A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 1

A History of the Four Georges and of William IV.

Volume III.

by Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy.

CHAPTER XLII.

"SUPREME IRONIC PROCESSION."

For six and forty years England had been ruled by German princes. One Elector of Hanover named George had been succeeded by another Elector of Hanover named George, and George the First and George the Second, George the father and George the son, resembled each other in being by nature German rather than English, and by inclination Electors of Hanover rather than Kings of England. Against each of them a Stuart prince had raised a standard and an army. George the First had his James Francis Edward, who called himself James the Third, and whom his opponents called the Pretender, by a translation which gave an injurious signification to the French word "pretendant." George the Second had his Charles Edward, the Young Pretender who a generation later led an invading army well into England before he had to turn and fly for his life. A very different condition of things awaited the successor of George the Second. George the Second's grandson was an English prince and an Englishman. He was born in England; his father was born in England; his native tongue was the English tongue; and if he was Elector of Hanover, that seemed an accident.

The t.i.tle was as unimportant and trivial to the King of {2} England as his t.i.tle of King of France was unreal and theatrical. The remnant of the Jacobites could not with truth call the heir to the throne a foreigner, and they could not in reason hope to make such a demonstration in arms against him as they had made against his grandfather and his great-grandfather. The young King came to a much safer throne under much more favorable auspices than either of the two monarchs, his kinsmen and his namesakes, who had gone before him.

[Sidenote: 1760--Accession of George the Third]

The young King heard the first formal news of his accession to the throne from the lips of no less stately a personage than the Great Commoner himself--the foremost Englishman then alive. George the Third, as he then actually was, had received at Kew Palace some messages which told him that his grandfather was sinking fast, that he was dying, that he was dead. George resolved to start for London. On his way, and not far from Kew, he was met by a coach and six, which, from the blue and silver liveries, he knew to be that of Mr. Pitt.

George received the congratulations of his great minister--the great Minister whom, as it was soon to appear, he understood so little and esteemed so poorly. Then Pitt, turning his horses' heads, followed his sovereign into London. Never perhaps in English history was a young king welcomed on his accession by so great a minister. Among the many auspicious conditions which surrounded the early days of George the Third's reign not the least auspicious was the presence of such a bulwark to the throne and to the realm. For the name of Pitt was now feared and honored in every civilized country in the world. It had become synonymous with the triumphs and the greatness of England. Pitt was the greatest War Minister England had yet known. He was the first English statesman who ill.u.s.trated in his own person the difference between a War Minister and a Minister of War.

Truly this journey of the King and the Prime Minister from Kew to London was what George Meredith calls a "supreme ironic procession, with laughter of G.o.ds in the background." The ignorant, unwise young King led the {3} way, the greatest living statesman in England followed after. One can hardly imagine a procession more supremely ironic.

Almost all the whole range of human intellect was stretched out and exhausted by the living contrast between the King who went first and the Minister who meekly went second. Pitt had made for young George the Third a great empire, which it was the work of George the Third not long after to destroy, so far as its destruction could be compa.s.sed by the stupidity of a man. Pitt had made the name of England a power all over the civilized world. Rome at her greatest, Spain at her greatest, could hardly have surpa.s.sed the strength and the fame of England as Pitt had re-made it. George, from the very first, felt a sort of coldness towards his superb Minister. He had all the vague pervading jealousy which dulness naturally shows to genius. It was a displeasure to him from the first that Pitt should have made England so great, because the work was the inspiration of the subject and not of the sovereign. No one can know for certain what thoughts were filling the mind of George as he rode to London that day in front of William Pitt.

But it may fairly be a.s.sumed that he was not particularly sorry for the death of his grandfather, and that he was pleasing his spirit with the idea that he would soon emanc.i.p.ate himself from Mr. Pitt. "Be a king, George," his mother used to say to him. The unsifted youth was determined, if he could, to be a king.

At the time of his accession George was in his twenty-third year. He was a decidedly personable young Prince. He had the large regular features of his race, the warm complexion of good health, and a vigorous const.i.tution, keen attractive eyes, and a firm, full mouth.

