with France, by which England was seriously imperilled, and the English people burdened with a debt that their remotest posterity will be unable to pay. But, notwithstanding all this, when Pitt, only a few years before his death, showed a determination to concede to the Irish a small share of their undoubted rights, the King dismissed him from office, and the King's friends, as they were called, expressed their indignation at the presumption of a minister who could oppose the wishes of so benign and gracious a master. And when, unhappily for his own fame, this great man determined to return to power, he could only recover office by conceding that very point for which he had relinquished it; thus settling the mischievous example of the minister of a free country sacrificing his own judgment to the personal prejudices of the reigning sovereign. As it was hardly possible to find other ministers who to equal abilities would add equal subservience, it is not surprising that the highest offices were constantly filled with men of notorious incapacity. Indeed, the King seemed to have an instinctive antipathy to everything great and noble. During the reign of George II the elder Pitt had won for himself a reputation which covered the world, and had carried to an unprecedented height the glories of the English name. He, however, as the avowed friend of popular rights, strenuously opposed the despotic principles of the Court; and for this reason he was hated by George III with a hatred that seemed barely compatible with a sane mind. Fox was one of the greatest statesmen of the eighteenth century, and was better acquainted than any other with the character and resources of those foreign nations with which our interests were intimately connected. To this rare and important knowledge he added a sweetness and amenity of temper which extorted the praises of even his political opponents. But he, too, was the steady supporter of civil and religious liberty; and he, too, was so detested by George III that the King, with his own hand, struck his name out of the list of Privy Councillors, and declared that he would rather abdicate the throne than admit him to a share in the Government.

"While this unfavorable change was taking place in the

sovereign and ministers of the country, a change equally unfavorable was being effected in the second branch of the Imperial Legislature. Until the reign of George III the House of Lords was decidedly superior to the House of Commons in the liberality and general accomplishments of its members. It is true that in both houses there prevailed a spirit which must be called narrow and superstitious if tried by the larger standard of the present age.

"The superiority of the Upper House over the Lower was on the whole steadily maintained during the reign of George II, the ministers not being anxious to strengthen the High Church party in the Lords, and the King himself so rarely suggesting fresh creations as to cause a belief that he particularly disliked increasing their numbers. It was reserved for George III by an unsparing use of his prerogative, entirely to change the character of the Upper House, and thus lay the foundation for that disrepute into which, since then, the peers have been constantly falling. The creations he made were numerous beyond all precedent, their object. evidently being to neutralise neutralise the liberal spirit hitherto prevailing, and thus turn the House of Lords into an engine for resisting the popular wishes, and stopping the progress of reform. How completely this plan succeeded is well-known to the readers of our history: indeed, it was sure to be successful considering the character of the men who were promoted. They consisted almost entirely of two classes-of country gentlemen, remarkable for nothing but their wealth, and the number of votes their wealth enabled them to control; and of mere lawyers, who had risen to judicial appointments partly from their professional learning, but chiefly from the zeal with which they repressed the popular liberties, and favored the Royal prerogative.

"That this is no exaggerated description may be ascertained by anyone who will consult the lists of the new peers made by George III. Here and there we find an eminent man, whose public services were so notorious that it was impossible to avoid rewarding them; but, putting aside those who were manner forced upon the Sovereign, it would be idle to

in a

deny that the remainder, and, of course, the overwhelming majority, were marked by a narrowness and illiberality of sentiment, which, more than anything else, brought the whole order into contempt. No great thinkers, no great writers, no great orators, no great statesmen, none of the true nobility of the land, were to be found among the spurious nobles created by George III."

In the early part of his reign, George III (whom even the courtly Alison pictures as having "little education, and no great acquired information") was very much under the influence of his mother, who had, previously to his being King, often spoken of her son with contempt. The Princess of Wales, in turn, was almost entirely guided by Lord Bute, represented by scandal, says Macaulay, as "her favored lover". "Of this attachment," Dr. Doran tells us, "the Prince of Wales himself is said to have had full knowledge, and did not object to Lord Bute taking solitary walks with the Princess, while he could do the same with Lady Middlesex." The most infamous stories were circulated in the Whisperer, and other journals of the time, as to the nature of the association between the Scotch Peer and the King's mother, and its results. Phillimore regarded the Princess of Wales as "before and after her husband's death the mistress of Lord Bute". The Princess

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Dowager seems to have been a hard woman. Walpole tells us how, when the Princess Dowager reproved one of her maids of honor for irregular habits, the latter replied: "Madame, chacun a son But." Seeing," says Thackeray, "the young Duke of Gloucester silent and unhappy once, she sharply asked him the cause of his silence. I am thinking,' said the poor child. 'Thinking, Sir! and of what?' 'I am thinking, if ever I have a son, I will not make him so unhappy as you make me.'

