Chapter 6

THE LAST OF THE GEORGES.

[Sidenote: 1829--Wellington fights Lord Winchilsea]

One incident connected more or less directly with the Catholic Emancipation question deserves historical record, if only for the curious light it throws upon the contrast between the manners of that day and the manners of more recent times. Shortly before the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill, the Earl of Winchilsea wrote a letter which was published in one of the newspapers strongly denouncing the conduct of the Duke of Wellington, and declaring him guilty of having joined in a conspiracy to overthrow the Church and the Constitution of England under false pretences. This letter was addressed to the secretary of a committee formed for the establishment of King's College in London, and Lord Winchilsea had apparently assumed that the subject under consideration warranted him in expressing his views with regard to the conduct of the Prime Minister on the Catholic relief question. In more recent times, of course, such a letter might have been written by anybody, whether peer or commoner, and published in all the newspapers of the country without calling for the slightest notice on the part of a Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington, however, lived at a time when a different code of honor and etiquette prevailed. He wrote to Lord Winchilsea a letter, the principal passage of which is worth quoting to illustrate the peculiar sense of duty which could, at the time, direct the conduct of a man like the Duke of Wellington. "The question for me now to decide is this: Is a gentleman who happens to be the King's Minister to submit to be insulted by any gentleman who thinks proper to attribute to him disgraceful or criminal motives for his conduct as an individual? I cannot {81} doubt of the decision which I ought to make on this question. Your Lordship is alone responsible for the consequences." This was, of course, a challenge to Lord Winchilsea to withdraw his accusation or to fight a duel forthwith.

Now, to the cool, philosophic mind, at least in later times, it might well seem obvious that whether Lord Winchilsea's charge against the Duke of Wellington was just or unjust, its justice or injustice could not in any way be made clear by the discharge of bullets from the pistols of the challenger and the challenged. The cool, philosophic observer of a later time might wonder also how the Duke's sense of public responsibility could allow him to peril a life which he must have known to be of the highest value to his country, for the sake of taking part in a combat with an antagonist whose personal opinion of the Duke and of the Duke's conduct could not be of the slightest importance to the vast majority of the Duke's countrymen. But the Duke of Wellington was not in any case a cool, philosophic observer, and he lived at a time when the established or tolerated code of what was called personal honor seemed to have nothing to do either with Christian morals, with political expediency, or with ordinary common-sense. Wellington accepted without question the dictates of the supposed code of honor, and he sent his challenge. Lord Winchilsea, it will be seen, did not intend to stand by his gross and preposterous charge against the Duke, but he did not think that the code of honor allowed him to say so like a man, and tender an apology like what we should now call a gentleman, without first subjecting himself to the fire of his wrongfully accused antagonist. So the Duke and the Earl went out with their seconds and met at Wimbledon. The victor of Waterloo was not destined to kill or be killed in this absurd contest. When the parties to the duel were placed on the ground and the word was given. Lord Winchilsea reserved his fire, the bullet from the Duke's pistol passed him without doing any harm, and Lord Winchilsea then discharged his pistol in the air, and authorized his second to make known his retraction of his {82} charge against the Duke, and his apology for having made such a charge. The retraction and the apology were published in the newspapers, and there, to use a form of words which was very common at the time after such an incident, the affair ended with equal honor to both parties.

[Sidenote: 1829--Comments upon Wellington's duel]

It seems hard now to understand how any man, in the position and with the responsibilities of the Duke of Wellington, could bring himself to think that he was called upon to risk his life for the mere sake of resenting an imputation which no rational man in his senses could possibly have regarded as of any consequence to the Duke's public or private character. The whole incident seems to us now one more properly belonging to comic opera than to serious political life. We can hardly conceive the possibility of the Marquis of Salisbury insisting on fighting a duel with some hot-headed member of the House of Lords who had chosen to describe him as a conspirator against the Constitution and the Church of England. The Duke of Wellington, however, must be judged according to the ways of his own time, and the code of political and personal honor in which he had been nurtured. There has not been in modern political history a more conscientious and high-minded statesman than Robert Peel, and yet not very long before the Winchilsea business Robert Peel had only been prevented by the interference of the law from going out to fight a duel with Daniel O'Connell, and O'Connell himself had killed his man in another affair of honor, as it was called. We who live in these islands at the present time may be excused if we indulge in a certain feeling of self-complacency when we contemplate the advance towards a better code of personal honor and a better recognition of the teachings of Christianity which has been made here since the days when the Duke of Wellington thought that for him, as a gentleman, there was no other course to take than to risk his life because an insignificant person had made a ridiculous charge against him.