He was tall and strongly made, and carried himself with a carriage that was dignified or stiff according to the interpretation of those who observed it. Many of the courtly ladies thought him extremely handsome, were eagerly gracious to him, did their best to thrust themselves upon his attention, and received, it would seem, very little notice in return for their pains. If George showed himself {4} indifferent and even ungallant to his enthusiastic admirers, his brother Edward was of a different disposition. But though Edward, like his brother, was an agreeable-looking youth, and keen to win favor in women's eyes, he found himself like Benedict: n.o.body marked him because he was not the heir to the throne.

In some ill.u.s.trated histories of the reign two portraits of George the Third are placed in immediate and pathetic contrast. The one portrait represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign--alert, young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast. So might a young king look called in the flower of his age to the control of a great country, pleased, confident, and courageous. The other picture shows how the King looked in the sixtieth year of his reign. The face is old and wrinkled and weary; the straggling white locks escape from beneath a fur-trimmed cap; the bowed body is wrapped in a fur-trimmed robe. The time of two generations of men lay between the young king and the old; the longest reign then known to English history, the longest and the most eventful.

[Sidenote: 1760--George's qualifications for King]

George the Third started with many advantages over his predecessors of the same name. He was an Englishman. He spoke the English language.

It was his sincere wish to be above all things English. He honestly loved English ways. He had not the faintest desire to start a seraglio in England. He had no German mistresses. He did not care about fat women. He was devoted to his mother--perhaps a good deal too devoted, but even the excess of devotion might have been pardonable in the public opinion of England; certainly it was only his own weakness and perversity that made it for a while not pardonable. He was of the country squire's order of mind; his tastes were wholly those of the stolid, well-intentioned, bucolic country squire. He would probably have been a very respectable and successful sovereign if only he had not been plagued by the ambition to be a king.

It is curious to remember that the accession of George {5} the Third was generally and joyfully welcomed. A hopeful people, having endured with increasing dislike two sovereigns of the House of Hanover, were quite prepared to believe that a third prince was rich in all regal qualities; in all public and private virtues. It would, perhaps, have been unreasonable on the part of any dispa.s.sionate observer of public affairs to antic.i.p.ate that a third George would make a worse monarch than his namesakes and immediate predecessors. The dispa.s.sionate observer might have maintained that there were limits to kingly misgovernment in a kingdom endowed with a Const.i.tution and blessed with a measure of Parliamentary representation, and that those limits had been fairly reached by the two German princes who ruled reluctantly enough over the fortunes of England. This same dispa.s.sionate observer might reasonably, a.s.suming him to possess familiar knowledge of certain facts, have hazarded the prediction that George the Third would be a better king than his grandfather and his great-grandfather. He was certainly a better man. There was so much of a basis whereupon to build a hope of better things. The profligacy of his ancestors had not apparently vitiated his blood and judgment. His young life had been a pure life. He was in that way a pattern to princes. He had been, which was rare with his race, a good son. He was to be--and there was no more rare quality in one of his stock--a good husband, a good father. He was in his way a good friend to his friends. He was sincerely desirous to prove himself a good king to his people.

The youth of George the Third had pa.s.sed under somewhat agitated conditions. George the Second's straight-forward hatred for his son's wife opened a great gulf between the Court and Leicester House, which no true courtier made any effort to bridge. While the young Prince knew, in consequence, little or nothing of the atmosphere of St.

James's or the temper of those who breathed that atmosphere, attempts were not wanting to sunder him from the influence of his mother. Some of the n.o.blemen and clergymen to whom the early instruction of the young {6} Prince was entrusted labored with a persistency which would have been admirable in some other cause to sever him not merely from all his father's friends but even from his father's wife. There was indeed a time when their efforts almost succeeded in alienating the young Prince from his mother. The wildest charges of Jacobitism were brought against the immediate servants of the Princess, charges which those who made them wholly failed to substantiate. The endeavor to remove the Prince from the tutelage of his mother was abandoned. The education of the Prince was committed to more sympathetic care. The change had its advantage in keeping George in the wholesome atmosphere of Leicester House instead of exposing him to the temptations of a profligate Court. It had its disadvantages in leaving him entirely under the influence of a man to whose guidance, counsel, and authority the Princess Dowager absolutely submitted herself.

