a mighty 
 fine gentleman, was courting the lady whom he 
 married, he treated her and her companion at 
 his lodgings to a supper from the tavern, and 
 after supper they sent out for a fiddler — three 
 of them. Fancy the three, in a great wainscoted 
 room, in Covent Garden or Soho, lighted by 
 two or three candles in silver sconces, some 
 grapes and a bottle of Florence wine on the 
 table, and the honest fiddler playing old tunes 
 in quaint old minor keys, as the Beau takes 
 
86 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 out one lady after the other, and solemnly dances 
 with her ! 
 
 The very great folks, young noblemen, with 
 their governors, and the like, went abroad and 
 made the great tour ; the home satirists jeered 
 at the Frenchified and Italian ways which they 
 brought back ; but the greater number of people 
 never left the country. The jolly squire often 
 had never been twenty miles from home. Those 
 who did go went to the baths, to Harrogate, or 
 Scarborough, or Bath, or Epsom. Old letters 
 are full of these places of pleasure. Gay writes 
 to us about the fiddlers at Tunbridge ; of the 
 ladies having merry little private balls amongst 
 themselves ; and the gentlemen entertaining them 
 by turns with tea and music. One of the young 
 beauties whom he met did not care for tea: 
 ** We have a young lady here,'' he says, '^that 
 is very particular in her desires. I have known 
 some young ladies, who, if ever they prayed, 
 would ask for some equipage or title, a husband 
 or matadores: but this lady, who is but seven- 
 teen, and has 30,000Z. to her fortune, places all 
 her wishes on a pot of good ale. When her 
 friends, for the sake of her shape and com- 
 
GEORGE THE SEGOXD. 87 
 
 plexion, would dissuade her from it, she answers, 
 with the truest sincerity, that by the loss of 
 shape and complexion she could only lose a hus- 
 band, whereas ale is her passion." 
 
 Every country town had its assembly-room — 
 mouldy old tenements, which we may still see in 
 deserted inn-yards, in decayed pro^dncial cities, 
 out of which the great wen of London has sucked 
 all the life. York, at assize times, and through- 
 out the winter, harboured a large society of 
 northern gentry. Shrewsbury was celebrated for 
 its festivities. At Newmarket, I read of *' a vast 
 deal of good company, besides rogues and black- 
 legs;" at Norwich, of two assemblies, with a 
 prodigious crowd in the hall, the rooms, and the 
 gallery. In Cheshire (it is a maid of honour of 
 Queen Caroline who writes, and who is longing 
 to be back at Hampton Court, and the fun there) I 
 peep into a country house, and see a very merry 
 party : '' We meet in the work-room before nine, 
 eat and break a joke or two till twelve, then we 
 repair to our own chambers and make ourselves 
 ready, for it cannot be called dressing. At noon 
 the great bell fetches us into a parlour, adorned 
 with all sorts of fine arms, poisoned darts, several 
 
88 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 pair of old boots and shoes worn by men of 
 might, with the stirrups of King Charles I., taken 
 from him at Edgehill/' — and there they have 
 their dinner, after which comes dancing and 
 supper. 
 
 As for Bath, all history went and bathed and 
 drank there. George II. and his queen, Prince 
 Frederick and his Court, scarce a character one 
 can mention of the early last century, but was 
 seen in that famous Pump-room where Beau 
 Nash presided, and his picture hung between the 
 busts of Newton and Pope : 
 
 ** This picture, placed these busts between, 
 Gives satii-e all its strength : 
 "Wisdom and Wit are little seen, 
 But Folly at full length." 
 
 I should like to have seen the Folly. It was a 
 splendid, embroidered, berufiled, snuff-boxed, red- 
 heeled, impertinent Folly, and knew how to make 
 itself respected. I should like to have seen that 
 noble old madcap Peterborough in his boots (he 
 actually had the audacity to walk about Bath in 
 boots !), with his blue ribbon and stars, and a 
 cabbage under each arm, and a chicken in his 
 hand, which he had been cheapening for his 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 89 
 
 dinner. Chesterfield came there many a time 
 and gambled for hundreds, and grinned through 
 his gout. Mary Wortley was there, young and 
 beautiful; and Mary Wortley, old, hideous, and 
 snuffy. Miss Chudleigh came there, slipping 
 away from one husband, and on the look-out 
 for another. Walpole passed many a day 
 there ; sickly, supercilious, absurdly dandified, 
 and affected; with a brilliant wit, a delightful 
 sensibility; and for his friends, a most tender, 
 generous, and faithful heart. And if you and 
 I had been alive then, and strolling down Milsoni 
 Street — hush ! we should have taken our hats off, 
 as an awful, long, lean, gaunt figure, swathed in 
 flannels, passed by in its chair, and a livid face 
 looked out from the window — great fierce eyes 
 staring from under a bushy, powdered wig, a 
 terrible frown, a terrible Eoman nose — and we 
 whisper to one another, " There he is! There's 
 the great commoner! There is Mr. Pitt!" As 
 we walk away, the abbey bells are set a-ringing ; 
 and we meet our testy friend Toby Smollett, on 
 the arm of James Quin the actor, who tells us 
 that the bells ring for Mr. Bullock, an eminent 
 cowkeeper from Tottenham, who has just arrived 
 
90 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 to drink the waters; and Toby shakes his cane 
 at the door of Colonel Kingworm — the Creole 
 gentleman's lodgings next his own — where the 
 coloneFs two negroes are practising on the French 
 horn. 
 
 When y/e try to recall social England, we must 
 fancy it playing at cards for many hours every 
 day. The custom is well nigh gone out among 
 us now, but fifty years ago was general, fifty 
 years before that almost universal, in the country. 
 '* Gaming has become so much the fashion,'' 
 writes Seymour, the author of the Gonrl Gamester, 
 '^that he who in company should be ignorant of 
 the games in vogue, v/ould be reckoned low-bred, 
 and hardly fit for conversation.'' There were 
 cards everywhere. It was considered ill-bred to 
 read in company. '^ Books were not fit articles 
 for drawing-rooms," old ladies used to say. 
 People were jealous, as it were, and angry with 
 them. You will find in Hervey that George II. 
 Vv^as alw^ays furious at the sight of books; and 
 his queen, who loved reading, had to practise it in 
 secret in her closet. But cards were the resource 
 of all the world. Every night, for hours, kings 
 and queens of England sat down and handled 
 
GEOKGE THE SECOiND. 91 
 
 their majesties of spades and diamonds. In 
 European Courts, I believe the practice still 
 remains, not for gambling, but for pastime. Our 
 ancestors generally adopted it. '' Books ! prithee, 
 don't talk to me about books,'' said old Sarah 
 Marlborough. '* The only books I Imow are men 
 and cards." ^^Dear old Sir Eoger de Coverley 
 sent all his tenants a string of hogs' puddings 
 and a pack of cards at Christmas," says the 
 Spectator, wishing to depict a kind landlord. One 
 of the good old lady writers in whose letters I 
 have been dipping cries out, '* Sure, cards have 
 kept us women from a great deal of scandal ! " 
 Wise old Johnson regretted that he had not 
 learnt to play. ^^It is very useful in life," he 
 says; '^it generates kindness, and consolidates 
 society." David Hume never went to bed with- 
 out his whist. We have Walpole, in one of his 
 letters, in a transport of gratitude for the cards. 
 '^ I shall build an order to Pam," says he, in his 
 pleasant dandified way, ''for the escape of my 
 charming Duchess of Grafton." The duchess 
 had been playing cards at Eome, when she ought 
 to have been at a cardinal's concert, where the 
 floor fell in, and all the monsignors were pre- 
 
92 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 cipitated into the cellar. Even the Nonconformist 
 clergy looked not unkindly on the practice. ''I 
 do not think/' says one of them, ^* that honest 
 Martin Luther committed sin by playing at back- 
 gammon for an hour or two after dinner, in order 
 by unbending his mind to promote digestion.'' 
 As for the High Church parsons, they all played, 
 bishops and all. On Twelfth-day the Court used 
 to play in state, '' This being Twelfth-day, his 
 Majesty, the Prince of Wales, and the Knights 
 Companions of the Garter, Thistle, and Bath, 
 appeared in the collars of their respective orders. 
 Their Majesties, the Prince of Wales, and three 
 eldest Princesses, went to the Chapel Eoyal, pre- 
 ceded by the heralds. The Duke of Manchester 
 carried the sword of State. The king and prince 
 made offering at the altar of gold, frankincense, 
 and myrrh, according to the annual custom. At 
 night their Majesties played at hazard with the 
 nobility, for the benefit of the groom-porter ; and 
 'twas said the king won 600 guineas ; the queen, 
 360 ; Princess Amelia, twenty ; Princess Caroline, 
 ten ; the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Port- 
 more, several thousands." 
 
 Let us glance at the same chronicle, which is 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 93 
 
 of the year 1731, and see how others of our fore- 
 fathers were engaged. 
 
 '^ Cork, 15th January. — This day, one Tim 
 Croneen was, for the murder and robbery of 
 Mr. St. Leger and his wife, sentenced to be 
 hanged two minutes, then his head to be cut off, 
 and his body divided in four quarters, to be placed 
 in four cross-ways. He was servant to Mr. St. 
 Leger, and committed the murder with the privity 
 of the servant-maid, who w^as sentenced to be 
 burned ; also of the gardener, whom he knocked 
 on the head, to deprive him of his share of the 
 booty." 
 
 '' January 3. — A postboy was shot by an Irish 
 gentleman on the road near Stone, in Stafford- 
 shire, who died in two days, for which the gentle- 
 man was imprisoned." 
 
 '' A poor man was found hanging in a gentle- 
 man's stables at Bungay, in Norfolk, by a person 
 wiio cut him down, and running for assistance, 
 left his penknife behind him. The poor man 
 recovering, cut his throat with the knife ; and a 
 river being nigh, jumped into it; but company 
 coming, he was dragged out alive, and was like to 
 
 remain so." 
 
94 THE FOUR GEOHGES. 
 
 ^' The Honourable Thomas Finch, brother to 
 the Earl of Nottmgham, is appointed ambassador 
 at the Hague, in the room of the Earl of Chester- 
 field, who is on his return home.'' 
 
 '' William Cowper, Esq., and the Eev. Mr. John 
 Cowper, chaplain in ordinary to her Majesty, and 
 rector of Great Berkhampstead, in the county of 
 Hertford, are appointed clerks of the commis- 
 sioners of bankruptcy." 
 
 ^' Charles Creagh, Esq., and — Macnamara, 
 Esq., between whom an old grudge of three years 
 had subsisted, which had occasioned their being 
 bound over about fifty times for breaking the 
 peace, meeting in company with Mr. Eyres, of 
 Galloway, they discharged their pistols, and all 
 three were killed on the spot — to the great 
 joy of their peaceful neighbours, say the Irish 
 papers." 
 
 '' Wheat is 265. to 28s., and barley 205. to 225. 
 a quarter ; three per cents., 92 ; best loaf sugar, 
 9\d. ; Bohea, 125. to 145. ; Pekoe, I85., and 
 Hyson, 355. per pound." 
 
 '' At Exon was celebrated with great magnifi- 
 cence the birthday of the son of Sir W. Courtney, 
 Bart., at v/hich more than 1,000 persons were 
 
GEORGE THE SECO^^D. 95 
 
 present. A bullock was roasted whole ; a butt of 
 wine and several tuns of beer and cyder were 
 given to the populace. At the same time Sir 
 . William delivered to his son, then of age, 
 Powdram Castle, and a great estate." 
 
 '^ Charlesworth and Cox, two solicitors, con- 
 victed of forgery, stood on the pillory at the Eoyal 
 Exchange. The first v/as severely handled by 
 the populace, but the other was very much 
 favoured, and protected by six or seven fellows 
 who got on the pillory to protect him from the 
 insults of the mob." 
 
 ^' A boy killed by falhng upon iron spikes, from 
 a lamp-post, which he cUmbed to see Mother 
 Needham stand in the pillory." 
 
 '^ Mary Lynn was burned to ashes at the stake 
 for being concerned in the murder of her mis- 
 tress." 
 
 " Alexander Eussell, the foot soldier, who was 
 capitally convicted for a street robbery in January 
 sessions, was reprieved for transportation; but 
 having an estate fallen to him, obtained a free 
 pardon." 
 
 ^' The Lord John Eussell married to the Lady 
 Diana Spencer, at Marlborough House. He has 
 
96 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 a fortune of 30,000L down, and is to have 
 lOOjOOOL at the death of the Duchess Do\Yager 
 of Marlborough, his grandmother/' 
 
 " March 1 being the anniversary of the queen's 
 birthday, when her Majesty entered the forty- 
 ninth year of her age, there was a splendid 
 appearance of nobility at St. James's. Her 
 Majesty was magnificently dressed, and wore a 
 flowered muslin head-edging, as did also her 
 Eoyal Highness. The Lord Portmore was said 
 to have had the richest dress, though an 
 Italian Count had twenty-four diamonds instead 
 of buttons." 
 
 New clothes on the birthday were the fashion 
 for all loyal people. Swift mentions the custom 
 several times. Walpole is constantly speaking of 
 it ; laughing at the practice, but having the very 
 finest clothes from Paris, nevertheless. If the 
 king and queen v/ere unpopular, there were very 
 few new clothes at the drawing-room. In a paper 
 in the True Patriot, No. 3, written to attack the 
 Pretender, the Scotch, French, and Popery, Field- 
 ing supposes the Scotch and the Pretender in 
 possession of London, and himself about to be 
 hanged for loyalty, — when, just as the rope is 
 
GEOKGE THE SECOND. 97 
 
 round his neck, he says: ^^ M}^ little girl entered 
 my bed-chamber, and put an end to my dream by 
 pulling open my eyes, and telling me that the 
 tailor had just brought home my clothes for his 
 Majesty's birthday." In his Temple Beau, the 
 beau is dunned '^ for a birthday suit of velvet, 
 40/." Be sure that Mr. Harry Fielding was 
 dunned too. 
 
 The public days, no doubt, were splendid, but 
 the private Court life must have been awfully 
 wearisome. *' I will not trouble you," writes 
 Hervey to Lady Sundon, ^' with any account of 
 our occupations at Hampton Court. No mill- 
 horse ever went in a more constant track, or a 
 more unchanging circle ; so that by the assistance 
 of an almanack for the day of the week, and a 
 watch for the hour of the day, you may inform 
 yourself fully, without any other intelligence but 
 your memory, of every transaction within the 
 verge of the Court. Walking, chaises, levees, 
 and audiences fill the morning. At night the 
 king plays at commerce and backgammon, and the 
 queen at quadrille, where poor Lady Charlotte 
 runs her usual nightly gauntlet, the queen pulhng 
 her hood, and the Princess Koyal rapping her 
 
 7 
 
98 THE FOUK GEOKGES. 
 
 knuckles. The Duke of Grafton takes his nightly 
 opiate of lottery, and sleeps as usual between the 
 Princesses Amelia and Caroline. Lord Grantham 
 strolls from one room to another (as Dry den says), 
 like some discontented ghost that oft appears, and 
 is forbid to speak ; and stirs himself about as 
 people stir a fire, not with any design, but in 
 hopes to make it burn brisker. At last the 
 king gets up; the pool finishes; and every- 
 body has their dismission. Their Majesties 
 retire to Lady Charlotte and my Lord Lifford ; 
 my Lord Grantham, to Lady Frances and 
 Mr. Clark : some to supper, some to bed ; and 
 thus the evening and the morning make the 
 day." 
 
 The king's fondness" for Hanover occasioned all 
 sorts of rough jokes among his English subjects, 
 to whom sauer-hraut and sausages have ever been 
 ridiculous objects. When our present Prince 
 Consort came among us, the people bawled out 
 songs in the streets indicative of the absurdity of 
 Germany in general. The sausage-shops pro- 
 duced enormous sausages which we might sup- 
 pose were the daily food and delight of German 
 princes. I remember the caricatures at the 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 99 
 
 marriage of Prince LeojDold with the Princess 
 Charlotte. The bridegroom was drawn in rags. 
 George III/s wife was called by the people a 
 beggarly German duchess ; the British idea being 
 that all princes were beggarly except British 
 princes. King George paid us back. He thought 
 there were no manners out of Germany. Sarah 
 Marlborough once coming to visit the princess, 
 whilst her Eoyal Highness was whipping one of 
 the roaring royal children, '' Ah!" saj^s George, 
 who was standing by, '' you have no good man- 
 ners in England, because you are not properly 
 brought up when you are young." He insisted 
 that no English cooks could roast, no English 
 coachman could drive : he actually questioned the 
 superiority of our nobility, our horses, and our 
 roast beef ! 
 
 Whilst he was away from his beloved Hanover, 
 every thing remained there exactly as in the 
 prince's presence. There were 800 horses in the 
 stables, there was all the apparatus of chamber- 
 lains, court-marshals, and equerries; and court 
 assemblies were held every Saturday, where all 
 the nobility of Hanover assembled at what I 
 can't but think a fine and touching ceremony. 
 
 7—2 
 
100 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 A large arm-chair was placed in the assembly- 
 room, and on it the king's portrait. The nobility 
 advanced, and made a bow to the arm-chair, 
 and to the image which Nebuchadnezzar the 
 king had set up ; and spoke under their voices 
 before the august picture, just as they would 
 have done had the King Churfiirst been present 
 himself. 
 
 He was always going back to Hanover. In 
 the year 1729, he went for two whole years, 
 during which Caroline reigned for him in England, 
 and he was not in the least missed by his British 
 subjects. He went again in '35 and '36 ; and 
 between the years 1740 and 1755 was no less than 
 eight times on the Continent, which amusement 
 he was obliged to give up at the outbreak of the 
 Seven Years' War, Here every day's amusement 
 was the same. ^' Our life is as uniform as that of a 
 monastery," writes a courtier whom Vehse quotes. 
 ^' Every morning at eleven, and every evening 
 at six, we drive in the heat to Herrenhausen, 
 through an enormous linden avenue; and twice 
 a day cover our coats and coaches with dust. In 
 the king's society there never is the least change. 
 At table, and at cards, he sees always the same 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 101 
 
 faces, and at the end of the game retires into 
 his chamber. Twice a week there is a French 
 theatre; the other days there is play in the 
 gallery. In this way, were the king always to 
 stop in Hanover, one could make a ten years' 
 calendar of his proceedings ; and settle before- 
 hand w^hat his time of business, meals, and plea- 
 sure would be." 
 
