gained upon him. “Mr Fox,” said the king, “I little thought that you and I should ever meet again in this place; but I have no desire to look back upon old grievances, and you may rest assured I never shall remind you of them.” On the 13th of September Fox died, and it was not long before the king and the ministry were openly in collision. The ministry proposed a measure enabling all subjects of the crown to serve in the army and navy in spite of religious disqualifications. The king objected even to so slight a modification of the laws against the Catholics and Dissenters, and the ministers consented to drop the bill. The king asked more than this. He demanded a written and positive engagement that this ministry would never, under any circumstances, propose to him “any measure of concession to the Catholics, or even connected with the question.” The ministers very properly refused to bind themselves for the future. They were consequently turned out of office, and a new ministry was formed with the duke of Portland as first lord of the treasury and Mr Perceval as its real leader. The spirit of the new ministry was distinct hostility to the Catholic claims. On the 27th of April 1807 a dissolution of parliament was announced, and a majority in favour of the king’s ministry was returned in the elections which speedily followed.
The elections of 1807, like the elections of 1784, gave the king the mastery of the situation. In other respects they were the counterpart of one another. In 1784 the country declared, though perhaps without any clear conception of what it was doing, for a wise and progressive policy. In 1807 it declared for an unwise and retrogressive policy, with a very clear understanding of what it meant. It is in his reliance upon the prejudices and ignorance of the country that the constitutional significance of the reign of George III. appears. Every strong government derives its power from its representative character. At a time when the House of Commons was less really representative than at any other, a king was on the throne who represented the country in its good and bad qualities alike, in its hatred of revolutionary violence, its moral sturdiness, its contempt of foreigners, and its defiance of all ideas which were in any way strange. Therefore it was that his success was not permanently injurious to the working of the constitution as the success of Charles I. would have been. If he were followed by a king less English than himself, the strength of representative power would pass into other hands than those which held the sceptre.
The overthrow of the ministry of All the Talents was the last political act of constitutional importance in which George III. took part. The substitution of Perceval for Portland as the nominal head of the ministry in 1809 was not an event of any real significance, and in 1811 the reign practically came to an end. The king’s reason finally broke down after the death of the princess Amelia, his favourite child; and the prince of Wales (see George IV.) became prince regent. The remaining nine years of George III.’s life were passed in insanity and blindness, and he died on the 29th of January 1820.
His wife, Charlotte Sophia (1744–1818), was a daughter of Charles Louis of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1816), and was married to the king in London on the 8th of September 1761. After a peaceful and happy married life the queen died at Kew on the 17th of November 1818.
George III. had nine sons. After his successor came Frederick, duke of York and Albany (1763–1827); William Henry, duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV. (1765–1837); Edward Augustus, duke of Kent (1767–1825), father of Queen Victoria; Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland, afterwards king of Hanover (1771–1851); Augustus Frederick, duke of Sussex (1773–1843); Adolphus Frederick, duke of Cambridge (1774–1850); Octavius (1779–1783); Alfred (1780–1782). He had also six daughters—Charlotte Augusta (1766–1828), married in 1797 to Frederick, afterwards king of Württemberg; Augusta Sophia (1768–1840); Elizabeth (1770–1840), married Frederick, landgrave of Hesse-Homburg, 1818; Mary (1776–1857), married to William Frederick, duke of Gloucester, 1816; Sophia (1777–1848); Amelia (1783–1810). (S. R. G.)
The numerous contemporary memoirs and diaries are full of the best material for a picture of George III.’s reign, apart from the standard histories. Thackeray’s Four Georges must not be trusted so far as historical judgment is concerned; Jesse’s Memoirs of the Life and Reign of George III. (2nd ed., 1867) is chiefly concerned with personalities. See also Beckles Willson, George III., as Man, Monarch and Statesman (1907).
GEORGE IV. [George Augustus Frederick] (1762–1830), king
of Great Britain and Ireland, eldest son of George III., was born
at St James’s Palace, London, on the 12th of August 1762. He
was naturally gifted, was well taught in the classics, learnt to
speak French, Italian and German fluently, and had considerable
taste for music and the arts; and in person he was remarkably
handsome. His tutor, Bishop Richard Hurd, said of him when
fifteen years old that he would be “either the most polished
gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe—possibly
both”; and the latter prediction was only too fully
justified. Reaction from the strict and parsimonious style of
his parents’ domestic life, which was quite out of touch with the
gaiety and extravagance of London “society,” had its natural
effect in plunging the young prince of Wales, flattered and
courted as he was, into a whirl of pleasure-seeking. At the outset
his disposition was brilliant and generous, but it was essentially
unstable, and he started even before he came of age on a career of
dissipation which in later years became wholly profligate. He
had an early amour with the actress Mary (“Perdita”) Robinson,
and in the choice of his friends he opposed and annoyed the king,
with whom he soon became (and always remained) on the worst
of terms, by associating himself with Fox and Sheridan and the
Whig party. When in 1783 he came of age, a compromise
between the coalition ministry and the king secured him an
income of £50,000 from the Civil List, and £60,000 was voted
by parliament to pay his debts and start his separate establishment
at Carlton House. There, under the auspices of C. J. Fox
and Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, he posed as a patron of
Whig politics and a leader in all the licence and luxury of gay
society—the “First gentleman in Europe,” as his flatterers
described him as years went on. And at this early age he fell
seriously in love with the famous Mrs Fitzherbert.
His long connexion with this lady may most conveniently be summarized here. It was indeed for some time the one redeeming and restraining factor in his life, though her devotion and self-sacrificing conduct were in marked contrast with his unscrupulousness and selfishness. Mary Anne (or as she always called herself, Maria) Fitzherbert (1756–1837) was the daughter of Walter Smythe, the second son of Sir John Smythe, Bart., of Acton Burnell Park, Shropshire, and came of an old Roman Catholic family. Educated at a French convent, she married first in 1775 Edward Weld, who died within the year, and secondly in 1778 Thomas Fitzherbert, who died in 1781, leaving his widow with a comfortable fortune. A couple of years later she became a prominent figure in London society, and her beauty and charm at once attracted the young prince, who wooed her with all the ardour of a violent passion. She herself was distracted between her desire to return his love, her refusal to contemplate becoming his mistress, and her knowledge that state reasons made a regular marriage impossible. The Act of Settlement (1689) entailed his forfeiture of the succession if he married a Roman Catholic, apart from the fact that the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 made any marriage illegal without the king’s consent, which was out of the question. But after trying for a while to escape his attentions, her scruples were overcome. In Mrs Fitzherbert’s eyes the state law was, after all, not everything. To a Roman Catholic, and equally to any member of the Christian church, a formal marriage ceremony would be ecclesiastically and sacramentally binding; and after a period of passionate importunacy on his part they were secretly married by the Rev. R. Burt, a clergyman of the Church of England, on the 15th of December 1785.[1] There is no doubt as to Mrs Fitzherbert’s belief, supported by ecclesiastical considerations, in her correct
- ↑ For a discussion of the ecclesiastical validity of the marriage see W. H. Wilkins, Mrs Fitzherbert and George IV. (1905), chs. vi. and vii.