[Sidenote: 1760--Lord Bute]

Observers of the lighter sort are pleased to insist upon the trifles which have the most momentous influence upon the fortunes of peoples and the fates of empires. A famous and facile French playwright derived the downfall of a favorite and of a political revolution from the spilling of a gla.s.s of water. There are times when the temptation to pursue this thread of fancy is very great. Suppose, for instance, it had not chanced to rain on a certain day at Clifden, when a cricket match was being played in which Frederick, Prince of Wales, happened to be interested. A fretted Prince would not have had to retire to his tent like Achilles, would not have insisted on a game of whist to cheer his humor. There would have been no difficulty in forming a rubber.

There would have been no need to seek for a fourth hand. No wistful gentleman-in-attendance seeking the desirable would have had to ask the aid of a strange n.o.bleman perched in an apothecary's chariot. Had this strange n.o.bleman not been so sought and found, had the apothecary not been wealthy enough to keep a chariot, and friendly enough to offer a poor Scotch gentleman a seat in it, it is possible that the {7} American Colonies might yet form portion and parcel of the British Empire, that Chatham's splendid dreams might have become still more splendid realities, that the name of Wilkes might never have emerged from an obscurity of debauch to a.s.sociation with the name of liberty.

For the n.o.bleman who made the fourth hand in the Prince of Wales's rubber was unfortunately a man of agreeable address and engaging manners, manners that pleased infinitely the Prince of Wales, and cemented a friends.h.i.+p most disastrous in its consequences to England, to the English people, and to an English king. The name of the engaging n.o.bleman was Lord Bute.

At the time of this memorable game of whist Lord Bute was thirty-six years old. He was well educated, well read, tall of body, pleasing of countenance, quick in intelligence, and curious in disposition. These qualities won the heart of the Prince of Wales, and lifted the young Scotch n.o.bleman from poverty and obscurity to prominence and favor.

The Prince appointed Bute a Lord of the Bedchamber and welcomed him to his most intimate friends.h.i.+p. The death of the Prince of Wales two years later had no disastrous effect upon the rising fortunes of the favorite. The influence which Bute had exercised over the mind of Frederick he exercised over the mind of Frederick's wife and over the mind of Frederick's heir. Scandal whispered, a.s.serted, insisted then and has insisted ever since, that the influence which Lord Bute exercised over the Princess of Wales was not merely a mental influence.

How far scandal was right or wrong there is no means, there probably never will be any means, of knowing. Lord Bute's defenders point to his conspicuous affection for his wife, Edward Wortley Montagu's only daughter, in contravention of the scandal. Undoubtedly Bute was a good husband and a good father. Whether the scandal was justified or not, the fact that it existed, that it was widely blown abroad and very generally believed, was enough. As far as the popularity of the Princess was concerned it might as well have been justified. For years no caricature was so popular as that which displayed the Boot and the {8} Petticoat, the ironic popular symbols of Lord Bute and the Princess.

By whatever means Lord Bute gained his influence over the Princess of Wales, he undoubtedly possessed the influence and used it with disastrous effect. He moulded the feeble intelligence of the young Prince George; he guided his thoughts, directed his studies in statecraft, and was to all intents and purposes the governor of the young Prince's person. The young Prince could hardly have had a worse adviser. Bute was a man of many merits, but his defects were in the highest degree dangerous in a person who had somehow become possessed of almost absolute power. In the obscurity of a private life, the man who had borne poverty with dignity at an age when poverty was peculiarly galling to one of his station might have earned the esteem of his immediate fellows. In the exaltation of a great if an unauthorized rule, and later in the authority of an important public office, his defects were fatal to his fame and to the fortunes of those who accepted his sway. For nearly ten years, from the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, to the death of George the Second, Bute was all-powerful in his influence over the mother of the future King and over the future King himself. When the young Prince came to the throne Lord Bute did not immediately a.s.sume ostensible authority. He remained the confidential adviser of the young King until 1761. In 1761 he took office, a.s.suming the Secretarys.h.i.+p of State resigned by Lord Holdernesse. From a secretarys.h.i.+p to the place of Prime Minister was but a step, and a step soon taken. Although he did not occupy office very long, he held it long enough to become perhaps the most unpopular Prime Minister England has ever had.