 The old pagan kept his promise to his dying 
 wife. Lady Yarmouth was now in full favour, 
 and treated with profound respect by the Hanover 
 society, though it appears rather neglected in 
 England when she came among us. In 1740, 
 a couple of the king's daughters went to see him 
 at Hanover; Anna, the Princess of Orange (about 
 whom, and whose husband and marriage-day, 
 Walpole and Hervey have left us the most ludi- 
 crous descriptions), and Maria of Hesse Cassel, 
 with then' respective lords. This made the Han- 
 over court very brilliant. In honour of his high 
 guests, the king gave several /<^'to ; among others, 
 a magnificent masked ball, in the green theatre 
 at Herrenhausen — the garden theatre, with linden 
 and box for screen, and grass for a carpet, where 
 the Platens had danced to George and his father 
 
102 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 the late sultan. The stage and a great part of 
 the garden were illuminated with coloured lamps. 
 Almost the whole court appeared in white domi- 
 noes, '^like/' says the describer of the scene, 
 ^'like spirits in the Elysian fields. At night, 
 supper was served in the gallery with three great 
 tables, and the king was very merry. After 
 supper dancing was resumed, and I did not get 
 home till five o'clock by full daylight to Hanover. 
 Some days afterwards we had in the opera-house 
 at Hanover, a great assembly. The king appeared 
 in a Turkish dress ; his turban was ornamented 
 with a magnificent agraffe of diamonds ; the 
 Lady Yarmouth was dressed as a sultana ; nobody 
 was more beautiful than the Princess of Hesse." 
 So, while poor Caroline was resting in her coffin, 
 dapper little George, with his red face and his 
 white eyebrows and goggle-eyes, at sixty years of 
 age, is dancing a pretty dance with Madame 
 Walmoden, and capering about dressed up like 
 a Turk ! For twenty years more, that little old 
 Bajazet went on in this Turkish fashion, until 
 the fit came which choked the old man, when he 
 ordered the side of his coffin to be taken out, 
 as well as that of poor Caroline's who had pre- 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 103 
 
 ceded him, so that his sinful old bones and ashes 
 might mingle with those of the faithful creature. 
 strutting Turkey-cock of Herrenhausen ! 
 naughty little Mahomet ! in what Turkish para- 
 dise are you now, and where be your painted 
 houris ? So Countess Yarmouth appeared as a 
 sultana, and his Majesty in a Turkish dress wore 
 an agraffe of diamonds, and was very merry, was 
 he ? Friends ! he was your fathers' king as well 
 as mine — let us drop a respectful tear over his 
 grave. 
 
 He said of his wife that he never knew a 
 woman who was worthy to buckle her shoe : he 
 would sit alone weeping before her portrait, and 
 when he had dried his eyes, he would go off to 
 his Walmoden and talk of her. On the 25th 
 day of October, 1760, he being then in the 
 seventy-seventh year of his age, and the thirty- 
 fourth of his reign, his page went to take him 
 his royal chocolate, and behold ! the most reli- 
 gious and gracious king was lying dead on the 
 floor. They went and fetched Walmoden ; but 
 Walmoden could not wake him. The sacred 
 Majesty was but a lifeless corpse. The king was 
 dead; God save the king ! But, of course, poets 
 
104 THE FOUH GEORGES. 
 
 and clergymen decorously bewailed the late one. 
 Here are some artless verses, in which an English 
 divine deplored the famous departed hero, and 
 over which you may cry or you may laugh, 
 exactly as your humour suits : — 
 
 ** While at lils feet expiring Faction lay, 
 No contest left but who should best obey ; 
 Saw in his offspring all himself renewed ; 
 The same fair path of glory still pursued ; 
 Saw to young George Augusta's care impart 
 Whate'er could raise and humanize the heart ; 
 Blend all his grandsu'e's viiiues with his o^vn, 
 And forai their mingled radiance for the throne — 
 No faiiher blessing could on earth be given — 
 The next degree of happiness was — heaven!" 
 
 If he had been good, if he had been just, if 
 he had been pure in life, and wise in council, 
 could the poet have said much more ? It was a 
 parson who came and wept over this grave, with 
 Walmoden sitting on it, and claimed heaven for 
 the poor old man slumbering below. Here was 
 one who had neither dignity, learning, morals, 
 nor wit — who tainted a great society by a bad 
 example ; who in youth, manhood, old age, was 
 gross, low, and sensual ; and Mr. Porteus, after- 
 w^ards my Lord Bishop Porteus, says the earth 
 
GEORGE THE SECOND. 105 
 
 was not good enough for liim, and that his only 
 place was heaven ! Bravo, Mr. Porteus ! The 
 divine who wept these tears over George the 
 Second's memory wore George the Third's lawn. 
 I don't know whether people still admire his 
 poetry or his sermons. 
 
III.-GEOEGE THE THIRD. 
 
109 
 
 GEORGE THE THIRD. 
 
 "> E have to 
 glance over 
 sixty years in 
 as many mi- 
 nutes. To read 
 the mere cata- 
 logue of cha- 
 racters who 
 figured during 
 that long pe- 
 riod, would 
 occupy our al- 
 lotted time, and 
 we should have 
 all text and no 
 sermon. Eng- 
 land has to un- 
 dergo the revolt of the American colonies ; to 
 submit to defeat and separation ; to shake under 
 
110 THE FOUR GEOEGES. 
 
 the volcano of the French Eevolution ; to grapple 
 and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy 
 Napoleon ; to gasp and rally after that tremendous 
 struggle. The old society, with its courtly splen- 
 dours, has to pass away ; generations of statesmen 
 to rise and disappear ; Pitt to follow Chatham to 
 the tomb ; the memory of Eodney and Wolfe to 
 be superseded by Nelson's and Wellington's glory; 
 the old poets who unite us to Queen Anne's time 
 to sink into their graves; Johnson to die, and 
 Scott and Byron to arise ; Garrick to delight the 
 world with his dazzling dramatic genius, and 
 Kean to leap on the stage and take possession of 
 the astonished theatre. Steam has to be invented; 
 kings to be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored. 
 Napoleon to be but an episode, and George III. 
 is to be alive through all these varied changes, to 
 accompany his people through all these revolutions 
 of thought, government, society ; to survive out 
 of the old world into ours. 
 
 When I first saw England, she was in mourn- 
 ing for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of 
 the empire. I came from India as a child, and 
 our ship touched at an island on the way home, 
 where my black servant took me a long walk over 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. Ill 
 
 rocks and hills until we reached a garden, where 
 we saw a man walking. ^' That is he/' said the 
 black man : '' that is Bonaparte ! He eats three 
 sheep every day, and all the little children he can 
 lay hands on ! " There were people in the British 
 dominions besides that poor Calcutta serving-man, 
 with an equal horror of the Corsican ogre. 
 
 With the same childish attendant, I remember 
 peeping through the colonnade at Carlton House, 
 and seeing the abode of the great Prince Eegent. 
 I can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates 
 of the place. The place ? What place ? The pa- 
 lace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar. It is but a name now. Where be the 
 sentries who used to salute as the Koyal chariots 
 drove in and out ? The chariots, with the kings 
 inside, have driven to the realms of Pluto ; the 
 tall Guards have marched into darkness, and the 
 echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades. 
 Where the palace once stood, a hundred httle 
 children are paddling up and down the steps to 
 St. James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen 
 are taking their tea at the Athenaeum Club ; as 
 many grisly warriors are garrisoning the United 
 Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great 
 
112 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 social ExcliaiiQfe of London now — the mart of 
 news, of politics, of scandal, of rumour — the Eng- 
 lish forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last 
 despatch from the Crimea, the last speech of Lord 
 Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now 
 and then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts 
 are with the past rather than with the present, it 
 is a memorial of old times and old people, and 
 Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look ! About this 
 spot, Tom of Ten Thousand w^as killed by 
 Konigsmarck's gang. In that great red house 
 Gainsborough lived, and CuUoden Cumberland, 
 George III.'s uncle. Yonder is Sarah Marl- 
 borough's palace, just as it stood when that 
 termagant occupied it. At 25, Walter Scott used 
 to live ; at the house, now No. 79, and occupied 
 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 
 in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn, 
 comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's chair 
 issued from under yonder arch ! All the men of 
 the Georges have passed up and down the street. 
 It has seen Walpole's chariot and Chatham's 
 sedan ; and Fox, Gibbon, Sheridan, on their way 
 to Brookes's; and stately WiUiam Pitt stalking 
 on the arm of Dundas ; and Hanger and Tom 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 113 
 
 Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron 
 limping into Wattier's ; and Swift striding out of 
 Bury Street ; and Mr. Addison and Dick Steele, 
 both perhaps a little the better for liquor ; and 
 the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York clatter- 
 ing over the pavement ; and Johnson counting 
 the posts along the streets, after dawdling before 
 Dodsley's window ; and Horry Walpole hobbling 
 into his carriage, with a gimcrack just bought 
 out at Christie's ; and George Selwyn sauntering 
 into White's. 
 
 In the published letters to George Sehvyn we 
 get a mass of correspondence by no means so 
 briUiant and witty as Walpole's, or so bitter and 
 bright as Heiwey's, but as interesting, and even 
 more descriptive of the time, because the letters 
 are the work of many hands. You hear more 
 voices speaking, as it were, and more natural 
 than Horace's dandified treble, and Sporus's ma- 
 lignant whisper. As one reads the Selwyn letters 
 — as one looks at Reynolds's noble pictures illus- 
 trative of those magnificent times and voluptuous 
 people — one almost hears the voice of the dead 
 past; the laughter and the chorus; the toast 
 called over the brimming cups ; the shout at the 
 
 8 
 
114 THE FOUR GEOrvGES. 
 
 racecourse or the gaming-table; the merry joke 
 frankly spoken to the laughing fine lady. How 
 fine those ladies were, those ladies who heard 
 and spoke such coarse jokes ; how grand those 
 gentlemen ! 
 
 I fancy that peculiar product of the past, the fine 
 gentleman, has almost vanished o& the face of the 
 earth, and is disappearing hke the beaver or the 
 Ked Indian. We can't have fine gentlemen any 
 more, because we can't have the society in which 
 they lived. The people will not obey : the para- 
 sites will not be as obsequious as formerly: 
 children do not go down on their knees to beg 
 their parents' blessing : chaplains do not say 
 grace and retire before the pudding: servants 
 do not say ^ your honour ' and ^ your worship ' at 
 every moment : tradesmen do not stand hat in 
 hand as the gentleman passes : authors do not 
 wait for hours in gentlemen's anterooms with a 
 fulsome dedication, for which they hope to get 
 five guineas from his lordship. In the days when 
 there were fine gentlemen, Mr. Secretary Pitt's 
 under-secretaries did not dare to sit down before 
 him ; but Mr. Pitt, in his turn, went down on his 
 gouty knees to George II. ; and when George III. 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 115 
 
 spoke a few kind words to him, Lord Chatham 
 bm'st into tears of reverential joy and gratitude ; 
 so awful was the idea of the monarch, and so 
 great the distinctions of rank. Fancy Lord John 
 Kussell or Lord Palmerston on their knees whilst 
 the Sovereign was reading a despatch, or begin- 
 ning to cry because Prince Albert said something 
 civil ! 
 
 At the accession of George III., the patricians 
 were yet at the height of their good fortune. 
 Society recognized their superiority, which they 
 themselves pretty calmly took for granted. They 
 inherited not only titles and estates, and seats 
 in the House of Peers, but seats in the House of 
 Commons. There were a multitude of Govern- 
 ment places, and not merely these, but bribes of 
 actual 5001. notes, which members of the House 
 took not much shame in assuming. Fox went 
 into Parliament at 20 : Pitt was just of age : his 
 father not much older. It was the good time for 
 Patricians, SmaU blame to them if they took 
 and enjoyed, and over-enjoyed, the prizes of 
 politics, the pleasures of social life. 
 
 In these letters to Selwyn, we are made ac- 
 quainted with a whole society of these defunct 
 
 8—2 
 
116 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 fine gentlemen : and can watch with a curious 
 interest a Hfe, which the novel-writers of that 
 time, I think, have scarce touched upon. To 
 Smollett, to Fielding even, a lord was a lord : a 
 gorgeous being with a blue ribbon, a coroneted 
 chair, and an immense star on his bosom, to 
 whom commoners paid reverence. Kichardson, a 
 man of humbler birth than either of the above 
 two, owned that he was ignorant regarding the 
 manners of the aristocracy, and besought Mrs. 
 Donnellan, a lady who had lived in the great 
 world, to examine a volume of Sir Charles 
 Grandison, and point out any errors which she 
 might see in this particular. Mrs. Donnellan found 
 so many faults, that Kichardson changed colour ; 
 shut up the book; and muttered that it were 
 best to throw it in the fire. Here, in Selwyn, we 
 have the real original men and women of fashion 
 of the early time of George III. We can follow 
 them to the new club at Almack's : we can travel 
 over Europe with them : we can accompany them 
 not only to the public places, but to their country- 
 houses and private society. Here is a whole 
 company of them ; wits and prodigals ; some 
 persevering in their bad ways; some repentant, 
 
GEOKGE THE THIRD. 117 
 
 but relapsing ; beautiful ladies, parasites, humble 
 chaplains, led captains. Those fair creatures 
 whom we love in Eejuolds's portraits, and who 
 still look out on us from his canvases with their 
 sweet calm faces and gracious smiles — those fine 
 gentlemen who did us the honour to govern us ; 
 who inherited their boroughs ; took their ease in 
 their patent places; and slipped Lord North's 
 bribes so elegantly under their ruffles — we make 
 acquaintance with a hundred of these fine folks, 
 hear their talk and laughter, read of their loves, 
 quarrels, intrigues, debts, duels, divorces; can 
 fancy them alive if we read the book long enough. 
 We can attend at Duke Hamilton's wedding, and 
 behold him marry his bride with the curtain-ring : 
 we can peep into her poor sister's death-bed : we 
 can see Charles Fox cursing over the cards, or 
 March bawling out the odds at Newmarket : we 
 can imagine Burgoyne tripping off from St. 
 James's Street to conquer the Americans, and 
 slinking back into the club somewhat crestfallen 
 after his beating : we can see the young king 
 dressing himself for the drawing-room and asking 
 ten thousand questions regarding all the gentle- 
 men ; we can have high life or low, the struggle 
 
118 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 at the Opera to behold the Violetta or the Zam- 
 perini — the Macaronies and fine ladies in their 
 chairs trooping to the masquerade or Madame 
 Comelys's — the crowd at Drury Lane to look at 
 the body of Miss Eay, whom Parson Hackman 
 has just pistolled — or we can peep into Newgate, 
 where poor Mr. Kice the forger is waiting his 
 fate and his supper. ^'You need not be par- 
 ticular about the sauce for his fowl/' says one 
 turnkey to another: ''for you know he is to be 
 hanged in the morning.'' ''Yes/' replies the 
 second janitor, " but the chaplain sups with him, 
 and he is a terrible fellow for melted butter." 
 
 Sehvyn has a chaplain and parasite, one Dr. 
 Warner, than whom Plautus, or Ben Jonson, or 
 Hogarth, never painted a better character. In 
 letter after letter he adds fresh strokes to the 
 portrait of himself, and completes a portrait not 
 a little curious to look at now that the man has 
 passed away ; all the foul pleasures and gambols 
 in which he revelled, played out ; all the rouged 
 faces into which he leered, worms and skulls; 
 all the fine gentlemen whose shoebuckles he 
 kissed, laid in their coffins. This worthy clergy- 
 man takes care to tell us that he does not believe 
 
GEORGE THE THIED. 119 
 
 in his religion, though, thank heaven, he is 
 not so great a rogue as a lawyer. He goes on 
 Mr. Selwyn's errands, any errands, and is proud, 
 he says, to be that gentleman's proveditor. He 
 waits upon the Duke of Queensberry — old Q. — 
 and exchanges pretty stories with that aristocrat. 
 He comes home ^' after a hard day's christening," 
 as he says, and writes to his patron before sitting 
 down to whist and partridges for supper. He 
 revels in the thoughts of ox-cheek and burgundy — 
 he is a boisterous, uproarious parasite, licks his 
 master's shoes with explosions of laughter and 
 cunning smack and gusto, and likes the taste of 
 that blacking as much as the best claret in 
 old Q.'s cellar. He has Kabelais and Horace 
 at his greasy fingers' ends. He is inexpressibly 
 mean, curiously jolly ; kindly and good-natured 
 in secret — a tender-hearted knave, not a venom- 
 ous lickspittle. Jesse says, that at his chapel in 
 Long Acre, ''he attained a considerable popu- 
 ,, larity by the pleasing, manly, and eloquent style 
 ■ of his delivery." Was infidelity endemic, and 
 corruption in the air? Around a young king, 
 himself of the most exemplary life and undoubted 
 piety, lived a court society as dissolute as our 
 
120 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 country ever knew. George 11. 's bad morals bore 
 their fruit in George III.'s early years; as I 
 believe that a knowledge of that good man's 
 example, his moderation, his frugal simplicity, 
 and God-fearing life, tended infinitely to improve 
 the morals of the country and purify the whole 
 nation. 
 
 After "Warner, the most interesting of Selwyn's 
 correspondents is the Earl of Carlisle, grand- 
 father of the amiable nobleman at present Vice- 
 roy in Ireland. The grandfather, too, was Irish 
 Viceroy, having previously been treasurer of the 
 king's household; and, in 1778, the principal 
 commissioner for treating, consulting, and agree- 
 ing upon the means of quieting the divisions 
 subsisting in his Majesty's colonies, plantations, 
 and possessions in North America. You may 
 read his lordship's manifestoes in the Boijal Ncic 
 Yorh Gazette. He returned to England, having 
 by no means quieted the colonies ; and speedily 
 afterwards the Eoyal Neic Yorh Gazette somehov/ 
 ceased to be published. 
 
 This good, clever, kind, highly-bred Lord 
 Carlisle was one of the Enghsli fine gentlemen 
 who Vv^as well-nigh ruined by the awful debauchery 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 121 
 
 and extravagance wliich preyailed in the great 
 English society of those days. Its dissoluteness 
 was awful : it had swarmed over Europe after 
 the Peace ; it had danced, and raced, and gambled 
 in all the courts. It had made its bow at Ver- 
 sailles ; it had run its horses on the plain of 
 Sablons, near Paris, and created the Anglo-mania 
 there : it had exported vast quantities of pictures 
 and marbles from Kome and Florence : it had 
 ruined itself by building great galleries and 
 palaces for the reception of the statues and 
 pictures : it had brought over singing-w^omen and 
 dancing-women from all the operas of Europe, 
 on whom my lords lavished their thousands, 
 whilst they left their honest wives and honest 
 children languishing in the lonely, deserted splen- 
 dours of the castle and park at home. 
 