Still, it is something to know that there were cool observers even at the time who thought the Duke of Wellington had done wrong. Charles Greville, in commenting on {83} the duel, says that "everybody, of course, sees the matter in a different light; all blame Lord Winchilsea, but they are divided as to whether the Duke ought to have fought or not." "Lord Winchilsea is such a maniac, and has so lost his head, that everybody imagined the Duke would treat what he said with silent contempt." Greville utterly condemns Lord Winchilsea for having made the attack on the Duke, and for not having sent an apology when it was first required of him, but he adds: "I think, having committed the folly of writing so outrageous a letter, he did the only thing a man of honor could do in going out and receiving a shot and then making an apology, which he was all this time prepared to do, for he had it ready written in his pocket." Most of us at this time of day would be inclined to think that if Lord Winchilsea was willing to make the apology and had it ready written in his pocket, he might have acted according to a better code of honor by not exposing the Duke to the chance of killing him. However, we must not expect too much from Greville, and it is well to know, as his final verdict on the whole affair, that "I think the Duke ought not to have challenged him; it was very juvenile, and he stands in far too high a position, and his life is so much _publica cura_ that he should have treated him and his letter with the contempt they merited." The King, it seems, approved of the Duke of Wellington's conduct in making the letter the subject of a challenge and meeting his opponent in a duel. Greville goes on to remark that somebody said "the King would be wanting to fight a duel himself," whereupon some one else observed, "He will be sure to think that he has fought one."

The Duke of Wellington had a great deal to trouble him after the passing of the Catholic Relief Bill. There was great distress all over the country, and the discontent was naturally in proportion to the distress. Wellington had lost much of his popularity with the more extreme members of his own party, who could not lift their minds to an understanding of the reasons which had compelled him to change his old opinions on the Catholic question. It cannot be doubted, too, that he sometimes felt disappointed {84} with the results which were following from his policy towards Ireland. Members of his own party were continually dinning into his ears their declaration that the measure passed in favor of the Roman Catholics had not put a stop to agitation in Ireland, and that, on the contrary, O'Connell was now beginning to agitate for a repeal of the Act of Union. At that time, as at all times, the opponents of any great act of justice were eager to make out that its concession must have been an utter failure, because instead of satisfying everybody forever it had only led other people to demand that other acts of justice should also be done. Some members of Wellington's own party were now inclined for the first time to become advocates of Parliamentary reform, on the ground that nothing but a reduced franchise in England could save the State Church from being overthrown by the emancipated Roman Catholics. Those who had trembled before at the possibility of revolutionary sentiments leading to the subversion of the throne, now declared themselves in terror lest the spread of Roman Catholic doctrine should lead to the subversion of the Protestant altar. The truth is, and it is a truth of which governments have to be reminded even in our own times, that the long delay of justice was alone answerable for any alarm which might have been caused by its sudden concession. The arguments in favor of Catholic Emancipation were just as strong, and ought to have been just as clear, to all rational men before it became evident to Wellington and Peel that there was no choice but between emancipation and civil war. The plain duty of a civilized government is to redress injustice at the earliest possible moment, and not to wait idly or ignorantly until the danger of a popular uprising makes instant redress inevitable.