[Sidenote: 1760--Hannah Lightfoot and Lady Sarah Lennox]

The youth of George the Third was starred with a strange romance. The full truth of the story of Hannah Lightfoot will probably never be known. What is known is sufficiently romantic without the additions of legend. Hannah Lightfoot was a beautiful Quaker girl, the daughter of a decent tradesman in Wapping. a.s.sociation with the family of an uncle, a linendraper, who lived near the {9} Court, brought the girl into the fas.h.i.+onable part of the town. The young Prince saw her by accident somehow, somewhere, in the early part of 1754, and fell in love with her. From that moment the girl disappears from certain knowledge, and legend busies itself with her name. It is a.s.serted that she was actually married to the young Prince; that William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, was present at the marriage; that she bore the Prince several children. Other versions have it that she was married as a mere form to a man named Axford, who immediately left her, and that after this marriage she lived with the Prince. She is supposed to have died in a secluded villa in Hackney. It is said that not only the wife of George the Third but the wife of George the Fourth believed that the marriage had taken place. We must not attach too much importance to a story which in itself is so very unlikely. It is in the last degree improbable that a statesman like Pitt would have lent himself to so singular a proceeding. Even if an enamoured young Prince were prepared to sanction his affections by a marriage, he would scarcely have found an a.s.sistant in the ablest politician of the age.

The story of the Axford marriage is far more probable. If Hannah Lightfoot had been married to George she would have been Queen of England, for there was no Royal Marriage Act in those days.

Another and more famous romance is a.s.sociated with the youth of George the Third. Lady Sarah Lennox, the youngest daughter of the second Duke of Richmond, was one of the most beautiful women of her time. The writers of the day rave about her, describe her as "an angel," as lovelier than any Magdalen by Correggio. When she was only seventeen years old her beauty attracted the young King, who soon made no secret of his devotion to her. The new pa.s.sion divided the Court into two camps. The House of Lennox was eager to bring about a marriage, which was not then obstructed by the law. Henry Fox, one of the most ambitious men of that time or of any time, was Lady Sarah's brother-in-law, and he did his best to promote the marriage. On the other hand, the {10} party which followed the lead of the Princess Dowager and Lord Bute fought uncompromisingly against the scheme. The Princess Dowager had everything to lose, Lord Bute had everything to lose, by such an alliance. The power of the Princess Dowager over the young King would vanish, and the influence of Lord Bute over the Princess Dowager would cease to have any political importance. Lord Bute did all he could to keep the lovers apart. Henry Fox did all he could to bring the lovers together. For lovers they undoubtedly were.

George again and again made it plain to those who were in his confidence that he was in love with Lady Sarah, and was anxious to make her his queen; and Lady Sarah, though her heart is said to have been given to Lord Newbottle, was quite ready to yield to the wishes of her family when those wishes were for the crown of England. On the meadows of Holland House the beautiful girl, loveliest of Arcadian rustics, would play at making hay till her royal lover came riding by to greet her.

But the idyll did not end in the marriage for which Fox and the Lennoxes hoped. It is said that the King was jealous of Lord Newbottle; it is said that a sense of duty to his place and to his people made him resolve to subdue and sacrifice his own personal feelings. He offered his hand and his crown to the Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Lady Sarah lost both her lovers, the King and Lord Newbottle, who, in the words of Grenville, "complained as much of her as she did of the King." But she did not remain long unmarried.

In 1762 she accepted as husband the famous sporting Baronet Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, and nineteen years later she married the Hon. George Napier, and became the mother of an ill.u.s.trious pair of soldier brothers, Sir Charles Napier, the hero of Scinde, and Sir William Napier, perhaps the best military historian since Julius Caesar. Lady Sarah died in 1826, in her eighty-second year. In her later years she had become totally blind, and she bore her affliction with a sweet patience. At her death she is described by the chroniclers of the time as "probably the last surviving {11} great-grand-daughter of King Charles the Second." A barren honor, surely.

[Sidenote: 1760--Princess Charlotte Sophia]

The young Princess whom George married was in many ways well and even excellently qualified to make a good queen. It is said that she was discovered for her young husband after a fas.h.i.+on something resembling a tale from the "Arabian Nights." The Princess Dowager, eager to counteract the fatal effect of the beauty of Lady Sarah Lennox, was anxious to have the young King married as soon as possible. Her own wishes were in favor of a daughter of the House of Saxe-Gotha, but it is said that fear of a disease hereditary in the family overruled her wishes. Then, according to the story, a Colonel Graeme, a Scotch gentleman upon whose taste Lord Bute placed great reliance, was sent on a kind of roving emba.s.sy to the various little German Courts in search of the ideal bride. The lady of the quest was, according to the instructions given to Colonel Graeme, to be at once beautiful, healthy, accomplished, of mild disposition, and versed in music, an art to which the King was much devoted. Colonel Graeme, with this pleasing picture of feminine graces ever in his mind, found the original of the portrait in Charlotte Sophia, the second daughter of Charles Lewis Frederick, Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