 Besides the great London society of those days, 
 there was another unacknowledged world, extra- 
 vagant beyond measure, tearing about in the 
 pursuit of pleasure ; dancing, gambling, drinking, 
 singing; meeting the real society in the public 
 places (at Kanelaghs, Vauxhalls, and Kidottos, 
 about which our old novelists talk so constantly), 
 and outvying the real leaders of fashion, in 
 
122 THE FOUR GEOEGES. 
 
 luxury^ and splendour, and beauty. For instance, 
 when the famous Miss Gunning visited Paris as 
 Lady Coventry, where she expected that her 
 beauty would meet with the applause which had 
 followed her and her sister through England, 
 it appears she was put to flight by an English 
 lady still more lovely in the eyes of the Parisians. 
 A certain Mrs. Pitt took a box at the opera 
 opposite the countess; and was so much hand- 
 somer than her ladyship, that the parterre cried 
 out that this was the real English angel, where- 
 upon Lady Coventry quitted Paris in a huff. The 
 poor thing died presently of consumption, acce- 
 lerated, it was said, by the red and white paint 
 with which she plastered those luckless charms 
 of hers. (We must represent to ourselves all 
 fashionable female Europe, at that time, as plas- 
 tered with white, and raddled with red.) She 
 left two daughters behind her, whom George 
 Selwyn loved (he was curiously fond of little 
 children), and who are described very drolly and 
 pathetically in these letters, in their little nursery, 
 where passionate Httle Lady Fanny, if she had 
 not good cards, flung hers into Lady Mary's face ; 
 and where they sate conspiring how they should 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 123 
 
 receive a new mother-in-law w^liom their papa 
 presently brought home. They got on very well 
 with their mother-in-law, who was very kind to 
 them ; and they grew up, and they were married, 
 and they were both divorced afterwards — poor 
 Httle souls ! Poor painted mother, poor society, 
 ghastly in its pleasures, its loves, its revelries ! 
 
 As for my lord commissioner, we can afford 
 to speak about him; because, though he was a 
 wild and weak commissioner at one time, though 
 he hurt his estate, though he gambled and lost 
 ten thousand pounds at a sitting — ^^five times 
 more,'' says the unlucky gentleman, '' than I ever 
 lost before;" though he swore he never would 
 touch a card again ; and yet, strange to say, went 
 back to the table and lost still more : yet he 
 repented of his errors, sobered down, and became 
 a worthy peer and a good country gentleman, 
 and returned to the good wife and the good 
 children whom he had always loved with the 
 best part of his heart. He had married at one- 
 and-twenty. He found himself, in the midst of 
 a dissolute society, at the head of a great fortune. 
 Forced into luxury, and obliged to be a great 
 lord and a great idler, he yielded to some tempta- 
 
12-1 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 tions, and paid for them a bitter penalty of manly 
 remorse ; from some others * he fled wisely, and 
 ended by conquering them nobly. But he always 
 had the good wife and children in his mind, and 
 they saved him. '^ I am very glad you did not 
 come to me the morning I left London,'' he 
 writes to G. Selwyn, as he is embarking for 
 America. '*I can only say, I never knew till 
 that moment of parting, what grief was." There 
 is no parting now, where they are. The faithful 
 wife, the kind, generous gentleman, have left a 
 noble race behind them : an inheritor of his 
 name and titles, who is beloved as widely as 
 he is known ; a man most kind, accomplished, 
 gentle, friendly, and pure ; and female descen- 
 dants occupying high stations and embellishing 
 great names; some renowned for beauty, and 
 all for spotless lives, and pious matronly virtues. 
 
 Another of Selwjm's correspondents is the Earl 
 of March, afterwards Duke of Queensberry, whose 
 life lasted into this century; and who certainly 
 * as earl or duke, young man or greybeard, was 
 not an ornament to any possible society. The 
 legends about old Q. are awful. In Selwyn, 
 in Wraxall, and contemporary chronicles, the 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 125 
 
 observer of human nature may follow him, drink- 
 ing, gambling, intriguing to the end of his career; 
 when the wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don 
 Juan died, as wicked and unrepentant as he had 
 been at the hottest season of youth and passion. 
 There is a house in Piccadilly, where they used 
 to show a certain low window at which old Q. 
 sat to his very last days, ogling through his senile 
 glasses the women as they passed by. 
 
 There must have been a great deal of good 
 about this lazy, sleepy George Selwyn, which, 
 no doubt, is set to his present credit. ''Your 
 friendship," writes Carlisle to him, '' is so different 
 from anything I have ever met with or seen in 
 the world, that when I recollect the extraordinary 
 proofs of your kindness, it seems to me like a 
 dream." '' I have lost my oldest friend and 
 acquaintance, G. Selwyn," wTites Walpole to 
 Miss Berry: ''I really loved him, not only for 
 his infinite wit, but for a thousand good quali- 
 ties." I am glad, for my part, that such a lover 
 of cakes and ale should have had a thousand 
 good qualities — that he should have been friendly, 
 generous, warm-hearted, trustworthy. '' I rise 
 at six," writes Carlisle to him, from Spa (a great 
 
126 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 resort of fashionable people in our ancestors' 
 days), '^ play at cricket till dinner, and dance 
 in the evening, till I can scarcely crawl to bed 
 at eleven. There is a life for you ! You get 
 up at nine ; play with Eaton your dog till twelve, 
 in your dressing-gown; then creep down to 
 White's; are five hours at table; sleep till 
 supper-time ; and then make two wretches carry 
 you in a sedan-chair, with three pints of claret 
 in you, three miles for a shilling." Occasionally, 
 instead of sleeping at White's, George went down 
 and snoozed in the House of Commons by the 
 side of Lord North. He represented Gloucester 
 for many years, and had a borough of his own, 
 Ludgershall, for which, when he was too lazy 
 to contest Gloucester, he sat himself. *' I have 
 given directions for the election of Ludgershall 
 to be of Lord Melbourne, and myself," he writes 
 to the Premier, whose friend he was, and who 
 was himself as sleepy, as witty, and as good- 
 natured as George. 
 
 If, in looking at the Hves of princes, courtiers, 
 men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict 
 them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must 
 make allowances for the rich men's failings, and 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 127 
 
 recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent 
 and Toluptuous, had we no motive for work, a 
 mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily 
 temptation of a large income. Wliat could a great 
 peer, with a great castle and park, and a great 
 fortune, do but be splendid and idle ? In these 
 letters of Lord Carlisle's from which I have been 
 quoting, there is many a just complaint made by 
 the kind-hearted young nobleman of the state 
 which he is obliged to keep ; the magnificence in 
 which he must live; the idleness to which his 
 position as a peer of England bound him. Better 
 for him had he been a lawyer at his desk, or 
 a clerk in his office; — a thousand times better 
 chance for happiness, education, employment, 
 security from temptation. A few years since the 
 profession of arms was the only one which our 
 nobles could follow. The church, the bar, medi- 
 cine, literature, the arts, commerce, were belov/ 
 them. It is to the middle class we must look 
 for the safety of England : the working educated 
 men, away from Lord North's bribery in the 
 senate ; the good clergy not corrupted into para- 
 sites by hopes of preferment; the tradesmen 
 rising mto manly opulence ; the painters pursuing 
 
128 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 their gentle calling ; the men of letters in their 
 quiet studies ; these are the men whom we love 
 and hke to read of in the last age. How small 
 the grandees and the men of pleasure look 
 beside them ! how contemptible the story of the 
 George III. court squabbles are beside the recorded 
 talk of dear old Johnson ! What is the grandest 
 entertainment at Windsor, compared to a night 
 at the club over its modest cups, with Percj^ and 
 Langton, and Goldsmith, and poor Bozzy at the 
 table ? I declare I think, of all the polite men 
 of that age, Joshua Keynolds was the finest 
 gentleman. And they were good, as well as 
 witty and wise, those dear old friends of the past. 
 Their minds were not debauched by excess, or 
 effeminate with luxury. They toiled their noble 
 day's labour : they rested, and took their kindly 
 pleasure : they cheered their holiday meetings 
 Vv^ith generous wit and hearty interchange of 
 thought : they were no prudes, but no blush need 
 follow their conversation : they were merry, but 
 no riot came out of their cups. Ah ! I would 
 have liked a night at the Turk's head, even 
 though bad news had arrived from the colonies, 
 and Doctor Johnson was growling against the 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 129 
 
 rebels ; to have sat with him and Goldy ; and to 
 have heard Burke, the finest talker in the world ; 
 and to have had Garrick flashing in with a story 
 from his theatre ! — I like, I say, to think of that 
 society; and not merely how pleasant and how 
 wise, but how good they were. I think it was on 
 going home one night from the club that Edmund 
 Burke — his noble soul full of great thoughts, be 
 sure, for they never left him ; his heart full of 
 gentleness — was accosted by a poor wandering 
 woman, to whom he spoke words of kindness; 
 and moved by the tears of this Magdalen, per- 
 haps having caused them by the good words he 
 spoke to her, he took her home to the house of 
 his wife and children, and never left her until he 
 had found the means of restoring her to honesty 
 and labour. you fine gentlemen ! you Marches, 
 and Selwyns, and Chesterfields, how small you 
 look by the side of those great men ! Good- 
 natured Carlisle plays at cricket all day, and 
 dances in the evening ''till he can scarcely 
 crawl," gaily contrasting his superior virtue with 
 George Selwyn's, '' carried to bed by two wretches 
 at midnight with three pints of claret in him." 
 Do you remember the verses — the sacred verses 
 
 9 
 
130 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 — which Johnson wrote on the death of his 
 humble friend, Levett ? 
 
 ** Well tried through many a varying year, 
 See Levett to the grave descend; 
 Officious, innocent, sincere, 
 
 Of every friendless name the friend. 
 
 ** In misery's dai'kest cavern known, 
 His useful care was ever nigh, 
 Where hopeless anguish poured the groan^ 
 And lonely want retired to die. 
 
 *' No summons mocked by chill delay, 
 No petty gain disdained by pride, 
 The modest wants of every day 
 The toil of every day supplied. 
 
 *' His virtues walked their narrow round, 
 Nor made a pause, nor left a void : 
 And sure the Eternal Master found 
 His single talent well employed." 
 
 Whose name looks the brightest now, that of 
 Queensberry the wealthy duke, or Selwyn the wit, 
 or Levett the poor physician ? 
 
 I hold old Johnson (and shall we not pardon 
 James Boswell some errors for embalming him 
 for us ?) to be the great supporter of the British 
 monarchy and church during the last age — better 
 than whole benches of bishops, better than Pitts, 
 
GEOKGE THE THIRD. 131 
 
 Norths, and the great Burke himself. Johnson 
 had the ear of the nation : his immense authority 
 reconciled it to loyalty, and shamed it out of 
 irreligion. When George III. talked with him, 
 and the people heard the great author's good 
 opinion of the sovereign, whole generations ralHed 
 to the king. Johnson was revered as a sort of 
 oracle ; and the oracle declared for church and 
 king. What a humanity the old man had ! He 
 was a kindly partaker of all honest pleasures : a 
 fierce foe to all sin, but a gentle enemy to all 
 sinners. '^ What, boys, are you for a froUc ? '" 
 he cries, when Topham Beauclerc comes and 
 wakes him up at midnight : '^ I'm with you." 
 And away he goes, tumbles on his homely old 
 clothes, and trundles through Covent Garden 
 with the young feUows. When he used to fre- 
 quent Garrick's theatre, and had '' the liberty of 
 the scenes," he says, '*AU the actresses knew 
 me, and dropped me a curtsey as they passed to 
 the stage." That would make a pretty picture : 
 it is a pretty picture in my mind, of youth, folly, 
 gaiety, tenderly surveyed by wisdom's merciful, 
 pure eyes. 
 
 George III. and his queen lived in a very 
 
 9—2 
 
132 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 unpretending but elegant-looking house, on the 
 site of the hideous pile under which his 
 granddaughter at present reposes. The king's 
 mother inhabited Carlton House, which con- 
 temporary prints represent with a perfect para- 
 dise of a garden, with trim lawns, green arcades, 
 and yistas of classic statues. She admired these 
 in company with my Lord Bute, who had a fine 
 classic taste, and sometimes council took and 
 sometimes tea in the pleasant green arbours 
 along with that polite nobleman. Bute was 
 hated with a rage of which there have been 
 few examples in English history. He was the 
 butt for everybody's abuse ; for Wilkes's devilish 
 mischief ; for Churchiirs slashing satire ; for the 
 hooting of the mob that roasted the boot, his 
 emblem, in a thousand bonfires ; that hated him 
 because he was a favourite and a Scotchman, 
 calling him *' Mortimer," '^Lothario," I know 
 not what names, and accusing his royal mistress 
 of all sorts of crimes — the grave, lean, demure, 
 elderly woman, who, I daresay, was quite as good 
 as her neighbours. Chatham lent the aid of his 
 great malice to influence the popular sentiment 
 against her. He assailed, in the House of Lords, 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 133 
 
 ^* the secret influence, more mighty than the 
 throne itself, which betrayed and clogged every 
 administration.'' The most furious pamphlets 
 echoed the cry. '' Impeach the king's mother," 
 was scribbled over every wall at the Court end of 
 the town, Walpole tells us. What had she done ? 
 What had Frederick, Prince of Wales, George's 
 father, done, that he was so loathed by George II. 
 and never mentioned by George III. ? Let us 
 not seek for stones to batter that forgotten grave, 
 but acquiesce in the contemporary epitaph over 
 him : — 
 
 *^ Here lies Fred, 
 Who was alive, and is dead. 
 Had it been his father, 
 I had much rather. 
 Had it been his brother. 
 Still better than another. 
 Had it been his sister. 
 No one would have missed her. 
 Had it been the whole generation, 
 Still better for the nation. 
 But since 'tis only Fred, 
 Who was alive, and is dead. 
 There's no more to be said." 
 
 The widow with eight children round her, 
 prudently reconciled herself with the king, and 
 won the old man's confidence and good-will. 
 
134 * THE FOUE GEOEGES. 
 
 A shrewd, hard, domineering, narrow-minded 
 woman, she educated her children according to 
 her hghts, and spoke of the eldest as a dull, 
 good boy : she kept him very close : she held 
 the tightest rein over him : she had curious 
 prejudices and bigotries. His uncle, the burly 
 Cumberland, taking down a sabre once, and 
 drawing it to amuse the child — the boy started 
 back and turned pale. The prince felt a gene- 
 rous shock: ^^What must they have told him 
 about me ? " he asked. 
 
 His mother's bigotry and hatred he inherited 
 with the courageous obstinacy of his own race ; 
 but he was a firm believer where his fathers had 
 been free-thinkers, and a true and fond supporter 
 of the Church, of which he was the titular 
 defender. Like other dull men, the king was all 
 his life suspicious of superior people. He did 
 not like Fox ; he did not like Keynolds ; he did 
 not like Nelson, Chatham, Burke ; he was testy 
 at the idea of all innovations, and suspicious of 
 all innovators. He loved mediocrities ; Benjamin 
 West was his favourite painter ; Beattie was his 
 poet. The king lamented, not without pathos, 
 in his after life, that his education had been 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 135 
 
 neglected. He was a dull lad brought up by 
 narrow-minded people. The cleverest tutors in 
 the world could have done little probably to 
 expand that small intellect, though they might 
 have improved his tastes, and taught his percep- 
 tions some generosity. 
 
 But he admired as well as he could. There is 
 httle doubt that a letter, written by the little 
 Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg Strehtz, — a 
 letter containing the most feeble commonplaces 
 about the horrors of war, and the most trivial 
 remarks on the blessings of peace, struck the 
 young monarch greatly, and decided him upon 
 selecting the young princess as the sharer of his 
 throne. I pass over the stories of his juvenile 
 loves — of Hannah Lightfoot, the Quaker, to 
 whom they say he was actually married (though 
 I don't know who has ever seen the register) — 
 of lovely black-haired Sarah Lennox, about whose 
 beauty Walpole has written in raptures, and who 
 used to lie in wait for the young prince, and 
 make hay at him on the lawn of Holland House. 
 He sighed and he longed, but he rode away from 
 her. Her picture still hangs in Holland House, 
 a magnificent master-piece of Keynolds, a canvas 
 
136 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 worthy of Titian. She looks from the castle 
 window, holding a bird in her hand, at black-eyed 
 young Charles Fox, her nephew. The royal bird 
 flew away from lovely Sarah. She had to figm-e 
 as bridesmaid at her little Mecklenburg rival's 
 wedding, and died in our own time a quiet old 
 lady, who had become the mother of the heroic 
 Napiers. 
 
 They say the little princess who had written 
 the fine letter about the horrors of war — a beau- 
 tiful letter without a single blot, for which she 
 was to be rewarded, like the heroine of the old 
 spelling-book story — was at play one day with 
 some of her young companions in the gardens of 
 Strelitz, and that the young ladies' conversation 
 was, strange to say, about husbands. " Who 
 will take such a poor little princess as me ? " 
 Charlotte said to her friend, Ida von Bulow, and 
 at that very moment the postman's horn sounded, 
 and Ida said, '^ Princess! there is the sweet- 
 heart." As she said, so it actually turned out. 
 The postman brought letters from the splendid 
 young King of all England, who said, " Princess! 
 because you have written such a beautiful letter, 
 which does credit to your head and heart, come 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD, 137 
 
 and be Queen of Great Britain, France, and 
 
 Ireland, and the true wife of your most obedient 
 
 servant, George ! '' So she jumped for joy ; and 
 
 went upstairs and packed all her little trunks; 
 
 and set off straightway for her kingdom in a 
 
 beautiful yacht, with a harpischord on board for 
 
 her to play upon, and around her a beautiful 
 
 fleet, all covered with flags and streamers, and 
 
 the distinguished Madame Auerbach comphmented 
 
 her with an ode, a translation of which may be 
 
 read in the Gentleman s Magazine to the present 
 
 day : — 
 
 ** Her gallant navy through the main, 
 Now cleaves its liquid way. 
 There to their queen a chosen train 
 Of nymphs due reverence pay. 
 
 ** Europa, when conveyed by Jove 
 To Crete's distinguished shore, 
 Greater attention scarce could prove, 
 Or be respected more." 
 
