with the sub-tutors, who were understood to be in more favour with the mother. The former complained of Stone as taking too much on himself; and as for Scott, Horace Walpole tells a wicked story of the Bishop turning him out of the Prince’s Chamber “by an imposition of hands that had at least as much of the flesh as of the spirit.” What brought these jars to light was the Bishop finding in the Prince of Wales’s hands a French book written to justify James II.’s measures, an offence which Stone tried to palliate by making out that this Jacobite treatise had been lent the Prince by his sister, to whom, one understands, it would do no such great harm. The end of it was that both Governor and Preceptor resigned their offices, replaced by Lord Waldegrave and the Bishop of Peterborough, who appear to have got on for a time more smoothly with the subordinate instructors, as with the family. The new Bishop, said their mother, gave great satisfaction, and the children took to him. Lord Waldegrave, by his own account, became no favourite with his most important pupil, and had a poor opinion of him. His Memoirs scout the Princess’s professions that she did not interfere in the boys’ education. The preceptors had little influence, he says; “the mother and the nursery always prevailed.” The Prince he sets down as obstinate, sulky, too stingy and too self-righteous for his years. George, for his part, is afterwards found recalling this Governor as a “depraved, worthless man.”
What seems most certain as to George III.’s education is that he learned very little from books, not even to spell, but that he came to speak French and German, and that he allowed his mother and her friend, if not his tutors, to stamp the theory that a king of England should not only reign but govern, upon a nature that proved wax to receive and marble to retain such impressions. The mother spoke of George as a good, dutiful boy, rather serious in his disposition than otherwise, but a little wanting in spirit. Whether at her apron-string he grew up sly as well as shy and sleepy, is a question raised by the story of his youthful amour with a Quakeress named Hannah Lightfoot, which makes the plot of one of Besant’s novels; but it is hard now to tell the truth of it. The idea one gets of this King’s youth suggests Blifil rather than Tom Jones. All the other sons turned out more like Tom Jones, while “insipid” was an epithet applied to young George, who would yet develop a strongly-flavoured character. His moral courage and pluck came to be well proved in several trying predicaments; and at the opening of the Seven Years’ War, he showed spirit by demanding to serve in the Army, to the King’s jealous displeasure.
We need not rake up all the scandals that echoed about the quiet household at Kew. The Whigs went on sounding an alarm that the Prince of Wales was brought up in Jacobite principles, a particular hullabaloo being raised by a charge that his tutor Stone had drunk the Pretender’s health twenty years back, in company with Murray, better known as Lord Mansfield. The chief reproach against Bute, as yet, seems to have been his easily supposed illicit relations with the Princess, of which there is no proof. It was after the accession, rather, that he came to be pilloried as having laid himself out to heighten the Prince’s notion of the prerogative. There can be no doubt that he had a great part in moulding the future King’s mind, and that they were really fond of each other. It is said that they took an incognito tour together through England, and as far as Edinburgh and the Isle of Bute.
At eighteen, when the Prince was considered fit to have done with tutors, in the new household formed for him, Waldegrave being shunted as a persona ingrata, the Kew influence availed to have Bute made his official mentor as Groom of the Stole. The King offered him quarters at Kensington, with a royal allowance; but the lad declared that he would stick to his mother, which seems only a way of speaking, as by this time he had a home of his own at Saville House in Leicester Fields. He was at Kew, at all events, when, starting for London on horseback one morning, he met a messenger with the news of George II.’s sudden death, confirmed presently by the appearance of the Prime Minister’s carriage on its way westwards to the new fountain of power and pensions.
We know with what fair prospects George III. ascended the throne, “glorying in the name of Briton,” as Bute is said to have prompted him in addressing a people of whom the majority would rather consider their king as born an Englishman. A true John Bull he proved to be in his sense of duty, in his narrow outlook, and in his pig-headed obstinacy. Too soon the sky clouded over this well-meaning Prince, who took pains to repair the deficiencies of his education, and had his character quickly developed in the light that pours upon a throne. The lessons of Kew had not been thrown away upon him. That unofficial tutor, hitherto kept behind the scenes, became his open counsellor, and presently Prime Minister, till overthrown by blasts of popular indignation excited against the unconstitutional politician, the slandered favourite, and the ambitious Scot, who made a magnet for drawing crowds of his hungry countrymen to the source of patronage. The young King shared the unpopularity of his adviser. He fell out with nobles and statesmen; from the mob his carriage had to be guarded by prize-fighters. And in the irony of fate, the cry of liberty swelled loudest round an unprincipled libertine, who, taking to patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” quickly rose to be the idol of the mob, and made his fortune out of the cause in which he afterwards boasted that he never believed. “I never was a Wilkesite,” said Wilkes; but poor George was at least honest in his notions of governing. It looks like a satire on the British Constitution that our most virtuous and well-meaning kings have usually been those who did us most mischief. At that time a puppet would have been more welcome than a patriot king, but not a puppet whose wires were pulled by Bute.
One thing cannot be denied by his worst enemies, that this king made an honest effort to rule himself, to lead a clean, simple and wholesome life, which did so much in the end to win back respect for royalty among the respectable classes. At the outset of his reign he seems ready to have married for love of the bewitching siren, Lady Sarah Lennox, who took care to be seen making hay on the lawn of Holland House, as the young king rode by on the road to Kew. But that mock-Arcadian romance was nipped in the bud by his managing mother, who made haste to look out a wife for him among the Protestant princesses of Germany. George “sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son.” Lady Sarah, great-grand-daughter of Charles II. as she was, had to content herself with serving as bridesmaid to the new queen. She soon got over her disappointed ambition, marrying twice and dying at a good old age as mother of the famous soldier-brothers Napier. It is a touching coincidence that her old age was afflicted by blindness, like her royal sweetheart’s, who in his last days appears to have recalled or imagined an earlier passion for Lady Elizabeth Spencer, afterwards Countess of Pembroke.
The royal bride chosen was Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a girl of seventeen, who for more than half a century gave a new tone to English society. After a little flutter of gaiety natural in her position, she entered upon a life of dignified propriety and domesticity with a husband who won her heart as well as her hand, and George, whatever wild oats he may or may not have sown, made a constant husband to his rather plain bride. This model couple agreed in the simple tastes at which worldly courtiers sneered. St. James’s Palace they kept as a stage for State functions; and they made little use of Windsor in the first years of the reign. For the “Queen’s House” was bought the Duke of Buckingham’s red-brick mansion on the site of what is now Buckingham Palace; and out of town the King lived a good deal at Richmond Lodge, also given to the Queen, where perhaps his mother still liked to keep him near her. Every evening, it appears, King and Queen dutifully visited that domineering princess either at Kew, or at her London residence, Leicester House. Carlton House, afterwards given to the next Prince of Wales, was also hers; and at one or other of these she lived “in a privacy that exceeded economy.” That is Horace Walpole’s reproach, who speaks of her as avaricious, but does not give the Dowager credit for paying off her husband’s debts, nor for her liberal charities. Her worst fault seems to have been a masterful temper that expressed itself in the lesson imprinted on her son’s softness, “George, be a king!”
Richmond Lodge soon proving too small for the growing royal family, George III. proposed to build a new palace for himself in Richmond Gardens, near the river opposite Syon House. The design is still preserved, and the work was actually begun; but a hitch occurred in the obstinacy of the Richmond people, who refused to sell the King a piece of ground he wanted to round off his demesne. Then the Princess Dowager, when her other sons left the nest, gave up Kew House to George and Charlotte, taking for herself the “Dutch House” across the way, till her death, not long afterwards; and