There is another version of the manner of George's wooing which nullifies the story of Colonel Graeme's romantic mission. According to this other version George fell in love with his future queen simply from reading a letter written by her. The tale sounds as romantic as that of the Provencal poet's pa.s.sion for the portrait of the Lady of Tripoli. It is true, however, that the letter of Charlotte Sophia was something of the nature of a state paper. The Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, of which the Princess Charlotte's brother was the sovereign, had been overrun by the troops of the King of Prussia. The young Princess wrote a letter to the Prussian King, which came to George's notice and inspired him, it is said, with the liveliest admiration for the lady who penned it. Whatever the actual reason, whether the report of Colonel Graeme or the {12} charms of her epistolary style, the certain thing is that George was married, first by proxy and afterwards in due form, to the young Princess in 1761.

The young Princess was not remarkably beautiful. Even the courtiers of the day, anxious to say their strongest in her praise, could not do much more than commend her eyes and complexion and call her "a very fine girl," while those who were not inclined to flatter said her face was all mouth, and declared, probably untruly, that the young King was at first obviously repelled by the plainness of his wife's appearance.

If she was plain, her plainness, as Northcote, the painter, said, was an elegant, not a vulgar plainness, and the grace of her carriage much impressed him. Walpole found her sensible, cheerful, and remarkably genteel, a not inconsiderable eulogy from him. She was fairly educated, as the education of princesses went in those days. She knew French and Italian, knew even a little English. She had various elegant accomplishments--could draw, and dance, and play, had acquired a certain measure of scientific knowledge, and she had what was better than all these attainments, a good, kindly, sensible nature. The marriage could hardly be called a popular marriage at first. Statesmen and politicians thought that the King of England ought to have found some more ill.u.s.trious consort than the daughter of a poor and petty German House. The people at large, we are told from a private letter of the time, were "quite exasperated at her not being handsome," beauty in a sovereign being a great attraction to the ma.s.s of subjects. The courtiers in general were amused by, and secretly laughed at, her simple ways and old-fas.h.i.+oned--or at least un-English--manners.

[Sidenote--1761--The Coronation of George the Third]

After the wedding came the coronation, a very resplendent ceremony, which was not free from certain somewhat ludicrous features, and was not denied a certain tragic dignity. It was enormously expensive.

Horace Walpole called it a puppet-show that cost a million. Loyal London turned out in its thousands. Surprisingly large sums of money were paid for rooms and scaffolds from which the outdoor sight could be seen, and much larger were paid {13} for places inside the Abbey. It was very gorgeous, very long, and very fatiguing. The spectator carried away, with aching senses, a confused memory of many soldiers, of great peers ill at ease in unbecoming habits, of beautiful women beautifully attired, of a blaze of jewels that recalled the story of Aladdin's mine, and of the wonderful effect by which the darkness of Westminster Hall was suddenly illuminated by an ingenious arrangement of sconces that caught fire and carried on the message of light with great rapidity. The heralds in whose hands the ceremonial arrangements lay bungled their business badly, causing fierce heartburnings by confusions in precedence, and displaying a lamentable ignorance of the names and the whereabouts of many wearers of stately and ancient t.i.tles. When the King expressed his annoyance at some of the blunders, Lord Effingham, the Earl Marshal, offered, for amazing apology, the a.s.surance that the next coronation would be conducted with perfect order, an unfortunate speech, which had, however, the effect of affording the King infinite entertainment. The one tragic touch in the whole day's work may be legend, but it is legend that might be and that should be truth. When Dymoke, the King's Champion, rode, in accordance with the antique usage, along Westminster Hall, and flung his glove down in challenge to any one who dared contest his master's right to the throne of England, it is said that some one darted out from the crowd, picked up the glove, slipped back into the press, and disappeared, without being stopped or discovered. According to one version of the incident, it was a woman who did the deed; according to another it was Charles Edward himself, the Young Pretender--now no longer so very young--who made this last protest on behalf of his lost fortunes and his fallen House. It is possible, it is even probable, that Charles Edward was in London then and thereafter, and it seems certain that if he was in London King George knew of it and ignored it in a chivalrous and kingly way. The Young Pretender could do no harm now. Stuart hopes had burned high for a moment, fifteen years earlier, when a handsome young {14} Prince carried his invading flag halfway through England, and a King who was neither handsome nor young was ready to take s.h.i.+p from Tower Stairs if worse came of it. But those hopes were quenched now, down in the dust, extinguished forever. No harm could come to the House of Hanover, no harm could come to the King of England, if at Lady Primrose's house in St. James's Square a party should be interrupted by the entrance of an unexpected guest, of a man prematurely aged by dissipation and disappointment, a melancholy ruin of what had once been fair and n.o.ble, and in whom his amazed and reverent hostess recognized the last of the fated Stuarts. There were spies among those who still professed adherence to Charles Edward and allegiance to his line, spies bearing names honorable in Scottish history, who were always ready to keep George and George's ministers posted in the movements of the unhappy Prince they betrayed. George could afford to be magnanimous, and George was magnanimous. If it pleased the poor Pretender to visit, like a premature ghost, the city and the scenes a.s.sociated with his House and its splendor and its awful tragedies, he did so untroubled and unharmed. It was but a cast of the dice in Fortune's fingers, and Charles Edward would have been in Westminster Hall and had a champion to a.s.sert his right. But the cast of the dice went the other way, and George the Third was King, and his little German Princess was Queen of England.