 They met, and they were married, and for 
 years they led the happiest, simplest lives sure 
 ever led by married couple. It is said the king 
 winced when he first saw his homely little bride ; 
 but, however that may be, he was a true and 
 faithful husband to her, as she was a faithful and 
 
138 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 loving wife. They had the simplest pleasures — 
 the very mildest and simplest — little country 
 dances, to which a dozen couple were invited, 
 and where the honest king would stand up and 
 dance for three hours at a time to one tune ; 
 after which delicious excitement they would go 
 to bed without any supper (the Court people 
 grumbling sadly at that absence of supper), and 
 get up quite early the next morning, and perhaps 
 the next night have another dance ; or the queen 
 would play on the spinnet — she played pretty 
 well, Haydn said — or the king would read to her 
 a paper out of the Spectator, or perhaps one of 
 Ogden's sermons. Arcadia! what a life it 
 must have been ! There used to be Sunday 
 drawing-rooms at Court; but the young king 
 stopped these, as he stopped all that godless 
 gambling whereof we have made mention. Not 
 that George was averse to any innocent pleasures, 
 or pleasures which he thought innocent. He was 
 a patron of the arts, after his fashion ; kind and 
 gracious to the artists whom he favoured, and 
 respectful to their calling. He wanted once to 
 establish an Order of Minerva ior literary and 
 scientific characters; the knights were to take 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 139 
 
 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 amongst 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. 
 
 He objected to painting St. Paul's, as Popish 
 practice; accordingly, the most clumsy heathen 
 sculptures decorate that edifice at present. It is 
 fortunate that the paintings, too, were spared, for 
 painting and drawing were wofuUy unsound at 
 the close of the last century ; and it is far better 
 for our eyes to contemplate whitewash (when we 
 turn them away from the clergyman) than to 
 look at Opie's pitchy canvases, or FuseU's livid 
 monsters. 
 
 And yet there is one day in the year — a 
 day when old George loved with all his heart 
 to attend it — when I think St. Paul's presents 
 the noblest sight in the whole world : when five 
 thousand charity children, with cheeks hke nose- 
 gays, and sweet, fresh voices, sing the hymn 
 which makes every heart thrill with praise and 
 happiness. I have seen a hundred grand sights 
 in the world — coronations, Parisian splendours, 
 
140 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 Crystal Palace openings, Pope's chapels with 
 their processions of long-tailed cardinals and 
 quavering choirs of fat soprani — but think in 
 all Christendom there is no such sight as Charity 
 Children's Day. Non Arigli, seel angeli. As one 
 looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents : 
 as the first note strikes : indeed one may almost 
 fancy that cherubs are singing. 
 
 Of church music the king was always very 
 fond, showing skill in it both as a critic and a 
 performer. Many stories, mirthful and affecting, 
 are told of his behaviour at the concerts which 
 he ordered. When he was blind and ill he chose 
 the music for the Ancient Concerts once, and the 
 music and words which he selected were from 
 Samso)i Agonistes, and all had reference to his 
 blindness, his captivity, and his affliction. He 
 would beat time wdth his music-roll as they sang 
 the anthem in the Chapel Koyal. If the page 
 below was talkative or inattentive, down would 
 come the music-roll on young scapegrace's pow- 
 dered head. The theatre was always his delight. 
 His bishops and clergy used to attend it, thinking 
 it no shame to appear where that good man was 
 seen. He is said not to have cared for Shak- 
 
GEOPvGE THE THIRD. 141 
 
 speare or tragedy much ; farces and pantomimes 
 were his joy; and especially when clown swal- 
 lowed a carrot or a string of sausages, he would 
 laugh so outrageously that the lovely Princess 
 by his side would have to say, ^' My gracious 
 monarch, do compose yourself/' But he con- 
 tinued to laugh, and at the very smallest farces, 
 as long as his poor wits were left him. 
 
 There is something to me exceedingly touching 
 in that simple early life of the king's. As long 
 as his mother lived — a dozen years after his 
 marriage with the little spinnet-player — he was 
 a great, shy, awkward boy, under the tutelage of 
 that hard parent. She must have been a clever, 
 domineering, cruel woman. She kept her house- 
 hold lonely and in gloom, mistrusting almost all 
 people who came about her children. Seeing 
 the young Duke of Gloucester silent and un- 
 happy once, she sharply asked him the cause of 
 his silence. *' I am thinking," said the poor 
 child. '^Thinking, sir! and of what?" ''I 
 am thinldng if ever I have a son I will not make 
 him so unhappy as you make me." The other 
 sons were all wild, except George. Dutifully 
 every evening George and Charlotte paid their 
 
142 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 visit to the king's mother at Carlton House. 
 She had a throat-complaint, of which she died ; 
 but to the last persisted in driving about the 
 streets to show she was alive. The night before 
 her death the resolute woman talked with her 
 son and daughter-in-law as usual, went to bed, 
 and was found dead there in the morning. 
 '^ George, be a king!" were the words which 
 she was for ever croaking in the ears of her 
 son : and a king the simple, stubborn, affec- 
 tionate, bigoted man tried to be. 
 
 He did his best; he worked according to his 
 lights ; what virtue he knew, he tried to practise ; 
 what knowledge he could master, he strove to 
 acquire. He was for ever drawing maps, for 
 example, and learned geography with no small 
 care and industry. He knew all about the family 
 histories and genealogies of his gentry, and pretty 
 histories he must have known. He knew the 
 whole Armtj List; and all the facings, and the 
 exact number of the buttons, and all the tags 
 and laces, and the cut of all the cocked hats, 
 pigtails, and gaiters in his army. He knew the 
 personnel of the Universities ; what doctors were 
 inclined to Socinianism, and who were sound 
 
GEORGE THE THUII). 143 
 
 Churchmen ; he knew the etiquettes of his own 
 and his grandfather's courts to a nicety, and 
 the smallest particulars regarding the routine of 
 ministers, secretaries, embassies, audiences; the 
 humblest page in the ante-room, or the meanest 
 helper in the stables or kitchen. These parts of 
 the royal business he was capable of learning, 
 and he learned. But, as one thinks of an oflfice, 
 almost divine, performed by any mortal man — 
 of any single being pretending to control the 
 thoughts, to direct the faith, to order the implicit 
 obedience of brother milhons, to compel them 
 into war at his oflfence or quarrel ; to command, 
 '^ In this way you shall trade, in this way you 
 shall think ; these neighbours shall be your aUies 
 whom you shall help, these others your enemies 
 whom you shall slay at my orders ; in this way 
 you shall worship God ; '' — who can wonder that, 
 when such a man as George took such an office 
 on himself, punishment and humiliation should 
 fall upon people and chief ? 
 
 Yet there is something grand about his courage. 
 The battle of the king with his aristocracy remains 
 yet to be told by the historian who shall view the 
 reign of George more justly than the trumpery 
 
144 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 panegyrists who wrote immediately after his 
 decease. It was he, with the people to back him, 
 who made the war with America ; it was he and 
 the people who refused justice to the Roman 
 Catholics ; and on both questions he beat the 
 patricians. He bribed : he bullied : he darkly 
 dissembled on occasion : he exercised a slippery 
 perseverance, and a vindictive resolution, which 
 one almost admires as one thinks his character 
 over. His courage was never to be beat. It 
 trampled North under foot : it beat the stiff neck 
 of the younger Pitt : even his illness never con- 
 quered that indomitable spirit. As soon as his 
 brain was clear, it resumed the scheme, only laid 
 aside when his reason left him : as soon as his 
 hands were out of the strait waistcoat, they took 
 up the pen and the plan which had engaged him 
 up to the moment of his malady. I believe it is 
 by persons believing themselves in the right that 
 nine-tenths of the tyranny of this world has been 
 perpetrated. Arguing on that convenient premiss, 
 the Dey of Algiers would cut off twenty heads of a 
 morning ; Father Dominic would bum a score of 
 Jews in the presence of the most Catholic King, 
 and the Archbishops of Toledo and Salamanca 
 
GEOKGE TUE THIRD. 145 
 
 sing Amen. Protestants were roasted, Jesuits 
 hung and quartered at Smithfield, and witches 
 burned at Salem, and all by worthy people, who 
 believed they had the best authority for their 
 actions. 
 
 And so, with respect to old George, even 
 Americans, whom he hated and who conquered 
 him, may give him credit for having quite 
 honest reasons for oppressing them. Appended 
 to Lord Brougham's biographical sketch of Lord 
 North are some autograph notes of the king, 
 which let us most curiously into the state of his 
 mind. " The times certainly require,'' says he, 
 ^' the concurrence of all who wish to prevent 
 anarchy. I have no wish but the prosperity of 
 my own dominions, therefore I must look upon 
 all who would not heartily assist me as bad men, 
 as well as bad subjects." That is the way he 
 reasoned. ^^I wish nothing but good, therefore 
 every man who does not agree with me is a 
 traitor and a scoundrel." Kemember that ho 
 believed himself anointed by a Divine commis- 
 sion ; remember that he was a man of slow 
 parts and imperfect education ; that the same 
 awful will of Heaven v/hich placed a crown upon 
 
 10 
 
146 THE FOUK GEOEGES. 
 
 his head, which made him tender to his family, 
 pure in his Hfe, courageous and honest, made 
 him dull of comprehension, obstinate of will, and 
 at many times deprived him of reason. He was 
 the father of his people ; his rebellious children 
 must be flogged into obedience. He was the 
 defender of the Protestant faith ; he would rather 
 lay that stout head upon the block than that 
 Catholics should have a share in the govern- 
 ment of England. And you do not suppose 
 that there are not honest bigots enough in all 
 countries to back kings in this kind of states- 
 manship ? Without doubt the American war 
 was popular in England. In 1775 the address 
 in favour of coercing the colonies was carried 
 by 304 to 105 in the Commons, by 104 to 
 29 in the House of Lords. Popular ? — so was 
 the Eevocation of the Edict of Nantes popular 
 in France : so was the massacre of St. Bar- 
 tholomew : so was the Inquisition exceedingly 
 popular in Spain. 
 
 Wars and revolutions are, however, the poli- 
 tician's province. The great events of this long 
 reign, the statesmen and orators who illustrated 
 it, I do not pretend to make the subjects of an 
 
GEOKGE TIIE THIRD. 
 
 147 
 
 hour's light talk.^ Let us return to our humbler 
 duty of court gossip. Yonder sits our little queen, 
 surrounded by many stout sons and fair daughters 
 whom she bore to her faithful George. The his- 
 tory of the daughters, as little Miss Burney has 
 
 * Here are the figures, as drawn by young Gilray, of Lord 
 North, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Biirke. 
 
 -LU — 2 
 
148 
 
 THE FOUE, GEORGES. 
 
 painted tliem to us, is delightful. They were 
 handsome — she calls them beautiful ; they were 
 most kind, loving, and lady-like ; they were 
 gracious to every person, high and low, who 
 served them. They had many little accomplish- 
 ments of their own. This one drew : that one 
 played the piano : they all worked most pro- 
 digiously, and fitted up whole suits of rooms — 
 pretty, smiling Penelopes, — with their busy little 
 needles. As we picture to ourselves the society 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 149 
 
 of eighty years ago, we must imagine hundreds 
 of thousands of groups of women in great high 
 caps, tight bodies, and full skirts, needling away, 
 whilst one of the number, or perhaps a favoured 
 gentleman in a pigtail, reads out a novel to the 
 company. Peep into the cottage at Olney, for 
 example, and see there Mrs. Unwin and Lady 
 Hesketh, those high-bred ladies, those sweet, 
 pious women, and WiUiam Cowper, that dehcate 
 wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentle- 
 man, absolutely reading out Jonathan Wild to 
 the ladies ! What a change in our manners, in 
 our amusements, since then ! 
 
 King George's household was a model of an 
 English gentleman's household. It was early; 
 it was kindly ; it was charitable ; it vras frugal ; 
 it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a 
 degree which I shudder now to contemplate. No 
 wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of , 
 that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, 
 rode, dined at stated intervals. Day after day 
 was the same. At the same hour at night the 
 king kissed his daughters' jolly cheeks ; the 
 princesses kissed their mother's hand ; and 
 Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. 
 
150 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 At the same hour the equerries and women in 
 waiting had their Httle dinner, and cackled over 
 their tea. The king had his backgammon or 
 his evening concert ; the equerries yawned them- 
 selves to death in the anteroom ; or the king and 
 his family walked on Windsor slopes, the king 
 holding his darling little princess Amelia by the 
 hand ; and the people crowded round quite good- 
 naturedly ; and the Eton boys thrust their chubby 
 cheeks under the crowd's elbows ; and the concert 
 over, the king never failed to take his enormous 
 cocked hat off, and salute his band, and say^ 
 " Thank you, gentlemen.'' 
 
 A quieter household, a more prosaic life than 
 this of Kew or Windsor, cannot be imagined. 
 Eain or shine, the king rode every day for hours j 
 poked his red face into hundreds of cottages round 
 about, and showed that shovel hat and Windsor 
 uniform to farmers, to pig-boys, to old women 
 making apple dumplings ; to all sorts of people, 
 gentle and simple, about whom countless stories 
 are told. Nothing can be more undignified than 
 these stories. AVhen Haroun Alraschid visits a 
 subject incog., the latter is sure to be very much 
 the better for the caliph's magnificence. Old 
 
GEOKGE THE TIIIHD. 151 
 
 George showed no such royal splendour. He used 
 to give a guinea sometimes : sometimes feel in 
 his pockets and find he had no money : often ask 
 a man a hundred questions ; about the number of 
 his family, about his oats and beans, about the 
 rent he paid for his house, and ride on. On one 
 occasion he played the part of King Alfred, and 
 turned a piece of meat with a string at a cottager's 
 house. When the old woman came home, she 
 found a paper with an enclosure of money, and a 
 note written by the royal pencil : '* Five guineas 
 to buy a jack." It was not splendid, but it was 
 kind and worthy of Farmer George. One day, 
 when the king and queen were walking together, 
 they met a Uttle boy — they were always fond of 
 children, the good folks — and patted the little 
 white head. '' Whose little boy are you ?'' asks 
 the Windsor uniform. '^ I am the lung's beef- 
 eater's little boy," replied the child. On which 
 the king said, ^' Then kneel down, and kiss the 
 queen's hand." But the innocent ofispring of 
 the beefeater declined this treat. '' No," said he, 
 '* I won't kneel, for if I do, I shall spoil my new 
 breeches." The thrifty king ought to have 
 hugged him and knighted him on the spot. 
 
152 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 George's admirers wrote pages and pages of such 
 stories about him. One morning, before anybody 
 else was up, the king walked about Gloucester 
 town ; pushed over Molly the housemaid who was 
 scrubbing the doorsteps with her pail; ran up- 
 stairs and woke all the equerries in their bed- 
 rooms ; and then trotted do\m to the bridge, 
 where, by this time, a dozen of louts were 
 assembled. '' What ! is this Gloucester New 
 Bridge?" asked our gracious monarch; and the 
 people answered him, '^ Yes, your Majesty." 
 «« Why, then, my boys," said he, '^ let us have a 
 liuzzay!" After giving them which intellectual 
 gratification, he went home to breakfast. Our 
 fathers read these simple tales with fond pleasure ; 
 laughed at these very small jokes ; liked the old 
 man who poked his nose into every cottage ; who 
 lived on plain wholesome roast and boiled ; who 
 despised your French kickshaws ; who was a true 
 hearty old English gentleman. You may have 
 seen Gilray's famous print of him — in the old 
 wig, in the stout old hideous Windsor uniform — 
 as the King of Brobdingnag, peering at a little 
 Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst 
 in the other he has an opera-glass, through which 
 
GEOKGE THE THIRD. 153 
 
 he suiTeys the pigmy ? Our fathers chose to set 
 up George as the type of a great kmg ; and the 
 Httle GuUiver was the great Napoleon. We prided 
 ourselves on our prejudices; we blustered and 
 bragged with absurd vain-glory ; we dealt to our 
 enemy a monstrous injustice of contempt and 
 scorn ; we fought him with all weapons, mean as 
 v/ell as heroic. There was no lie we would not 
 believe ; no charge of crime which our furious 
 prejudice would not credit. I thought at one 
 time of making a collection of the lies which the 
 French had written against us, and we had pub- 
 lished against them during the war : it would be 
 a strange memorial of popular falsehood. 
 
 Their majesties were very sociable potentates : 
 and the Court Chronicler tells of numerous visits 
 vrhich they paid to their subjects, gentle and 
 simple : with whom they dined ; at whose great 
 country-houses they stopped ; or at whose poorer 
 lodgings they affably partook of tea and bread- 
 and-butter. Some of the great folks spent 
 enormous sums in entertaining their sovereigns. 
 As marks of special favour, the king and queen 
 sometimes stood as sponsors for the children of 
 the nobility. We find Lady Salisbury was so 
 
154 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 honoured in the year 1786 ; and in the year 1802, 
 Lady Chesterfield. The Court Neios relates how 
 her ladyship received their majesties on a state 
 bed ^' dressed with white satin and a profusion of 
 lace : the counterpane of white satin embroidered 
 , with gold, and the bed of crimson satin lined with 
 white." The child was first brought by the nurse 
 to the Marchioness of Bath, who presided as 
 chief nurse. Then the marchioness handed baby 
 to the queen. Then the queen handed the little 
 darhng to the Bishop of Norwich, the officiating 
 clergyman; and, the ceremony over, a cup of 
 caudle was presented by the earl to his majesty 
 on one knee, on a large gold waiter, placed on a 
 crimson velvet cushion. Misfortunes would occur 
 in these interesting genuflectory ceremonies of 
 royal worship. Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, 
 a very fat, pufiy man, in a most gorgeous court- 
 suit, had to kneel, Cumberland says, and was so 
 fat and so tight that he could not get up again. 
 '^ Kneel, sir, kneel !'' cried my lord in waiting to 
 a country mayor who had to read an address, but 
 who went on with his compliment standing. 
 '* Kneel, sir, kneel!" cries my lord, in dreadful 
 alarm. ^^ I can't!" says the mayor, turning 
 
GEORGE THE THIRD. 155 
 
 round ; ^^ don't you see I have got a wooden leg ?" 
 In the capital Burney Diary and Letters, the home 
 and court life of good old King George and good 
 old Queen Charlotte are presented at portentous 
 length. The king rose every morning at six : and 
 had two hours to himself. He thought it effemi- 
 nate to have a carpet in his bedroom. Shortly 
 before eight, the queen and the royal family were 
 always ready for him, and they proceeded to the 
 king's chapel in the castle. There were no fires 
 in the passages : the chapel was scarcely ahght ; 
 princesses, governesses, equerries grumbled and 
 caught cold : but cold or hot, it was their duty to 
 go : and, wet or dry, light or dark, the stout old 
 George was always in his place to say amen to the 
 chaplain. 
 
