Chapter 8

LE ROI D'YVETOT.

[Sidenote: 1830-37--Eccentricities of William the Fourth]

We may turn for a moment from the path of politics to mention a fact that is worth mentioning, if only because of the immense difference between the accepted usages of that time and any usages that would be possible in our days. King William shortly after his accession created his eldest son Earl of Munster, and conferred upon all his other sons and daughters the rank that belongs to the younger children of a marquis. The King's living children, as has been said before, were all illegitimate. In raising them to the rank of the peerage King William was only following the example of many or most of his predecessors. People thought none the less of him, at the time, because he had bestowed such honor upon his progeny. Charles Greville, the famous Clerk of the Council to George the Fourth and William the Fourth, describes the new sovereign with characteristic frankness and lack of reverence. "Altogether," says Greville, writing about a fortnight after the King's accession, "he seems a kind-hearted, well-meaning, not stupid, burlesque, bustling old fellow, and if he doesn't go mad may make a very decent king, but he exhibits oddities."

The early bringing-up of the new King had certainly not tended much to fill him with the highest aspirations or to qualify him for the most dignified duties of royalty. "Never," says Greville, "was elevation like that of King William the Fourth. His life has hitherto been passed in obscurity and neglect, in miserable poverty, surrounded by a numerous progeny of bastards, without consideration or friends, and he was ridiculous from his grotesque ways and little, meddling curiosity."

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He appears to have been a man of rather kindly, and certainly not ungenerous, disposition, and it is decidedly to his credit, in one sense, that the expectations of most of the Whigs were disappointed when he came to the throne. During his career in the Navy he had a way of disregarding orders, and when in command of a squadron would sometimes take his own vessel on an expedition according to his own fancy, and leave the remainder of the vessels under his charge to do as well as they could without him until it pleased him to return. Some of his later exploits in this way drew down on him a marked expression of disapproval from the Duke of Wellington, then at the head of the Government, and for this reason it was thought by many, when William came to the throne, that he would be sure to dismiss from his service the Prime Minister who once had offended him so deeply. A man with a more malevolent turn of mind would very likely have acted as public expectation seemed to foreshadow, but William, as we have seen, soon made it clear that he had no fault to find with the Duke of Wellington, that he cherished no ill-will and was quite ready to let bygones be bygones. There can be no doubt that William, although he had no great defects of any deep or serious nature, no defects at least which are not common enough among the sovereigns of his time, was yet as undignified a figure for a throne as even the modern comic opera itself could imagine.

He was eccentric to a degree that sometimes seemed to suggest a lurking tendency to insanity. He was fussy, garrulous, excitable, noisy, overbearing, apt to take strong likes and dislikes and to express his likings and his dislikings with an utter disregard for the accepted conventionalities of social life.

He could explode at a moment's notice into a burst of rage which sometimes made itself felt for hours, and perhaps when the next day came he had forgotten all about it and greeted those who were its especial objects with hilarious good-humor. There were many anecdotes told about him in the days not long before his accession to the throne which were commonly believed by those who knew him, {116} and which it would not be possible to reproduce in the modest pages suitable to our own times.

[Sidenote: 1830-37--Some strange doings of the King]

Now it would certainly be most unfair to accept every story told by gossip about some exalted personage as a story worthy of credit and qualified to take its place in authentic history, but, at the same time, it is quite fair and reasonable when forming an estimate of the exalted personage's character to take some account of the sayings of contemporary gossip. We may be sure that there were stories told about the father of Frederick the Great, about Catherine of Russia, about a late King of Bavaria, which were not true, but none the less the historian is undoubtedly helped to form an estimate of the ways and doings of these exalted personages by the collective testimony of the stories that are told about them and believed in their own time. William the Fourth could not, when he ascended the throne, suddenly shake off all the rough manners and odd ways which he had allowed himself to foster during his long career as a Prince of the Blood Royal, as a sailor, and as a man much given to the full indulgence of his humors, whatever they might happen to be.

