Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/19

A.D. 1761.] no means of government bribery were omitted to procure one of tory tendencies, and favourable to the Bute cabal. The sale of boroughs was extensively and undisguisedly practised, and the mode, now so common, of evading the direct charge of bribery by giving an absurdly great price for some article to an elector, was lavishly introduced. Foote, in his play of "The Nabob," happily hit off this custom. He makes a voter say—"When I took up my freedom, I could get but thirty guineas for a new pair of jack-boots; whilst my neighbour over the way had a fifty-pound note for a pair of wash-leather breeches!"

On the 8th of July an extraordinary privy council was summoned. All the members, of whatever party, were desired to attend, and many were the speculations as to the important object. The general idea was that it involved the continuation or the termination of the war. It turned out to be for the announcement of the king's intended marriage. The lady selected was Charlotte, the second sister of the duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a prince of a petty state, but of the most enormous pretensions to the antiquity and unadulterated blood of his lineage. In this respect the young princess his sister, who was yet only seventeen, and of no beauty or fortune, thought herself infinitely the superior of her intended husband, the king of England, the lofty purity of whose genealogy had been so grievously debased by such encroachments as those of the Woodvilles, Tudors, Hydes, and the like plebeians. Like George himself, she was by no means overdone with education; she could play upon the harpsichord, and that was the sum-total of her accomplishments. Like the Hanoverian monarchs, whose line she was destined to perpetuate, she had no taste whatever for literature and the arts; she had read little, and of that little next to no English. In fact, whatever may have been the advantage in a protestant point of view, the importation of German princesses has been a practice especially pernicious in many other respects. German men are generally well educated, German women generally as ill.

The contempt of the female mind in Germany is one of the worst features of that country; hence the wretched education and the wretched moral character of our princes, except in our present excellent queen, who have had German mothers. The mother of George III. and of the duke of Cumberland, whose connection with Bute was the scandal of the age, could only turn out ill-educated sons. Walpole says that George III. was brought up in duplicity, and that his first act, the command to his groom to utter a falsehood, in order to enable him to secure his grandfather's hoards, was expressive of his character. Lord Malmesbury shows us what a wretched education queen Caroline, the consort of George IV., had, and how certain were the most disastrous consequences to succeed. The want of moral truth in queen Charlotte was propagated in the licentious character of her sons.

Apart from these defects of an overwhelming pride of pedigree, and of the narrowness of her education, the young princess had a considerable amount of amiability, good sense, and domestic taste. These she shared with her intended husband, and whilst they made the royal couple always retiring, at the same time they caused them to give, during their lives, a certain moral air to their court. This morality, however, became dreadfully outraged by their children, even during their own day, nor had George III. that unexceptionable right to declare that his sons had abandoned the example of their father, which our historians too generally assume. Lord Mahon finds no spot of sensual taint in his youthful character; the writer of the "Pictorial History" goes further. He says: — "On ascending the throne, George III. was only in his twenty-third year, yet he presented few of the graces, and none of the liveliness of youth. At the same time, he was wholly free from the vices or irregularities which commonly attended that age with persons in his situation."

That is, that George had not kept his mistress, according to the regular custom of his forefathers. It is too true that there is nothing so remarkable in the English people as their co-existent propensities to king-worsbip and freedom-worship. A moral and religious nation, abhorring licentiousness, and severe in its punishment of the invaders of domestic purity, we have, as a rule, been ready to tolerate in our monarchs a contempt for the conjugal virtues. Nay, so far have our countrywomen forgotten in kings and princes their stern and inexorable judgments against the frailties of their sex, that they have often honoured if not even envied the position of a prince's concubine. They have eagerly wrangled for the universal distinction; they have boasted of it; they have paraded it before the world when they have got it; and there is no cause which has tended to diffuse demoralisation through English society so much as this. We need not glance back to the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts, or point to the highest places of the peerage, for the proofs of it: the princes of Hanover, a heavy and dull race, were always surrounded by a sort of harem of this kind. George I. had, besides English ones, a troop of German ones, notorious for their impudent rapacity.

George II. is said to have had little natural disposition to gallantry, but actually thought it an honour to bow to them! So far had our customs sanctioned royal vice. He was, in fact, led by his education, and the evidence of public opinion, to adopt adultery as a royal grace. And now George III. is held up by some historians as a perfect model of chastity and propriety. "Though so young," says one writer, "so healthy and robust, and though his predecessor had been so old, he was the first prince of his house to do without a mistress! A few months after his accession he married, and from that time his fidelity to his consort was as remarkable as his previous continence."

This is a singular statement for a writer of a history of England, and especially regarding a prince of our time. We should be glad to be able to confirm that eulogy; but, with all George's domestic and public virtues, and he had many, we should justly forfeit all claim to confidence if we did not state the real facts. To say nothing of a certain flirtation with lady Sarah Lennox—recorded by lord Orford just previous to George's marriage—which, probably, was innocent enough, there is another affair, which involves a grave charge against the pattern king. When prince of Wales he fell in love with a beautiful quakeress of the name of Hannah Lightfoot. She resided at a linendraper's shop, at the corner of Market Street, St. James's Market. The