[Sidenote--1761--The London gayeties of the time]

It is probable that those early days in London were the happiest in the little Queen's long life. She had come from exceeding quiet to a great and famous city; she was the centre of splendor; she was surrounded by splendid figures; she was the first lady of a great land; she was the queen of a great king; she was the fortunate wife of a loyal, honorable, and pure-minded man. She was young, she was frank, she was fond of all innocent pleasures, keenly alive to all the entertainment that Court and capital could offer her. She crammed more gayeties into the first few days of her marriage than she had dreamed of in all her previous life. The girl, who had never seen {15} the sea until she took s.h.i.+p for England, had never seen a play acted until she came to London. Mecklenburg-Strelitz had its own strong ideas about the folly and frivolity of the stage, and no Puritan maiden in the sternest days of Cromwellian ascendency, no Calvinist daughter of the most rigorous Scottish household, could have been educated in a more austere ignorance of the arts that are supposed to embellish and that are intended to amuse existence. She went to playhouse after playhouse, alarmed at the crowds that thronged the streets to see her, but fascinated by the delights that awaited her within the walls. She attended the opera. She saw "The Beggar's Opera," which may have charmed her for its story without perplexing her by its satire. She saw "The Rehearsal," and did not dream that twenty years later the humors of Bayes, which she probably did not understand, would be eclipsed forever by the fantasies of Mr. Puff. She carried the King to Ranelagh, to that amazing, enchanting a.s.sembly where all the world made masquerade, and mandarins, harlequins, shepherdesses, and much-translated pagan divinities jostled each other through Armida's gardens, where the pink of fas.h.i.+on and the plain citizen, the patrician lady and the plebeian waiting-maid made merry together in a motley rout of Comus, and marvelled at the brilliancy of the illuminations and the many-colored glories of the fireworks.

The London to which the little Princess came, and which she found so full of entertainment, was a very different London from the city for which the first of the Georges had quitted reluctantly the pleasures of Hanover and the gardens of Herrenhausen. The Hanoverian princes had never tried, as the Stuart sovereigns had tried, to stop by peremptory legislation the spread of the metropolis. London had been steadily spreading in the half-century of Guelph dominion, eating up the green fields in all directions, linking itself with little lonely hamlets and tiny rustic villages, and weaving them close into the web of its being, choking up rural streams and blotting out groves and meadows with monuments of brick and mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals, if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England. The great city did not deserve the adjective that is applied to it by the poet of Chevy Chase. London was by no means lovely. However much it might have increased in size, it had increased very little in beauty, and not at all in comfort, since the days when an Elector of Hanover became King of England. It still compared only to its disadvantage with the centres of civilization on the Continent; it still was rich in all the dangers and all the discomforts Gay had celebrated nearly two generations earlier. And these dangers and discomforts were not confined to London. The world beyond London was a world of growing provincial towns and increasing seaports connected by tolerable and sometimes admirable highways, and of smaller towns and villages reduced for the most part to an almost complete isolation by roads that were always nearly and often quite impa.s.sable. To travel much in England in those days was scarcely less adventurous even for an Englishman than to travel in Africa to-day; for a foreigner the adventure was indeed environed by perils.