After he had become King, and it was part of his royal duty to give great State dinners, it was sometimes his way to behave himself on the occasions of those festivities after a fashion which even W. S. Gilbert never could have caricatured in any "Mikado" or other such piece of delightful burlesque. The King was fond of making speeches at his State dinners, and it was his way to ramble along on all manner of subjects in the same oration. Whatever idea happened to come uppermost in his mind he usually blurted out, without the slightest regard for time, place, or company. This habit of his became very embarrassing now and then when some of the ambassadors of great European States happened to be guests at his dinner-table. In the presence of the French Ambassador, for instance, the King, while delivering his after-dinner speech, would suddenly recall some of his recollections of the days when the great Napoleon held the Imperial throne of France, and he would then, perhaps, close a sentence {117} with an exultant reference to the glorious triumphs we had obtained over our enemies the French.

On one occasion when Leopold, King of the Belgians, was dining with him the King suddenly observed that his royal guest was drinking water, and he called to him with an oath and demanded what he was drinking that sort of stuff for; and not content with the poor King's plea that he drank water because he liked it better than wine, William insisted that, in his house at least, his royal brother must swallow the juice of the grape. One day when Talleyrand was among his guests King William favored the company with a very peculiar sort of speech, and he concluded the speech by proposing a toast which is described by those who heard it as utterly unsuited for publication. One of the guests was Charles Greville. He was anxious to know what impression this extraordinary performance had made upon Talleyrand. He asked Talleyrand in a whisper if he had ever heard anything like that before. But Talleyrand, who had listened to the oration and the toast with unmoved composure, was not to be thrown off his balance or drawn into any expression of opinion by an indiscreet question. He merely answered that it was certainly "bien remarquable."

The Duchess of Kent and the young Princess Victoria were dining with the King one day, and some of the guests, although not all, were well aware that there had been differences of opinion lately between William and his sister-in-law. The guests, however, were amazed indeed when the King rose and delivered a speech in which he raked up all his old grievances against the Duchess of Kent, and complained of her and denounced her as if he were the barrister, the hero of the old familiar story, who, having no case, is advised to abuse the plaintiff's attorney. The child Princess Victoria is said to have been so distressed by some parts of this unexpected oration that she burst into tears; but the Duchess, her mother, retained self-control, and sat as composedly silent as if the King had been taking his part in some dignified State ceremonial.

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King William sometimes broke the conventionalities of royal deportment in a quite different sort of way, in a way which undoubtedly shocked the traditional sensibilities of the older officials of the Court, but with which the lovers of modern and more simple manners are inclined sometimes, perhaps, to have a sort of wilful sympathy. He would sometimes insist on dropping some great royal visitor from abroad at the door of his hotel, just as if he were an ordinary London resident giving a lift in his carriage to a friend from the country. At the most solemn State ceremonial he would bustle about irresponsibly, and talk in a loud voice to any one who might seem to him at the moment to be an attractive person with whom to have a pleasant chat. It might happen that some great State functionary or some dignified ambassador from a foreign capital, who ought to have been spoken to long before, was kept waiting until the unconcerned sovereign had had his talk out with some comparatively insignificant personage who had been known to the King in former days, and whose appearance brought with it certain early and jovial associations. Many of the King's minor offences in this way seem now to the unconcerned reader about as venial as that by which Marie Antoinette in her early Court days broke through the established rules of etiquette among the ladies of her bedchamber by snatching her chemise one morning with her own hands instead of allowing it to pass in its regular order from the lowest to the highest degree of the attendant women. But it certainly was perhaps a little too much of a departure from the usages of a Court when the monarch, about to sign an important document in the presence of his State Council, flung down the quill with which he had begun to write and proclaimed it to be a damned bad pen.