[Sidenote: 1829--Need for radical reforms]

The great distress in many parts of the country was in the mean time leading to new forms of crime. The burning of corn-ricks and farm-houses was becoming in many districts the terrible form in which hunger and want of work made wild war against property. The Game Laws, which were then at their highest pitch of severity, led to {85} ferocious and frequent struggles between the patrons and the enemies of legalized monopoly. Poachers were killed by game preservers, and game preservers were killed by poachers. Every assize court told this same story. An entirely new form of crime broke out in the murders which were committed for the sake of obtaining bodies to be sold for the purposes of dissection. The price of food was often made enormously high by the purely artificial restrictions imposed upon its importation, and even in some cases on its mere production, and in ordinary human society increase of poverty always means increase of crime. A large proportion of the population was sunk in absolute ignorance, and as yet no systematic attempt whatever was made to establish any form of national education. The luxury and the extravagance of the rich were enormous, and were greatly stimulated by the example of the sovereign and the Court. Under the influence of the spasmodic and unreal impulse given to commercial activity by the late wars the rich seemed to be growing richer, while by the increased taxation which was the result of these wars the poor were certainly made to grow poorer. The demand for Parliamentary reform was beginning to express itself in systematic movements. Lord John Russell and Henry Brougham made their voices heard in the House of Commons and throughout the country. Daniel O'Connell went so far as to declare that nothing would satisfy him short of universal suffrage--manhood suffrage, that is to say--vote by ballot, and triennial Parliaments. This was thought at the time by most people to be the mere raving of a madman or the wild outcry of a revolutionary demagogue. We are not very far from the full accomplishment of the programme just now. The agitation against slavery and the slave trade was becoming an important movement. The time, in fact, was one of storm and high pressure. The shapes of great coming changes were daily seen upon the horizon, and part of the community regarded as the portents of coming national destruction what others welcomed as the bright signs of approaching prosperity, education, and peace.

{86}

[Sidenote: 1830--Death of George the Fourth]

One coming change all men looked forward to with the conviction that it was near. The end of the reign was close at hand. The King's health and strength had wholly given way of late years, and it was beyond the reach of medical science to do much for the prolongation of his life, even if George had been the sort of man to give medical science any chance of doing much for him. Preparations, however, were still being made for his birthday celebration in April, and nothing was done by any official announcement to give strength to the general prevailing impression that the end was near at hand. When, on April 15, a bulletin was at last issued, it merely announced that the King was suffering from a bilious attack accompanied by a slight difficulty in breathing, but nothing was said to intimate that the King's physicians were in any alarm for the result. The royal physicians still kept issuing bulletins, but they were so vague in their terms that it is impossible to believe they were not made purposely deceptive. It would appear that King George, like many braver and better men, had a nervous objection to any admission by himself or on his behalf that there was the slightest reason for alarm as to the state of his health. Greville, who was then in Rome, notes on May 12 that: "Everybody here is in great alarm about the King, who I have no doubt is very ill." Then Greville adds, in characteristic fashion: "I am afraid he will die before I get home, and I should like to be in at the death, and see all the proceedings of a new reign." But he makes up his mind that he must not hurry his departure on the ground that "I shall probably never see Rome again, and I have a good chance of seeing at least one king more leave us."

Days and days went on and the public were still kept in doubt, until on May 24 a message was sent in the King's name to both Houses of Parliament to say that the King no longer found it convenient to sign State papers with his own hand, and hoped some means might be found for relieving him from the necessity of making any attempt to discharge the painful duty. This announcement made it clear enough to everybody that the King was in a very {87} weak condition, but there was naturally some difficulty about devising an entirely satisfactory method of dispensing him from the duty of appending his sign-manual to important documents. Not a very long time had passed away since the throne of England was nominally occupied by an insane sovereign. It was thought quite possible that insanity might show itself in the present King, and it was absolutely necessary that the utmost care should be taken to provide against any chance of the royal authority being misused by those who surrounded the sovereign. It was arranged, therefore, that the sign-manual should be affixed in the King's presence, and in obedience to his order given by word of mouth, and that the document thus stamped must be endorsed by three members of the Privy Council. All this was to be provided for by an Act of Parliament, and the Act was only to be in operation during the session then going on, in order that if the King's malady should last the renewal of the regular authority must be formally sought from the Legislature. The Bill for this purpose became law on May 28, and it remained in operation but for a very short time. On June 26, about three in the morning, the reign of George the Fourth came to an end. The death was sudden, even when we consider that there had been for some time no hope left of the King's recovery. George was sitting up in bed, and to all outward appearance was not any worse than he had been for some days before, when suddenly a startled expression came over his face, he leaned his head on the shoulder of one of his attendants, was heard to say, "O God, this is death," and then all was over.