[Sidenote: 1761--Fas.h.i.+ons under George the Third]

Dress and manners had changed in the Hanoverian half-century, though not as much as they were to change in the fifty years that were still in futurity. Extravagance of attire still persisted, though the extravagance had changed its expression. The gigantic hoops in which ladies had delighted had diminished, had dwindled, and gowns were of a slender seemliness. But reformed below, fantasy rioted above. The headdresses of women in the early days of the third George were as monstrous, as horrible, and as shapeless in their way as the hideous hoops had been in theirs. Vast pyramids of false hair were piled on the heads of fas.h.i.+onable ladies, were pasted together with pomatums, {17} were smothered in powder and p.r.i.c.ked with feathers like the headgear of a savage. These odious erections took so long to build up that they were suffered to remain in their ugly entirety not for days but for weeks together, until the vast structure became a decomposing ma.s.s. It is rather ghastly to remember that youth and beauty and grace allowed itself to be so loathsomely adorned, that the radiant women whose faces smile from the canvases of great painters, and whose names illuminate the chronicles of the wasted time of the reign of George the Third, were condemned to dwell with corruption in consenting to be caricatured. Till far on in the lifetime of Queen Charlotte the fas.h.i.+on in women's wear oscillated from one extreme to another, the gracious of to-day becoming the grotesque of yesterday, and mode succeeding mode with the confusion and fascination of a masquerade.

The men were no less remarkable than the women for the clothes they wore, no less capricious in their changes. A decided, if not a conspicuous, turn of public taste had done much since the accession of the first George to minimize if not to obliterate the differences between cla.s.s and cla.s.s. Men no longer consented readily to carry the badge of their calling in their daily costume, and the great world came gradually to be no longer divided sharply from the little world by marked distinction of dress. But still, and for long after 1760, the clothes of men were scarcely less brilliant, scarcely less importunate in their demands upon the attention of their wearers, than the clothes of women. Men made a brave show in those days. A group of men might be as strong in color and as vivid in contrast as a group of women; the neutralization of tone, the degradation of hue, did not begin till much later, and only conquered in the cataclysm of the birth-throes of two republics. Blue and scarlet, green and yellow, crimson and purple, orange and plum-color were the daily wear of the well-to-do; and even for the less wealthy there were the warm browns and murreys, the bottle-greens and clarets, and lavenders and buffs which made any crowd a thing to please a painter in the eighteenth century. In all the {18} varying breeds of beaux and macaronis and dandies, of bucks and fribbles, into which the fine gentlemen of the age allowed themselves to be cla.s.sified, the one dominant feature, the one common characteristic, was the love for gold and silver and fine laces, for gaudiness of color and richness of ornament, for every kind of exquisite extravagance, every refinement in foppishness. There was a pa.s.sion for the punctilio of dress, for the grace of a gold-headed cane and a chased sword-hilt, for the right ribbon, the right jewel, the right flower, and the right perfume, for the right powder in the hair and the right seals on the fob and the right heels and buckles on the shoes. There was an ardent appreciation, an uncompromising wors.h.i.+p of the fine feathers that make fine birds.

[Sidenote: 1761--The wine-drinking propensities of the age]

The social system of the polite world had been slowly changing with the successive Georges. The familiar events in the lives of the well-to-do cla.s.ses were growing steadily later. The dinner hour, which was generally at noon or one in the reign of Queen Anne, had crept on to three o'clock under the first, and to four o'clock under the second George. Under the third it was to grow later and later, until it made Horace Walpole rage as if the world were coming to an end because among fas.h.i.+onable folk it had settled itself at six o'clock. In the country, indeed, for the most part people lived the quiet lives and kept the early hours of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, however, London lived, and whatever London chose to do, England's simple honest King and England's simple honest Queen would have no concern with the follies of fas.h.i.+on and the luxuries of late hours. However much the rashness and wrong-headedness of his public policy forced him to accept the services and prime the pockets of a gang of drunkards and debauchees who called themselves and were called the King's friends, the evil communications had not the slightest influence upon the royal good manners, and did not alter by one jot the rigid frugality of George's life and that of his royal consort. The King's friends were only the King's jackals; they never were suffered for a moment to cross the line which severed the {19} sovereign's private life from his public actions. Indeed, it may be a.s.sumed that few of the hard-drinking, hard-living, gambling, raking ruffians who battened on the King's bounty, and who voted white black and good bad with uncompromising pertinacity and unappeasable relish, would have welcomed the hard seats at the royal table, the meagre fare on the royal platters, the homely countrified air the royal couple breathed, and the homely countrified hour at which the royal couple took up their candles and went to bed. George the Third would be long asleep at an hour when his friends would be thinking of paying a visit to Ranelagh, or preparing to spend a pleasant evening over their cards, their dice-box, and their wine.