John Stuart, Earl of Bute, shared with William Pitt and John Wilkes the bulk of popular attention during the first ten years of the King's reign. Bute had risen rapidly to favor, having attracted the attention of the Princess Dowager at some private theatricals, and he became by her influence Groom of the Stole. His poverty and ambition made him grasp at power, both against the great Commoner and the Pelham

faction; and a lady observer described the great question of the day in 1760, as being whether the King would burn in his chamber Scotch coal, Newcastle coal, or Pitt coal. Macaulay, who seems to have followed Lord Waldegrave's "Memoirs ", says of Bute: "A handsome leg was among his chief qualifications for the stage. His understanding was narrow, his manners cold and haughty." His qualifications for the part of a statesman were best described by Prince Frederick, who often indulged in the unprincely luxury of sneering at his dependents. "Bute," said his Royal Highness, "you are the very man to be envoy at some small, proud German Court, where there is nothing to do." Phillimore speaks of Lord Bute as a "minion raised by Court favor to a post where his ignorance, mean understanding, and his disregard of English honor, became national calamities ".

The King's speech on his accession is said to have been drawn up by Bute, who did not then belong to the Council; but the terms being vehemently objected to by Pitt, it was actually altered after it had been spoken, and before it found its way to the printer.

Whatever were the relations between Lord Bute and the Princess Dowager, it is quite certain that on more than one occasion George III condescended not only to prevaricate, but to lie downright as to the influence exercised by Lord Bute. It is certain, from the "Memoirs" of Earl Waldegrave and other trustworthy sources, that the Scotch Earl, after being hissed out of office by the people, was still secretly consulted by the King, who, like the true Royal Brunswick, did not hesitate to use falsehoods on the subject, even to his own ministers. Phillimore, in remarkably strong language, describes George III as an "ignorant, dishonest, obstinate, narrow-minded boy, at that very moment the tool of an adulteress and her paramour." The Duke of Bedford has not only put upon record, in his correspondence, his conviction that the King behaved unfaithfully to his ministers, but asserts that he told him so to his face.

In 1759, George was married to Hannah Lightfoot, a Quakeress, in Curzon Street Chapel, Mayfair, in the presence

of his brother, Edward Duke of York.

Great doubt has,

however, been cast on the fact as well as the legality of the marriage. It would, if in all respects valid, have rendered null, as a bigamous contract, the subsequent marriage entered into by the King. Dr. Doran alleges that the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV, when needing money in later years, used this Lightfoot marriage as a threat against his Royal parents—that is, that he threatened to expose his mother's shame and his own illegitimacy if the Queen would not use her influence with Pitt. Glorious family, these Brunswicks ! Walpole affirms that, early in his reign, George III admitted to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, "that it had not been common in their family to live well together ".

On the 18th September, 1761, George was married to the Princess Charlotte Sophia, of Mecklenburgh Strelitz, Hannah Lightfoot being still living. Of the new Queen, Phillimore says: "If to watch over the education of her children and to promote their happiness be any part of a woman's duty, she has little claim to the praises that have been so lavishly bestowed on her as a model of domestic virtue. Her religion was displayed in the scrupulous observance of external forms. Repulsive in her aspect, grovelling in her instincts, sordid in her habits; steeped, from the cradle, in the stupid pride which was the atmosphere of her stolid and most insignificant race; inexorably severe to those who yielded to temptation from which she was protected, not more by her situation and the vigilance of those around her, than by the extreme homeliness of her person; bigoted, avaricious, unamiable to brutality, she added dulness and gloom even to the English court."

In 1761, the Duke of Bedford was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, that unfortunate country, for centuries governed by men who tried to exterminate its native population, and used under the first three reigns of the House of Brunswick as a sponge out of which, regardless of much bloodshed and more misery, gold could be squeezed for the dependents and relatives of aristocrats in office. His reign of office in Ireland was brief. Walpole says that "the ill-humor of the country determined the Duke of Bedford to quit the Government, after having amply gratified