The rupture of a blood-vessel proved to have been the immediate cause of death, but ossification of some of the vessels near the heart had begun years before and a complication of disorders had been gradually setting in. The King's mode of life was not one which gave him any chance of rallying against such disorders. He was reckless in his food and drink, and had long been in the way of cheering and stimulating himself by glasses of cherry-brandy taken at any moment of the day when the impulse came upon {88} him. Shortly before his death George made an earnest request to the Duke of Wellington, who was in constant attendance, that he should be buried in the night-shirt which he was wearing at the time. The Duke was somewhat surprised at this request, for one reason among others that the garment in question did not seem likely to commend itself as a shroud even to a sovereign less particular as to costume than George the Fourth had been. During his later years, however, as we learn from the testimony of Wellington himself, the King, who used to be the very prince of dandies where his outer garments were concerned, had got into the way of sleeping in uncleanly nightshirts and particularly dirty night-caps. When the King was dead, Wellington noticed that there was a red silk ribbon round his neck beneath the shirt. The ribbon was found to have attached to it a locket containing a tiny portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, perhaps the one only woman he had ever loved, perhaps, too, the woman he had most deeply wronged. It seemed that at one period of their love story the King and Mrs. Fitzherbert had exchanged small portraits, each covered by half a cut diamond, and no doubt there was an understanding that each should rest forever on the breast of its wearer.

[Sidenote: 1830--The character of George the Fourth]

Nothing in the story of George the Fourth's worthless and erring life is more discreditable and dishonorable to him than the manner in which he behaved to Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the utter falsehood of the denial which he had given to the reports that a marriage ceremony had taken place between them--a falsehood which, be it remembered, he had declared to Charles Fox upon his honor to be a truthful statement. The moralist may be a little puzzled how to make up his mind as to the bearing of this incident upon the character of George the Fourth. Does it relieve the murky gloom of George's life by one streak of light if we find that, after all, he did love Mrs. Fitzherbert to the last, and that in his dying moments he wished her portrait to go with him to the tomb? Or does it darken the stain upon the man's life to know that he really did love the woman whom nevertheless he could deliberately consign {89} to an infamous imputation? We do not know whether any writer of romance has ventured to introduce into his pages an incident and a problem such as those which are thus associated with the death-bed of George the Fourth. It is something to know that the King's brother, the Duke of Clarence, whom that death-bed had made King of England, was kind and generous to Mrs. Fitzherbert, and did all in his power to atone to her for the trials which her love and her royal lover had brought upon her life.

George was in his sixty-eighth year when he died. It would not be easy to find anywhere the story of a life which left so little of good to be remembered. George seems to have had some generous impulses now and then, and he probably did some kindly acts which could be set off against his many errors, imperfections, ignoble selfishnesses, and grave offences. But the record of his career as history gives it to us is that of a life almost absolutely surrendered to self-indulgence. It is only fair to remember when we consider all the unworthy acts of his manhood that the unwise and harsh restraints imposed upon him in his early years are accountable, at least to a certain extent, for the follies and the vices to which he yielded himself up when he became, as Byron says of one of his characters, "Lord of himself, that heritage of woe." Heritage of woe it certainly was in the case of George the Fourth. In his early manhood he appears to have had the gift of forming close friendships with men of genius and of noble impulse, but their example never told upon him, and as one cause or other removed them from his side his career bore with it no trace of their influence or their inspiration. No one ever seems to have loved him except Mrs. Fitzherbert alone, and we have seen how that love was repaid. Even those who were most devoted to him in his later years, because of their devotion to the royal house and to the State of which he was the representative, found themselves compelled to bear the heaviest testimony against his levity, his selfishness, his lack of conscience, his utter indifference to all the higher objects and purposes of life.

