GEORGE prime minister, and Fox and North the secretaries of state as its real heads. _ _ This attempt to impose upon him a ministry which he (lisliked made the king very angry. But the new cabinet had a large majority in the House of Commons, and the only chance of resisting it lay in an appeal to the country against the House of Commons. Such an appeal was not likely to be responded to unless the ministers discredited themselves with the nation. George III. therefore waited his time. Though a coalition between men bitterly opposed to one another in all political principles and drawn together by nothing but love of ofiice was in itself discreditable, it needed some more positive cause of dissatisfaction to arouse the constituencies, which were by no means so ready to in- terfere in political disputes at that time as they are now. Such dissatisfaction was given by the India Bill, drawn 11p by Burke. As soon as it had passed through the Commons the king hastened to procure its rejection in the House of Lords by his personal intervention with the Peers. He authorized Lord Temple to declare in his name that he would count any peer who voted for the Bill as his enemy. On December 17, 1783, the Bill was thrown out. The next day ministers were dismissed. William Pitt became prime minister. After some weeks’ struggle with a con- stantly decreasing majority in the Commons, the king dis- solved parliament 011 March 25, 1784. The country rallied round the crown and the young minister, and Pitt was firmly established in office. Since the publication of a letter from Mr Orde in Lord E. F itzmaurice’s Life of ;S'/zelburne (iii. 393) there can be no reasonable. doubt that Pitt not only took advantage of the king’s intervention in the Lords, but was cognizant of the intrigue before it was actually carried out. It was upon him, too, that the weight of reconciling the country to an administration formed u11der such circumstances lay. How he acquitted himself under the task, what were his great achievements, and what his still greater unaccom- plished projects should be told in connexion with his name rather than with that of the king. The general result, so far as George III. was concerned, was that to all outward appearance he had won the great battle of his life. It was he who was to appoint the prime minister, not any clique resting on a parliamentary support. But the circumstances under which the victory was won were such as to place the constitution in a position very different from that in which it would have been if the victory had been gained earlier in the reign. Intrigue there was indeed in 1783 and 1784 as there had been twenty years before. Parliamentary sup- port was eonciliated by Pitt by the grant of royal favours as it had been in the days of Bute. The actual blow was struck by a most questionable message to individual peers. ’»ut the n1ain result of the whole political situation was that George III. had gone a long way towards disentangling the reality of parliamentary government from its accidents. His ministry finally stood because it had appealed to the constituencies against their representatives. At the present day it has properly become a constitutional axiom that no such appeal should be made by the crown itself. But it may reasonably be doubted whether any one but the king was at that time capable of making the appeal. Lord Shel- burne, the leader of the ministry expelled by the coalition, was unpopular in the country, and the younger Pitt had not had time to make his great abilities known beyond a limited circle. The real question for the constitutional historian to settle is not whether under ordinary circum- stances a king is the proper person to place himself really as well as nominally at the head of the government; but whether under the special circumstances which existed in 1783 it was not better that the king should call upon the people to support him, than that government should be left III 425 in the hands of men who rested their power on close boroughs and the dispensation of patronage, without looking beyond the walls of the House of Commons for support. Of the glories of Pitt’s ministry this is not the place to write. That the king gained credit by them far beyond his own deserts is beyond a doubt. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that his own example of domestic propriety did much to strengthen the position of his minister. It is true that that life was unsufferably dull. N o gleams of literary or artistic taste lightened it up. The dependants of the court became inured to dull routine un- chequered by loving sympathy. The sons of the house- hold were driven by the sheer weariness of such an existence into the coarsest profligacy. But all this was not visible from a distance. The tide of moral and religious improvement which had set in in England since the days of Wesley brought popularity to a king who was faithful to his wife, in the same way that the tide of manu- facturing industry and scientific progress brought popu- larity to the minister who in some measure translated into practice the principles of the Wectltk of 1Vatz'ons. Nor were there wanting subjects of importance beyond the circle of politics in which George III. showed a lively interest. The voyages of discovery which made known so large a part of the islands and coasts of the Pacific Ocean received from him a warm support. In the early days of the Royal Academy, its finances were strengthened by liberal grants from the privy purse. His favourite pur- suit, however, was farming. When Arthur Young was issuing his Annals of A_q-ric2:.lt2zrc, he was supplied with information by the king, under the assumed name of Mr Ralph Robinson, relating to a farm at Petersham. The life of the king was suddenly clouded over. Early in his reign, in 1765, he had been out of health, and it is now known—what was studiously concealed at the time— that symptoms of mental aberration were even then to be perceived. In October 1788 he was again out of health, and in the beginning of the following month his insanity was beyond a doubt. Whilst Pitt and Fox were contending in the House of Commons over the terms on which the regency should be committed to the prince of Wales, the king was a helpless victim to the ignorance of physicians and the brutalities of his servants. At last Dr Willis, who had made himself a name by prescribing gentleness instead of rigour i11 the treatment of the insane, was called in. Under his more humane management the king rapidly re- covered. Before the end of February 1789 he was able to write to Pitt thanking him for his warm support of his interests during his illness. On April 23 he went in person to St Paul’s to return thanks for his recovery. The popular enthusiasm which burst forth around St Paul’s was but a foretaste of a popularity far more u11iver— sal. The French Revolution frightened the great Whig land- owners till they made their peace with the king. Those who thought that the true basis of government was aristocratical were now of one mind with those who thought that the true basis of government was monarchical ,' and these two classes were joined by a far larger multitude which had no political ideas whatever, but which had a moral horror of the guillo- tine. As Elizabeth had once been the symbol of resistance to Spain, George was now the symbol of resistance to France. He was not, however, more than the symbol. He allowed Pitt to levy taxes and incur debt, to launch armies to defeat, and to prosecute the English imitators of French revolutionary courses. At last, however, after the Union with Irela11d was accomplished, he learned that Pitt was planning a scheme to relieve the Catholics from the disabilities under which they laboured. The plan was revealed to him by the chancellor, Lord Loughborough, a selfish and intriguing politician who had served all parties
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