 The queen's character is represented in Burney 
 at full length. She was a sensible, most decorous 
 woman; a very grand lady on state occasions, 
 simple enough in ordinary life ; well read as times 
 went, and giving shrewd opinions about books; 
 stingy, but not unjust ; not generally unkind to 
 her dependants, but invincible in her notions of 
 etiquette, and quite angry if her people suftered 
 ill-health in her service. She gave Miss Burney 
 
156 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 a shabby pittance, and led the poor young woman 
 a Hfe which well-nigh killed her. She never 
 thought but that she was doing Burney the 
 greatest favour, in taking her from freedom, fame, 
 and competence, and killing her off with languor 
 in that dreary court. It was not dreary to her. 
 Had she been servant instead of mistress, her 
 spirit would never have broken down : she never 
 would have put a pin out of place, or been a 
 moment from her duty. She was not weak, and 
 she could not pardon those who were. She was 
 perfectly correct in life, and she hated poor sinners 
 with a rancour such as virtue sometimes has. She 
 must have had awful private trials of her own : 
 not merely with her children, but with her 
 husband, in those long days about which nobody 
 will ever know anything now ; when he w^as not 
 quite insane ; when his incessant tongue was 
 babbling folly, rage, persecution; and she had to 
 smile and be respectful and attentive under this 
 intolerable ennui. The queen bore all her duties 
 stoutly, as she expected others to bear them. At 
 a State christening, the lady who held the infant 
 was tired and looked imwell, and the Princess of 
 Wales asked permission for her to sit down. 
 
GEOKGE THE THIRD. 157 
 
 '^ Let her stand," said the queen, flicking the 
 snuff off her sleeve. She would have stood, the 
 resolute old woman, if she had had to hold the 
 child till his beard was grown. '^ I am seventy 
 years of age,'' the queen said, facing a mob of 
 ruffians who stopped her sedan: '' I have been 
 fifty years queen of England, and I never was 
 insulted before." Fearless, rigid, unforgiving 
 little queen ! I don't wonder that her sons 
 revolted from her. 
 
 Of all the figures in that large family group 
 which surrounds George and his queen, the 
 prettiest, I think, is the father's darling, the 
 Princess Amelia, pathetic for her beauty, her 
 sweetness, her early death, and for the extreme 
 passionate tenderness with which her father loved 
 her. This was his favourite amongst all the 
 children : of his sons, he loved the Duke of York 
 best. Burney tells a sad story of the poor old 
 man at Weymouth, and how eager he was to have 
 this darling son with him. The king's house was 
 not big enough to hold the prince ; and his father 
 had a portable house erected close to his own, 
 and at huge pains, so that his dear Frederick 
 should be near him. He clitns: on his arm all the 
 
158 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 time of his visit : talked to no one else ; had 
 talked of no one else for some time before. The 
 prince, so long expected, stayed but a single 
 night. He had business in London the next day, 
 he said. The dulness of the old king's court 
 stupefied York and the other big sons of 
 George III. They scared equerries and ladies, 
 frightened the modest little circle, with their 
 coarse spirits and loud talk. Of little comfort, 
 indeed, were the king's sons to the king. 
 
 But the pretty Amelia was his darling ; and the 
 little maiden, prattling and smiling in the fond 
 arms of that old father, is a sweet image to look 
 on. There is a family picture in Burney, which 
 a man must be very hard-hearted not to like. 
 She describes an after-dinner walk of the royal 
 family at Windsor: — '^ It was really a mighty 
 pretty procession," she says. '^ The little 
 princess, just turned of three years old, in a robe- 
 coat covered with fine muslin, a dressed close cap, 
 white gloves, and fan, walked on alone and first, 
 highly delighted with the parade, and turning 
 from side to side to see everybody as she passed ; 
 for all the terracers stand up against the walls, to 
 make a clear passage for the royal family the 
 
GEOEGE THE THIRD. 159 
 
 moment they come in sight. Then followed the 
 king and queen, no less delighted with the joy of 
 their little darling. The Princess Royal leaning 
 on Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, the Princess 
 Augusta holding by the Duchess of Ancaster, the 
 Princess Elizabeth led by Lady Charlotte Bertie, 
 followed. Office here takes place of rank/' says 
 Burney, — to explain how it was that Lady 
 E. Waldegrave, as lady of the bed-chamber, 
 walked before a duchess ; — '' General Bude, and 
 the Duke of Montague, and Major Price as 
 equerry, brought up the rear of the procession." 
 One sees it ; the band playing its old music, the 
 sun shining on the happy, loyal crowd ; and 
 lighting the ancient battlements, the rich elms, 
 and purple landscape, and bright greensward ; the 
 royal standard drooping from the great tower 
 yonder; as old George passes, followed by his 
 race, preceded by the charming infant, who 
 caresses the crowd with her innocent smiles. 
 
 " On sight of Mrs. Delany, the king instantly 
 stopped to speak to her; the queen, of course, 
 and the little princess, and all the rest, stood still. 
 They talked a good while with the sweet old lady, 
 during which time the king once or twice ad- 
 
160 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 dressed himself to me. I caught the queen's eye, 
 and saw, in it a Httle sm^prise, but by no means 
 any displeasm^e, to see me of the party. The 
 Httle princess went up to Mrs. Delany, of whom 
 she is very fond, and behaved like a little angel 
 to her. She then, with a look of inquiry and 
 recollection, came behind Mrs. Delany to look at 
 me. ^I am afraid,' said I, in a whisper, and 
 stooping down, ^your Eoyal Highness does not 
 remember me ? ' Her answer was an arch little 
 smile, and a nearer approach, with her lips pouted 
 out to kiss me." 
 
 The princess wrote verses herself, and there 
 are some pretty plaintive lines attributed to her, 
 which are more touching than better poetry : — 
 
 ** Untliinking, idle, wild, and young, 
 I laughed, and danced, and talked, and sung : 
 And, proud of health, of freedom vain, 
 Dreamed not of sorrov/, care, or pain; 
 Concluding, in those hours of glee, 
 That all the world was made for me. 
 
 ** But when the hour of trial came. 
 When sickness shook this trembling frame, 
 When folly's gay pursuits were o'er. 
 And I could sing and dance no more, 
 It then occurred, how sad 'twould be 
 Were this world only made for me.'* 
 
GEOKGE THE THIRD. 
 
 161 
 
 The poor soul quitted it — and ere yet she was 
 dead the agonized father was in such a state, that 
 the officers round about him were obKged to set 
 watchers over him, and from November, 1810, 
 George III. ceased to reign. All the world knows 
 the story of his malady : all history presents no 
 sadder figure than that of the old man, bhnd and 
 deprived of reason, wandering through the rooms 
 of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, 
 reviewing fancied troops, holding ghostly courts. 
 I have seen his picture as it was taken at this 
 time, hanging in the apartment of his daughter, 
 the Landgravine of Hesse Hombourg — amidst 
 books and Windsor furniture, and a hundred fond 
 reminiscences of her Enghsh home. The poor 
 old father is represented in a purple gown, his 
 snowy beard faUing over his breast — the star 
 of his famous Order still idly shining on it. He 
 was not only sightless : he became utterly deaf. 
 All light, all reason, all sound of human voices, 
 all the pleasures of this world of God, were taken 
 from him. Some slight lucid moments he had ;: 
 in one of which, the queen, desiring to see him„ 
 entered the room, and found him singing a hymn, 
 and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. 
 
 11 
 
1G2 THE FOUK GEORaES. 
 
 When lie liacl finished, he knelt down and prayed 
 aloud for her, and then for his family, and then 
 for the nation, concluding with a prayer for him- 
 self, that it might please God to avert his heavy 
 calamity from him, but if not, to give him resig- 
 nation to submit. He then burst into tears, and 
 his reason again fled. 
 
 What preacher need moralize on this story; 
 what words save the simplest are requisite to tell 
 it ? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of 
 such a misery smites me dov^n in submission 
 before the Euler of kings and men, the Monarch 
 Supreme over empires and republics, the inscru- 
 table Dispenser of life, death, happiness, victory. 
 ^' brothers," I said to those who heard me first 
 in America — ^'0 brothers! speaking the same 
 dear mother tongue — comrades ! enemies no 
 m.ore, let us take a mournful hand together as 
 we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce 
 to battle ! Low he lies to whom the proudest 
 used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than 
 the poorest : dead, whom millions prayed for in 
 vain. Driven off his throne; buJBfeted by rude 
 hands; with his children in revolt; the darling 
 of his old age killed before him untimely; our 
 
GEOPvGE THE THIRD. 
 
 163 
 
 Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries, 
 ^ Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little ! ' 
 
 * Vex not his gliost — oh ! let him pass — ^lie hates him 
 That would upon the rack of this tough world 
 Stretch him out longer!' 
 
 Hush ! strife and Quarrel, over the solemn grave ! 
 Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark 
 curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his 
 awful tragedy. 
 
 11 
 
 
IV-GEORGE THE FOURTE. 
 
167 
 
 GEORGE THE FOURTH. 
 
 
 N Twiss's 
 amusing 
 
 don, we 
 read how, 
 ]^^ on the 
 death of 
 the Duke 
 of York, 
 the old 
 chancellor 
 became 
 possessed 
 of a lock 
 of the 
 d efunct 
 prince's 
 
 hair; and so careful was he respecting the au- 
 thenticity of the rehc, that Bessy Eldon his wife 
 
168 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 sate in the room with the young man from 
 Hamlet's, who distributed the ringlet into sepa- 
 rate lockets, which each of the Eldon family 
 afterwards wore. You know how, when George IV. 
 came to Edinburgh, a better man than he went 
 on board the royal yacht to welcome the king 
 to his kingdom of Scotland, seized a goblet from 
 which his majesty had just drunk, vowed it 
 should remain for ever as an heirloom in his 
 family, clapped the precious glass in his pocket, 
 and sate down on it and broke it when he got 
 home. Suppose the good sheriff's prize unbroken 
 now at Abbotsford, should we not smile with 
 something like pity as we beheld it ? Suppose 
 one of those lockets of the no-Popery prince's 
 hair offered for sale at Christie's, quot libras e 
 duce summo invenies ? how many pounds would you 
 find for the illustrious duke ? Madame Tussaud 
 has got King George's coronation robes ; is there 
 any man now alive who would kiss the hem of 
 that trumpery ? He sleeps since thirty years : 
 do not any of you, who remember him, wonder 
 that you once respected and huzza'd and admired 
 him? 
 
 To make a portrait of him at first seemed a 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 169 
 
 matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, 
 his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under 
 it : with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could 
 at this very desk perform a recognizable likeness 
 of him. And yet after reading of him in scores 
 of volumes, hunting him through old magazines 
 and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there 
 at a public dinner, there at races and so forth, you 
 find you have nothing — nothing but a coat and wig 
 and a mask smiling below it — nothing but a great 
 simulacrum. His sire and grandsires were men. 
 One knows what they were like : what they 
 would do in given circumstances : that on 
 occasion they fought and demeaned themselves 
 like tough good soldiers. They had friends 
 whom they hked according to their natures ; 
 enemies whom they hated fiercely; passions, 
 and actions, and individualities of their own. 
 The sailor king who came after George was a 
 man : the Duke of York was a man, big, burly, 
 loud, jolly, cursing, courageous. But this George, 
 what was he ? I look through all his life, and 
 recognize but a bow and a grin. I try and take 
 him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, 
 stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star 
 
170 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 and blue ribbon, a pocket-handkerchief prodi- 
 giously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty brown 
 wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge 
 black stock, underwaistcoats, more underwaist- 
 coats, and then nothing. I know of no sentiment 
 that he ever distinctly uttered. Documents are 
 published under his name, but people wrote them 
 — private letters, but people spelt them. He 
 put a great George P. or George K. at the 
 bottom of the page and fancied he had written 
 the paper: some bookseller's clerk, some poor 
 author, some man did the work ; saw to the spell- 
 ing, cleaned up the slovenly sentences, and gave 
 the lax maudlin slipslop a sort of consistency. 
 He must have had an individuality : the dancing- 
 master whom he emulated, nay, surpassed — the 
 wig-maker who curled his toupee for him — the 
 tailor who cut his coats, had that. But, about 
 George, one can get at nothing actual. That 
 outside, I am certain, is pad and tailor's work ; 
 there may be something behind, but what ? We 
 cannot get at the character; no doubt never 
 shall. Will men of the future have nothing 
 better to do than to unswathe and interpret that 
 royal old mummy ? I own I once used to think 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 171 
 
 it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on 
 liim, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed 
 to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a 
 full field, and then to hunt the poor game. 
 
 On the 12th August, 1762, the forty-seventh 
 anniversary of the accession of the House of 
 Brunswick to the English throne, all the bells 
 in London pealed in gratulation, and announced 
 that an heir to George III. was born. Five days 
 afterwards the king was pleased to pass letters 
 patent under the great seal, creating H. K. H. 
 the Prince of Great Britain, Electoral Prince 
 of Brunswick Ltineburg, Duke of Cornwall and 
 Eothsay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Kenfrew^, 
 Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland, 
 Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester. 
 
 All the people at his birth thronged to see this 
 lovely child ; and behind a gilt china-screen 
 railing in St. James's Palace, in a cradle sur- 
 mounted by the three princely ostrich feathers, 
 the royal infant was laid to delight the eyes of the 
 lieges. Among the earliest instances of homage 
 paid to him, I read that '^ a curious Indian 
 bow and arrows were sent to the prince from his 
 father's faithful subjects in New York." He was 
 
172 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 fond of playing with these toys : an old states- 
 man, orator, and wit of his grandfather's and 
 great-grandfather's time, never tired of his 
 business, still eager in his old age to be well 
 at court, used to play with the little prince, and 
 pretend to fall down dead when the prince shot 
 at him with his toy bow and arrows — and get 
 up and fall down dead over and over again — to 
 the increased delight of the child. So that he 
 was flattered from his cradle upwards ; and before 
 his little feet could walk, statesmen and courtiers 
 were busy kissing them. 
 
 There is a pretty picture of the royal infant — 
 a beautiful buxom child — asleep in his mother's 
 lap ; who turns round and holds a finger to her 
 lip, as if she would bid the courtiers around 
 respect the baby's slumbers. From that day 
 imtil his decease, sixty-eight years after, I suppose 
 there were more pictures taken of that personage 
 than of any other human being who ever was 
 born and died — in every kind of uniform and 
 every possible court-dress — in long fair hair, with 
 powder, with and without a pig-tail — in every 
 conceivable cocked-hat — in dragoon uniform — in 
 Windsor uniform — in a field-marshal's clothes — 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 
 
 173 
 
 1780 
 
 1790, 
 
 The Regent. 
 
 The King. 
 
174 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 in a Scotch kilt and tartans, with dirk and 
 claymore (a stupendous figure) — in a frogged 
 frock-coat with a fur collar and tight breeches 
 and silk stockings — in wigs of every colour, fair, 
 brown, and black — in his famous coronation robes 
 finally, with which performance he was so much 
 in love that he distributed copies of the picture 
 to all the courts and British embassies in Europe, 
 and to numberless clubs, town-halls, and private 
 friends. I remember as a young man how almost 
 every dining-room had his portrait. 
 
 There is plenty of biographical tattle about 
 the prince's boyhood. It is told with wiiat 
 astonishing rapidity he learned all languages, 
 ancient and modem; how he rode beautifully, 
 sang charmingly, and played elegantly on the 
 violoncello. That he was beautiful was patent 
 to all eyes. He had a high spirit : and once, 
 when he had had a difi*erence with his father, 
 burst into the royal closet and called out, 
 *' Wilkes and liberty for ever!'' He was so 
 clever, that he confounded his very governors 
 in learning; and one of them. Lord Bruce, 
 having made a false quantity in quoting Greek, 
 the admirable young prince instantly corrected 
 
GEOEGE THE FOUETII. 175 
 
 him. Lord Bruce could not remain a governor 
 after this humiliation; resigned his office, and, 
 to soothe his feelings, was actually promoted to 
 be an earl ! It is the most wonderful reason for 
 promoting a man that ever I heard. Lord Bruce 
 was made an earl for a blunder in prosody ; and 
 Nelson was made a baron for the victory of the 
 Nile. 
 
 Lovers of long sums have added up the mil- 
 lions and millions which in the course of his bril- 
 liant existence this single prince consumed. Be- 
 sides his income of 50,000L, 70,000L, 100,000L, 
 120,000/. a-year, we read of three applications to 
 parliament : debts to the amount of 160,000/., 
 of 650,000/. ; besides mysterious foreign loans, 
 whereof he pocketed the proceeds. What did he 
 do for all this money ? Why was he to have it ? 
 If he had been a manufacturing town, or a popu- 
 lous rural district, or an army of five thousand 
 men, he would not have cost more. He, one 
 solitary stout man, who did not toil, nor spin, 
 nor fight,— what had any mortal done that he 
 should be pampered so ? 
 
 In 1784, when he was twenty-one years of age, 
 Carlton Palace was given to him, and furnished 
 
176 THE FOUE GEORGES. 
 
 by the nation with as much luxury as could be 
 devised. His pockets were filled with money : 
 he said it was not enough ; he flung it out of 
 window : he spent 10,000/. a-year for the coats 
 on his back. The nation gave him more money, 
 and more, and more. The sum is past counting. 
 He was a prince, most lovely to look on, and 
 christened Prince Florizel on his first appearance 
 in the world. That he was the handsomest prince 
 in the whole world was agreed by men, and alas ! 
 by many women. 
 
 I suppose he must have been very graceful. 
 There are so many testimonies to the charm of 
 his manner, that we must allow him great elegance 
 and powers of fascination. He, and the King of 
 France's brother, the Count d'Artois, a charming 
 young prince who danced deliciously on the tight- 
 rope — a poor old tottering exiled king, who asked 
 hospitality of King George's successor, and lived 
 awhile in the palace of Mary Stuart — divided in 
 their youth the title of first gentleman of Europe. 
 We in England of course gave the prize to our 
 gentleman. Until George's death the propriety of 
 that award was scarce questioned or the doubters 
 voted rebels and traitors. Only the other day I was 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 
 
 177 
 
 reading in the reprint of the dehghtful Nodes of 
 Christopher North. The health of THE KINO 
 is drunk in large capitals by the loyal Scotsman. 
 You would fancy him a hero, a sage, a statesman, 
 a pattern for kings and men. It was Walter 
 Scott who had that accident with the broken 
 glass I spoke of anon. He was the king's Scot- 
 tish champion, rallied all Scotland to him, made 
 loyalty the fashion, and laid about him fiercely 
 with his claymore upon all the prince's enemies. 
 The Brunswicks had no such defenders as those 
 two Jacobite commoners, old Sam Johnson the 
 Lichfield chapman's son, and Walter Scott, the 
 Edinburgh lawyer's. 
 