George must have had some natural talents and some {90} gifts of intellect, for he would otherwise not have chosen such friends as those whom in his better days he chose out and brought around him. We are told that he had marvellous powers of conversation, that he had a ready wit, and a keen insight into the humors and the weaknesses of those with whom he was compelled to associate. We are told that he could compete in repartee with the recognized wits of his time, and that he could shine as a talker even among men whose names still live in history because of their reputations as talkers. Of course it will naturally occur to the mind that the guests of the Prince Regent might be easily inclined to discover genuine wit in any repartee which came from the Prince Regent, but it is certain that some at least of the men who surrounded him were not likely to have been betrayed into admiration merely because of the rank of their royal entertainer. Burke was held to have spoken disparagingly of George when he described him as "brilliant but superficial." To one of Burke's deep thought and wide information a man might well have seemed superficial in whom others nevertheless believed that they saw evidences of intellect and understanding, but if Burke thought a man brilliant it is only reasonable to assume that that man's conversation must have had frequent flashes of brilliancy.

[Sidenote: 1830--The Third and Fourth Georges contrasted]

Undoubtedly George was capable sometimes of appreciating thoroughly the qualities of greatness in other men, but the appreciation never left any abiding influence upon his character or his career. He certainly did not make himself the cause of so much injury to the best interests of the State as George the Third had done, but it has also to be observed that when George the Third went wrong and obstinately maintained a wrongful course he was acting in dogged obedience to what he believed to be his conscience and the teachings of his creed. George the Fourth had absolutely no conscience and no law of life, and when he talked most vehemently and loudly about his coronation oath those who were accustomed to deal with him knew quite well from experience that when he had exhausted his humor by a {91} sufficient outpouring of eloquence he would be sure to take the advice given to him and to trouble himself no more about the question of conscience. In this way, of course, George the Fourth did less harm to the State than his father had done, but when we come to compare the moral character of the two men we must admit that the obstinacy of the father deserves the recognition which we cannot give to the spasmodic and ephemeral self-assertion of the son. Nobody for a moment believed that George the Fourth had the slightest idea of actually abdicating his royal position in England and betaking himself to perpetual boredom in Hanover rather than consent to the passing of Catholic Emancipation. But at times of trial those who were around George the Third had good reason to believe that if he were driven to choose between his throne and his conscience he would have come down deliberately from the throne and followed his conscience whithersoever it might lead him. With George the Fourth the only question was how long he would stand the wear and tear of having to defend his position, and how soon he would begin to feel that the inconvenience of giving in would be less troublesome than the inconvenience of holding out. Even the most courtly historian would be hard put to it if he were set to find out any passage in the whole of George the Fourth's matured life which compels admiration.

George seems to have been an absolutely self-centred man. He was to all appearance constitutionally unable to import into his mind any considerations but those which affected his own personal comforts and likings and indulgences and occasional love of display. There were times when he evidently thought he was acting a great part, and when it filled him with joy to believe that he was thus making himself an object of public admiration; but no higher consideration, no thought beyond him and the applause he believed himself to be winning, appear to have entered his mind even at such moments of exaltation. We read in history of princes who believed themselves qualified by nature to be great actors or great singers, and who made absurd exhibitions of themselves accordingly and accepted {92} the courtly and venal applause as genuine tributes to artistic genius. In the same way, and only in the same way, George the Fourth sometimes believed himself to be playing a great part, and it gratified his vanity to act the part out until it became tiresome to him and he found it a relief to go back to the ordinary delights of his easy, lazy, and sensuous nature. Perhaps the best that can be said of him is that he had possibly some gifts which under other conditions might have been turned to better account. Perhaps if he had had to work for a living, to make a career in life for himself, to depend for his success entirely on the steady use of his own best qualities, and to avoid the idleness and self-indulgence which would have condemned him to perpetual stint and poverty, he might have made a respectable name in some career where intelligence and application count for much. But a hard fortune had condemned him to be a king, and to begin by being the son of a king, and thus to find as the years went on increasing opportunity of gratifying all his meanest tastes and finding always around him the ready homage which accords its applause to the most ignoble caprices and the most wanton self-indulgence. The reign of George the Fourth saw great deeds and great men; it could have seen few men in all his realm less deserving a word of praise than George the Fourth.