[Sidenote: 1830-37--Béranger's King of Yvetot]

Every day the King was sure to astonish those around him by some breach of Court conventionality, little or great. He was liable to strong likings and dislikings, and he took no pains to conceal his sentiments in either case. He seems to have had an affectionate regard for his young niece, the Princess Victoria, and a strong dislike to her {119} mother. The Duchess of Kent would appear to have had no particular liking for him, and she very much objected to be brought into familiar association with the sons and daughters of the eccentric sovereign. Perhaps it is not to William's discredit that he always treated these children as if they were his legitimate descendants. It was no fault of theirs if the ceremony of marriage had not preceded their coming into the world, and the King apparently did not see why even the most righteous person should feel any objection to their frequent presence. But one can understand that the Duchess of Kent must have often wished that the sense of public decorum, which was even already growing up in English society, should not be shocked by the too frequent reminder that the King had several children who were not born in wedlock. Béranger, the once popular French lyric poet, satirized a certain royal personage, a contemporary of William the Fourth, as the King of Yvetot. There was a French legend which told of the conditions under which the descendants of a certain lord of the manor in Brittany had been created by Clotaire kings of Yvetot. Béranger's monarch is described by him as one having made little mark of his own in history, who could live very comfortably without troubling himself about glory, and who liked to be crowned with a simple cotton nightcap. This monarch, the poet tells us, could enjoy his four meals a day, and liked very often to lift his glass to his lips.

There are many reasons, we are told, why some of his subjects might have called him a father to his people, but the name was not applied by the poet in the ordinary metaphorical sense of the word. He never desired to trouble his neighbors, and never disturbed his mind with any projects for the increase of his dominions, and, like a true model to all potentates, found his ambition quite satisfied in the indulgence of his own pleasures while desiring as little as possible to interfere with the pastimes of his people. Every verse of the ballad ends by telling us what a good little king was this sovereign of Yvetot. With certain slight alterations Béranger's satirical verses might {120} have served as a picture of William the Fourth. But our good little King of Yvetot was not destined altogether to have quite an easy time of it, although he was more successful in that way than the monarch for whom Béranger intended his satire. William had come in for the age of reform. The whole course of English history hardly tells us of any reign, of anything like equal length, into which so many reforms were crowded. William the Fourth, we may be sure, would never have troubled himself or any of his subjects about any projects of improvement in the political or social conditions of his realm. He would have been quite content to let things go on just as they had been going in the days before he came to the throne, and would probably have asked no higher title of affection from the loyalty of his subjects than the familiar name that they gave him of the Sailor King. When for a while he began to be called the Patriot King he must have associated the title with a sense of all the worry and trouble brought upon him by the incessant preparation of patriotic projects for the improvement of everything all over the country.

[Sidenote: 1830-37--Lord Grey and William the Fourth]

It seems like a curious freak of fate that such a sovereign, at such a time, should have had to get rid of the Duke of Wellington and accept Lord Grey as his Prime Minister. The Duke of Wellington was himself simple, plain, and occasionally rough in manners, with little taste for Court ceremonial and little inclination for the exchange of stately phrase and inflated language. There are many anecdotes told of Wellington which show that he had no more liking or aptitude for the ways dear to a Court functionary than King William himself had. Lord Grey was a man of the most stately bearing and the most refined style. His manner was courtly without the slightest affectation; he was courtly by nature, and dignity was an element of his every-day demeanor. He had been in constant companionship with some of the greatest statesmen and orators of his time, but even his devotion to Charles James Fox had never beguiled him into any of Fox's careless, free-and-easy ways. He was sorely tried, as all {121} contemporary accounts tell us, by the abrupt and overbearing manners of his son-in-law, Lord Durham, but he always contrived, in public at least, to bear Durham's eccentricities with unruffled temper and undisturbed dignity. Such a statesman must have had a hard time of it with King William of Yvetot; but let it be freely admitted that King William of Yvetot must have had a hard time of it with such a minister as Lord Grey. William would probably, if left to his own inclinations, have made up his mind to hold on to the Duke of Wellington, join with the Duke in opposing all schemes of reform, and face the music, if we may adopt a familiar modern phrase. But there was good sense enough in William's head, for all his odd ways and his unkingly humors, to teach him that he had better not begin his reign by setting himself against the public opinion of the great majority of his subjects, and therefore our good King of Yvetot consented to become, if not the head, at least the figure-head of a great historical movement.

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