 Nature and circumstance had done their utmost 
 to prepare the prince for being spoiled: the 
 dreadful dulness of papa's court, its stupid amuse- 
 ments, its dreary occupations, the maddening 
 humdrum, the stifling sobriety of its routine, 
 would haye made a scapegrace of a much less 
 lively prince. All the big princes bolted from 
 that castle of ennui where old King George sat, 
 posting up his books and droning over his Handel ; 
 and old Queen Charlotte over her snuff and her 
 tambour-frame. Most of the sturdy, gallant sons 
 
 12 
 
178 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 settled clown after sowing their wild oats, and 
 became sober subjects of their father and brother 
 — not ill liked by the nation, which pardons 
 youthful irregularities readily enough, for the sake 
 of pluck, and unafifectedness, and good-humour. 
 
 The boy is father of the man. Our prince 
 signalized his entrance into the world by a feat 
 worthy of his future life. He invented a new 
 shoebuckle. It was an inch long and five inches 
 broad. ''It covered almost the whole instep, 
 reaching down to the ground on either side of 
 the foot.'' A sweet invention ! lovely and useful 
 as the prince on whose foot it sparkled. At his 
 first appearance at a court ball, we read that '' his 
 coat was pink silk, with white cufis ; his waist- 
 coat white silk, embroidered with various-coloured 
 foil, and adorned with a profusion of French 
 paste. And his hat w^as ornamented with two 
 rows of steel beads, five thousand in number, 
 with a button and loop of the same metal, and 
 cocked in a new miUtary style.'' What a Florizel ! 
 Do these details seem trivial ? They are the 
 grave incidents of his life. His biographers say 
 that when he commenced housekeeping in that 
 splendid new palace of his, the Prince of Wales 
 
GEORGE THE FOUKTII. 179 
 
 had some windy projects of encouraging literature, 
 science, and the arts; of having assembhes of 
 Hterary characters; and societies for the encou- 
 ragement of geography, astronomy, and botany. 
 Astronomy, geography, and botany ! Fiddle- 
 sticks ! French ballet-dancers, French cooks, 
 horse-jockeys, buffoons, procurers, tailors, boxers, 
 fencing-masters, china, jewel, and gimcrack mer- 
 chants — these w^ere his real companions. At 
 first he made a pretence of having Burke and 
 Pitt and Sheridan for his friends. But how could 
 such men be serious before such an empty scape- 
 grace as this lad ? Fox might talk dice with him, 
 and Sheridan wine ; but what else had these men 
 of genius in common with their tawdry young 
 host of Carlton House ? That fribble the leader 
 of such men as Fox and Burke ! That man's 
 opinions about the constitution, the India Bill, 
 justice to the Catholics — about any question 
 graver than the button for a waistcoat or the 
 sauce for a partridge — worth anything ! The 
 friendship between the prince and the Whig chiefs 
 was impossible. They were hypocrites in pre- 
 tending to respect him, and if he broke the hollow 
 compact between them, who shall blame him? 
 
 12—2 
 
180 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 His natural companions were dandies and para- 
 sites. He could talk to a tailor or a cook ; but, 
 as the equal of great statesmen, to set up a 
 creature, lazy, weak, indolent, besotted, of mon- 
 strous vanity, and levity incurable — it is absurd. 
 They thought to use him, and did for awhile; 
 but they must have known how timid he was; 
 how entirely heartless and treacherous, and have 
 expected his desertion. His next set of friends 
 were mere table companions, of whom he grew 
 tired too ; then we hear of him with a very few 
 select toadies, mere boys from school or the 
 Guards, whose sprightliness tickled the fancy of 
 the worn-out voluptuary. What matters what 
 friends he had ? He dropped all his friends ; he 
 never could have real friends. An heir to the 
 throne has flatterers, adventurers who hang about 
 him, ambitious men who use him ; but friendship 
 is denied him. 
 
 And women, I suppose, are as false and selfish 
 in their dealings with such a character as men. 
 Shall we take the Leporello part, flourish a cata- 
 logue of the conquests of this royal Don Juan, 
 and tell the names of the favourites to whom, 
 one after the other, George Prince flung his 
 
GEORGE THE FOUKTII. 181 
 
 pocket -handkercliief ? Wliat purpose would it 
 answer to say how Perdita was pursued, won, 
 deserted, and by whom succeeded ? What good 
 in knowing that he did actually marry Mrs. Fitz- 
 Herbert according to the rites of the Eoman 
 Catholic Church ; that her marriage settlements 
 have been seen in London ; that the names of 
 the witnesses to her marriage are known. This 
 sort of vice that we are now come to presents no 
 new or fleeting trait of manners. Debauchees, 
 dissolute, heartless, fickle, cowardly, have been 
 ever since the world began. This one had more 
 temptations than most, and so much may be said 
 in extenuation for him. 
 
 It was an unlucky thing for this doomed one, 
 and tending to lead him yet farther on the road 
 to the deuce, that, besides being lovely, so that 
 women were fascinated by him; and heir appa- 
 rent, so that all the world flattered him; he 
 should have a beautiful voice, which led him 
 ( directly in the way of drink : and thus all the 
 ' pleasant devils were coaxing on poor Florizel ; 
 desire, and idleness, and vanity, and drunkenness, 
 all clashing their merry cymbals and bidding him 
 come on. 
 
182 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 We first hear of his warbling sentimental 
 ditties under the walls of Kew Palace by the 
 moonlight banks of Thames, with Lord Viscount 
 Leporello keeping watch lest the music should be 
 disturbed. 
 
 Singing after dinner and supper was the uni- 
 versal fashion of the day. You may fancy all 
 England sounding with choruses, some ribald, 
 some harmless, but all occasioning the consump- 
 tion of a prodigious deal of fermented liquor. 
 
 ** The jolly muse her wmgs to try no frolic flights need take, 
 But round the bowl would dip and fly, like swallows round a 
 lake," 
 
 sang Morris in one of his gallant Anacreontics, to 
 which the prince many a time joined in chorus, 
 and of which the burden is, — 
 
 ** And that I think's a reason fair to diink and fill again." 
 
 This delightful boon companion of the prince's 
 found '^ a reason fair '' to forego filling and drink- 
 ing, saw the error of his ways, gave up the bowl 
 and chorus, and died retired and religious. The 
 prince's table no doubt was a very tempting one. 
 The wits came and did their utmost to amuse him. 
 It is wonderful how the spirits rise, the vat 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 183 
 
 brightens, the wine has an aroma, when a great 
 man is at the head of the table. Scott, the loyal 
 cavalier, the king's true liegeman, the very best 
 raconteur of his time, poured out with an endless 
 generosity his store of old-world learning, kind- 
 ness, and humour. Grattan contributed to it his 
 wondrous eloquence, fancy, feeling. Tom Moore 
 perched upon it for awhile, and piped his most 
 exquisite little love-tunes on it, flying away in a 
 twitter of indignation afterwards, and attacking 
 the prince with bill and claw. In such society, 
 no wonder the sitting w^as long, and the butler 
 tired of drawing corks. Eemember what the 
 usages of the time were, and that William Pitt, 
 coming to the House of Commons after having 
 drunk a bottle of port-wine at his own house, 
 would go into Bellamy's with Dundas, and help 
 finish a couple more. 
 
 You peruse volumes after volumes about our 
 prince, and find some half-dozen stock stories — 
 indeed not many more — common to all the 
 histories. He was good-natured ; an indolent, 
 voluptuous prince, not unkindly. One story, the 
 most favourable to him of all, perhaps, is that as 
 Prince Regent he was eager to hear all that could 
 
184 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 be said in behalf of prisoners condemned to death, 
 and anxious, if possible, to remit the capital sen- 
 tence. He was kind to his servants. There is a 
 story common to all the biographies, of Molly the 
 housemaid, who, when his household was to be 
 broken up, owing to some reforms which he tried 
 absurdly to practise, was discovered crying as she 
 dusted the chairs because she was to leave a 
 master who had a kind word for all his servants. 
 Another tale is that of a groom of the prince's 
 being discovered in corn and oat peculations, and 
 dismissed by the personage at the head of the 
 stables ; the prince had word of John's disgrace, 
 remonstrated with him very kindly, generously 
 reinstated him, and bade him promise to sin no 
 more — a promise which John kept. Another 
 story is very fondly told of the prince as a young 
 man hearing of an officer's family in distress, and 
 how he straightway borrowed six or eight hundred 
 pounds, put his long fair hair under his hat, and 
 so disguised carried the money to the starving 
 family. He sent money, too, to Sheridan on his 
 death-bed, and would have sent more had not 
 death ended the career of that man of genius. 
 Besides these, there are a few pretty speeches, 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 185 
 
 kind and graceful, to persons with whom he was 
 brought in contact. But he turned upon twenty 
 friends. He was fond and famihar with them one 
 day, and he passed them on the next without 
 recognition. He used them, Uked them, loved 
 them perhaps in his way, and then separated from 
 them. On Monday he kissed and fondled poor 
 Perdita, and on Tuesday he met her and did not 
 know her. On Wednesday he was very affectionate 
 with that wretched Brummell, and on Thursday 
 forgot him ; cheated him even out of a snuff-box 
 which he owed the poor dandy ; saw him years 
 afterwards in his downfall and poverty, when the 
 bankrupt Beau sent him another snuff-box with 
 some of the snuff he used to love, as a piteous 
 token of remembrance and submission, and the 
 king took the snuff, and ordered his horses and 
 drove on, and had not the grace to notice his old 
 companion, favourite, rival, enemy, superior. In 
 Wraxall there is some gossip about him. When 
 the charming, beautiful, generous Duchess of 
 Devonshire died — the lovely lady whom he used 
 to call his dearest duchess once, and pretend to 
 admire as all English society admired her — he 
 said, ^^ Then we have lost the best bred woman in 
 
186 THE FOUIl GEORGES. 
 
 England/' '^ Then we have lost the kmdest heart 
 in England," said noble Charles Fox. On ano- 
 ther occasion, when three noblemen were to 
 receive the Garter, saj^s Wraxall, '' A great per- 
 sonage observed that never did three men receive 
 the order in so characteristic a manner. The 
 Duke of A. advanced to the sovereign v/ith a 
 phlegmatic, cold, awkward air like a clown; 
 Lord B. came forward fawning and smiling like a 
 courtier; Lord C. presented himself easy, unem- 
 barrassed, like a gentleman!" These are the 
 stories one has to recall about the prince and 
 king — kindness to a housemaid, generosity to a 
 groom, criticism on a bow. There are no better 
 stories about him : they are mean and trivial, and 
 they characterize him. The great war of empires 
 and giants goes on. Day by day victories are 
 won and lost by the brave. Torn, smoky flags 
 and battered eagles are wrenched from the heroic 
 enemy and laid at his feet ; and he sits there on 
 his throne and smiles, and gives the guerdon of 
 * valour to the conqueror. He ! Elliston the actor, 
 when the Coronation was performed, in which he 
 took the principal part, used to fancy himself the 
 king, burst into tears, and hiccup a blessing on 
 
GEOEGE THE FOUHTII. 187 
 
 the people. I believe it is certain about George IV., 
 that he had heard so much of the war, knighted 
 so many people, and worn such a prodigious 
 quantity of marshal's uniforms, cocked-hats, 
 cock's feathers, scarlet and bullion in general, 
 that he actually fancied he had been present in 
 some campaigns, and, under the name of General 
 Brock, led a tremendous charge of the German 
 legion at Waterloo. 
 
 He is dead but thirty j^ears, and one asks how 
 a great society could have tolerated him ? Would 
 we bear him now ? In this quarter of a century, 
 what a silent revolution has been working ! how 
 it has separated us from old times and manners ! 
 How it has changed men themselves ! I can see 
 old gentlemen now among us, of perfect good 
 breeding, of quiet lives, with venerable grey 
 heads, fondling their grandchildren ; and look 
 at them, and wonder at what they were once. 
 That gentleman of the grand old school, when 
 he was in the 10th Hussars, and dined at the 
 prince's table, would fall under it night after 
 night. Night after night, that gentleman sate 
 at Brookes's or Kaggett's over the dice. If, in 
 the petulance of play or drink, that gentleman 
 
188 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 spoke a sharp word to his neighbour, he and the 
 other would infaUibly go out and try to shoot 
 each other the next morning. That gentleman 
 would drive his friend Richmond the black boxer 
 down to Moulsey, and hold his coat, and shout 
 and swear, and hurrah with delight, whilst the 
 black man was beating Dutch Sam the Jew. 
 That gentleman would take a manly pleasure in 
 pulling his own coat off, and thrashing a barge- 
 man in a street row. That gentleman has been 
 in a watchhouse. That gentleman, so exquisitely 
 poHte with ladies in a drawing-room, so loftily 
 courteous, if he talked now as he used among 
 men in his youth, would swear so as to make 
 your hair stand on end. I met lately a very old 
 German gentleman, who had served in our army 
 at the beginning of the century. Since then he 
 has lived on his own estate, but rarely meeting 
 with an Englishman, whose language — the lan- 
 guage of fifty years ago that is — he possesses 
 perfectly. When this highly bred old man began 
 to speak English to me, almost every other word 
 he uttered was an oath : as they used it (they 
 swore dreadfully in Flanders) with the Duke of 
 York before Valenciennes, or at Carlton House 
 
GEOEGE THE FOURTH. 189 
 
 over the supper and cards. Bead Byron's letters. 
 So accustomed is the j^oung man to oaths that he 
 employs them even in writing to his friends, and 
 swears by the post. Bead his account of the 
 doings of young men at Cambridge, of the ribald 
 professors, one of whom ^^ could pour out Greek 
 like a drunken Helot,'' and whose excesses sur- 
 passed even those of the young men. Bead 
 Matthews' description of the boyish lordhng's 
 housekeeping at Newstead, the skull-cup passed 
 round, the monk's dresses from the masquerade 
 warehouse, in which the young scapegraces used 
 to sit until dayhght, chanting appropriate songs 
 round their wine. ^' We come to breakfast at 
 two or three o'clock," Matthews says. ^' There 
 are gloves and foils for those who hke to amuse 
 themselves, or we fire pistols at a mark in the 
 hall, or we worry the wolf." A jolly life truly ! 
 The noble young owner of the mansion writes 
 about such affairs himself in letters to his friend, 
 Mr. John Jackson, pugilist, in London. 
 
 All the prince's time tells a similar strange 
 story of manners and pleasure. In Wraxall we 
 find the prime minister himself, the redoubted 
 William Pitt, engaged in high jinks with person- 
 
190 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 ages of no less importance than Lord Thurlow 
 the lord chancellor, and Mr. Dundas the treasurer 
 of the navy. Wraxall relates how these three 
 statesmen, returning after dinner from Addis- 
 combe, found a turnpike open and galloped 
 through it without paying the toll. The turn- 
 pike man, fancying they were highwaymen, fired 
 a blunderbuss after them, but missed them ; and 
 the poet sang, — 
 
 ** How as Pitt wandered darkling o'er the plain^ 
 His reason drown'd in Jenkinson's champagne, 
 A rustic's hand, but righteous fate withstood, 
 Had shed a premier's for a robber's blood." 
 
 Here we have the treasurer of the navy, the 
 lord high chancellor, and the prime minister, all 
 engaged in a most undoubted lark. In Eldon's 
 Memoirs, about the very same time, I read that 
 the bar loved wine, as well as the woolsack. Not 
 John Scott himself ; he was a good boy always ; 
 and though he loved port wine, loved his business 
 and his duty and his fees a great deal better. 
 
 He has a Northern Circuit story of those days, 
 about a party at the house of a certain Lawyer 
 Fawcett, who gave a dinner every year to the 
 counsel. 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 191 
 
 '^ On one occasion," related Lord Eldon, ^'I 
 heard Lee say, ^ I cannot leave Fawcett's wine. 
 Mind, Davenport, you will go home immediately 
 after dinner, to read the brief in that cause that 
 we have to conduct to-morrow.' " 
 
 " ' Not I,' said Davenport. ' Leave my dinner 
 and my wine to read a brief ! No, no, Lee ; that 
 won't do.' 
 
 '^ ' Then,' said Lee, ' what is to be done ? who 
 else is employed ? ' 
 
 ^' Davenport. — ' Oh ! young Scott.' 
 
 *' Lee. — ^ Oh ! he must go. Mr. Scott, you 
 must go home immediately, and make yourself 
 acquainted with that cause, before our consul- 
 tation this evening.' 
 
 '' This was very hard upon me ; but I did go, 
 and there was an attorney from Cumberland, and 
 one from Northumberland, and I do not know 
 how many other persons. Pretty late, in came 
 Jack Lee, as drunk as he could be. 
 
 ***I cannot consult to-night; I must go to 
 bed,' he exclaimed, and away he went. Then 
 came Sir Thomas Davenport. 
 
 ^''We cannot have a consultation to-night, 
 Mr. Wordsworth ' (Wordsworth, I think, was 
 
192 THE FOUK GEORGES. 
 
 the name ; it was a Cumberland name) , shouted 
 Davenport. 'Don't you see how drunk Mr. Scott 
 is ? it is impossible to consult.' Poor me ! who 
 had scarce had any dinner, and lost all my wine 
 — I was so drunk that I could not consult ! Well, 
 a verdict was given against us, and it was all 
 owing to Lawyer Fawcett's dinner. We moved 
 for a new trial ; and I must say, for the honour 
 of the bar, that those two gentlemen, Jack Lee 
 and Sir Thomas Davenport, paid all the expenses 
 between them of the first trial. It is the only 
 instance I ever knew, but they did. We moved 
 for a new trial (on the ground, I suppose, of 
 the counsel not being in their senses) , and it was 
 granted. When it came on, the following year, 
 the judge rose and said, — 
 
 '' ' Gentlemen, did any of you dine with 
 Lawyer Fawcett yesterday? for, if you did, I 
 will not hear this cause till next year.' 
 
 '' There was great laughter. We gained the 
 cause that time." 
 
 On another occasion, at Lancaster, where poor 
 Bozzy must needs be going the Northern Circuit, 
 " we found him," says Mr. Scott, '' lying upon 
 the pavement inebriated. We subscribed a guinea 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 193 
 
 at supper for him, and a half-crown for his clerk '' 
 — (no doubt there was a large bar, and that 
 Scott's joke did not cost him much), — ''and 
 sent him, when he waked next morning, a brief, 
 with instructions to move for what we denomi- 
 nated the writ of quare adhcesit pavimerito ? with 
 observations duly calculated to induce him to 
 think that it required great learning to explain 
 the necessity of granting it, to the judge before 
 whom he was to move." Boswell sent all round 
 the town to attorneys for books, that might 
 enable him to distinguish himself — but in vain. 
 He moved, however, for the writ, making the best 
 use he could of the observations in the brief. 
 The judge was perfectly astonished, and the 
 audience amazed. The judge said, ''I never 
 heard of such a writ — what can it be that adheres 
 pavimento ? Are any of you gentlemen at the bar 
 able to explain this ? '' 
 
 The bar laughed. At last one of them said, — 
 '' My lord, Mr. Boswell last night adhcesit pavi- 
 mento. There was no moving him for some time. 
 At last he was carried to bed, and he has been 
 dreaming about himself and the pavement." 
 The canny old gentleman rehshes these jokes. 
 