[Sidenote: 1830--Events in the reign of George the Fourth]

The reign saw the beginning of many great enterprises in practical science, the uprising of many philanthropic combinations, and the first movements of political and social reform. It saw the earliest attempts made in a systematic way towards the spread of education among the multitude, and the close of many a bright career in literature and the arts. Bishop Heber died in 1826. The death of Byron has already been recorded in these pages, and at even an earlier period of the reign two other stars of the first magnitude in the firmament of literature ceased to shine upon the earth in bodily presence with the deaths of Keats and Shelley. John Kemble, probably the greatest English tragic actor from the days of Garrick to the uprising of Edmund Kean, died while George the Fourth was {93} King. Sir Thomas Lawrence, Flaxman, Fuseli, and Nollekens ceased to work for art. Sir Humphry Davy, Dugald Stewart, and Pestalozzi were lost to science. The reign saw the foundation of the Royal Society of Literature, which, to do him justice, George the Fourth helped to establish; the beginning of Mechanics' Institute, and the opening of some new parks and the Zoological Gardens. It is doubtful if the Thames Tunnel can be described as a really valuable addition to the triumphs of engineering, and it will perhaps be generally admitted that Buckingham Palace was not an artistic addition to the architectural ornaments of the metropolis. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was set on foot owing chiefly to the energy and the instincts of Henry Brougham.

We have seen how the foreign policy of Canning opened a distinctly new chapter in English history, and it may be observed that owing to the influence of that policy the principle of neutrality was maintained under difficult conditions, and even where the general sympathy of England went distinctly with one of the parties to a foreign dispute. This policy might well have been followed with credit and advantage to England on more than one critical occasion at a much later time. The reign saw the beginning of the movement towards free trade as a distinct international policy, and saw the removal of some of the most cramping and antiquated restrictions on the commerce of the kingdom and the colonies. The crusade against slavery and the slave-trade may be said to have begun its march in anything like organized form during this reign. The political principles which we now describe as Liberal became a new force in the State during the same time. The idea that even beneficent despotism can be counted on as an enduring or an endurable form of government began to die out, and the principle came to be more and more distinctly and loudly proclaimed that the best form of government must be not only for, but by, the people.

These things are in themselves enough to show that in the sphere of political and social reform as well as in that {94} of practical science the reign of George the Fourth was at least a reign of great beginnings. The student of history may perhaps draw an instructive and a moral lesson from the knowledge forced upon him of the fact which seems lamentable in itself that to the ruler of the State little or nothing was due for the achievements which give the reign its best claim to be honored in history. The reign of George the Fourth teaches us that in a country like modern England, while a good sovereign may do much to forward the intellectual, political, and social progress of the people, even the worst sovereign could no longer do much to retard it.

[Sidenote: 1830: The Georges and the Stuarts]

The Four Georges had come and gone. A famous epoch in English history had ended. Four princes of the same race, of the same name, had ruled in succession over the English people. Practically, the reigns of the four namesakes may be said to coincide with, to comprehend, and to represent the history of the eighteenth century in England. The reign of George the Fourth may be regarded as a survival from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, as the reign of Anne was a survival from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century. In all the changes of that long and eventful age one change is very memorable and significant. The position of the dynasty was very different when George the Fourth died from what it was when his great-great-grandfather came over unwillingly from Germany to grasp the sceptre. When the Elector of Hanover became King of England, the Stuart party was still a power in political life and the Stuart cause the dearest hope of a very large number of devoted Englishmen. It might well be hard for men to realize in the days of George the Fourth that in the reign of the first George and in the reign of the second George the throne reeled beneath the blows which the armed adherents of the exiled Stuart princes struck at the supremacy of the sovereigns of the House of Brunswick. Even when the third George came to the throne there were still desperate dreamers who hoped against hope that something, anything, might happen which would allow the King--the King over the {95} water--to enjoy his own again. When the last of the Georges passed away, the Stuart cause had been buried for nearly half a century in that grave in Rome which encloses the remains of the last and perhaps the most unhappy of the Stuart princes.

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WILLIAM THE FOURTH.