Especially their wine. The one great characteristic of the gentility of the day was its capacity for drinking wine. "Wine, dear child, and truth," says a Greek poet, naming the two most admirable gifts of life.

Truth was not always very highly prized by the men who set manners and made history in the second half of the eighteenth century, but to wine they clung with an absolutely unswerving and unalterable attachment.

If the great Oriental scholar who adorned the age had been more fortunate in his studies, if Sir William Jones had chanced to make acquaintance with a Persian poet who has since become very famous among Englishmen, he would have found in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam the very verses to please the minds and to interpret the desires of the majority of the statesmen, soldiers, divines, lawyers, and fine gentlemen of the day. It is as impossible to imagine the men of the eighteenth century without their incessant libations of wine as it is impossible to imagine what the eighteenth century would have been like if it had been for the most part abstemious, sober, or even reasonably temperate. As we read the memoirs of the day, and if we believe only a part of what they tell us, making the most liberal allowance for the exaggeration of the wit and the satire of the cynic, we have to picture the political and social life of the time as a drunken orgy.

Undoubtedly there were then, as always, men of decent behavior and discreet life, men who would {20} no more have exceeded in wine than in any other way. But the temper of the age and the tone of the fas.h.i.+onable world was not in tune with their austerity. Wonder at the frequency with which men of position got drunk then is only rivalled by wonder at the amount which they could drink without getting drunk.

[Sidenote: 1761--Unpropitious time for the King's rule]

The cry of the Persian nightingale to the Persian rose, "wine, wine, wine," was the cry to which hearts responded most readily in all the Georgian era. Walpole the father made Walpole the son drink too much, that he might not be unfilially sober while his father was unpaternally drunk. A generation later the younger Pitt plied himself with port as a medicine for the gout. The statesmen of the period, in the words of Sir George Trevelyan, sailed on a sea of claret from one comfortable official haven to another. The amount of liquor consumed by each man at a convivial gathering was Gargantuan, prodigious, hardly to be credited. Thackeray tells, in some recently published notes for his lectures on the four Georges, of a Scotch judge who was forced to drink water for two months, and being asked what was the effect of the _regime_, owned that he saw the world really as it was for the first time for twenty years. For a quarter of a century he had never been quite sober. This man might be taken as a type of the _bons vivants_, the _buveurs tres ill.u.s.tres_ of the eighteenth century. They were never quite sober all through their lives. They never saw the world as it really was. They pleaded, preached, debated, fought, gambled, loved, and hated under the influence of their favorite vintage, saw all things through a vinous fume, and judged all things with inflamed pulses and a reeling brain. But it must not be forgotten that the population of the country was not entirely composed of corrupt, hard-drinking politicians, profligate, hard-drinking n.o.blemen, and furious, hard-drinking country gentlemen. If these were, in a sense, the more conspicuous types, there were other types very different and very admirable. Apart from the great ma.s.s of the people, living their dull daily lives, doing their dull daily tasks, quiet, ignorant, unconscious that they {21} could or should ever have any say in the disposition of their existences, there were both in town and country plenty of decent, sober, honorable, and upright men and women who had nothing in common with the fine gentlemen and the fine ladies who fill the historical fas.h.i.+on plates. If, unfortunately, Squire Western and Parson Truliber were true pictures, at least Parson Adam and Sir Roger de Coverley still held good. None the less a young, self-willed King, not too intelligent and not too well educated, could scarcely have come to his sovereignty at a time less like to be fruitful of good for him or for the country that he was resolved to govern.