 13 
 
194 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 When the Bishop of Lincoln was moving from 
 the deanery of St. PauFs, he says he asked a 
 learned friend of his, by name Will Hay, how he 
 should move some especially fine claret, about 
 which he was anxious. 
 
 *'Pray, my lord bishop,'' says Hay, ''how 
 much of the wine have you ?'' 
 
 The bishop said six dozen. 
 
 '^'If that is all,'' Hay answered, ''you have but 
 to ask me six times to dinner, and I Avill carry it 
 all away myself." 
 
 There were giants in those days ; but this joke 
 about wine is not so fearful as one perpetrated by 
 Orator Thelwall, in the heat of the French Eevo- 
 lution, ten years later, over a frothing pot of 
 porter. He blew the head off, and said, " This is 
 the way I would serve all kings." 
 
 Now we come to yet higher personages, and 
 find their doings recorded in the blushing pages 
 of timid little Miss Burney's Memoirs. She repre- 
 sents a prince of the blood in quite a royal con- 
 dition. The loudness, the bigness, boisterousness, 
 creaking boots and rattling oaths, of the young 
 princes, appeared to have frightened the prim 
 household of Windsor, and set all the tea-cups 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH, 195 
 
 twittering on the tray. On the night of a ball 
 and birthday, when one of the pretty, kind prin- 
 cesses was to come out, it was agreed that her 
 brother. Prince William Henry, should dance the 
 opening minuet with her, and he came to visit 
 the household at their dinner. 
 
 ''At dinner, Mrs. Schwellenberg presided, 
 attired magnificently ; Miss Goldsworthy, Mrs. 
 Stanforth, Messrs. Du Luc and Stanhope, dined 
 with us; and while we were still eating fruit, 
 the Duke of Clarence entered. 
 
 ''He was just risen from the Idng's table, and 
 waiting for his equipage to go home and prepare 
 for the ball. To give you an idea of the energy 
 of his royal highnesses language, I ought to set 
 apart an objection to writing, or rather intimating, 
 certain forcible words, and beg leave to show you 
 in genuine colours a royal sailor. 
 
 "We all rose, of course, upon his entrance, 
 and the two gentlemen placed themselves behind 
 their chairs, while the footmen left the room. 
 But he ordered us all to sit down, and called the 
 men back to hand about some wine. He was in 
 exceeding high spirits, and in the utmost good 
 humour. He placed himself at the head of the 
 
 13—2 
 
196 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 table, next Mrs. Schwellenberg, and looked 
 remarkably well, gay, and full of sport and mis- 
 chief; yet clever withal, as well as comical. 
 
 '' * Well, this is the first day I have ever dined 
 with the king at St. James's on his birthday. 
 Pray, have you all drunk his majesty's health V 
 
 '' ' No, your royal highness; your royal high- 
 ness might make dem do dat,' said Mrs. Schwel- 
 lenberg. 
 
 '^ ' Oh, by , I will! Here, you (to the 
 
 footman), bring champagne ; I'll drink the king's 
 health again, if I die for it. Yes, I have done it 
 pretty well already; so has the king, I promise 
 you ! I beheve his majesty was never taken such 
 good care of before; we have kept his spirits 
 up, I promise you; we have enabled him to go 
 through his fatigues; and I should have done 
 more still, but for the ball and Mary; — I have 
 promised to dance with Mary. I must keep sober 
 for Mary.' " 
 
 Indefatigable Miss Bumey continues for a dozen 
 pages reporting H.E.H.'s conversation, and indi- 
 cating, with a humour not unworthy of the clever 
 little author of Evelina, the increasing state of 
 excitement of the young sailor prince, who drank 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 197 
 
 more and more champagne, stopped old Mrs. 
 Schwellenberg's remonstrances by giving the old 
 lady a kiss, and telling her to hold her potato- 
 trap, and who did not ''keep sober for Mary." 
 Mary had to find another partner that night, for 
 the royal William Henry could not keep his 
 legs. 
 
 Will you have a picture of the amusements 
 of another royal prince ? It is the Duke of York, 
 the blundering general, the beloved commander- 
 in-chief of the army, the brother with whom 
 George IV. had had many a midnight carouse, 
 and who continued his habits of pleasure almost 
 till death seized his stout body. 
 
 In Ptickler Muskau's Letters, that German 
 prince describes a bout with H.R.H., who in his 
 best time was such a powerful toper that '' six 
 bottles of claret after dinner scarce made a per- 
 ceptible change in his countenance.'* 
 
 'M remember," says Ptickler, ''that one even- 
 
 , ing, — indeed, it was past midnight, — he took 
 
 ' some of his guests, among whom were the 
 
 Austrian ambassador. Count Meervelt, Count 
 
 Beroldingen, and myself, into his beautiful 
 
 armoury. We tried to swing several Turkish 
 
198 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 sabres, but none of u& had a very firm grasp ; 
 whence it happened that the duke and Meervelt 
 both scratched themselves with a sort of straight 
 Indian sword so as to draw blood. Meervelt then 
 wished to try if the sword cut as well as a 
 Damascus, and attempted to cut through one of 
 the wax candles that stood on the table. The 
 experiment answered so ill, that both the candles, 
 candlesticks and all, fell to the ground and were 
 extinguished. While we were groping in the dark 
 and trying to find the door, the duke's aide-de- 
 camp stammered out m great agitation, * By G — , 
 sir, I remember the sword is poisoned ! ' 
 
 '*You may conceive the agreeable feelings of 
 the wounded at this intelligence ! Happily, on 
 further examination, it appeared that claret, and 
 not poison, was at the bottom of the colonel's 
 exclamation." 
 
 And now I have one more story of the baccha- 
 nalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the 
 very highest personage of the realm, the great 
 Prince Eegent, all play parts. The feast took 
 place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was de- 
 scribed to me by a gentleman who was present at 
 the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 199 
 
 Fox's jolly associates, there figures a great noble- 
 man, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of 
 Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table 
 exploits. He had quarrelled v/ith the prince, like 
 the rest of the Whigs ; but a sort of reconcilia- 
 tion had taken place ; and now, being a very old 
 man, the prince invited him to dine and sleep at 
 the Pavilion, and the old duke drove over from 
 his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage 
 of grey horses, still remembered in Sussex. 
 
 The Prince of Wales had concocted with his 
 royal brothers a notable scheme for making the 
 old man drunk. Every person at table was 
 enjoined to drink wine with the duke — a challenge 
 which the old toper did not refase. He soon 
 began to see that there was a conspiracy against 
 him; he drank glass for glass; he overthrew 
 many of the brave. At last the First Gentleman 
 of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of 
 the royal brothers filled a great glass for the 
 duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink. 
 **Now^,'' says he, ^^I will have my carriage, and 
 go home.'' The prince urged upon hini his pre- 
 vious promise to sleep under the roof where he 
 had been so generously entertained. '*No,"he 
 
200 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 said, he had had enough of such hospitahty* 
 A trap had been set for him ; he would leave 
 the place at once and never enter its doors 
 more. 
 
 The carriage was called, and came ; but, in the 
 half-hour's interval, the liquor had proved too 
 potent for the old man; his host's generous 
 purpose was answered, and the duke's old grey 
 head lay stupefied on the table. Nevertheless, 
 when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered 
 to it as well as he could, and stumbling in, bade 
 the postilions drive to Arundel. They drove him 
 for half an hour round and round the Pavilion 
 lawn; the poor old man fancied he was going 
 home. When he awoke that morning he was 
 in bed at the prince's hideous house at Brighton. 
 You may see the place now for sixpence : they 
 have fiddlers there every day; and sometimes 
 bufibons and mountebanks hire the Kiding House 
 and do their tricks and tumbhng there. The 
 trees are still there, and the gravel walks round 
 which the poor old sinner was trotted. I can 
 fancy the flushed faces of the royal princes as 
 they support themselves at the portico pillars, 
 and look on at old Norfolk's disgrace ; but I can't 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 201 
 
 fancy how the man who perpetrated it continued 
 to be called a gentleman. 
 
 From drinking, the pleased Muse now turns to 
 gambling, of which in his youth our prince was 
 a great practitioner. He was a famous pigeon 
 for the play-men ; they lived upon him. Egalite 
 Orleans, it was believed, punished him severely. 
 A noble lord, whom we shall call the Marquis of 
 Steyne, is said to have mulcted him in immense 
 sums. He frequented the clubs, where play was 
 then almost universal ; and, as it was known his 
 debts of honour were sacred, whilst he was 
 gambling Jews waited outside to purchase his 
 notes of hand. His transactions on the turf 
 were unlucky as well as discreditable : though 
 I believe he, and his jockey, and his horse 
 Escape, were all innocent in that affair which 
 created so much scandal. 
 
 Arthur's, Almack's, Bootless, and White's were 
 the chief clubs of the young men of fashion. 
 There was play at all, and decayed noblemen and 
 broken-down senators fleeced the unwary there. 
 In Selwyn's Letters we find Carlisle, Devonshire, 
 Coventry, Queensberry, all undergoing the pro- 
 bation. Charles Fox, a dreadful gambler, was 
 
202 THE rOUK GEORGES. 
 
 cheated in very late times — lost 200,000/. at play. 
 Gibbon tells of his playing for twenty-two hours 
 at a sitting, and losing 500/. an hour. That 
 indomitable punter said that the greatest pleasure 
 in life, after winning, was losing. What hours, 
 vfhat nights, what health did he waste over the 
 devil's books ! I was going to say what peace of 
 mind ; but he took his losses very philosophically. 
 After an awful night's play, and the enjoyment 
 of the greatest pleasure but one in life, he was 
 found on a sofa tranquilly reading an Eclogue of 
 Virgil. 
 
 Play survived long after the wild prince and 
 Fox had given up the dice-box. The dandies 
 continued it. Byron, Brummell — hov^ many 
 names could I mention of men of the world who 
 have suffered by it ! In 1837 occurred a famous 
 trial whict pretty nigh put an end to gambling in 
 England. A peer of the realm was found cheat- 
 ing at whist, and repeatedly seen to practise the 
 trick called sauter la coupe. His friends at the 
 clubs saw him cheat, and went on playing with 
 him. One greenhorn, who had discovered his 
 foul play, asked an old hand what he should do. 
 ''Do,'' said the Mammon of Unrighteousness, 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 203 
 
 *' Bach Mm, you fool.'' The best efforts were 
 made to screen him. People wrote hhn anony- 
 mous letters and warned hhn ; but he would 
 cheat, and they were obliged to find him out. 
 Since that day, when my lord' s shame was made 
 public, the gaming-table has lost all its splendour. 
 Shabby Jews and blacklegs prowl about race- 
 courses and tavern parlours, and now and then 
 inveigle silly yokels with greasy packs of cards 
 in railroad cars ; but Play is a deposed goddess, 
 her worshippers bankrupt and her table in rags. 
 
 So is another famous British institution gone 
 to decay — the King : the noble practice of British 
 boxing, which in my youth was still almost 
 flourishing. 
 
 The prince, in his early days, was a great 
 patron of this national sport, as his grand-unclo 
 CuUoden Cumberland had been before him ; but, 
 being present at a fight at Brighton, where one 
 of the combatants was killed, the prince pen- 
 sioned the boxer's widow, and declared he never 
 would attend another battle. ^'But, neverthe- 
 less," — I read in the noble language of Pierce 
 Egan (whose smaller work on Pugilism I have 
 the honour to possess) , — ''he thought it a manly 
 
204 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 and decided English feature, which ought not 
 to be destroyed. His majesty had a drawing of the 
 sporting characters in the Fives' Court placed in 
 his boudoir, to remind him of his former attach- 
 ment and support of true courage ; and when any 
 fight of note occurred after he was king, accounts 
 of it were read to him by his desire." That 
 gives one a fine image of a king taking his 
 recreation ; — at ease in a royal dressing-gown ; — 
 too majestic to read himself, ordering the prime 
 minister to read him accounts of battles : how 
 Cribb punched Molyneux's eye, or Jack Eandall 
 thrashed the Game Chicken. 
 
 Where my prince did actually distinguish him- 
 self was in driving. He drove once in four hours 
 and a half from Brighton to Carlton House — - 
 fifty-six miles. All the young men of that day 
 were fond of that sport. But the fashion of 
 rapid driving deserted England; and, I believe^ 
 trotted over to America. Where are the amuse- 
 ments of our youth ? I hear of no gambling 
 now but amongst obscure ruffians ; of no boxing 
 but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary 
 four-in-hand still drove round the parks in Lon- 
 don last year; but that charioteer must soon 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 205 
 
 disappear. He was very old ; lie was attired after 
 the fashion of the year 1825. He must drive to 
 the banks of Styx ere long, — where the ferry-boat 
 waits to carry him over to the defunct revellers, ' 
 who boxed and gambled and drank and drove 
 with King George. 
 
 The bravery of the Brunswicks, that all the 
 family must have it, that George possessed it, are 
 points which all English writers have agreed to 
 admit; and yet I cannot see how George IV. 
 should have been endowed with this quahty. 
 Swaddled in feather-beds all his Ufe, lazy, obese, 
 perpetually eating and drinking, his education 
 was quite unlike that of his tough old progenitors. 
 His grandsires had confronted hardship and war, 
 and ridden up and fired their pistols undaunted 
 into the face of death. His father had conquered 
 luxury, and overcome indolence. Here was one 
 who never resisted any temptation ; never had a 
 desire but he coddled and pampered it ; if ever he 
 had any nerve, frittered it away among cooks, and 
 tailors, and barbers, and furnituremongers, and 
 opera dancers. What muscle would not grow 
 flaccid in such a Kfe — a Kfe that was never strung 
 up to any action — an endless Capua without any 
 
206 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 campaign — all fiddling, and flowers, and feasting, 
 and flattery, and folly ? When George III. was 
 pressed by the Catholic question and the India 
 Bill, he said he would retire to Hanover rather 
 than yield upon either point ; and he would have 
 done what he said. But, before yielding, he was 
 determined to fight his ministers and parhament ; 
 and he did, and he beat them. The time came 
 when George IV. was pressed too upon the 
 Catholic claims : the cautious Peel had shpped 
 over to that side ; the grim old Wellington had 
 joined it ; and Peel tells us, in his Memoirs, what 
 was the conduct of the king. He at first refused 
 to submit ; whereupon Peel and the duke ofi'ered 
 their resignations, which their gracious master 
 accepted. He did these two gentlemen the 
 honour, Peel says, to kiss them both when they 
 went away. (Fancy old Arthur's grim counte- 
 nance and eagle beak as the monarch kisses it !) 
 When they were gone he sent after them, surren- 
 dered, and wrote to them a letter begging them to 
 remain in office, and allowing them to have their 
 way. Then his majesty had a meeting v/ith Eldon, 
 which is related at curious length in the latter' s 
 Memoirs. He told Eldon what was not true about 
 
GEOKGE THE FOURTH. 207 
 
 his interview with the new Catholic converts; 
 utterly misled the old ex-chancellor ; cried, whim- 
 pered, fell on his neck, and kissed him too. We 
 know old Eldon's ot\ti tears were pumped very 
 freely. Did these two fountains gush together ? 
 I can't fancy a behaviour more unmanly, imbecile, 
 pitiable. This a defender of the faith! This a 
 chief in the crisis of a great nation ! This an 
 inheritor of the courage of the Georges ! 
 
 Many of my hearers no doubt have journeyed 
 to the pretty old town of Brunswick, in company 
 with that most worthy, prudent, and polite gentle- 
 man, the Earl of Malmesbury, and fetched away 
 Princess Caroline for her longing husband, the 
 Prince of Wales. Old Queen Charlotte would have 
 had her eldest son marry a niece of her own, that 
 famous Louisa of StreUtz, afterwards Queen of 
 Prussia, and who shares with Marie Antoinette in 
 the last age the sad pre-eminence of beauty and 
 misfortune. But George III. had a niece at 
 Brunswick: she was a richer princess than her 
 Serene Highness of Strelitz : — in fine, the Princess 
 Caroline was selected to marry the heir to the 
 English throne. We follow my Lord Malmesbury 
 in quest of her ; we are introduced to her illus- 
 
208 THE FOUK GEORGES. 
 
 trious father and royal mother; we witness the 
 balls and fetes of the old court ; we are presented 
 to the princess herself, with her fair hair, her 
 blue eyes, and her impertinent shoulders — a lively, 
 bouncing, romping princess, who takes the advice 
 of her courtly English mentor most generously 
 and kindly. We can be present at her very 
 toilette, if we Kke, regarding which, and for very 
 good reasons, the British courtier implores her to 
 be particular. What a strange court ! What a 
 queer privacy of morals and manners do we look 
 into ! Shall we regard it as preachers and 
 moralists, and cry. Woe, against the open vice and 
 selfishness and corruption ; or look at it as we do 
 at the king in the pantomime, with his pantomime 
 wife, and pantomime courtiers, whose big heads 
 he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pan- 
 tomime sceptre, whom he orders to prison under 
 the guard of his pantomime beefeaters, as he sits 
 down to dine on his pantomime pudding ? It 
 is grave, it is sad, it is theme most curious 
 for moral and political speculation; it is mon- 
 strous, grotesque, laughable, with its prodi- 
 gious littlenesses, etiquettes, ceremonials, sham 
 moralities; it is as serious as a sermon, and 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 209 
 
 as absurd and outrageous as Punch's puppet- 
 show. 
 
 Malmesbury tells us of the private life of the 
 duke, Princess CaroHne's father, who was to die, 
 like his warlike son, in arms against the French ; 
 presents us to his courtiers, his favourite ; his 
 duchess, George III.'s sister, a grim old princess, 
 who took the British envoy aside, and told him 
 wicked old stories of wicked old dead people and 
 times ; who came to England afterwards when 
 her nephew was regent, and lived in a shabby 
 famished lodging, old, and dingy, and deserted, 
 and grotesque, but somehow royal. And we go 
 with him to the duke to demand the princess's 
 hand in form, and we hear the Brunswick guns 
 fire their adieux of salute, as H.K.H. the Princess 
 of Wales departs in the frost and snow ; and we 
 visit the domains of the Prince Bishop of Osna- 
 burg — the Duke of York of our early time ; and 
 we dodge about from the French revolutionists, 
 whose ragged legions are pouring over Holland 
 and Germany, and gaily trampHng down the old 
 world to the tune of ga ira ; and we take 
 shipping at Slade, and we land at Greenwich, 
 where the princess's ladies and the prince's 
 
 14 
 
210 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 ladies are in waiting to receive her royal high- 
 ness. 
 
 What a history follows ! Arrived in London, 
 the bridegroom hastened eagerly to receive his 
 bride. When she was first presented to him, 
 Lord Malmesbury says she very properly attempted 
 to kneel. He raised her gracefully enough, 
 embraced her, and turning round to me, said, — 
 
 *' Harris, I am not well ; pray get me a glass 
 of brandy," 
 
 I said, ^' Sir, had you not better have a glass 
 of water ? " 
 
 Upon which, much out of humour, he said, 
 with an oath, ^' No ; I will go to the queen." 
 
 What could be expected from a wedding vdiich 
 had such a beginning — from such a bridegroom 
 and such a bride ? I am not going to carry you 
 through the scandal of that story, or follow the 
 poor princess through all her vagaries ; her balls 
 and her dances, her travels to Jerusalem and 
 Naples, her jigs, and her junketings, and her 
 tears. As I read her trial in history, I vote she is 
 not guilty. I don't say it is an impartial verdict; 
 but as one reads her story the heart bleeds for the 
 kindly, generous, outraged creature. If wrong 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 
 
 211 
 
 there be, let it lie at his door who wickedly thrust 
 her from it. Spite of her follies, the great, 
 hearty people of England loved, and protected, 
 
 The PrincG and Princess of Wales, 
 
 and pitied her. ^' God bless you ! we will bring 
 your husband back to you/' said a mechanic one 
 day, as she told Lady Charlotte Bury with tears 
 
 1-1—2 
 
212 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 streaming down her cheeks. They could not 
 bring that husband back ; they could not cleanse 
 that selfish heart. Was hers the only one he had 
 wounded ? Steeped in selfishness, impotent for 
 faithful attachment and manly enduring love, — 
 had it not survived remorse, was it not accustomed 
 to desertion ? 
 
 Malmesbury gives us the beginning of the mar- 
 riage story ; — how the prince reeled into chapel 
 to be married ; how he hiccupped out his vows of 
 fidelity — you know how he kept them ; how he 
 pursued the woman whom he had married; to 
 what a state he brought her ; with what blows he 
 struck her; with what malignity he pursued her; 
 what his treatment of his daughter was; and 
 what his own life. He the first gentleman of 
 Europe \ There is no stronger satire on the 
 proud English society of that day, than that they 
 admired George. 
 
 No, thank God, we can tell of better gentle- 
 men ; and whilst our eyes turn away, shocked, 
 from this monstrous image of pride, vanity, weak- 
 ness, they may see in that England over which 
 the last George pretended to reign, some who 
 merit indeed the title of gentlemen, some who 
 
GEOKGE THE FOURTH. 213 
 
 make our hearts beat when we hear their names, 
 and whose memory we fondly salute when that of 
 yonder imperial manikin is tumbled into obUvion. 
 I will take men of my own profession of letters. 
 I will take Walter Scott, who loved the king, and 
 who was his sword and buckler, and championed 
 him like that brave Highlander in his own story, 
 who fights round his craven chief. What a good 
 gentleman ! What a friendly soul, what a gene- 
 rous hand, what an amiable life was that of the 
 noble Sir Walter ! I will take another man of 
 letters, whose life I admire even more, — an Eng- 
 lish worthy, doing his duty for fifty noble years of 
 labour, day by day storing up learning, day by 
 day working for scant wages, most charitable out 
 of his small means, bravely faithful to the calHng 
 which he had chosen, refusing to turn from his 
 path for popular praise or princes' favour; — I 
 mean Bobert Southey. We have left his old 
 poUtical landmarks miles and miles behind ; we 
 protest against his dogmatism ; nay, we begin to 
 forget it and his pohtics : but I hope his life will 
 not be forgotten, for it is sublime in its simplicity, 
 its energy, its honour, its aff'ection. In the com- 
 bat between Time and Thalaba, I suspect the 
 
214 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 former destroyer has conquered. Kehama's curse 
 frightens very feAV readers now; but Southey's 
 private letters are worth piles of epics, and are 
 sure to last among us, as long as kind hearts like 
 to sjmpathize with goodness and purity, and love 
 and upright life. '* If your feelings are like 
 mine,'' he writes to his wife, '' I will not go to 
 Lisbon without you, or I will stay at home, and 
 not part from you. For though not unhappy 
 when away, still without you I am not happy. 
 For your sake, as well as my o^vn and Httle 
 Edith's, I will not consent to any separation ; the 
 growth of a year's love between her and me, if it 
 please God she should live, is a thing too delight- 
 ful in itself, and too valuable in its consequences, 
 to be given up for any light inconvenience on 
 your part or mine. ... On these things we 
 "will talk at leisure ; only, dear, dear Edith, toe 
 mitst not part!'' ■'■'' 
 
 This was a poor literary gentleman. The First 
 Gentleman in Europe had a wife and daughter 
 too. Did he love therh so ? Was he faithful to 
 them ? Did he sacrifice ease for them, or show 
 them the sacred examples of religion and honour ? 
 Heaven gave the Great EngHsh Prodigal no such 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 215 
 
 good fortune. Peel proposed to make a baronet 
 of Southey; and to this advancement the king 
 agreed. The poet nobly rejected the offered 
 promotion. 
 
 '' I have/' he wrote, '^ a pension of 200/. a 
 year, conferred upon me by the good offices of my 
 old friend C. Wynn, and I have the laureateship. 
 The salary of the latter was immediately appro- 
 priated, as far as it went, to a life insm-ance for 
 3,000Z., which, with an earlier insurance, is the 
 sole provision I have made for my family. All 
 beyond must be derived from my own industry. 
 Writing for a livelihood, a livelihood is all that I 
 have gained; for, having also something better 
 in view, and never, therefore, having courted 
 popularity, noi written for the mere sake of gain, 
 it has not been possible for me to layby anything. 
 Last year, for the first time in my life, I was pro- 
 vided with a year's expenditure beforehand. This 
 exposition may show how unbecoming and unwise 
 it w^ould be to accept the rank which, so greatly 
 to my honour, you have solicited for me." 
 
 How noble his poverty is, compared to the 
 v/ealth of his master ! His acceptance even of a 
 pension w^as made the object of his opponents' 
 
216 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 satire : but think of the merit and modesty of 
 this State pensioner; and that other enormous 
 drawer of pubhc money, who receives 100,000Z. 
 a year, and comes to Parhament with a request 
 for 650,000L more! 
 
 Another true knight of those days was Cuth- 
 bert CoUingwood ; and I think, since heaven 
 made gentlemen, there is no record of a better 
 one than that. Of brighter deeds, I grant you, 
 we may read performed by others ; but where of 
 a nobler, kinder, more beautiful Hfe of duty, of a 
 gentler, truer heart ? Beyond dazzle of success 
 and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred 
 and a hundred times higher, the sublime purity of 
 CoUingwood's gentle glory. His heroism stirs 
 British hearts when we recall it. His love, and 
 goodness, and piety make one thrill with happy 
 emotion. As one reads of him and his great com- 
 rade going into the victory with which their names 
 are immortally connected, how the old EngHsh 
 word comes up, and that old English feeling of 
 what I should Uke to call Christian honour! 
 What gentlemen they were, what great hearts 
 they had! ''We can, my dear Coll,'' writes 
 Nelson to him, ''have no little jealousies; we 
 
GEOKGE THE FOURTH. 217 
 
 have only one great object in yiew, — that of 
 meeting the enemy, and getting a glorious peace 
 for our country," At Trafalgar, when the Roijal 
 Sovereign was pressing alone into the midst of the 
 combined fleets. Lord Nelson said to Captain 
 Blackwood : '^ See how that noble fellow, Colling- 
 wood, takes his ship into action! How I envy 
 him!" The very same throb and impulse of 
 heroic generosity was beating in CoUingwood's 
 honest bosom. As he led into the fight, he said : 
 *' What would Nelson give to be here ! " 
 
 After the action of the 1st of June, he writes : — 
 *'We cruised for a few days, like disappointed 
 people looking for what they could not find, until 
 the morning of little Saralis birthday, between eight 
 and nine o'clock, when the French fleet of twenty- 
 five sale of the hne, was discovered to windward. 
 We chased them, and they bore down within 
 about five miles of us. The night was spent in 
 watching and preparation for the succeeding day ; 
 and many a blessing did I send forth to my 
 Sarah, lest I should never bless her more. At 
 dawn, we made our approach on the enemy, then 
 drew up, dressed our ranks, and it was about 
 eight when the admiral made the signal for each 
 
218 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 ship to engage her opponent, and bring her to 
 close action ; and then down we went under a 
 crowd of sail, and in a manner that would have 
 animated the coldest heart, and struck terror into 
 the most intrepid enemy. The ship w^e were to 
 engage was two ahead of the French admiral, so 
 we had to go through his fire and that of two ships 
 next to him, and received all their broadsides two 
 or three times, before we fired a gun. It was 
 then near ten o'clock. I observed to the admiral, 
 that about that time our wives w^ere going to 
 church, but that I thought the peal we should 
 ring about the Frenchman's ears would outdo 
 their parish bells.'' 
 
 There are no words to tell what the heart feels 
 in reading the simple phrases of such a hero. 
 Here is victory and courage, but love sublimer 
 and superior. Here is a Christian soldier spend- 
 ing the night before battle in watching and pre- 
 paring for the succeeding day, thinking of his 
 dearest home, and sending many blessings forth 
 to his Sarah, '^lest he should never bless her 
 more." Who would not say Amen to his sup- 
 plication ? It was a benediction to his country — 
 the prayer of that intrepid loving heart. 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 219 
 
 We have spoken of a good soldier and good 
 men of letters as specimens of English gentlemen 
 of the age just past : may we not also — many of 
 my elder hearers, I am sure, have read, and 
 fondly remember his delightful story — speak of a 
 good divine, and mention Eeginald Heber as one 
 of the best of English gentlemen ? The charm- 
 ing poet, the happy possessor of all sorts of 
 gifts and accomplishments, birth, wit, fame, high 
 character, competence — he was the beloved parish 
 priest in his ow^n home of Hoderel, '^ counselling 
 his people in their troubles, advising them in 
 their difficulties, comforting them in distress, 
 kneeling often at their sick beds at the hazard 
 of his own life ; exhorting, encouraging where 
 there was need ; where there was strife the peace- 
 maker; where there was want the free giver/' 
 
 When the Indian bishopric was offered to him 
 he refused at first; but after communing with 
 himself (and committing his case to the quarter 
 whither such pious men are wont to carry their 
 doubts), he withdrew his refusal, and prepared 
 himself for his mission and to leave his beloved 
 parish. ''Little children, love one another, and 
 forgive one another,'' were the last sacred words 
 
220 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 he said to his weeping people. He parted with 
 them, knowing, perhaps, he should see them no 
 more. Like those other good men of whom we 
 have just spoken, love and duty were his life's 
 aim. Happy he, happy they who were so glo- 
 riously faithful to both ! He writes to his wife 
 those charming lines on his journey : — 
 
 ** If thou, my love, wert by my side, my babies at my knee, 
 How gladly would our pinnace glide o'er Gunga's mimic sea ! 
 
 I miss thee at the dawning gray, when, on our deck reclined. 
 In careless ease my limbs I lay and woo the cooler wind. 
 
 I miss thee when by Gunga's stream my twilight steps I guide ; 
 But most beneath the lamp's pale beam I miss thee by my 
 side. 
 
 I spread my books, my pencil try, the lingering noon to cheer ; 
 But miss thy kind approving eye, thy meek attentive ear. 
 
 But when of mom and eve the star beholds me on my knee, 
 I feel, though thou art distant far, thy prayers ascend for me. 
 
 Then on ! then on ! where duty leads my course be onward 
 
 still,— 
 O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads, o'er bleak Almorah's 
 
 hiU. 
 
 That course nor Delhi's kingly gates, nor wild Malwah detain. 
 For sweet the bliss us both awaits by yonder western main. 
 
 Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say, across the dark 
 
 blue sea: 
 But ne'er were hearts so blithe and gay as there shall meet 
 
 in thee ! " 
 
GEOIUIE THE FOUETH. 221 
 
 Ib it not Ck>IIiiigwood and Sarah, and Sontliej 
 and Edith? His affection is part of his life. 
 What were life without it ? Withont Ioto, I can 
 fiincy no gentleman. 
 
 How tonching is a remark Heber makes in his 
 Travels through Indian that on iaqniring of the 
 natives at a town, which of the goTemors of India 
 stood highest in the opinion of the people, he 
 found that, though Lord Wellesley axd Warren 
 Hastings were honoured as the two greatest men 
 who had ever ruled this part of the world, the 
 people spoke with chief affection of Judge Cleave- 
 land, who had died, aged twenty-nine, in 1784. 
 The people haye built a monument over him, and 
 still hold a religious feast in his memory. So 
 does his own countiy still tend with a heart's 
 r^ard the memory of the gentle Heber. 
 
 And deaveland died in 1784, and is still loyed 
 by the heathen, is he ? Why, that year 1784 was 
 remarkable in the life of our Mend the First 
 Gentleman of Europe. Do you not know that he 
 was twenty-one in that year, and opened Carlton 
 House with a grand ball to the nobility and 
 genby, and doubtless wore that lovely pink coat 
 which we have described. I was eager to read 
 
222 THE FOUR GEOKGES. 
 
 about the ball, and looked to the old magazines 
 for information. The entertainment took place 
 on the 10th February. In the European Maga- 
 zine of March, 1784, I came straightway 
 upon it : — 
 
 ^' The alterations at Carlton House being 
 finished, we lay before our readers a description 
 of the state apartments as they appeared on the 
 10th instant, when H.E.H. gave a grand ball to 
 
 the principal nobility and gentry. • 
 
 The entrance to the state room fills the mind 
 with an inexpressible idea of greatness and 
 splendour. 
 
 *' The state chair is of a gold frame, covered 
 wdth crimson damask ; on each corner of the feet 
 is a lion's head, expressive of fortitude and 
 strength ; the feet of the chair have serpents 
 twining round them, to denote wisdom. Facing 
 the throne, appears the helmet of Minerva; and 
 over the windows, glory is represented by Saint 
 George with a superb gloria. 
 
 ^* But the saloon may be styled the chef 
 d'ceuvre, and in every ornament discovers great 
 invention. It is hung with a figured lemon satin. 
 The window-curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the 
 
GEORGE THE FOUKTH. 223 
 
 same colour. The ceiling is ornamented with 
 emblematical paintings, representing the Graces 
 and Muses, together with Jupiter, Mercury, 
 Apollo, and Paris. Two ormolu chandeUers are 
 placed here. It is impossible by expression to do 
 justice to the extraordinary workmanship, as well 
 as design, of the ornaments. They each consist 
 of a palm, branching out in five directions for the 
 reception of lights. A beautiful figure of a rural 
 nymph is represented entwining the stems of the 
 tree with wreaths of flowers. In the centre of 
 the room is a rich chandelier. To see this 
 apartment dans son plus heau jour, it should be 
 viewed in the glass over the chimney-piece. The 
 range of apartments from the saloon to the ball- 
 room, when the doors are open, formed one of 
 the grandest spectacles that ever was beheld." 
 
 In the Gentleman s Magazine, for the very same 
 month and year — March, 1784 — is an account of 
 another festival, in which another great gentle- 
 man of English extraction is represented as taking 
 a principal share : — 
 
 *^ According to order, H. E. the Commander- 
 in-Chief was admitted to a public audience of 
 Congress ; and, being seated, the president, after 
 
224 THE FOUE GEORGES. 
 
 a pause, informed him that the United States 
 assembled were ready to receive his communica- 
 tions. Whereupon he arose, and spoke as 
 follows : — 
 
 '' 'Mr. President, — The great events on which 
 my resignation depended having at length taken 
 place, I present myself before Congress to sur- 
 render into their hands the trust committed to 
 me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from 
 the service of my country. 
 
 *' ' Happy in the confirmation of our indepen- 
 dence and sovereignty, I resign the appointment 
 I accepted with diffidence ; which, however, was 
 superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our 
 cause, the support of the supreme power of the 
 nation, and the patronage of Heaven. I close 
 this last act of my official life, by commending 
 the interests of our dearest country to the pro- 
 tection of Almighty God, and those who have the 
 superintendence of them to His holy keeping. 
 Having finished the work assigned me, I retire 
 from the great theatre of action; and, bidding 
 an affectionate farewell to this august body, under 
 whose orders I have so long acted, I here oiBfer 
 my commission and take my leave of the employ- 
 
GEORGE THE FOURTH. 225 
 
 ments of my public life/ To which the president 
 replied : — 
 
 '' ' Sir, having defended the standard of liberty 
 in the New World, having taught a lesson useful 
 to those who inflict and those who feel oppres- 
 sion, you retire with the blessings of your fellow- 
 citizens; though the glory of your virtues will 
 not terminate with your mihtary command, but 
 will descend to remotest ages.' '' 
 
 Which was the most splendid spectacle ever 
 witnessed; — the opening feast of Prince George 
 in London, or the resignation of Washington ? 
 Which is the noble character for after ages to 
 admire ; — yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, 
 or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a 
 life of spotless honour, a purity unreproached, a 
 courage indomitable, and a consummate victory ? 
 Which of these is the true gentleman ? What 
 is it to be a gentleman ? Is it to have lofty 
 aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour 
 virgin ; to have the esteem of your fellow-citizens, 
 and the love of your fireside; to bear good 
 fortune meekly.; to suffer evil with constancy; 
 and through evil or good to maintain truth 
 always ? Show me the happy man whose life 
 
 16 
 
226 THE FOUR GEORGES. 
 
 exhibits these quahties, and him we will salute as 
 gentleman, whatever his rank may be ; show me 
 the prince who possesses them, and he may be 
 sure of our love and loyalty. The heart of Britain 
 still beats kindly for George III., — not because 
 he was wise and just, but because he was pure in 
 life, honest in intent, and because according to 
 his lights he worshipped heaven. I think we 
 acknowledge in the inheritrix of his sceptre, a 
 wiser rule, and a life as honourable and pure; 
 and I am sure the future painter of our manners 
 will pay a willing allegiance to that good life, 
 and be loyal to the memory of that unsullied 
 virtue. 
 
 THE END. 
 

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